Oracles & Chaos
Oracles are how a solo game surprises you. When you don’t know what happens next — or don’t want to decide alone — ask the dice. Every roll lands in the transcript with its question, table, and result, and becomes part of the record.
🎲 Fate — yes/no questions
Ask the world a question (“Is the hatch locked?”), pick the odds, and roll:
- Almost certain
- Likely
- 50 / 50
- Unlikely
- Small chance
The answer comes back yes or no — sometimes exceptionally so, and sometimes with a random event riding along when the dice land just right. The current chaos factor tilts the odds: a wilder world says “yes, and it gets worse” more often.
🔤 Meaning — inspiration
Two evocative words from the oracle tables (“Deliver / Battle”) for you to interpret in context. Use it when you know something happens but not what. The word pairs come flavored by your campaign’s setting — Space, Fantasy, or Dungeon Crawl.
⚡ Event — a twist
A random event with a focus (“NPC action”, “Remote event”) and inspiration words. Use it when the story needs something you didn’t plan.
The chaos factor — ◴ 1–9
A dial for how unstable the story is, shown in the Play header (− ◴ N +).
- Raise it when events spiral beyond your protagonist’s control; lower it when they’re on top of things. In control? Lower it. Overwhelmed? Raise it.
- High chaos makes fate rolls swingier and makes new scenes more likely to be altered or interrupted — the story veers from what you expected.
- In Game Master and Autonomous modes the GM manages chaos for you: scenes that went badly push it up, scenes that went well calm it down, and shifts are noted in the journal (“Chaos rises to 6”).
Where the tables come from
MythmakeRPG’s inspiration oracles are built on Datasworn data from the Ironsworn family of games by Shawn Tomkin (CC BY 4.0). The keyword tables are theirs; the chaos/fate/scene mechanics are our own implementation.