I'm working on a brand new campaign world after a session zero. I've also just returned from a five-day education conference fascinated by an epistemological construct. Who isn't?
Both of these are of course a source for considerable excitement- I can delve deep into the mud of world-building and roll my brain around like some sort of cerebral swine. And I can use my new campaign world as a vehicle to explore Alethic Truth.
I have sent to my players a fairly terse thematic document about the setting. It has a few tensions, rules which create a ludonarrative incentive towards certain characters and nothing else.
No cosmology. No gods. No cities or mountain ranges or dungeons or dragons to wars or history or fauna or flora or NPCs or quests or antagonism or villains or organisations.
I have those things in my mind of course.
This will be something of an experiment. You see, I want my players to construct their own alethic truth or narrative around the world.
If I dump on them some sort of tedious purple prose setting document (no matter how much you kid yourself that's exactly what you're creating) they'll skim read it and refer to it vaguely. That document even if filtered through some artificial secondary person would be my omniscient DM narrative. This is a game world in narratives about the past and present are wildly divergent between the characters they meet.
I will give them no narratives. They will, like the children in my classroom, be engaged in discovery learning.
Instead I want them to encounter what I would call in my lesson sources. Experiences, NPC dialogue, texts, artefacts, locations, notes, literature, street names, monsters, foes....from each they shall make inferences and I will tell them nothing narrative. I shall simply tell them information. "You rolled an 18 History check and recognise this statue depicts an ancient Fey King in battle array, disgraced with graffiti and neglected " not "You rolled an 18 and know this area was a battleground between the Fey and the Humans who displaced them." They should infer the narrative from the facts. This is a human area. It depicts a fey King. Whatever they surmise from the interplay of these facts is their own alethic truth, and perhaps they will be different between characters. They shall have their own narratives.
There's considerable evidence that this form of learning in the classroom leads to meaningful long term learning experiences. I'm going to see how if affects my players interaction with the world around them, and their own sense of agency in the world.
