Ep 9 - Anatomy of a Myth

They have a name, a poem, illustration, the omens, the cast, a 2D6 table, and then some of the elements are repeated in the prompts.

My first question is,

do you mention the name of the myth

Very rarely.

Often I have players just guess what it is.

If you come across the troll, they're like, oh, hey, look, there's a troll here.

But do you refer to the myth as the troll? Like, do you have NPCs, for example, mentioned, oh, well, we have seen the troll? Or have you heard about the plague?

They talk about the beast in the north.

I guess the plague kind of makes sense, but they'll sooner call it like the Black Death or something like that.

I introduce it based on the omens and whatever information would be available to the people in the omens, that's what the players will get.

I'm not really sure what an alternative would be.

So I'm interested to hear if people have considered doing different things, like reading out the poem at the beginning of the myth.

So does anyone do that?

I have occasionally used the poem as something that a NPC in the world, whether it's a vassal or a seer or something, will just blurt out randomly at some point.

So I'll try to incorporate that just for flavor because they're great.

But I think I'm like y'all, I don't really ever use the names specifically.

The plague is a good example because that's one of the ones that some of my players have most interacted with.

And after the last omen and things had completely come undone, they finally said, oh, this might be a plague.

And for the poem, I would say that having the seers to read the poem, because as Jesse said, it is super evocative.

It doesn't give too much away.

It's vague enough that a seer could say stuff like that.

There are some omens that also have people singing or reciting, and I think that's a good moment to use the poem as well.

The White has a dude who's cleaning clothing, and he sings this song about nights, and I just forgo that and just went straight to the poem and just incorporated that into a song.

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