PDA

View Full Version : Prophecy and the end of the world in a rationalist plot



kieza
2021-03-08, 05:27 AM
So, I'm running a campaign that's about to get into territory involving prophecy and the end of the world. The thing is, I'm trying to run a rationalist plot, with some consistent rules about how prophecy works, and I've got some pet peeves about end-of-the-world plots:
--Why won't the authorities or the Mysterious Old Wizard help the prophesied heroes save the world?
--Why can't a prophet tell them how to foil the villain's plans?
--Why does it have to be these prophesied heroes, and what happens if there's a TPK?

I've put a lot of thought into ways to address these pitfalls:
--Nobody knows what causes the end of the world yet, just that it's going to happen, so they don't even know who to ask for help or what to ask for.
--The prophet can only see the future in terms of probabilities and has to perform time-consuming research on the future to figure out what to do. He could conceivably figure out a way to e.g. prevent the villain's Start of Darkness, but he just hasn't figured out how yet.
--The heroes are unique in that, by coincidence, they make a difference in enough timelines for the prophet to notice. The prophet hasn't figured out what that difference is yet, but he's now taking steps to ensure their survival until they figure out what they need to do. If they figure that out, then conceivably someone else can take over for them, and even if they TPK early on, the prophet and anyone else they tell will be working on the problem, trying to figure out what that crucial step they failed at could be

Now, the actual setup I'm going to use. The PCs have just been through a vision where they witnessed Bad Stuff (TM) happening, thanks to a faerie seer with a sufficiently accurate and detailed prediction engine. The seer who put them through it is about to give them the background and point them towards next steps; monologue in spoilers below:

The power of the Court of Stars is exactly what your faerie tales tell you it is: the power to see the future through the stars. Not a singular future that WILL happen, but many futures that MAY happen. Gazing at the stars, the future unfurls for us, like a path that branches ahead of us with every decision, every random event. We can walk down these paths, to see what lies there, and if we dislike it, we can turn back and try another, until we find one that satisfies us.
The cost—for all power in Faerie carries a cost—is an inability to speak of what we see except in riddles and verse. What we must discuss now is too important to trust to riddles, and so against all counsel and wisdom, I have severed myself from my Mantle of Power so that it may no longer bind my tongue. Now, I stand before you as the mortal elf I was two centuries ago: I will surely pay a cost for it—indeed, I already have begun to pay—but I pay it gladly knowing what it may buy.
We of the Court have seen many futures, some good, some bad, some simply indescribable. But what you saw in the vision we showed you is the only way any of us have ever seen the world END.

The details—the fighters, the foes they face, their ultimate fates—all vary depending on the paths we walk. But there is always the battle through those strange halls, the attempt to destroy that font of power. Sometimes they succeed, and it is destroyed as you saw. Sometimes they fail, and the path simply…ends…shortly after. But either way, we can see nothing past that vision: no wars, no ruins, no hellish fires, not even a lifeless world, simply…nothingness.
We do not know what leads up to the end. Parts of the paths are dark or clouded, especially as we approach the end, and the crucial events are seemingly hidden from us. So we have studied events probabilistically, compared the paths which end with those that do not, and sought out seemingly mundane events which raise or lower the odds of survival. Much to our surprise, we found you…
If we do nothing, the world will continue to spin on for some time before it ends: the odds of reaching the end are quite low for the immediate future, but increase steadily over time. A century from now, one path in ten will have led to the end. In two centuries, one in three. We have not looked farther than that in detail, but we see no signs that the pattern will not hold.

But if you take the book that you came for, and give it to your learned professor…
It is dangerous, certainly. One in six paths end within a decade. One in five within fifty years. But a century from now, or two centuries…still no more than one in four. Something that you do with that book--something that as far as I know, ONLY you can do--will either hasten the end, or avert it entirely.

I have decided to wager on you. A one-in-five chance that the world ends within a mortal lifetime, against the near-certainty that it ends eventually? It is no choice at all. Sadly, not all of the Court thinks as I do. I have allies, but we are few. So I have taken this desperate step, to give you the time and tools you need to fulfill this destiny: already my plans and agents are in motion, beyond the reach of the Court. My allies have worked a magic to conceal you from future sight—although ironically, it may be this very spell that prevents us from seeing the events surrounding the end of the world. Once you return to the mortal world, I have arranged for you to learn all that we know of your role, although I caution you not to read too much of it at first. Some of what you must do may be impossible to accomplish but by blind luck. And first, we must escape the forces that the Court is sending to thwart me. Gather your things: I will accompany you as far as I can, but the cost I have incurred is a heavy one; I will be taken from you before long, and you must not aid me, lest you be burdened with the costs I willingly pay.

