Destiny combat

Image by Pete Linforth

I've been noodling with a concept I call destiny combat, which is how the very wise and powerful get their revenge on each other. The idea is that with a great deal of planning and effort, you can ensure a rival fulfils their destiny in the absolute worst way possible.

The foundational premise is that everyone has a destiny, whether it be large or small. You're fated to live and die in a particular way, and that's unchangeable. But while the outline may be fixed, the details are forever changing. That's why fortune-tellers are unreliable and oracles are mystical and cryptic. They can only see your current future and by the time it arrives it may have changed.

The outline of your destiny is important to the world, but it's the details that are important to you personally. For example, your outline might be that you're destined to inspire generations of the world's great philosophers. That might be through founding one of the great colleges, with a strong tradition of sharing knowledge... or by getting tortured so horribly that a religion forms around it. Obviously you'd prefer one. Your enemies might prefer the other.

The very powerful are capable of reading destiny (theirs and others) but they usually don't. In the process of looking hard at someone's fate, it gets fixed in place. Both the outline and the details. That might mean the good outcome gets selected, but then again it might not. It's a heavy responsibility to bear. And if you fix your own bad outcome in place you'll have good reason to regret being so curious.

Naturally, wizards will ward their own destiny to prevent someone else examining it. Even so, there are ways and means to get partial but accurate glimpses of a future without running into a ward or altering fate. Certain places, times and rituals you can follow. To outsiders, the process seems even more vague and mystical than normal wizardry. Use them properly and you can observe a fate like a bird in your peripheral vision, ready to fly away if you turn your head. You can make guesses about it based on that, and maybe nudge it a little to move in the direction you want.

This is the work of years, or perhaps even lifetimes. Great sages trying to uncover and fix their own good end in place, and infer from unexpected changes who’s working against them and how.

In a world like this, what happens to people who achieve their great destiny and survive? If you believe that the workings of destiny are as perfect and omnipresent as physics, they probably just live quietly until they die unremarkably. In a world where it’s a legitimate threat that a god might drunkenly lose your planet in a game of cards, things might not be so neat. I think a party of former Prophecied Heroes would be perfect agents for a high-powered wizard. Cut loose by destiny, unpredictable and un-divineable. And it makes sense of the way players will stomp all over a GM’s plans for them.

And it makes this scene possible:

“You’re a former chosen one of the prophecy? So am I!”
“And me! I fulfilled a prophecy. What about you?”
“Well, yes. But I don’t like to talk about it. There were spiders.”
“‘Scuse me, I just recently fulfilled quite a big prophecy--“
“Shut up, assassin. We’re still turning you in for the bounty.”