How to foreshadow: asking for techniques and tips

[guileus]

This is a problem I've run a number of times while DMing and wanted to get your input on it guys.

The last time is with this campaign we're playing: sword and sorcery version of Kingmaker using the Iron Heroes d20 ruleset. The PC group has founded a settlement in a frontier land, and of course the attention of neighbouring kingdoms and evil-doers has been brought to it. I want them to start feeling that *someone* (more like, several people) is onto them, so I want to make them face minor threats and get subtle hints they're being watched or spied.

One of my ideas is that there is this superb assassin "The Silent Blade" (if it's too corny I'll change it :smallbiggrin:) that is stalking the PC lord of the settlement. Things like he feels a presence during the night. Footmarks on the ground next to his window (left on purpose), a dagger on his night table (the assassin is not only following orders from a neighbouring kingdom's king, he also gets a kick from making his victim get paranoid, that's the reason for him not outright killing him).

My concern is that my players will investigate the clues and derail from the main adventure of the day. Instead, I want that just to make them feel uneasy, paranoid maybe, but not forget about more pressing issues (ie. the adventure of that day). In a word: I'm just foreshadowing the future confrontations with the assassin and the neighbouring kingdoms.

How to?

[Thrudd]

In RPG format, you can't really do it well. Unlike a movie or a book where the narration or visual can give clues, in the game you are only really describing the things relevant to the characters at any given moment. If you say there are footprints or a knife on the table, they will absolutely investigate, because why else would you have mentioned it? You don't say stuff like "you see your own dagger on the table that you left there yesterday." Or "there are footprints in the dirt coming into town"- of course there are, there are always footprints where people always walk. You aren't going to waste game time describing every single footprint they've ever seen, so that they won't immediately investigate it when you mention the one footprint that is a little out of place.

So you need to choose what you're really trying to accomplish with this. Do you want there to be a chance that they notice the clues and a chance that the attacks happen by surprise? If so, then you should roll to see if they notice any or all of the clues, and only tell them when a character notices that something is out of place, and expect them to investigate immediately if/when they do. Don't even mention the knife on the table if the roll indicates they don't notice it as being something out of the ordinary.

If you want them to have warning of the attack but not to divert them from whatever else they're doing, you could just wait until you want them to actually worry about/investigate the attack and then tell them all the little clues from the past weeks that their characters have just now put together in their heads.

Alternatively, they must be under real time pressure. They notice the clues, but their other activities need to be very important and immediate- such that if they divert time to start following footprints their kingdom will collapse or there is some other impending consequence, like someone declaring war on them, or a village gets destroyed by monsters, etc. So they need to choose what is more important- risk, having a spy about, or risk the peace talks failing or letting the giant reach town or whatever.

Basically, you can't describe anything in the present tense that you don't want the players to pay attention to or to treat as important immeduately.

[RazorChain]

Rumors and hearsay


PC overhears

Hunter speaking to a peasant: "I was a tad late when I came from the woods last night and I stumbled upon this figure who was in hiding staring intently at the castle. That dark clad figure just vanished into thin air when it saw me, gave me a terrible fright so I ran back to the village....almost broke my leg on a rabbit hole. No good running during the night.


Later the PC overhears

Guard#1 to Guard#2 "The Captain doesn't believe me but I know what I saw...a shadow in the night, jumping across the battlements and onto the roof of the barracks. We did a sweep but found nothing and now the Captain has put me on graveyard shifts for the rest of the week for waking him up in the middle of the night


This makes it harder to sidetrack the PC's, makes the world more alive and there is very little the PC's can do directly

[sabernoir]

This is a problem I've run a number of times while DMing and wanted to get your input on it guys.

The last time is with this campaign we're playing: sword and sorcery version of Kingmaker using the Iron Heroes d20 ruleset. The PC group has founded a settlement in a frontier land, and of course the attention of neighbouring kingdoms and evil-doers has been brought to it. I want them to start feeling that *someone* (more like, several people) is onto them, so I want to make them face minor threats and get subtle hints they're being watched or spied.

