The Chosen One (Is a Moron)

The Game

There is a prophecy. The person who is meant to fulfill that prophecy is a well-meaning idiot. Your job, and the jobs of your fellows, is to make the prophecy come true at any cost so that the big dummy can thwart the Big Evil.

What I Like About This One

It’s hard to do the Chosen One trope in RPGs because the entire medium of games is agency. Not to get too into the weeds on theory, but the choices that we make and the free will we exercise are the tool we use to create the Art Moment of a game. That experience isn’t necessarily undermined by narrative tropes around destiny, but those tropes can feel really restricting, at times in ways that can de-value the artistic experience of the participants. So having your player characters be the Chosen One without explicit buy-in as to what that means can be kind of disastrous.

Making the Chosen One a) a non-player character and b) a dummy presents some interesting opportunities for how to utilize free will and agency towards a specific goal - how do we get this moron to fulfill the prophecy in a way that will actually let us destroy the Great Evil?

Also, I love the idea of a random prophecy, so mad-libs!

What I’d Do Differently Next Time:

I’d maybe consider a few different types of prophecy? I feel like this one is really cute in concept but kinda lacks in the execution department, so if I do come back to this idea it’s going to probably require I go back to the drawing board completely. It’s playable as is, but I think I could find ways to execute on these concepts better with some more room maybe.