A couple years ago (about 8) I took on the personal challenge to create an Eberron short campaing for a single PC where you play an Ancient Dragon (in spite it being explicitly said that you probably should not play dragons as PCs in eberron). After a couple years of replaying it with different people, I came to be somewhat proud of the result.

It forced me to dive a lot on the nature of the Prophecy and I just wanted to share with you how it works in My Eberron. The basic gist is that being a prophet is a lot more like being a scientist than having faith. If you are interested, read on. Lots of it is inspired by Keith and official sourcebooks, but a lot is my own

​

What it is?

The Prophecy is the map of chaos. Like Keith has stated many times, its always conditional "If A, then B" or "X unless Y". But even if it is conditional, it will always be narrowing a much wider array of possibilities into many less.
The Prophecy is effectively an entity with agency, which it manifests whenever it... well, manifests... and whose goals are simply incomprehensible to beings that see time in a linear way the way every being in Eberron even dragons do.

Where does it show?

The Prophecy manifests in one way: written. And it shows up in many places. So MANY more than what everyone suspects.

In the skies, the stars move in very slow motions. Some times, they shine in a particular way for a day or hour and they might repeat this pattern latter. Very patient astronomers take note of this movements, extend the vectors and adjust the lines according to certain rules that have been honed by millenia of trial and error. When they do this, they see the writtings of the prophecy very clearly on the papers

They are often also seen in the patterns of trees. On the patterns of rivers of lava from a fresh volcanoe. Actually, even the wisps of smoke of teacups often manifest prophetic characters and they are virtually always just lost.

In this way, the Prophecy is always talking. Always saying stuff and delivering data. Always giving data about when the next characters about a certain topic will appear. But only a very few know how to observe it.

It's a common misconception that the Prophecy is often vague or ambiguous. This cannot be further from the truth. The Prophecy is extremely detailed about events and characters. The usual problem is that those collecting fragments of the Prophecy can rarely find them all. The ambiguity then comes from finding only part of the texts.

The good news is that the Prophecy manifests itself about event from all of spacetime, not just the things that are to come soon. Thus, prophets can meticulously collect data for millenia and the pieces start making sense the more you collect parts of the puzzle.

And smart prophets don't throw away prophecies, even if they might find it currently irrelevant. You never know if that half cooked prophecy about a left handed farmer getting a flu while drinking tea in the next millenia might turn out to be a relevant part of the destiny of dragonmarks down the line.

​

How do you read it?

Each character of the Prophecy, called a "Glyph", is a "word" and might represent something. Or maybe a combination of multiple Glyphs makes up for what a human might consider a single thing. It's syntax is very alien, more complicated than the rules for articles in japanesse and more complicated than talking to someone who insists on using eightuple negations.

Feel free to make up Glyphs that encapsulate complex ideas. I used one to mean "the closure of a window of opportunity"

This languaje can be read. Dragons know this because the magics and logic that allows some spells to read languajes you don't know allow beings to listen to how this text would sound. This languaje is called Prophetic and most people would say that it sounds like Draconic. That's no coincidence it's actually a very huge influence on how Draconic as the latter is a mix of what Dragons in the age of demons used to talk and a simplified version of Prophetic.

But to piece together the corresponding Glyphs from the Prophecy into coherent sentences that actually say something about the things that will happen and the condition for them to happen is no easy feat. It's comparable to trying to read a book after it's been shredded into just the words.

You have to not their orientation when they manifested and how fast were they moving (for instance, if it's on the sky). You often don't see the manifestation itself but evidence of it, such as if the tree that grew in the character for "peace" is now bent over and not corresponding to the character but you can see that if certain branches were still there, it would look like the aforementioned character.

To put this things together, you have to organize dozens of manifestations and line them up by what is known as a common Thread.

On the skies, the most basic Thread is the Ring of Siberis. Prophecies on the sky are read linearly in lines parallel to the Ring (which does oscillate, so take that into account for calculations). The Glyphs manifest separated from each other by the same separation in time. Thus, if they are separated by a day and there's 10 Glyphs, this Thread will manifest over ten days. There's 13 different time intervals for Threads in the sky and each is associated with one of the planes in scope. For instance, the threads of Mabar have their Glyphs separated by a year and month and almost always predict the (conditional) end of something

The Prophecies of the sky are the easiest ones and that's probably why the Druids of the Eldeen Reaches do them. Vvaraak sough fit to teach them something, but the other types were too complicated for the primitive bipeds.

On other parts, the Threads might follow after certain geological object, perhaps a mountain or perhaps an unseen spiraling vein of dragonshards. Only after the vein is revealed do the Glyphs make sense together.

The appearance of the dragonmarks created a very complicated new kind of Thread, one that follows bloodlines. No draconic organization (or demonic) to this day has figured out a coherent complete theory of how this new Threads work, but it seems consistant that it follows around those *not* dragonmarked that have the potential for it. As if the dragonmarks around them are the result of their Thread.

​

What's a Truename?

All beings have a unique name in Prophetic. Dragons always read the name of their infants when they are born and they are usually words that kinda sound like a combination of known words.

The protagonist of my short adventure was named Shimanio-Kocoi, which could be read as "The light above a tower" or "The answer above a tower" or "The answer without a question".

Dragons are usually the only beings with names this cryptic. Most humanoids would have truenames that are much less... foreboding. This is part of why dragons see the world as dragon centric in a way similar to how we humans in real life think of the roles of humans in the planet compared to that of, say, fishes. But there are some exceptions. Ask a Nighthag her truename and you will get the names that can only be translated into very abstract multiple concepts.

​

What about choice?

Many prophets believe that every single time the Prophecy manifests itself to anyone, even partially, it gives that being a relevant choice. That choice is real, even if it's "I ignore this". Sometimes, other people's choices affect the effectiveness with which the Prophecy is manifested to the next person, putting those down the line in a different, but always relevant, situation of choice.

For instance, if you collect a Glyph about murder from an active volcano and decide to waste time saving the villagers from the lava rather than give it right away to your draconic master for him to decypher, you might have choosen to give him less time to act on it. But when he gets it, he will still have a choice.... just a harder one.

A particularly common scenario is that the readers of a Thread have it incomplete yet know enought to be forced to act on it. You can 100% guarantee that someone down the line is responsible for this. Someone who saw a piece and understood that piece (without full context, of course) and took action that either delayed the pieces comming together sooner or actually accelerated the events so that the final Glyphs haven't even manifested.

​

Ok, so now what?

Well, if you actually read through all this, you have my sincere appreciation. If it inspired at least something you can let me know.

And if you are curious, how can I use this in a campaing? Well, the answer is that this works if your campaign is centered around finding Prophecy.

And it works extremely well narratively if you explain all this stuff to players, then convince them this campaign will be basically "make chores to recover Glyphs for dragon so that he can add to a vast library that none of you will read or care for those things will only matter in a thousand years", then throw at them at the least expected moment their Truename Glyph as part of a Thread they are following and see how they react.

I found it was pretty pretty good setup to tell an invincible Ancient Gold Dragon Prophet PC that he was going to be assasinated unless he found the killer in less than 24 hours :)