Rumors have been around since the dawn of the hobby. OD&D had a rule that you could learn a rumor by buying a round in the local tavern (10-60 gp) or slipping the barkeep a few coins (1-10 gp). Both the classical introduction modules B1 In search of the Unknown, and B2 Keep on the Borderlands had a rumor list. In B1 it was called "legend table" with 8 out of 20 false. In B2 it was called "rumor table" with 7 out of 20 false, among them the delicious false rumor that “Bree-yark” is goblin-language for “we surrender”!, while it really is an alarm/ralling cry.
What good do rumors do?
Rumors can help the characters, they are an economical tool to make the world believable, and most importantly, they create an air of mystery and spur a desire for exploration and action:
- Provide useful information to the player characters. Knowledge from rumors may help them survive traps, avoid monsters or prepare themselves for fighting them, or find hidden treasure. If you know you will be facing a mummy, bring fire and oil. A vampire, bring stakes and garlic. Learn about a secret stash under the dungeon fountain. Even if the rumors are not reliable, they are valuable enough that players are willing to pay for them.
- Provide an economical tool to have the world come alive. As Justin Alexander observed, it is a mistake to just think of these lists as rumor lists: you can use them to bring life to conversations in a pub, to have news from travellers arriving in town, to be overheard when listening to gossiping housewives, to poplulate newssheets, to have a lunatic make prophecies, or as secrets peddled by information brokers and spies.
- Feed tantalizing adventure hooks to the players. Learning about the magic staff in the cave down the river or the wyvern terrorizing the poor village of Woodhome can be enough to make the players want to explore. In this rumors are similar to maps found as treasure. If you think about it, to the end the whole game is about trickling out of information in response to player action, to create mystery and tension. Rumors help with this.
How to come up with rumors?
As Justin Alexander he observes for his hexcrawl, and Delta in his discussion of rumors, your exsisting adventure is a great source of rumors. You can roll some dice to see
- if the rumor is about the adventure background/history, world, region, town, a dungeon or keep (allocate ranges on your die to each)
- if these places have key numbers like hex numbering levels and room numbers, about which of them something may be learned. If the roll is out of range of the keys, maybe it is a more general piece of information about factions or history.
- if it is true or false. For example, roll d6: 1-3 true, 4-5 half-true, or 6 false. Use different numbers if you like.
Then, dress up the detail rumor on the spot based on the factoid you got, add-lib details, be vague or explicit, provide more detail or less, describe it as hearsay or experienced fact. I think vague or mysterious descriptions hinting at things are more interesting than flat out facts.
For example, your rolling indicates your overland map, and there the wyvern with a magical +1 sword that grants Speak with Plants 1/day in its nest in an old oak tree, a true rumor. You could dress this up as:
- Sir Pellidor the Younger ventured forth last spring carrying the family's magical blade Wormfoe to slay the wyvern known as "Old Ironhide" aiming to impress fair maid Eleanor, never to be heard of again. Everyone knows and avoids the huge old oak where the monster has its roost.
- Cattle and travelers to the south have been carried off at night by some flying horror from woods for years. Derrick the Trapper is said to know its lair, no doubt full of treasure from its victims. No-one else dares to enter that forest, and good folk get their cattle inside over the night.
- There is an fey sword embedded in the great old oak down at the forest near Woodhome. It is said to have been a gift of the love-sick king of the fey to the dryad Nurme. Nobody goes there anymore, as a gruesome monster took up residence, and kills anyone who comes near. (You can decide if the dryad will be there, a prisoner of the Wyvern, if only the slayer of the Wyvern can pull out the Sword, etc.)
Do you need to prepare or remove rumors?
It may not even be necessary to prep such a list, if you use random generation and you have a rolling scheme you can use on the fly.
If however the encounters on your map are not numbered (maybe they use letters), or if the general information is not numbered (it usually is not), then rolling may not be as straightforward. And with multiple rolls, this procedure may be too slow and tediuous for in game use. In such cases, you want to prep and create a couple rumors in advance in this way to hand out.
Should you remove rumors once shared from the list? I think you would keep the rumors on until you used up a good portion - while the players will not get new exitement from re-hearing the same story again, the townfolk may still be jabbing about the mysterious disappearnces around the old forest. Eventually you will need to refresh the list, so the world does not feel static. Best of course, take the rumor off after the players killed the wyvern in the old forest, and replace it with one about a mighty group of heroes that killed the wyvern in the old forest. Just do not overdo that.
I never cared about these lists, we would roll for rumors the group knew at the start, hand them out, and then move on. In some cases the players took action to learn more, for example after learning that the Dungeon of the Unknown was built by Dwarves, they asked around who in the area was doing such work and eventually were able to track down some dwarves that could share additional information. But I never used them systematically. I think that was a mistake, they are a great way to deliver concentrated information.
The Lazy DM's secrets are very similar to rumors, in that they represent a list of secret pieces of knowledge that the player characters can learn about. And that guy is all about effort economy.
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