How to Make Your Game In Tense

I’ve written before about how language is a powerful tool in RPGs. Here’s another great language tool for our games. Let’s talk about prophetic perfect tense. Per Wikipedia:

“The prophetic perfect tense is a literary technique commonly used in religious texts that describes future events that are so certain to happen that they are referred to in the past tense as if they had already happened.”

The biblical examples in the Wikipedia link are instructive, but I don’t think they would jump out at a contemporary bible reader, because most translations have various archaic and indirect wordings that just sound strange to modern readers. But excerpted and emphasized, they become more interesting. Something foretold by the divine is so certain that one can talk about it in the past tense even when it’s in the future. Ponder that for a moment.

In fantasy media, prophecies are a cliche. NPC statements like “the dark lord is prophesied to rise again” or “the prophesied heroes will come at the fated hour” are not going to put players on the edge of their seats. In a world of magic and monsters, prophecies are just Another Weird Thing That Happens.

So try this instead: Have prophets speak in the prophetic perfect tense. If the prophet says “the dark lord arose in spring of the year 416” and the players know it is autumn in the year 415, they’ll wonder what is up. They’ll ask the GM if they made a mistake, and when the GM says no, and reiterates what the prophet said, the players will have to engage a little more seriously with the statement. 

There's no need to hide the ball – unless it seems like an opportunity for a little diegetic puzzle. Once the players catch on to the incongruity of what the prophet is saying, you as GM can just explicitly flag that the statement is in prophetic perfect tense, and explain what that means. By that point, the importance of the prophecy has already been flagged and certified as special and truly out of the ordinary. If there is an entire lingual structure that is only used for prophecies, players are much more likely to remember it as something unusual and important, not just lore wallpaper.