Using the Draconic Prophecy [Archive] - Wizards Community

Using the Draconic Prophecy [Archive] - Wizards Community

Post/Author/DateTime Post
dndcmb
12-15-07, 08:48 PM I am getting ready to start a new campaign in Eberron and want the overall theme to be prophecy based. I have ready every Eberron novel published (with the exception of The Draconic Prophecy, Im holding off for all three to be released) so I have a good idea as to what the prophecy is and what its part is in the world. However, reading about it in a book and actually basing a campaign on it are two different things.

Im curious as to how others have used the prophecy in their games.

I would really like to be able to get accross the whole "prophecy" thing where you have that internal struggle with believing in fate and knowing your whole future is already laid out for you, etc...

I plan on doing a story rich campaign where the PC's history is integral to the story line. As the game progresses, I want them to start dealing with the struggles of fate vs free will, and the like.

Just wondering how other have conveyed such things in their games.

Thanks in advanced for the feedback.
WarlockDa
12-16-07, 09:12 AM Thus far I've just recently begun using the Prophecy in my campaign, just a few lines. The group thought it was great, since their patron, Sur'Kil from the Eyes of the Lich Queen adventure they'd recently completed, passed some info to them and they didn't completely understand it all until the end of the game and all events had come to pass.

After one hundred eighty turns of darkness the daughter of Kyber has her voice heard below the lake of silver.

The fallen dark and the wearer of Khyber's spawn will seek the ord of red in the fortress of the feathered fallen.

Joined by followers of ancient dragons long ascended, the slayers of the dragon's eye will fight ice long dead in the village near the forest of ashen horns.

The orbs of gold and silver will not long be hidden and great dragons will fall for their ancient foes will, the daughter will stir, her talons growing to rip into the dragon between, releasing horror upon the children of the one above.

They noticed the obvious links, "slayers of the dragon's eye" to pull them into it,....but didn't catch on to the "Followers of ancient dragons" line being the two new PCs (Worshippers of the Host). The best was after they chased the Black Guard and Acolyte of the Skin back out of the dungeon (an old Cotal fortress long buried beneath Silver Lake in Breland) the Acolyte had raised the corpse of a white dragon while underground, and once the zombie of set upon the PCs one jumped out and recited the "Fight ice long dead" line, grabbed a map and pointed out that they should be roughly near Shavalant and Whitehorn Wood.

Now they know two more orbs will be the next targets of their foes, and that basically all hell's about to break loose if they don't stop it from happening.
Vharuck
12-17-07, 12:43 PM There are great aspects of the Draconic Prohecy that DMs can (and should) take advantage of. In your case, I highly stress that it's mutable. It doesn't state the future, it only shows an "if X, then Y" path the future can take. This is nice because this means the players can fail and it's fine (from a DM's point of view, it might be disastrous in the game). There's no explaining why the Prophecy was wrong, it was only unfulfilled. Make sure to exploit this in such a way that the death of one of the PCs doesn't ruin the campaign (the Prophecy states that a group of five must do something, but doesn't specify the exact five who'll succeed).
Kreistor2
12-17-07, 01:30 PM I treat the prophecy similarly to the prophecies in Goodkind's Sword of Truth. In that series, prophecies can branch into alternate futures. Some prophecies are if-then and either-or prophecies, which allow the future to have multiple options. Prophecies that are absolutes can happen on either path, so some prophecies never come true once the present makes the choice.

I don't include the multiple choices for future, but I include the concept that one doesn't knw which prophecy follows on which other prophecy. If a prophecy says, "The city of fire will scorch the land of the elves", well, it's hard to say which city of fire that means. If it the city named "Firemountain", or is it Drinazad, the Sulatar city that flies through the power of a Fire Elemental? And which land of the elves does it mean? Aerenal, Valenar, or some small village high in a mountain in Xen'drik?

A prophecy like this explains the long amounts of time the dragons require studying them. They are trying to sort through hundreds or thousands of little prophecies and put them in the correct order.

Additionally, it creates competition among the dragons. One dragon may want a particular series to occur, and so he steps in to nudge things along, while another may want a different series to be true, so he steps in to nudge the present away from a particular interpretation. The dragons are forced to use proxies, so that they don't interfere with each other, which would be terribly bad form.

Absolute prophecies with reliable date/locations are not interesting to me. They are godly, and ultimately cause either the prophecy to have to come true, or the prophecies lose their power. Players that see absolute prophecies that can be defeated lose any sense of awe, and pooh-pooh the prophecies over the long run. But if the prophecies are inevitable, although preventable in the short term, then the PC's can act against them, but still fear for the future knowing that prophecy still exists and it will come true in time.
Gurv
12-17-07, 04:30 PM I treat the prophecy similarly to the prophecies in Goodkind's Sword of Truth.