Does anyone see any plot holes or pitfalls I've missed planning this? Has anyone else tried to run a plot involving rationalist prophecy?

Yora
2021-03-08, 06:12 AM
Prophecies as a storytelling device really make no sense, unless your particular story is a tragedy about bad things happening to good people and there's nothing that can be done to prevent it. Then we really just can watch how the doomed protagonist deals with the fact that he is doomed. It's a story about character, not a story about action.

If the prophecy is "You will defeat the villain and save the world", then the whole story becomes meaningless. The hero does not have any incentive to give it his best or any reason to worry. It's predetermined that he will win, which means he can't fail, and so nothing he does matters anyway.

The one way I can see prophecy kind of working is when they are messages from higher powers, that have vastly superior knowledge and understanding, which allows them to make quite accurate predictions about how things would end if they are allowed to continue as they are now. They can make predictions about the big picture, like there's going to be a great European war in the late 1910s, but they can't predict that an assassin randomly runs into his target in the street after just having run away from a failed assassination attempt.
If you have a prophecy that says "At some point, important leader A and important leader B will cross paths, and the outcome of that encounter will determine the outcome of the war", then you still have the tension of something critical being about to happen, but you don't give away what will actually happen.

MoiMagnus
2021-03-08, 06:47 AM
I've played in two campaigns where we were the prophetised heroes.


Plot:
+ The "prophecy" is pretty much just the long-term plan of an dynasty of dragons to create few industrial revolutions and eventually to guide humans into conquering the multiverse.
+ The LN extraplanar entities discovering this plan decide to interact with the material plane to kill the dragon before this empire starts getting out of hand. Because of the rules they must abide to, they have to proceed in the way which interferes the least with the material plane, so they decide to save the life of a small group of individuals (the PCs) from a certain death, specifically chosen because they will most likely defeat the dragon (a "counterprophecy").
+ While we did not have a TPK, it's has if that was the case. After few sessions, we start a sequence of sessions where members of our team die one by one, until only one survives (my wizard) and ... the campaign stops because the group is falling apart too. The last scene of the campaign was those extraplanar being pretty pissed off out of the near-suicidal behaviour of my now dead teammates.



Plot:
+ There is Shadow, a LE god of the ineluctable end of the world. Though this "prophecy" is more a religion than an actual prophecy. When the god which is objectively more clever than the remaining of the pantheon combined decides to plan for universal destruction, it's not absurd to believe that it will eventually happen. Heroes and other gods working against it might successfully prevent a prophecy/plan, delaying the end of the world until the next prophecy/plan. But they just need to fail once for the universe to be destroyed, and statistically it is bound to eventually happens. As such Shadow is bound to be eventually correct.
+ The GM changes the motivation of Shadow in each campaign. In this campaign, Shadow had understood that the universe was fake, merely a simulation of some sort, and decided to put an end to it.
+ As part of Shadow's prophecy/plan for this campaign was a self-defeating prophecy. Build a situation where the best bet for the other gods seems to be to trust a group of mortal with god-killing powers, and hope that they make a fatal mistakes taking the universe with them, as mortals often do.
+ Shadow was not that far from being right. We did conquer a good portion of the universe with our empire, inadvertently started a full scale war against the nine Hells, then did no see coming one of the worst demonic incursion imaginable, with both us and the nine Hells themselves almost falling to the invasion (we actually had to help them...). After all of that and many other dubious choices made by us, the (RP) tensions between our characters grew to the points where at the deciding moment one of the PCs strongly hesitated to betray and give the victory to Shadow.


Additional though on your three points:

--Why won't the authorities or the Mysterious Old Wizard help the prophesied heroes save the world
(1) Assuming the enemy is not going all-in (probably a LE world-destroyer?), escalating the conflict by having the Mysterious Old Wizard might push the enemy to think "well, if you're going all-in, then so should I!"
(2) Authorities might think the prophecy is a trap from the BG, so they consider that putting the heroes in a cell and destroying all the traces of the prophecy is a safer bet than trying to help the heroes.
(3) The plan might relies on the enemy not knowing the prophecy, so the PCs can't publicly get help for that and must work at high level of secrecy. If the BG knows the prophecy, he might notice the flaws in his plan and change for a plan without those flaws.

