Creating a prophecy/history

[hennasmith]

I'm about to run a new campaign with new players. I'm planning to start them going into the Valley of Obelisks and run through Shattered Gates of Slaughtergarde, then transition into a homebrew world/campaign. The cleric's player and I have been hashing out his particulars and back story. His character is a middle-aged cloistered cleric with zero combat skills, and he wants a believable motivation for him to go a-journeying. I suggested his character could have found a snippet of information/history/prophecy/something similar that intrigues him so much he wants to know more, and the player likes the idea.

I found this paragraph in the module: "The blind dwarf sage Thermeskor had a vision of a mountain weeping blood. Elf mystics found their meditations interrupted by similar scenes. Humans native to one particular mountain valley began erecting black obelisks at the direction of their priests, often with the aid of dwarves and elves." It goes on to describe more preparations and the battle and defeat of the demon forces. I'd like to take that bit, though, and create a scroll fragment he might have found in his archives. It's roughly 800 years past, so information would be hard to track down without going to the source, at least that's what I think, does it sound plausible?

I'm having trouble wording this though. I don't want to sound too cheesy in my first session... and I don't want to drop too much information either. Would some sort of jumbled prophetic ranting be enough to pique someone's curiosity enough to leave everything he's ever known? What would you have him find? Suggestions on the actual wording?

[VoxRationis]

If you want it to be a history, consider having most of the writing be about how great or how horrible a particular person is, with only occasional reference to the details of what happened on a practical level. Ancient writers were in many ways like tabloid journalists: they liked "human interest" and the stories of personal relationships between famous people, rather than say, going into detail on the technological or practical aspects of the world they lived in, since they assumed most people knew that already.
So instead of "The priest-king Malomehanembar developed the Black Obelisks, which channeled the energies of a spell which prevented the oncoming demon hordes from progressing beyond the Weeping Mountain save by efforts equal to that needed to enter this world in the first place, you might have an account saying "Malomehanembar, architect of the Black Obelisks and by them victor of the War of the Weeping Mountain, was indicted by the Council of Hierophants for his illicit affair with the concubine of his rival Ammerek..."