I've also drawn from Goodkind when running the Draconic Prophecy. Goodkind refers to a prophecy with an "if X, then Y" component as a "forked" prophecy. These are the best tools to use in a roleplaying game, since even the DM doesn't know what the outcome of every event is going to be before it happens.

Another useful tool, also drawn from Goodkind, is the concept behind his fiction's "Ancient D'Haran". Imagine a language so complex that each word can have as many as a dozen, semi-related meanings. A single word might refer to "the color black", "death, the dead or dying", "night", "weakness", and "eternity". It would have made perfect sense to someone fluent in the ancient language, who understood the original context. But for someone reading a sentance thousands of years later and translating each rune independant of one another, all kinds of confusion ensues.

I use the D'Haran model for my Draconic language. Everything could have multiple meanings; and without the speaker present to guide with inflection and such, nothing seperates one meaning from another. The draconic language is a simplified form of the Draconic Prophecy. Every word of the Prophecy could mean many things. But the time the Prophecy has been translated into Draconic, and then further simplifed into Common (or whatever), it resembles something like "The shadow fails at the behest of the lion who roars at midnight". Knowledge of Draconic, and even moreso ranks in Decipher Script, become important is figuring out what was really meant. It also controls the use of comprehend languages to bypass Decipher Script.

The way I would bring all of this together is to write a campaign with several forks. Depending on what the PCs choose to do, and whether they succeed or fail at things, different events will occur. That isn't so different from most games, with the exception that you've got to have it planned ahead more completely. Then write up some Prophey to describe each event, and decide who wants to interfere and who wants to cause such events.

Some of the best icing on the cake is when someone who wants to cause/prevent some piece of Prophecy accidently bring about exactly what he was trying to avoid. Had they never read the Prophecy, it would never have occured.
Kreistor2
12-17-07, 11:46 PM The problem wiht forking prophecies in a DnD game is the same one that Richard faces in the Stone of Truth: if you can't tell if a prophecy is on the current fork, a future fork, or a past dead and eliminated fork, how can you determine which prophecies might happen. Look at the scramble at the beginning of that book with the introduction of a new, unknown fork. Decades or centuries of work discarded as prophecies are rearranged at emergency speed. What's the point of trying? You can't affect the future until the forks come along, and you can't accurately choose a fork based on what you might determine exists on that fork, so knowing which ones might be on each fork is flat out useless knowledge. All you can do is wait for the prophecies to trigger and deal with each individually. And that's all Richard winds up doing, despite having the best studiers of prophecy at his disposal. The onyl prophet that really knows which prophecy could fit where isn't telling, and what he does say can't be trusted for being manipulative.

It's the same here. You could hand the PC's dozens of prophecies, but any work they may do to organize them is wasted effort, unless you intentionally give them everything, in which case you're letting them metagame to realize the problem is solvable. That's too great an effort for too little gain for me, and I don't think my players would appreciate that kind of puzzle. If you're capable and interested, go ahead, but it's not a course I would suggest to a random DM. It involves a lot of work if oyu reveal it.

One of the advantages of my solution is that all prophecies are always relevant: they will occur, if they haven't already. A prophecy that the PC's stop is still a threat.Determining the true future is quite impossible, if prophecies can be delayed, and so there's no desire on their part to work that through. That gives me the prophecies to deal with as I will, without their desperate search to try to investigate them themselves. (Yes, one of my players wanted to get involved with that early on, with no knowledge of the prophecies themselves, thinking that he could break into what it took dragons to achieve. I developed this type of prophecy in response to that desire, and once he learned how it worked, he realized the futility. Even if he found a prophecy, it would take decades of research just to determine if it had already come true. They gain pieces of the prophecy in the same way Richard does -- when they are relevant to his present. They deal with what they can deal with, and leave what it takes dragons to puzzle out to the dragons.)
Nerdicus
12-22-07, 12:24 PM If you are going to be using the dragon prophecies you may want to check out Edy's ideas on Truenaming It ties into the prophecy very nicely and can add something tangible to the power of the prophecy.

I really like the idea of using the prophecies in game play, but as of yet haven't been able to come up with any good means of doing so. For that reason I will be watching this thread closely for inspiration!
Gurv
12-22-07, 08:05 PM Obviously, you'd need to adjust the complexity of the Prophecy to fit the scope of the campaign. We're not authors of our entire world, with complete control over everything that happens. We have dice and players to contend with.