--Why can't a prophet tell them how to foil the villain's plans?
(1) "[...] and it is with the rage of having lost your wife in the destruction of your hometown that you will give the final blow!" "Wait, what? My wife will die!?! I'm not letting that happen!" "But you have to! If you save her, the ..."So I can save her? Good luck with this prophecy, family first! Bye.".
=> In general, there might be complications, and information that the prophet just must hide from the heroes for the prophecy to actually work.
(2) There might be a lot of ways for the prophecy to unfold, and the solution might be different each time.

--Why does it have to be these prophesied heroes, and what happens if there's a TPK?
(1) Maybe that's one of the "solutions" that the prophet cannot spell out to the heroes. Some paths to the victory have those heroes succeed themselves, but other paths have the heroes die in a TPK and their quest be continued by another group (exploiting the overconfidence of a BG convinced to have eliminated the prophecy). Just because it has to be those heroes who start the quest doesn't mean it has to be them who finish it.
(2) Do your NPCs level-up in the same way as your PCs? If not, the fact that PCs are quick-learners are probably a big factor in them being chosen ones.

Sneak Dog
2021-03-08, 07:52 AM
So, I'm running a campaign that's about to get into territory involving prophecy and the end of the world. The thing is, I'm trying to run a rationalist plot, with some consistent rules about how prophecy works, and I've got some pet peeves about end-of-the-world plots:
--Why won't the authorities or the Mysterious Old Wizard help the prophesied heroes save the world?
--Why can't a prophet tell them how to foil the villain's plans?
--Why does it have to be these prophesied heroes, and what happens if there's a TPK?



The Mysterious Old Wizard is old, and would likely fall to mundane disease were they to go travel the world. Handing out a macguffin, some magic items and telling others to do it is safe. Then just teleport in at the final confrontation, pull off some epic spells, weaken the great evil and set up an illusion to fake their death while they contingency teleport away gravely wounded to a safehouse is a much better bet. After that, any old level 15ish party can handle the rest.
The authorities meanwhile are dealing with rats in the sewers, bandits in the hills, skeletons in the graveyard and an emptying treasury.

The prophet does tell them how to foil the plans. Go out, gather the nine artefacts or as many as you can before the villain does, get stronger and confront the villain. Don't muck up.
What, you were expecting something more specific? Plenty of prohpets need to be in an... altered mindset... when receiving their prophecies. Asleep, high on hallucinatory substances, nearly dead, actually dead, in the middle of an emotional crisis, and so on.

It has to be these Prophesied Heroes because they are the ones The Mysterious Old Wizard gave the macguffin to and by the end, they're probably the only level 15ish party. If they TPK, the prophecy doesn't come through and the world ends. If it's early enough, The Mysterious Old Wizard comes in, grabs their macguffin and gives them to the definitely actually Prophesied Heroes, who now have to work on a much tighter schedule and might have a final confrontation at level 12ish. No pressure, save for the whole world ending if you fail thing. Good luck!

Kardwill
2021-03-08, 08:08 AM
Additional though on your three points: [...]


Nice ones. :)

Another possibility :
--Why won't the authorities or the Mysterious Old Wizard help the prophesied heroes save the world
1 - Because the authorities and the Mysterious Old Wizard are the one who want the prophecy to succed (for a Prophecy of Doom) or to be foiled (for a Prophecy about saviors). They genuinely think the prophecized bad stuff is good. Maybe because they're the evil bad guys, maybe because they see it as a religious duty, maybe because they see it in a positive light, like the bad guys of the videogame Suidoken Tierkreis that honestly think that traping the entire world in a time loop will remove suffering for all eternity).
2 - Same idea, but the prophecy doenst' really exist. It's just the endgame of the authorities, what they want to happen and are working for. The entire "it will be as prophecized" is just a bluff to get the people behind the idea.

Either way, they won't help the player because they don't want the players to succeed.



--Why can't a prophet tell them how to foil the villain's plans?
1 - The prophet just announced the prophecy, but since they're working for the Evil Empire or have been "dealt with", they're not available to give details. And even if they were available, they just had this prophecy, not the entire guideline in "how to make it (not) happen"
2 - The prophecy is made/found/researched by a scholar for the Evil Empire, that uses it to puts their plans in place. Finding a way to get to the prophet and convince them to share the details could be one of the most important goals of the PCs :)



--Why does it have to be these prophesied heroes, and what happens if there's a TPK?
It doesn't have to be about those particular heroes. Prophecies are often blurry on the details. Either :
1 - the heroes happen to be the ones in position to accomplish/stop the prophecy (maybe because of the authorities' attempt to push/suppress it backfires and sets the heroes against them - Think "Willow", where the evil queen's decision to kill the prophecized child backfires and creates the unlikely group of heroes that kills her). It could have been somebody else, but they picked up the sword/saved the Child of Prophecy/had their town destroyed/are the only survivors of the rebel army.
2 - the heroes were the first ones to rise against what is happening, or are the biggest guns on the "rebel" size (because the other, more prominent opponents have been wiped out). Or they have a way to protect themselves from whatever the other side uses to suppress opposition. Anyway, their possible allies are far away, weaker, or neutered in some way.

