Joshua, a [Patreon of Sly Flourish] asks:
I'm having trouble squaring the Six Truths about a world with not providing spoilers to the players. What if one or more of the truths are entirely unknown to the characters? What if one of the Truths is also one of the Secrets/Clues within the campaign? I don't see how a DM should share that in a session zero without "giving away too much."
The article says it:
If there are secrets about your campaign world that the characters don’t know, exclude them from your list of truths.
It seems to me, from reading this, that the answer to this is simple: pick a different Truth.
Six Truths are supposed to be things everybody knows. If you’ve got something that is a Secret or Clue, then by definition it’s not a Truth in the first place. I was going to say “there are no rules about what constitutes a Truth” but the more I look at it the more it looks like this is literally the only one.
For example, in the world of one of my in-perpetual-limbo stories, everybody knows that Summoned Champions are a thing that exists. In fact, I could easily include the fact that Summoned Heroes are common knowledge as one of my Truths, because that’s not true in every setting where Summoned Heroes exist at all. However, not everybody knows that the enemy faction also has one. I can, should, and do hint at that along the way to the “big reveal” of it, but I would be foolish indeed to tell it as a Truth up front.