The greatest problem with using prophecy or divination in a game like D&D is that the DM himself has limited ability to actually predict the future. Especially once that future is known to a bunch of crazies bent on changing it.

So you have to cheat. There are several ways I know to do this:

Come up with three meanings for every element in a Prophecy, so that if one thing is prevented, the others can step in. If the prediction says that "The dark empire falls when the King's child dies.", then you need at least two dark empires and three children. The empires might be Karrnath and House Thuranni. The children might be the true heir of Karrnath, High Prince Rygar ir'Wynarn, and some vampire spawn to King Kauis III (a child of sorts). Most likely, information overload will do the work for you, and the PCs will focus on stopping what they consider the most obvious interpretation and never realize they're fulfilling another.

Note that I'm not advocating cheating the players out of achieving their goals. If they want to prevent the fall of House Thuranni and feel that protecting High Prince Rygar will do that, then it should. But make sure that protecting Rygar involves slaying a recurring vampire minion of Kaius, and that the end result is Rygar exposing the vampire king for what he is and staking a claim to the throne of a destabilized Karrnath.

Find ways to make avoiding a problem, cause the problem. Easier to do than you'd think. If the bad guys are seeking an evil artifact/relic/spell, then the PCs will seek it too. Make sure that any Prophecy regarding the ones who find the artifact/relic/spell does as good a job of describing the PCs as it does the bad guys.

If "The King's child shall die by the Mithril Scepter, drawn from the land of dragons by the blind warrior", then all you have to do is make sure that the bad guys are led by an advanced dolgaunt, and that one of the unavoidable encounters close to the Sceptar involves an nymph. Whoever finds it, just make sure they're blind. Heck, make it easier for a blind guy to be the one who grabs it by using illusory defenses immediately around the Sceptar.

Note that making the PC blind along the way means that they won't realize the Prophecy could be fulfilled by them until the last minute. By then, it's too late.
Raun
01-11-08, 08:05 PM Gurv,

I'm running my Prophecy the same way.

I think the Draconic Prophecy is a great tool any good Eberron DM should make use of. It has a nearly limitless ability to get PCs moving onto many different adventures.

When dealing directly with the prophecy, you must be as vague as possible. I will sit down and write it 3-4 times to get it wonky enough that it's really hard to figure out exactly what without making some kind of leap in logic.

