Toolkit: The Truth of the World

Mrs. Sith and I recently saw Evil Dead the Musical, which we very thoroughly enjoyed.

Yes, there will be blood!

Yes, this is an actual thing. What, you were thinking after telling you about the Mike Tyson Mysteries that I'd make something like this up?



Two of the things we enjoyed the most were very small things.

First, there was Jake. Jake is a very minor throw-away character who only exists to get two of the late arriving characters out to the cabin in the woods. The musical, being more than a little of a farce, stops to ask why anyone trusts someone who just happens to be hanging out in the woods in the middle of the night and offers to be their guide.

Jake has an answer, and it’s very funny. He gets a song, Good Old Reliable Jake.

If you need a guy to get you through them woods
And I knows that trail and I knows it good
You can trust in me, there’s no mistake
I’m good old reliable Jake
You can trust in me, there’s no mistake
I’m good old reliable Jake

For the rest of his (brief) time in the play, Jake is the voice of reason you never hear in a horror movie, telling everyone to get out of there.

The deliberate call to attention of a character who doesn't have any real role to play is very funny, and can teach us something about making our gaming worlds seem more lived in.

The second thing that really worked for the Mrs. and I was the moose. Those of you who've seen Evil Dead 2 know there’s an evil deer head in the film that’s evil.

In the musical, they've changed that to be a moose, who looks like this.

There's a moose on the loose!

He has a very important (and painful) part to play as a part of Ash’s character development, but in the Musical he give Ash a lot of other bad news that’s really funny, telling him among other things that the mustard stain on his pants is the sort that’s just not going to come out. His character is very goofy, unexpected, and had us laughing out loud. He stole the show.

Since I've taken to writing OnTheDie, I think a lot more about how the things I experience can make for good fodder for the blog, and Evil Dead gives me a great opportunity to talk about something from my new game, Sword of Virtues.

The Truth of the World

The idea is called the Truth of the World. Both Jake and the moose weren't in the original story, but they're something that if, say, a group of people were sitting around a table discussing Ash's situation, they might have just dreamed up. The parallels to role playing are shocking.

So, Truth, eh? Sounds like a big concept, doesn't it? Well, like most big ideas, it is and it isn't.

The Truth of the World is an idea that can take the setting for a role playing game and turn it from something that the game present to you into something that’s your own. More precisely, it makes a campaign in a game setting belong to you and your group.

What do I mean by that? Well even a world like the Forgotten Realms, where volume after volume has been written about the most trivial details, there are still holes. Empty spaces. As much as Ed Greenwood might joke “just give me time,” it will never be complete.

A game world is never complete until you make it yours. Not just yours as the GM, but yours as everyone who’s involved with the game. That's a big deal.

At the same time, it's simple: all it does is let you take player input and make decisions about who people are, and how they behave and turn it into Truth.

As a GM, it’s a very simple concept, but also very powerful. To implement it, all you have to do is pause periodically and ask your players to fill in a detail about why or who or how something works in your game. This works especially well when your group asks you for a detail that you hadn't thought about or prepared.

If your group has just come into a small town that you thought they’d just pass through on the way to their next big adventure, and asks something about it, you can turn it on them and ask them to provide the details.

“You said this town was called Three Willows, why’s that?”

Now you might answer them with “I don’t know, that’s what it’s called on the map from the module I’m running,” but let me propose an alternative:

“Good question, why is that?”

Now if you've never asked this sort of question before, expect some reluctant faces. You should also expect at least one person to say something like “it’s a trick, get an axe” … especially if they've recently been watching Bruce Campbell movies.

If you get a questioning response, just let them know that they can tell you, and that the result will be something True for the game. See what I did there by capitalizing the T in true? I've been doing it for some time now, actually. That’s because you’re letting them in on establishing The Truth of the World and Truth is a Really Big Deal <tm>.

Three Widows: an Example

The time I was in exactly that situation, one of the players spoke up and said “it’s actually not, it’s really Three Widows, but the Imperial Magistrate got it wrong. Seems like there were three wealthy families back when, and all of their husbands disappeared together, leaving the three widows to run the place. That was all a long time ago.”