In both case, it has to be them because there is nobody else to do it. And even if they were not the prophecized ones", a true hero would try and go down swinging anyway.

As for the TPK : Well, having a "blurry" prophecy can take care of that (they were not the prophecised ones, or the prophecy of doom will happen). Anyway, if you put the "end of the world" on the table as a stake of a game, then you have to be ready to end the world when the heroes fail or stop trying, prophecy or not. No "and then Elminster teleports in and saves the world himself" backsie.

Willie the Duck
2021-03-08, 09:43 AM
So, I'm running a campaign that's about to get into territory involving prophecy and the end of the world. The thing is, I'm trying to run a rationalist plot, with some consistent rules about how prophecy works, and I've got some pet peeves about end-of-the-world plots:
--Why won't the authorities or the Mysterious Old Wizard* help the prophesied heroes save the world?
--Why can't a prophet tell them how to foil the villain's plans?
--Why does it have to be these prophesied heroes, and what happens if there's a TPK?
Does anyone see any plot holes or pitfalls I've missed planning this? Has anyone else tried to run a plot involving rationalist prophecy?

Out of curiosity, what do you mean by rationalist in this situation? I've seen the word used, misused, and proverbially put through the wringer in online discussions, so would rather you just tell us how you intend the term.

Regarding prophesy pet peeves, I think the first two are relatively easy to solve, depending upon your campaign -- authorities don't believe the Mysterious Old Wizard, the Mysterious Old Wizard is too frail, Mysterious Old Wizard doesn't know exact plan (perhaps their own interference has already muddied the situation), other side has a prophet working against them, etc. The third is much more of an issue, and one I think you should seriously consider what you want out of your campaign plot arc. Predestination works acceptably in tales where the author already knows if (and how) the protagonist succeeds -- they just have to work backwards to make sure that the players act in a way to get them to the point where they fulfill the prophecy. It works poorly in game systems where the players are rolling dice to see if their characters succeed at such and such. Overall, I would shy away from anything where the PCs need to do any specific thing, or the game world ends (now, or generations from now. I don't think your specific framing changes anything, as players won't want to keep playing in a doomed world). I think the idea of the Mysterious Old Wizard looking towards something near to the future, and "Much to our surprise, we found you" there is a good one -- now we don't actually know that the (current) PCs saved the world, only that they were present onstage while the world-saving was done. Thus, even if they trip and fall to their death leaving the valley of the Mysterious Old Wizard, that just means that you have to start the next group of characters walking by the valley, examining the corpse.

Aneurin
2021-03-08, 10:43 AM
So, I'm running a campaign that's about to get into territory involving prophecy and the end of the world. The thing is, I'm trying to run a rationalist plot, with some consistent rules about how prophecy works, and I've got some pet peeves about end-of-the-world plots:
--Why won't the authorities or the Mysterious Old Wizard help the prophesied heroes save the world?

...They would help? And do? I mean, why do you as GM not want them to? Authorities tend to have a personal interest in the world not ending, after all. YMMV with mysterious old wizards, though.

If you actually do want your authorities out of the way, then there's always the very simple answer that the authorities just don't believe the prophecy - especially if the source is a bit sketchy. Worlds are big, hard-to-destroy places. Personally, I wouldn't believe someone who walked up to me and told me the world was going to end - and haven't in the past - unless they could provide some evidence.


--Why can't a prophet tell them how to foil the villain's plans?

Possibilities:


They did, but having been dead for a few hundred years are unable to fill in the bits of the prophecy that have gotten lost in the intervening years.
They don't know. Their information is less "prophecy" and more "spying"; they know what someone's trying to do, and maybe even how they're doing it, but the outcome isn't actually something they know. The spy calls their words a prophecy because prophets get more respect than spies, usually, or because they already tried and failed to convince people just on the strength of their word; "No, governor, I absolutely heard this guy talking about how he'll blow up the world. What proof do I have? Er...".