Post/Author/DateTime	Post
dndcmb 12-15-07, 08:48 PM	I am getting ready to start a new campaign in Eberron and want the overall theme to be prophecy based. I have ready every Eberron novel published (with the exception of The Draconic Prophecy, Im holding off for all three to be released) so I have a good idea as to what the prophecy is and what its part is in the world. However, reading about it in a book and actually basing a campaign on it are two different things. Im curious as to how others have used the prophecy in their games. I would really like to be able to get accross the whole "prophecy" thing where you have that internal struggle with believing in fate and knowing your whole future is already laid out for you, etc... I plan on doing a story rich campaign where the PC's history is integral to the story line. As the game progresses, I want them to start dealing with the struggles of fate vs free will, and the like. Just wondering how other have conveyed such things in their games. Thanks in advanced for the feedback.
WarlockDa 12-16-07, 09:12 AM	Thus far I've just recently begun using the Prophecy in my campaign, just a few lines. The group thought it was great, since their patron, Sur'Kil from the Eyes of the Lich Queen adventure they'd recently completed, passed some info to them and they didn't completely understand it all until the end of the game and all events had come to pass. After one hundred eighty turns of darkness the daughter of Kyber has her voice heard below the lake of silver. The fallen dark and the wearer of Khyber's spawn will seek the ord of red in the fortress of the feathered fallen. Joined by followers of ancient dragons long ascended, the slayers of the dragon's eye will fight ice long dead in the village near the forest of ashen horns. The orbs of gold and silver will not long be hidden and great dragons will fall for their ancient foes will, the daughter will stir, her talons growing to rip into the dragon between, releasing horror upon the children of the one above. They noticed the obvious links, "slayers of the dragon's eye" to pull them into it,....but didn't catch on to the "Followers of ancient dragons" line being the two new PCs (Worshippers of the Host). The best was after they chased the Black Guard and Acolyte of the Skin back out of the dungeon (an old Cotal fortress long buried beneath Silver Lake in Breland) the Acolyte had raised the corpse of a white dragon while underground, and once the zombie of set upon the PCs one jumped out and recited the "Fight ice long dead" line, grabbed a map and pointed out that they should be roughly near Shavalant and Whitehorn Wood. Now they know two more orbs will be the next targets of their foes, and that basically all hell's about to break loose if they don't stop it from happening.
Vharuck 12-17-07, 12:43 PM	There are great aspects of the Draconic Prohecy that DMs can (and should) take advantage of. In your case, I highly stress that it's mutable. It doesn't state the future, it only shows an "if X, then Y" path the future can take. This is nice because this means the players can fail and it's fine (from a DM's point of view, it might be disastrous in the game). There's no explaining why the Prophecy was wrong, it was only unfulfilled. Make sure to exploit this in such a way that the death of one of the PCs doesn't ruin the campaign (the Prophecy states that a group of five must do something, but doesn't specify the exact five who'll succeed).
Kreistor2 12-17-07, 01:30 PM	I treat the prophecy similarly to the prophecies in Goodkind's Sword of Truth. In that series, prophecies can branch into alternate futures. Some prophecies are if-then and either-or prophecies, which allow the future to have multiple options. Prophecies that are absolutes can happen on either path, so some prophecies never come true once the present makes the choice. I don't include the multiple choices for future, but I include the concept that one doesn't knw which prophecy follows on which other prophecy. If a prophecy says, "The city of fire will scorch the land of the elves", well, it's hard to say which city of fire that means. If it the city named "Firemountain", or is it Drinazad, the Sulatar city that flies through the power of a Fire Elemental? And which land of the elves does it mean? Aerenal, Valenar, or some small village high in a mountain in Xen'drik? A prophecy like this explains the long amounts of time the dragons require studying them. They are trying to sort through hundreds or thousands of little prophecies and put them in the correct order. Additionally, it creates competition among the dragons. One dragon may want a particular series to occur, and so he steps in to nudge things along, while another may want a different series to be true, so he steps in to nudge the present away from a particular interpretation. The dragons are forced to use proxies, so that they don't interfere with each other, which would be terribly bad form. Absolute prophecies with reliable date/locations are not interesting to me. They are godly, and ultimately cause either the prophecy to have to come true, or the prophecies lose their power. Players that see absolute prophecies that can be defeated lose any sense of awe, and pooh-pooh the prophecies over the long run. But if the prophecies are inevitable, although preventable in the short term, then the PC's can act against them, but still fear for the future knowing that prophecy still exists and it will come true in time.
Gurv 12-17-07, 04:30 PM	I treat the prophecy similarly to the prophecies in Goodkind's Sword of Truth. I've also drawn from Goodkind when running the Draconic Prophecy. Goodkind refers to a prophecy with an "if X, then Y" component as a "forked" prophecy. These are the best tools to use in a roleplaying game, since even the DM doesn't know what the outcome of every event is going to be before it happens. Another useful tool, also drawn from Goodkind, is the concept behind his fiction's "Ancient D'Haran". Imagine a language so complex that each word can have as many as a dozen, semi-related meanings. A single word might refer to "the color black", "death, the dead or dying", "night", "weakness", and "eternity". It would have made perfect sense to someone fluent in the ancient language, who understood the original context. But for someone reading a sentance thousands of years later and translating each rune independant of one another, all kinds of confusion ensues. I use the D'Haran model for my Draconic language. Everything could have multiple meanings; and without the speaker present to guide with inflection and such, nothing seperates one meaning from another. The draconic language is a simplified form of the Draconic Prophecy. Every word of the Prophecy could mean many things. But the time the Prophecy has been translated into Draconic, and then further simplifed into Common (or whatever), it resembles something like "The shadow fails at the behest of the lion who roars at midnight". Knowledge of Draconic, and even moreso ranks in Decipher Script, become important is figuring out what was really meant. It also controls the use of comprehend languages to bypass Decipher Script. The way I would bring all of this together is to write a campaign with several forks. Depending on what the PCs choose to do, and whether they succeed or fail at things, different events will occur. That isn't so different from most games, with the exception that you've got to have it planned ahead more completely. Then write up some Prophey to describe each event, and decide who wants to interfere and who wants to cause such events. Some of the best icing on the cake is when someone who wants to cause/prevent some piece of Prophecy accidently bring about exactly what he was trying to avoid. Had they never read the Prophecy, it would never have occured.