One of my ideas is that there is this superb assassin "The Silent Blade" (if it's too corny I'll change it :smallbiggrin:) that is stalking the PC lord of the settlement. Things like he feels a presence during the night. Footmarks on the ground next to his window (left on purpose), a dagger on his night table (the assassin is not only following orders from a neighbouring kingdom's king, he also gets a kick from making his victim get paranoid, that's the reason for him not outright killing him).

My concern is that my players will investigate the clues and derail from the main adventure of the day. Instead, I want that just to make them feel uneasy, paranoid maybe, but not forget about more pressing issues (ie. the adventure of that day). In a word: I'm just foreshadowing the future confrontations with the assassin and the neighbouring kingdoms.

How to?

Rolls, make them roll. Nothing works as well for putting my characters on edge than making them roll perception checks.

[Doorhandle]

Think about the kind of things a critter or trap leaves behind, and then throw them in the path of the players long before what left them arrives. Burn marks and small red scales for a red drake, for example, or scrape marks and bloodstains from where a trap has fallen too low to the floor.

If all else fails, find a motif and plaster it everywhere. If a temple is covered in images of fire, it would be odder not to see fire elementals, cultists, efreeti and a red dragon inside it.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

I just blatantly use dramatic irony - I tell them stuff their characters don't know, as a cut-scene.

So I'd describe a scene where the assassin is given their brief in a darkened room, and have their cryptic conversation give enough hints, but not enough to know everything - like in a Bond film where we don't see the villain until some big reveal later.

My player group are well used to cinematic / TV show style, though. Some players don't get on board with it.

[Pelle]

This is a problem I've run a number of times while DMing and wanted to get your input on it guys.

The last time is with this campaign we're playing: sword and sorcery version of Kingmaker using the Iron Heroes d20 ruleset. The PC group has founded a settlement in a frontier land, and of course the attention of neighbouring kingdoms and evil-doers has been brought to it. I want them to start feeling that *someone* (more like, several people) is onto them, so I want to make them face minor threats and get subtle hints they're being watched or spied.

One of my ideas is that there is this superb assassin "The Silent Blade" (if it's too corny I'll change it :smallbiggrin:) that is stalking the PC lord of the settlement. Things like he feels a presence during the night. Footmarks on the ground next to his window (left on purpose), a dagger on his night table (the assassin is not only following orders from a neighbouring kingdom's king, he also gets a kick from making his victim get paranoid, that's the reason for him not outright killing him).

My concern is that my players will investigate the clues and derail from the main adventure of the day. Instead, I want that just to make them feel uneasy, paranoid maybe, but not forget about more pressing issues (ie. the adventure of that day). In a word: I'm just foreshadowing the future confrontations with the assassin and the neighbouring kingdoms.

How to?

Is the purpose of the foreshadowing to avoid it feeling like a screwjob when the assassin ambushes and (try to) murders the party? Can't you just leave obvious clues of someone stalking them, but make sure the assassin is good enough that the players wont find much when they investigate? Or just have the motivation of the adventure be more pressing. If The Silent Blade is a superb assassin though, the characters shouldn't really be aware of it. If it really wants to mess with them, they should definitely notice something is up.

What about playing up the animosity of the neighbour king? Make sure that they suspect the king wants to hurt them, but not show how.

[oonker]

Rolls, make them roll. Nothing works as well for putting my characters on edge than making them roll perception checks.

That would be my tip.

"You walk into your bedroom. What are your modifiers to perception, again? Ok" - rolls dice. rolls dice again. rolls dice again. tells the player nothing. Everytime the player goes into his own bedroom, ask for his perception, or just roll the dice for him.

The most important thing regarding foreshadowing is consistency. I find that repeated themes are more powerful to foreshadow something than a diverse cast of things. For example, make this npc fond of a color. Maybe the color white, for example. And now you begin describing little things using the color white.

"you're tired from the day of adventuring, and head into your room. Your muddy boots and clothes leave stains all over the white carpet by the entrance of the bedroom"

"As you're going through the woods, an arrow with white feathers is struck in a tree nearby. You hear the goblins call to attack: Cactchua'caaa!"

"the butler gently asks 'would you care for more wine, sir?', he shows you a white bottle made of glass and with the stamp of the Elder Dragon Vineyard".

