Fantasy often includes within it the idea of glimpsing the future.  Our stories are filled with seers and prophets, ancient writ or song speaking of future events, visions and dreams which warn of disaster.  Yet such predictions are rarely found in our games, or if they are they are difficult to execute.  There are some tricks of the trade that can be useful in this regard, and if properly used may open the possibility for new dimensions in the game.

  I’ll start by looking at the Scottish Play.  In crafting this tragedy, Shakespeare included the predictions of three witches, predictions crafted to put MacBeth’s mind at ease while at the same time foretelling his doom.  Of these, the one that calls attention to itself was the charm that the usurper need “fear no man of woman born”.  MacBeth took this as assurance that no one could hurt him.  This was opposed to the instruction to “Beware the Thane of Cawdor.”  This nemesis, MacDuff Thane of Cawdor, broke the charm with the information that he was “from his mother’s womb untimely ripped”–that is, a caesarian section not born naturally.

  There’s a clue here to how to do good fantasy predictions.  If you didn’t see it, you’ll find it again in Ezekiel 12:13, where it’s considerably less a fantasy yet very similar in form.  The prophet declares of the king, “I will bring him to Babylon in the land of the Chaldeans; yet he will not see it, though he will die there.”  One easily imagines that Zedekiah considered this nonsense.  How could he be taken to Babylon, and die there, but never see the place?  The answer is revealed in II Kings 25:7, where we are told that as the king fled Jerusalem, he was captured, and Nebuchadnezzar had him blinded before taking him back to Babylon.

  In these cases, there was a seeming contradiction in the prophecies themselves which was resolved by what almost seems a trick, a piece of information which makes the seemingly impossible possible.

  But perhaps to determine the use of prophecy in your games, you have to take a step back and decide on the nature of prophecy.  There are some critical questions that must be answered in this regard before you make your first prophetic announcements.  Chief among these is whether the future predicted is fixed or mutable; that is, has the seer declared what will inevitably happen, or is this a declaration of what may happen if steps are not taken to prevent it?  Multiverser uses both kinds of predictions, but carefully distinguishes them; thus it provides a viable example for how this can be done.

  In Multiverser, psionic predictions, those of the sort people call psychic and attribute to special mental powers, are almost always mutable.  That is, the psychic is not seeing the actual future, but rather the most probable future based on the present.  This means that the future predicted will occur if nothing intervenes; but the fact that the psychic has foreseen it means that there is opportunity to intervene and so prevent the impending disaster.  I believe that this is the sort of “seeing the future” that is used in Minority Report, in that three psychics are attempting to predict crimes before they occur.  It is the fact that one of them can disagree with the other two (hence the minority report) that suggests they are not seeing the future–were they seeing the future, they would all see the same future.  They are instead seeing the most likely future based on current events.  (The very fact that they can take steps to prevent that which they have foreseen demands that they are not viewing the future itself, since once they have prevented it from happening they have also prevented themselves from seeing it.)

  Another example of this is found in Dune’s Paul Atriedes.  Unlike the guild steersmen, he doesn’t see “the future”; he sees all possible futures, and chooses his actions as a means of selecting which of those futures will become reality.  The steersmen are doing much the same, on a smaller scale.  They see that if they leave port now, there will be a collision.  They thus choose not to leave port, and so prevent the collision.

  Magical predictions (in Multiverser), by contrast, are nearly always fixed, immutable.  These are the utterances of prophets, the readings of omens, the statements of oracles.  They may be conditional, such as “if you do not mend your ways”, but if they do not state a condition they are generally deemed absolute.  This poses a much more challenging problem for the referee, as once such a prediction is made it must come to pass in some form.

  It is that last clause, in some form, that is the secret to using such predictions in games.  I cannot control the actions of the players, even if I am quite skilled at manipulating them.  Thus part of the trick is to so couch the initial prophecy in such a way that you can fulfill it no matter what the players do.

  That doesn’t mean you have to railroad them into your plot.  It means you have to give predictions that are subject to interpretation.  Of course, the players will probably ascribe a certain interpretation to them.  If they did not do so, the prophecy would be pointless.  But the wording has to be such that there may be alternate ways to fulfill it; and the referee has to have these possibilities in mind when he delivers the prediction initially.

  Certainly the trick we saw above is useful in this regard:  to have a method of fulfilling a prophecy which appears on its face self-contradictory.  If the players can see no way for a prediction to be fulfilled, they cannot easily thwart it.  But there are many other ways to accomplish the same goal.  Prophetic messages are often vague, frequently symbolic, and always fragmentary.  This last point is the most useful.  In MacBeth, the warning was that the end would come when the woods came to the castle; they did come to the castle, in the form of disguises worn by the attacking armies.  Could that prediction have been otherwise fulfilled, perhaps by the forest being cut for siege works, or being brought for rather peaceful purposes such as firewood or construction, or washed up to the walls by flooding?  The sisters did not say how the woods would move; in the absence of that information lies the opportunity for fulfillment.  Vague predictions are easier to fulfill, but less useful.  The trick is striking that balance, where the prediction appears to be very significant but can be brought to pass by any of several events.

  I’ve suggested something along this line elsewhere, and the discussion there may be helpful despite that not being game related.  But these ideas should help get a few prophetic visions into your games, and get around the problems normally associated with them.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.