--Why does it have to be these prophesied heroes, and what happens if there's a TPK?


It doesn't. The prophesied heroes are the ones who actually get the job done - if they all die, they clearly weren't the prophesied heroes.
The prophecy is non-specific as to the outcome. It just says "Bad Thing will start to happen, PCs will rise against it" without actually telling them that they're going to win, just that they're going to try.
Alternatively (and possibly somewhat boringly depending on how it's handled) they can't die for good until they've actually done what they set out to do. No matter what happens, they will come back regardless of what pain, suffering and misery they go through - something will not let them fail or give up, regardless of the cost to the heroes or the world around them. If it has to force some poor miracle worker through hell just to have them handy to resurrect a dead character, that's what it'll do. If it has to spare their life in the event of a fatal fall (though not, naturally, the horrific accompanying injuries that don't result in death) then that'll happen. There's some in-universe force that is trying to railroad the characters through events, essentially - obviously, you'd need player buy in for that and, ideally, a way to thwart fate and break free of the rails. Heck, maybe there's an actual respawn mechanic and the characters will pop up alive, well, and naked somewhere in the event of their death - or a "quick save" point, where time rewinds and they repeat the events that killed them until they do it right.



I appreciate none of these are very relevant to the situation you're actually running, but they were interesting questions. And I now kind of want to run a game where the PCs are battling Fate itself because it's trying to run their lives like every horror-story railroader the forums have ever heard of.



Does anyone see any plot holes or pitfalls I've missed planning this? Has anyone else tried to run a plot involving rationalist prophecy?

Not really prophecy related, but why is the Court coming to kill the prophet? I assume because they broke faerie law to be frank with the PCs, but it's perhaps something worth asking - you mentioned allies, but presumably there are enemies, too? Once the Court has meted out its vengeance or whatever, what's it going to do? They know about the End, whatever that may be, but do they want it to happen? Do they want it to stop? Do they want to kill everyone who heard an un-riddled version and then sort matters out for themselves, lock the PCs away, or help them on their way once they've dealt with their renegade?

Catullus64
2021-03-08, 11:26 AM
So, I'm running a campaign that's about to get into territory involving prophecy and the end of the world. The thing is, I'm trying to run a rationalist plot, with some consistent rules about how prophecy works, and I've got some pet peeves about end-of-the-world plots:
--Why won't the authorities or the Mysterious Old Wizard help the prophesied heroes save the world?
--Why can't a prophet tell them how to foil the villain's plans?
--Why does it have to be these prophesied heroes, and what happens if there's a TPK?


For the first point, I think that if there were an order of sages capable of divining the future, it would make sense for them to have oaths that limits their ability to actually act on the prophecies they make. It would be all too easy for them to bring about catastrophes by attempting to prevent them. This also serves as a good explanation for the second point.

I think it has to be said that even when prediction itself obeys consistent principles, it ultimately has to be filtered through human perception and language in order to become prophecy. That's why in the histories and literature of the ancients, prophecies almost always turned upon ambiguities of language; people's certainty that they understood what they meant always blinded them to other possibilities contained within the language of prophecy. Even if prophecy is consistent, human inconsistency can always work within it.

Consider that to predict the future is to predict only a certain vantage of it. If you look out over a landscape, you can only see so much of it; even that within the range of your vision may be hidden behind the hills and valleys, and distance may warp your perception of the relationship between objects. The seer may see an event of trivial importance and mistake it for being integral to the outcome; he may see an outcome but not fully appreciate its implications. Thus it is possible for the heroes' triumph to be foreseen, and yet for the journey to have unexpected consequences, surprises, and reversals that give the story real drama.

Segev
2021-03-08, 12:48 PM
One possibility is that the Chosen Ones are literally that - CHOSEN. They're not special because the prophesy says so; they're special because the prophet chose them as the ones he thinks most able to fulfill the conditions he foresaw as being necessary to achieve the best ending. Or even the best ending for him. (If he's a good-guy prophet, this is likely what everyone would agree is "the best ending," or at least is one of "the least bad endings."

It's also possible that "the chosen one" who "will do X" is not so much "chosen" as the person who happens to do X.

The prophecy merely is a view on what is going to happen, and it happens to catch that somebody does something. This tends to be unsatisfying because it suggests inability of the actors to choose things. Generally better, narratively and for agency, if it is in the form of "if X, then Y," and the prophets get visions of possible ways X can be done and bring about Y. Maybe they even get a read on the kind of person their possible chosen ones are based on what those people do in various futures where they accomplish X and bring about Y. Is their Y better than somebody else's?

