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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 138769" data-attributes="member: 812">You know, it's kind of great that my gaming group's in the middle of a long layoff -- a week and a half (long for them, just barely enough for me -- these players are running me ragged!) because suddenly I have some time to actually read through the posts that interest me. And am I ever glad I read through this one.I wanted to address a couple of comments that reflect very closely one of the things I'm doing in my campaign:and:I assume that the myths we know, from the New Testament to Arthur to Gilgamesh, may based on true events. The relationship between the true event and the story we know today is unknowable, however, and so any part of the story may or may not be true. There's no way to determine the historical validity -- and of course, the historical validity is probably the LEAST important part of these tales. People don't remember and pass on stories because they're true, but because they're good stories. Mythic stories.This holds true in my campaign. The myths and legends that the party comes across are what people like to tell each other happened, and may bear no resemblance to what actually happened. My players may NEVER discover what actually happened, and so they're always encountering disparate versions of stories that just don't add up. Even with crucial decisions, like "Which of these two power-mad psychotic godlike beings do we support against the other?", they just have no way of knowing how to assess what they're told about the world.It really throws them for a loop when one trusted authority tells them some tale about a legendary figure and then another authority tells them a completely contradictory one. They used to get very cranky, but I think it's really drawn them into the campaign because the moral distinctions they're making are THEIRS, not mine. They're deciding who the bad guys are -- they're creating their own myths.And I think that's one of the keys to creating great campaigns -- not to come up with brilliant mythic structures, but to give your players the raw materials out which they can fashion their own myths.fixed a formatting problem</blockquote>

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