Deception and Mistake (Fiction Version)

I'm working on a book in my off hours. Actually I'm working on several books in my off-hours but that's not the point. Anyway, in the book I'm working on, one of the major plot points is that the whole back story for the book is a series of lies designed to manipulate the main characters.

Story takes place in the mid 16th century as the last of the Italian Wars is winding down. Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and Francis, King of France meet with Pope Paul III in Trent and concoct a plan to obliterate the major Protestant armies on the continent so that they can lead the Counter-Reformation. They'll deal with England some other time.

Strictly speaking, they should be worried about the Danes, who historically were worried about the Swedes, who really and truly given how things worked out in the 17th century is who everyone should have worried about -but that's historical rabbit holing and I won't worry about it.

Anyway, since the Protestant factions (Schmalkaldic League in the Empire and Huguenot Party in France) are unlikely to just disband themselves, Emperor and King came up with a plan. They each launch an attack into Italy (war to this point having mostly been fought in Holland, despite the object of the war being Milan...), and subtly suggest that they need truly loyal men to lead it. The Protestants in both places trying to -for a variety of reasons -get on the good side of the court, volunteer. As a result, the largest portion of both Protestant faction's armies go off to kill each other, leaving the Catholics to clean up the remainder back home. Which they do in the Schmalkaldic War (April, 1547) and the St. Bartholemew's Day Massacre -which I'm moving up a decade for dramatic purposes.

So there's a pretty massive deception in the backstory which the main characters can't figure out too soon because if they do, they'd turn around and head home. I also want to decieve the reader at least for a while for dramatic purposes. The problem comes in revealing the deception without just having someone say "hey, he lied!"

In fact, I've got one character who says "he's lying!" from the start, no one believes him for the altogether good reason that he's been saying it for a while before the evidence even starts to accumulate. If the reader figures it out too fast, they spend however many pages of the book until the characters figure it out going "morons..." or at the least they're waiting for the book to catch up to where they were 40 pages ago.

Likewise, the character's have to be believably wrong, without being so believable that the reader doesn't believe they're wrong.

I worry about this because of previous debacles. I ran a game once where the villain pretended to be the player's contact for something like three sessions. At the end of the three sessions, the players got themselves captured and their real contact rescued them. What followed was a whole bunch of confused looks as this person they'd never met before said "I'm here to help you," and they all said "but we know you, and you're not you..."

What brings it to mind today, other than working on the novel, is that I was reminiscing about the writing for Knights of the Old Republic II, which has the same problem. There are some interesting bits in the game which I missed repeatedly until they were pointed out to me -explicitly because so many characters are lying that, despite having been told these points a few times, I'd disregarded them.

In particular, the penultimate villain is a creature who feeds on the Force, sucking the Living Force out of Living Creatures leaving... Dead Creatures. The hero is a Jedi who, in the back story, cut herself off from the Force as a defense mechanism against the mother of all "disturbances" in the Force. The game's metaphor is being deafened by a loud noise. Anyway, throughout the game the hero is regaining her ability to use the Force -which seems to suggest the character is healing. Actually, the character is using the Force of other people, but unlike the villain, is doing it with something like consent. It's like jumpstarting a car, except that you can never unhook the vehicles.

This leads up to the climactic penultimate villain duel where the hero can tell the villain to drain her of her massive amount of Force rather than the planet below -defeating the enemy because what happens when the insatiable thirst meets the unfillable void...

It's all very dramatic. I missed it at least 4 times before it was pointed out to me because so many people in the game lied, I simply assumed the character was healing and the Jedi were just dumb (it's not like the game provided a lot of counter-evidence... to either point).

The ending also became totally incomprehensible because, if you don't realize that your character is not using personal Force Power but rather is absorbing external Force power, then the villains plan to poison you with the Death of the Force and send it through the universe killing the Force... sounds like a crazy plan.

Excellent game, wrecked in part by too-good lying on the part of the writers/characters. I worry about the same thing, though "excellent book" may be stretching it a bit.