Kreistor2 12-17-07, 11:46 PM	The problem wiht forking prophecies in a DnD game is the same one that Richard faces in the Stone of Truth: if you can't tell if a prophecy is on the current fork, a future fork, or a past dead and eliminated fork, how can you determine which prophecies might happen. Look at the scramble at the beginning of that book with the introduction of a new, unknown fork. Decades or centuries of work discarded as prophecies are rearranged at emergency speed. What's the point of trying? You can't affect the future until the forks come along, and you can't accurately choose a fork based on what you might determine exists on that fork, so knowing which ones might be on each fork is flat out useless knowledge. All you can do is wait for the prophecies to trigger and deal with each individually. And that's all Richard winds up doing, despite having the best studiers of prophecy at his disposal. The onyl prophet that really knows which prophecy could fit where isn't telling, and what he does say can't be trusted for being manipulative. It's the same here. You could hand the PC's dozens of prophecies, but any work they may do to organize them is wasted effort, unless you intentionally give them everything, in which case you're letting them metagame to realize the problem is solvable. That's too great an effort for too little gain for me, and I don't think my players would appreciate that kind of puzzle. If you're capable and interested, go ahead, but it's not a course I would suggest to a random DM. It involves a lot of work if oyu reveal it. One of the advantages of my solution is that all prophecies are always relevant: they will occur, if they haven't already. A prophecy that the PC's stop is still a threat.Determining the true future is quite impossible, if prophecies can be delayed, and so there's no desire on their part to work that through. That gives me the prophecies to deal with as I will, without their desperate search to try to investigate them themselves. (Yes, one of my players wanted to get involved with that early on, with no knowledge of the prophecies themselves, thinking that he could break into what it took dragons to achieve. I developed this type of prophecy in response to that desire, and once he learned how it worked, he realized the futility. Even if he found a prophecy, it would take decades of research just to determine if it had already come true. They gain pieces of the prophecy in the same way Richard does -- when they are relevant to his present. They deal with what they can deal with, and leave what it takes dragons to puzzle out to the dragons.)
Nerdicus 12-22-07, 12:24 PM	If you are going to be using the dragon prophecies you may want to check out Edy's ideas on Truenaming It ties into the prophecy very nicely and can add something tangible to the power of the prophecy. I really like the idea of using the prophecies in game play, but as of yet haven't been able to come up with any good means of doing so. For that reason I will be watching this thread closely for inspiration!
Gurv 12-22-07, 08:05 PM	Obviously, you'd need to adjust the complexity of the Prophecy to fit the scope of the campaign. We're not authors of our entire world, with complete control over everything that happens. We have dice and players to contend with. The greatest problem with using prophecy or divination in a game like D&D is that the DM himself has limited ability to actually predict the future. Especially once that future is known to a bunch of crazies bent on changing it. So you have to cheat. There are several ways I know to do this: Come up with three meanings for every element in a Prophecy, so that if one thing is prevented, the others can step in. If the prediction says that "The dark empire falls when the King's child dies.", then you need at least two dark empires and three children. The empires might be Karrnath and House Thuranni. The children might be the true heir of Karrnath, High Prince Rygar ir'Wynarn, and some vampire spawn to King Kauis III (a child of sorts). Most likely, information overload will do the work for you, and the PCs will focus on stopping what they consider the most obvious interpretation and never realize they're fulfilling another. Note that I'm not advocating cheating the players out of achieving their goals. If they want to prevent the fall of House Thuranni and feel that protecting High Prince Rygar will do that, then it should. But make sure that protecting Rygar involves slaying a recurring vampire minion of Kaius, and that the end result is Rygar exposing the vampire king for what he is and staking a claim to the throne of a destabilized Karrnath. Find ways to make avoiding a problem, cause the problem. Easier to do than you'd think. If the bad guys are seeking an evil artifact/relic/spell, then the PCs will seek it too. Make sure that any Prophecy regarding the ones who find the artifact/relic/spell does as good a job of describing the PCs as it does the bad guys. If "The King's child shall die by the Mithril Scepter, drawn from the land of dragons by the blind warrior", then all you have to do is make sure that the bad guys are led by an advanced dolgaunt, and that one of the unavoidable encounters close to the Sceptar involves an nymph. Whoever finds it, just make sure they're blind. Heck, make it easier for a blind guy to be the one who grabs it by using illusory defenses immediately around the Sceptar. Note that making the PC blind along the way means that they won't realize the Prophecy could be fulfilled by them until the last minute. By then, it's too late.
Raun 01-11-08, 08:05 PM	Gurv, I'm running my Prophecy the same way. I think the Draconic Prophecy is a great tool any good Eberron DM should make use of. It has a nearly limitless ability to get PCs moving onto many different adventures. When dealing directly with the prophecy, you must be as vague as possible. I will sit down and write it 3-4 times to get it wonky enough that it's really hard to figure out exactly what without making some kind of leap in logic.