Seers
Mythic Bastionland uses seers to convey secrets and clues about myths to knights. I love seers, and I think they are an excellent way for us to create interesting and useful oracles for our roleplaying games. This post discusses how they work in Mythic Bastionland, and how they could function in other games to a similar effect.
(Also, I released a new single-session adventure on itch called Quest for the Vorpal Sword. You might use it with Dungeons and Dragons 5e or you might borrow bits for your other games.)
Seers in Mythic Bastionland
In Mythic Bastionland, seers come in 72 shapes and sizes. They are responsible for knighting a specific kind of knight, and they have three distinct features that make them unique.
Here is an example of a seer from the book:
The Pain Seer (Knighter of the Pearl Knight) VIG 7, CLA 13, SPI 5, 1GD
- Awkwardly hunched woman, her very image appearing shattered like glass.
- Absorbs sorrow and aches, like nectar to a bird. Exchanges them for guidance doomed to cause only more sorrow.
- Wants to feed enough to finally be satisfied, then she can begin offering truly useful guidance.
Weird, right?
Their name gives you an inkling about their theme. Sometimes it's a theme they represent, a goal they have, or something else.
The next line is a set of stats for the character. These are rarely relevant in the game, which makes seers pretty easy to transplant into other game systems. If you do care about how the values compare to each other, just know that VIG, CLA, and SPI each range from 2 to 19.
The three bullet points can be generalized for most of the seers in the book:
- The first point is a description of what the seer looks like.
- The second point is an idea of how their sight works (what exactly can they do well).
- The third point is their goal.
In practice, these three bullet points are enough for me to run a seer as an NPC throughout a few brief scenes where knights reach out for guidance. You have an idea of what the seer looks like and what they want, and you can make an educated guess for how they give any information to the knights.
Some of the seers in the book are harder to understand than the others, that's for sure, but for the most part they are highly usable characters that you can drag and drop into a realm without much forethought.
Seers in other Systems
I haven't seen characters like seers in any system I've played before. There are some character options that let players act like oracles, but rarely are their fortune tellers, future seers, or crystal orb ponderers as NPCs in my games.
However, I think we could benefit from using seers and oracles more often!
Making them is simple, you just follow the three bullet point generalization and you'll have an entertaining NPC instantaneously. Seers are fantastic vehicles for secretes and clues. They also prompt adventures just by themselves; when players learn about the Oracle of San Erasov on Blackhook Mountain who knows all things, they'll probably want to pay a visit in the near future.
I encourage you to think about adding an oracle or two to your adventure setting to see if it inspires new adventures for your play group.
How Much Info?
One fear you may have when implementing seers is how to give "just enough" information without being too revealing. The simplest solution to this is to say about half the truth.
Consider this example:
The party wants to defeat a goblin king. The goblin king lives in the Warrens, and is creating an army to march on a nearby village. The goblin king also has recruited an evil sorcerer to help out.
The party arrives at the seer's enclave to ask for guidance. They say: "What should we look out for when we approach the goblin king?"
The seer says: "The king recruits many allies in his service. Beware their foul tricks."
The party now knows that the king has allies with tricks, but not who or how many. This is usually good enough to make a few decisions on their own, and create a plan of attack or infiltration.
How Many Questions?
A second fear would be if the party is asking too many questions. A simple solution to this is to limit the amount of times per day/week the oracle will give guidance.
Alternatively, you can give out more and more cryptic responses until the players give up. Both are valid options, though the first is easier on your brain than the other.
In the goblin king example, I would probably give enough information to help the party clue in on some kind of magic user being part of the king's retinue. I might say the name of the sorcerer (and a wizard in the group might recognize it) or I might mention foul sorcery.
Once I've given out as much information as I want for the given situation, I'll usually have the oracle be taken away by acolytes (oracles should always have acolytes) or they'll go to sleep in their chair. It's a pretty simple way to transition the scene from Q/A to Let's Make a Plan.
Final Thoughts
There, a nice short post about using seers and recommending them for other roleplaying systems. I wrote about how seers are described in Mythic Bastionland, and how we can use the same process to make similar NPCs in any system.
Thanks for reading!
Things on my radar:
- Wonder Man is the best Marvel TV Show out there, 10/10.
- Moonrise Kingdom is still a great movie, 10/10.
- Get Out, Predator: Badlands, and Ex Machina were all OK: 5/10.
- The No ICE in Minnesota bundle is a great opportunity to support a good cause and get some cool games.
- MurkDice talks about describing doors. Sounds boring, but is actually very important to influence decision making during dungeon crawls. I hate having to pick between two unlabeled doors.
- MrHitchhikerDave has a cool point-crawl dungeon generator on itch!