Chris' suggestions are some I would have made it he hadn't already done so. The presence of a commentary on the prophecy adds verisimilitude to your world plus can lead to little sub-adventures if your players should ever be bright enough to seek out other works by the commentators (alas, none of mine ever were). Think of Nostrodamus and the Book of Revelations. The thing might be in an unknown language or have been translated from that language. If you already have revealed some of the details of the prophecy, then I suggest writing an outline of the thing, breaking it into verses and/or stanzas. Be explicit as to what the thing means. Hide this document from the players. As part of the explication (I love using these big words :) process, you should have tied the characters' actions and history into the prophecy. Cheat and use things that never were planned. Now you can start obscuring the thing. Substitute allegory and metaphor wherever possible. Remember that when you get done, the whole thing is going to look blindingly obvious to you. You probably don't need to make it harder; if you're lucky, your players will figure out the parts they have done.
Joe
--- "Chris Tutty"
> wrote:
>From: "Robert A. Howard"
>> Any suggestions on how to go about writing a prophesy? Or how I can again
>avoid telling them it? :) Though I don't know how much longer they'll let me
>live if I keep on dodging that particular bullet... :)
>>
>
>The other thing I found useful was to have a raw document that formed the
>original prophecy and to add notes written by different researchers down
>through time as they attempted to explain the prophecy. This let's you make
>the actual prophecy really vague and surreal, but identify and explain
>elements of it. The advantage of the notes is that they can be wrong, or
>they can disagree with each other.
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