The Spiritual Healing of Oracular Play
Form and Content can not save a referee from a lack of Inner Resources. Whether one must believe themselves a shut eye or acknowledge the dice know more than we do, there is a certain kind of play that I have begun to find incredibly rewarding. Oracular Play's premise is fairly simple. It's an acknowledgement that prep goes beyond what you've written and read. Prep can be a conversation in a grocery store, a chance encounter over the holidays, a miserable broken ankle during a hike in the worst Indian Summer in Oklahoma... Those of you reading this have a tapestry of experiences to pull from when it comes to populating your games with prep outside of prepping. It's not just lived experiences either. Art, the news, and other quotidian sources of information can spark up and become embers of immensely pleasurable play.
It can be a bit daunting to start out with Oracular play. My suggestion would be to grab something well keyed but sparse that forces you to draw from your own creativity to sketch out the rest (Mike's World and 1000 Statues would be my suggestions.) It's hard to instruct a creator on how to add support for Oracular Play. It's not as simple as using bullet points or prose effectively, the proper use of random tables, hooks, and dashboard design. It comes from the soul. It comes from experience. And most fruitfully by trusting a reader enough to leave some of the creation up to the divine striking of oracular play. Idraluna lays it out well here and Shy Owl's followup fleshes it out more. For my own Point of View, Oracular Play is when all players in a game have High Trust in the material being presented to allow parts of their lives and imaginings to speak where the game does not. It is not about having a game where future consequences can be predicted with ease or knowing where/how the game will end: Oracular Play is having enough trust in the images and moments presented by Play to give and take with the game about what it's presenting. Most clearly for me this type of play comes up in the Classic Traveller sessions I run. I have talked about my struggles with feeling the need to have a universe and a half prepared before. But Oracular Adventures would argue: Prepare what is needed to accommodate for the lack in your experiences but trust the process and what generates from y our mind to keep the adventure going.
Uncharitably some might misconstrue this as an advocacy for a low prep, improvised style of play that de-emphasizes prep beyond the bare essentials. (I think about my notecard of prep when I ran Spirit of '77 and that was NOT Oracular Play.) This style of play still requires you do the legwork reasonable for your campaign. Giving trust to the Oracular nature of play means recognizing that your prep goes beyond what you scribble in your notes and what you read in a module. It comes from experience, the people you play with, books/movies you take in all contribute to the act of play. I do a lot of hiking and whenever play takes us to wilderness I can rely on all those hikes to fill in the details of the trials and tribulations of the trail. Oracular play is combining the experiences you have with the game you intend to run to give it texture, make it immutably your table's experience. I've talked about how designers can inspire Sauce, but what can referees do? Well simply live a rich and varied life. Be open to new experiences, experience the world with curiosity, understand things and people. Go through the world with awe and a willingness to internalize it. I can't give you exact lists or procedures for this because our wants and desires are all so varied. Pursue what you care about and don't dismiss the new and you may find that you start generating parts of the world you neglected before, NPCs feel more memorable
And all that Sauce comes from the forceful grappling with the Fuzzy Logic of the game and our mind's running understanding of it. That effort is very fruitful. Often that demanded effort is what Referees latch onto the most when they run because it's something that they had to produce themselves. I think about my own experience with running Wolves Upon the Coast and having to figure out how the Minotaur Arena ties into the surrounding lands. There were some answers provided by the text, but I also had to generate some of my own to fill in what was missing. Similar requests for context can be seen in Blark's Dungeons, Mike's Dungeons/ World, and though a bit more fleshed out Stonehell. The scaffold and pre-existing structure makes the process for imagination more organized. Because I don't think that most Referees have an imagination problem, I think they have an organization problem. Look at how popular the Judge's Guild idea generators and organizers are to this day! Campaigns, investigations, and dungeons are all hard things to organize in ways that don't fall apart to the whims and pulls of campaign play. Often those supporting structures can only be found through play and usually failing at maintaining some part of play. There is no one size fits all for RPGs and especially so for Oracular Play. What works for me will probably not work for you or need some form of elucidation or adjustment to fit your game's needs.All I can really say is let it scream and bleed out of you as much as you can. Sustain that melding of experiences through fiction and real life.
And maybe, we will dig more into what Sauce is at a later date...