This combines well with the "complex predictions and modeling calculations" type of prophecy. "What if I change this variable?" becomes a complicated thing to predict, errors can accumulate, but it can serve as a guide.

kieza
2021-03-08, 11:02 PM
Out of curiosity, what do you mean by rationalist in this situation? I've seen the word used, misused, and proverbially put through the wringer in online discussions, so would rather you just tell us how you intend the term.

a) The rules of powerful magic are consistent, and the plot is driven by people using those rules to their full potential (rather than there being some magic out there that would have solved the problem if only anyone had bothered to try it). I intend to avert Forgotten Phlebotinum (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ForgottenPhlebotinum) (Warning: TVTropes)

b) There are no trivial ways to exploit those rules, but there are NON-trivial ways that are fun (for the right kind of player) to figure out. As an example, the following spoilers contain an exploit of how prophecy is explained to work:

My premise explicitly allows viewing the future, which in turn means that there are ways to send information back in time. This is potentially-exploitable: for example, the seer could resolve to randomly search down one particular path to see what happens, and then raise either a red or a green flag depending on whether he finds anything informative. Then, before making his random choice, he could quickly check through each of the paths that creates, and if he sees a green flag, then he can focus his search on that path instead of having to actually check all of them. And if the players came up with this idea, worked out all the kinks to avoid acausal loops, and suggested it to the seer, I would give them a lot more useful information from that point on.

c) The villains are just as competent as the heroes and have all the same tools at their disposal, because I also intend to avert Contrived Stupidity (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ContrivedStupidityTropes).


One possibility is that the Chosen Ones are literally that - CHOSEN. They're not special because the prophesy says so; they're special because the prophet chose them as the ones he thinks most able to fulfill the conditions he foresaw as being necessary to achieve the best ending. Or even the best ending for him. (If he's a good-guy prophet, this is likely what everyone would agree is "the best ending," or at least is one of "the least bad endings."

It's also possible that "the chosen one" who "will do X" is not so much "chosen" as the person who happens to do X.

The prophecy merely is a view on what is going to happen, and it happens to catch that somebody does something. This tends to be unsatisfying because it suggests inability of the actors to choose things. Generally better, narratively and for agency, if it is in the form of "if X, then Y," and the prophets get visions of possible ways X can be done and bring about Y. Maybe they even get a read on the kind of person their possible chosen ones are based on what those people do in various futures where they accomplish X and bring about Y. Is their Y better than somebody else's?

This combines well with the "complex predictions and modeling calculations" type of prophecy. "What if I change this variable?" becomes a complicated thing to predict, errors can accumulate, but it can serve as a guide.

Yup, that's more or less the route I'm going with. The seer's ability to see the future lets them see any possible timeline in perfect detail and accuracy, but not omnisciently: they can see any minute part of the timeline that's not deliberately obscured, but they have to actually LOOK, in a way that takes time in the present. So they're limited to seeing either big events that are easy to spot skimming through the timeline, or small events that proceed immediately from some decision or random factor they've decided to study. They also have a handful of useful diagnostic tools like the exploit in spoilers (although less powerful than that one).


Not really prophecy related, but why is the Court coming to kill the prophet? I assume because they broke faerie law to be frank with the PCs, but it's perhaps something worth asking - you mentioned allies, but presumably there are enemies, too? Once the Court has meted out its vengeance or whatever, what's it going to do? They know about the End, whatever that may be, but do they want it to happen? Do they want it to stop? Do they want to kill everyone who heard an un-riddled version and then sort matters out for themselves, lock the PCs away, or help them on their way once they've dealt with their renegade?

They're immortal, and the brand of risk-aversion that they embrace drives most of them to avoid taking risks that might end the world SOON. They plan to petrify the PCs while they work on reducing the risk to less than 1-in-5 odds of ending the world. If they see signs that the world is actually about to end, they'll pull the PCs out of mothballs, arm them with whatever improved information they came up with in the meantime, and hope that there's still time to put them back on track.

The underlying reason, though, is that

the Realm of Faerie is itself a genius loci that gives phenomenal powers to people who surrender to its will. A large part of its will is that it wants to tell a particular brand of story for mortals that wander in: it's set up so that if mortals play the hero to the good faeries, bargain with the tricksters, and oppose the wicked sorcerers, everything seems to go their way, but if they try to buck the system, things just...don't. It gets grumpy when its "actors" break character like this seer just did. Thus the costs which the seer is about to pay, and why he warns them not to help...