The moment the player said that, I told them, “okay, that’s True.” And I started thinking about a plot involving the characters that had just been introduced into the game. The group ended up coming back through this town several times over the course of the game, and eventually investigated one of the widow's old houses, the wife of the former timber baron. Her creepy old house had a hidden treasure in it that people had been searching for since her death.

Along the way the group also needed to work with the local authorities in the next bigger village, and I was ready with the fact that the magistrate was none too bright. One throwaway line gave me half a dozen interesting characters and even an entire adventure. And the players bought into it because it was really their idea to begin with.

The Truth of the World in Sword of Virtues

Let’s use a few examples of how The Truth of the World can be used from Sword of Virtues.

A great time to allow a player to add some Truth to the game is when they’re creating their character. For a couple of examples, consider Crr-Grr, one of the most unusual characters who were ever part of the game.

Crr-Grr's player told me that he was from the Savage Jungles of Karesh Nor.

What are they, I asked. Well, it seems that they’re actually in a hidden land surrounded by huge mountains, and they’re sort of like the Savage Lands from old Marvel comics: dinosaurs and lizard men with an ancient civilization on it that has mysterious magic to it unlike anything seen around here!

Interesting, What kind of magic? 

Well, maybe it’s not really magic, but advanced technology or something like that. All I know is that Giant 50’ tall stone golems are also somehow involved.

And so the Savage Jungles of Karesh Nor were added to the map, and at another point, many years later when a player asked if they could play a character who rode around in a 50’ tall stone golem I was able to answer, “yes, actually, they have a history right here.” I don’t think they were expecting that, but the response was waiting there, out of what the previous player had set in motion.

So the Truth of the World sets things in motion that can come back and make for a better game years later.

There’s another example from the game where a player asked me about playing a paladin, who was a follower of a god. I mentioned that the god’s had largely left the world, so this would be something unusual. Not only did the player agree, but he also suggested something very unusual.

“You know how the evil gods really hate each other” (They do, I thought, well, I guess they do now). “Well, let’s say there are only a couple sects left, both of them horrible gods, who hate each other. How about I play a paladin who’s actually the follower of a dark goddess, but who’s fighting another evil god and so can act to all the world as if they’re a good person?”

And with that, Kessara, champion of Hekate was born, sworn enemy of the Dark One.

In the Sword of Virtues fiction, I described part of the creation of the world as a battle between two gods who were both self-centered to the extreme. Now I had names to go with that! Kessara was one of the most influential characters in the history of the game, and a character who’s had an enormous impact on the world itself. I didn't create almost any of the Truth about her, that was all her player: I was just listening.

Truth While in Session

Those are a couple examples of using Truth for world building, but what should you do when you’re actually in a session?

Again, it’s a simple answer: listen, and ask your players “why is that?” or “how does that work?” or even say, “I don’t know, you tell me.”

You don't want to do this too often, otherwise you might derail what's really important to your players, but a good question about the Truth every few hours can make the game a lot more fun for everyone involved.

There’s a great example from a game from many years back. The group was just starting to explore a dwarven tomb, and there was considerable discussion as to which way to go.

Joe, one of the players eventually piped up with, “we should go right.”

When asked why, he said that dwarves always put their traps to the left.

When asked why that was, he, without missing a beat, said “everyone knows that dwarves hate gnomes, and gnomes are always left handed.”

The wise GM accepted it as True, and thus was born the Truth of dwarven trap construction, left-handed gnomes, and the lasting enmity between the two species.

All from Joe’s simply being sick of debating which way to go while exploring.

Truth but Verify

One last important part about using the Truth of the World: you need to remember it. Now if you're lucky, you'll have a player who makes notes about everything that happens in a session. That player can become the Scribe of Truth for you. If you do something like this, make sure to give the player a little reward for the extra work, after all they're making your game something more memorable. Of course the very fact that it's being recorded may mean the Truth is altered somewhat. Let that go and give the Scribe a bit of poetic license.

If you have a group who really enjoys this sort of thing, you can rotate the Scribe's duties periodically so that everyone gets a chance to add to the world.

Wrap Up

So that’s The Truth of the World. Does that sound like something that would make your game more interesting? Talk to me about it.

And until next time, Make Mine 20.