Then, when you introduce the White Cloaked Mysterious Figure, they'll start to notice that there are too many things in the color white, in this game. Is that white bottle of wine actually poison? Were the goblins armed by the WCMF? Is the inn you're currently resting at in league with your WCMF?

Maybe your players will start teasing you, saying things like "aaaah, everything is white in this game", and you can brush this off as a joke. You'll begin picturing a description and one player will let out a "Let me guess! The bedroom is white!", and you will "yeah, you got me, lol!". But as the presence of the White Cloaked Mysterious Figure intensifies, so will their fear and/or paranoia of the color white.

"'You're safe here, don't worry', says the dirty barman. His clothes are greased from whatever it is that he prepares in the kitchen. The tavern is old and smells like rotten fungus. He slowly cleans the table with a very clean white piece of cloth. He smiles at you and goes to the kitchen to fetch a beer. Krognar, would you please roll the dice? *rolls dice*. You notice that 5 minutes have passed and he did not return". The usual response from the players will be:

- A white piece of cloth??? This guy sure is in league with that White Cloaked Mysterious Figure.

[Darth Ultron]

To Foreshadow, you first need the right kind of game play. And this is the real tricky part. The vast majority of most game play is all focused on the ''action/adventure(aka combat)'' and anything else is ''downtime'' and is not played out. This type of game leaves little room for foreshadowing, as all you can do is put it directly in front of a character and go ''Bam!'' look at this.

So the thing is to have a lot more free range type of game play that is more then just about ''action/adventure(aka combat)''. And you want to go right from the start of character creation. When a player makes a roll playing optimized murderhobo character with nothing but mechanical ways to roll for death and destruction.....well, guess what that player will do during the game: mindless role play combat. So getting the players to make other types of characters.

Next, you want to make the game a lot less about combat, and add more role playing. You don't just want combat-.nothing-.combat.

At the same time you want a game that is slow paced enough that the characters can relax and interact with the world.

And the real trick part is you might really, really, really want to think about just dumping all the dumb social skills. At the very best, social skills are ''ok, guys roll the dice so you can find out X or do X, and hurry up so we can get back to the combat!" And you want to avoid that.

And in the end, you really want to break the player idea of everything that happens during the game is a DM Vile Plot. This is when the players get all crazy over ''their character saw a broken window...well the DM would only mention it if it was important to the combat adventure roll playing! You see this all the time, characters find foot prints or a 'message' dagger, and it's SLAM! they must stop and derail the game and must find the evil assassin in the next five minutes! You don't want the players to treat any foreshadowing like an adventure hook.


The type of foreshadowing does depend on the players, and what they will react too:

1.Obvious. A bloody dagger with the words, in blood, saying 'time is up'
2.Strange. ''there was a guy that passed through town today and was asking all about you''
3.Weird. The characters find a door they left locked and trapped...open and disarmed.

[guileus]

Being the naive DM I am, I still tried to do the whole foreshadow thing even though I guessed that what you guys said about it being difficult was right.

I opted for a different idea from the campaign to be foreshadowed: I basically wanted to give them an "Evil is coming" feeling, as one of the themes from the campaign is that they are taming the wild, frontier lands, but that it resists their civilising actions.

Anyway, during one night they heard some noises and it turns out it was a villager slamming on the walls of their town hall (he was possessed by the evil presences lurking in the woods, but they didn't know that). I intended it to be a sign of "something bigger" in the wilds developing, growing... but it turned out to be a lure for them, as they spent a lot of time looking for clues. :(

[Darth Ultron]

Anyway, during one night they heard some noises and it turns out it was a villager slamming on the walls of their town hall (he was possessed by the evil presences lurking in the woods, but they didn't know that). I intended it to be a sign of "something bigger" in the wilds developing, growing... but it turned out to be a lure for them, as they spent a lot of time looking for clues. :(

From time to time players will often go off on crazy wild tangents. And really the worst thing you can do is ''just watch''. Assuming you don't want to waste the time, you should get the game back on track. It's simple enough to give a nudge or even just use force to do so. This is a good example of why players can't have total freedom to do whatever they want on a whim.

And if the characters do want to stop and look for clues....you might as well make some for them to find.