Tabletop RPGs are, by and large, a collaborative effort. There’s no one main character, at least if you do it right. As such, there’s no such thing as a “Chosen One” in these games.

Right?

In general, yeah.

But what if you want chosen heroes in your game? How do you go about that?

Prophecies and “the Chosen One” in RPGs

First, let’s tackle some of the problems with having a “Chosen One” in your game. While the idea of the chosen hero is a hallmark of fantasy, it generally doesn’t work in TTRPGs like D&D, Pathfinder, etc. Why?

Favoritism

The first reason is the fact that you need to give everyone the spotlight. One of the reasons people play these games is to feel important, and if you’re giving preference to one player over all the others, it can get problematic. The idea of a singular prophesied hero puts the spotlight squarely on one player’s character and their story, reducing everyone else to supporting cast.

Player Agency

The other problem is with agency.

Prephecies tend to put the game on rails, which already subverts the agency of players, but it’s much worse than that. See, in many cases, the “Chosen One” is not allowed to fail. If that one character dies, it throws the entire plot off track. With this character’s death, the thread of prophecy is severed.

I played in a campaign like this. We weren’t allowed to die lest the campaign be put into an irrevocable fail state. The most fun we had was during the last session after the GM decided she was done and just threw stuff at us without a care whether we lived or died. It felt good to be able to actually problem-solve our way through challenges rather than spend the 2-3 hours hunting for the predesigned solution to the current adventure. We knew there was no safety net, and that meant our choices mattered.

The Morrowind Tactic

The keen-eyed and cultured among you may have noticed the Morrowind reference earlier. If you must have chosen heroes, probably the best route to take would be to follow that game’s example.

In The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, the player character is at some point told that they are the reincarnation of an ancient elf hero named Nerevar. As the Nerevarine, they have the duty to fulfill various prophecies to save the land from the blight of a villain called Dagoth Ur.

Here’s the catch though: it’s entirely up to the player whether they fulfill the prophecies or not.

Morrowind is a game that plops you into the world with directions on where to go, but then tells you to do whatever you want anyway. The main quest is entirely optional. You can actually legitimately defeat Dagoth Ur without doing any of it, as long as you get the right bits of equipment you need beforehand (a fact which speedrunners have used to great effect, naturally).

That said, you still satisfy some of the qualifications for fulfilling the prophecy regardless of what you do. Your character was born on a certain day (represented by choosing a star sign during character creation) to uncertain parents (you can pick whatever race you want to play).

What’s really key here, though, is the fact that you are not the only reincarnation of Nerevar. At one point in the main quest, you enter a cave where you meet the ghosts of past incarnates. Each has their own story of how they failed. One died on the slopes of Red Mountain trying to get to Dagoth Ur. Another died looting a ruin. And yet another never even believed in the prophecies until it was too late.

The main character is explicitly told by a wise woman at one point that they are not the Nerevarine, but rather someone who can become the Nerevarine. The burden of prophecy is there, but only if the player is willing to bear it.

Implementing “Chosen Ones” in TTRPGs

Morrowind’s approach to prophecy can be easily adapted into tabletop roleplaying. There are just three principles to keep in mind:

1. Flexible Requirements

The first is to make sure all the player characters can fit your world’s prophecies. The powers of fate or the gods or whatever might call upon many individuals to save the world. Perhaps there are those who meet special requirements, such as having certain powers, or being born under specific astrological signs, or being physically marked in some way.

Maybe during character creation, you have the player describe a dream their character keeps having, or a peculiar birthmark they have, or some strange phenomenon that keeps happening wherever they go. Whatever it is, the key here is to make the qualifiers loose enough that if a player character dies (or if a player leaves the group), another potential Chosen One can take their place with minimal disruption of verisimilitude.

2. Make It Personal

The second principle is to make the prophecy personal. This is mostly about bait. Perhaps agents of the main villain hunt anyone with a certain mark. Maybe the players discover something about the signs they keep seeing that gets them intrigued. Maybe local madmen hurl abuse at them wherever they go. Tease them with mystery or intrigue or personal vendettas, and your players should go chasing headlong after it.

3. Permission to Fail

The last principle is allowing your players to fail. This includes making sure that no failure need be final for your campaign.

Maybe they failed to stop the Very Bad Ritual before it was completed and now demons are roving the land. Great! Your campaign is now about fighting demons. Sounds fun!

Perhaps they went off in another direction and now the Cosmic Evil Guy Who Will End All Time (CEGWWEAT for short) has showed up. Cool! Now your players are scrambling to find a solution, which could involve defeating the CEGWWEAT, escaping the world before the CEGWWEAT consumes it, or maybe even joining the CEGWWEAT. Should be a thrilling time in any case.

Or it could be that the player characters all fell in combat with the Lord of Doom, allowing him to conquer the world. The new campaign is about surviving in a blighted, twisted world and possibly organizing a rebellion against the Lord of Doom. Could be a good opportunity to give MÖRK BORG a try…

Permission to fail also means there could be multiple avenues to success. The Dragonlances in the Dragonlance novels were foretold to have the power to kill dragons, but many could be made as long as a certain process was followed.

Failure is not the end. Failure just moves the story forward in a cool way.

Abandon All Plots, Ye Who Enter Here

To sum it all up, either don’t bother with having chosen heroes, or implement them in such a way that preserves player agency. Either way, make sure you abandon all plots and allow your players to shape their own story.

The Astral Wanderer is brought to you by the Steel & Starlight Fantasy RPG! Share this blog with all of your gaming friends, leave a comment telling me why I’m wrong, or simply move on and forget any of this exists. All proceeds will fund an ultimately doomed expedition to Red Mountain. It fails because Dagoth Ur is a god. How can you kill a god? What a grand and intoxicating innocence! Really.