Hark! I prophesy a conqueror slaughtering his way across our lands to enslave the one who claims to see the future, and, wait, aha, just a story I heard once, never mind.
The crone who gazed into the future, returning with a vision that boiling water first would, like, totally save everyone so much hassle.
The augury predicting that the Shadow Lord’s magical amulet would have to be cast into his enchanted forge. Also predicting the two weeks when he’d be visiting the astral plane and heroes could stroll in quite easily.
The fabulously wealthy oracle, Lady Astania, who lived in a cave before making a fortune betting on jousting at the King’s Tourney. She immediately hired the alchemist Necrodarque who’d been cast out of the guild for unseemly experiments with the dead. But regular funding and comfortable lodging seemed to suit Necrodarque, or “Necci” as she started calling herself, and Astania introduced her to a nice farming lad, and she ended up curing the pox to save thousands of lives.
The divination revealing the “Chosen One” destined to save the land. It reveals them two generations in advance, giving her family plenty of time to train and equip her, with generous support from the kingdom and safe conduct guaranteed by all surrounding territories.
The dread prognostication revealing that the future is already set so nobody really has to bother doing anything. All the heroes quit to drink and carouse. It’s left to severely nonrandom Brownian motion of air particles to maintain causality by blowing the Emerald Blade through the dragon’s heart.
Cassandra realizes that none will ever believe her warnings, makes a fortune on defaulting short-term credit swaps.
A fit of automatic writing reveals the coming of a cruel warlord who will bathe the world in flame. It also specifies the exact time and place of his birth, and of his first capital crime as a prosecutable adult so that the noble king doesn’t feel bad about predestinated prosecution.
A medium is contacted by a future intelligence who has learned an Old Tongue to send a warn the past of impending doom. Unfortunately the medium’s goat-skin yurt doesn’t contain a modem. The desperate 56k signal just sounds like the screeching of the particularly damned.
The ancient and terrible prophecy of author realizing that convincing reasons for unlikely heroes to move towards the most dangerous things in their world are really hard, and just couldn’t be bothered, and decided to have a magic narrator tell the characters their own plot at the start of the damn book.
More fictional fun:
Luke Writes What You Read 