Today, foreshadowing danger. The next few posts in this series are my take on the path of fear for adventure games: how GMs can threaten and surprise players, maintaining player agency even as they lose control over events.
Step 1 (last post): Making players care about failing.
Step 2 (today’s post): Foreshadow overwhelming danger, both immediate and future.
Step 3: Place dangerous, tempting choices in their path.
Step 4: Reward dangerous choices with unpleasant surprises.
Step 5: Keep the surprises coming, slowly spiral events out of their control.
Step 6: Allow failure, and recovery from failure.
As always, keep reading if you want the longer version.
Dread and uncertainty
Fear is fueled by three main things: uncertainty, surprise and loss of control, and high stakes. If you have already pulled off the first trick, making them care about failing, then all you need to do next is arrange some mood lighting and cheap tricks to sell the upcoming horror. To arrive at uncertainty, foreshadow strangeness and terrible danger.
Trick #2: Foreshadowing threats
“Fear is the beginning of wisdom.”
–William Tecumsah Sherman
“You may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together - what do you get? The sum of their fears."
–Winston Churchill
I think, as an adult, you have likely seen a horror movie. So you already know that, to make players afraid, a GM should be hinting at Bad Things To Come. Both in the next room, and at the End of the dungeon, and stuff coming several months (maybe) from now.
Think of these as the little touches of the unknown, signals that tell PCs that the out of ordinary is occurring. A GM should make players uncertain about their relationships, their choices, and their understanding of the world. Good examples are Omens in Mythic Bastionland (done sequentially, starting with mysterious Signs and often ending in battles), or a crowd of NPCs that mutter and go quiet when the PCs enter the inn.
Foreshadowing works near and far. Have local NPCs drop disturbing facts, and PCs run across signs of scary monsters regularly. In addition, show distant glimpses of pursuers and dark events. Near threats heighten tension, and faraway threats give players time to choose how to react. A party should always know its enemies are out there, hunting them, waiting for a time to strike.
If the PCs are exploring, make the terrain unfriendly and unpredictable. Resource depletion can create dread, if the GM foreshadows the horror of running out of food or torches or air. When traveling a desert, they find a merchant caravan, dead of thirst. Random corpses are great object lessons, and disgust and pity are a GM’s friend.
If the players are not reacting to GM hints, they should give them another sign of dark events, coming closer. If they don’t respond, we escalate with a hint closer to home. Still no response? We attack them with a distracting force at the front, and send in a raid to the rear, to steal or damage something they like. Hit and run. Pull them into the story. Put them at the center of the action, and light a match to the long fuse of the powderkeg.
A example where I pulled this off:
In my current 5e game, my players robbed a jewel from a tomb beneath a giant statue. As they exited, it stood up, shooting lasers at them. Immediate foreshadowing: the eye rubies began glowing. Near-term foreshadowing: as they escaped, dodging laser fire and flying over the jungle, they heard it crashing through the woods. Long-term foreshadowing: It followed them through the night, to the beach, bursting out in the middle of a three-way fight. They sailed away, only to see it walk towards them, down into the water. To this day, months later, they continue to expect it will pop out like the Kool-Aid Man. Oh yeah!
An example where I failed to pull this off:
In my first time as a DM, the players saved the Mayor’s daughter from some goblin bandits. She wasn’t a nice person, but they hadn’t a clue. Then, when she was safe at home, she betrayed them, telling the Mayor that they made advances towards her. The players were banned from town: they found it funny, instead of feeling threatened by a sign of things being Amiss. They went to the next town and moved on.
Takeaway—how best to get players to notice and respond to GM foreshadowing?
Good foreshadowing is
A CONTRAST to normal events (birds flying backwards, fish fighting each other to death, a trail of maggots through the woods).
HARD TO IGNORE (the ground shakes violently when you poke it, the monster is thundering after you, the mayor’s daughter doesn’t have a shadow).
REPEATED REPEATED (at least 2-3 times until they pick up on it, preferably several different hints).
UNSETTLING (a light touch of powerlessness in the face of ominous events). While the players can interact with the foreshadowing element, they can’t easily stop the horror from advancing–visions dissolve, NPCs mysteriously get away when chased, and thundering giants appear invincible (at first, anyways).
One more: foreshadow truly terrifying things. Titans, mighty spells, vast conspiracies, body-stealing brain eaters, mimic plagues, cannibalism curses, soul-sucking revenants–shit that the players are NOT ready for. SHOW THEM these things wreaking havoc, on NPCs and landscapes and anything they care about.
A GM should foreshadow all sorts of threats, from small irritants to dread menaces the players think they can't handle. When my neophyte players offed the Black Wyrm of Brandonsford, they crowed for weeks. They 'knew' the dragon was beyond them–it broke the bitter hunter at the tavern, destroyed the witch’s garden, and stalked the forest, leaving behind destroyed trees and poisoned ground. Inspired by this excellent starter module, I fill my weekly game full of kaiju and terrible threats that the party has to avoid or overcome, by hook or by crook. That’s what makes them heroes.
Do it right, and players will thank the GM
It’s been said before. Players need information to make meaningful choices. Meaningful choices don’t have obvious solutions. Once players choose, their actions must change the world. Never gate a hint behind a roll or an expected action, and never give a hint that demands the players do one specific thing.
By giving players frequent hints about upcoming dangers, distant and near, and by giving them space to respond as they see fit, GMs both support player agency and heighten their fear. Even more than in horror RPGs, players in adventure games expect to have the ability to choose their response. So if they run, it must be their choice, not an expectation. They will enjoy choosing to flee for their lives.
GMs can go too far with hints, in that they accidentally tell the players what will happen through repeated or obvious hints, and players feel they have no control over the outcome. So, when providing omens and hints, GMs should practice a poker face, be vague and inscrutable about events (what does three fish fighting in a pond even mean? Is the statue invulnerable?), and keep players guessing.
If a GM makes a hint and the players guess what’s coming, they should change it up sometimes. Maybe the Goblin King doesn’t make an appearance. Maybe the Mayor’s daughter is just fine, and the PCs have been tricked. Maybe the island IS a titanic bullette, but it ignores the party as the tsunami of its rising washes them away.
Things that (will) make them run
If the GM’s foreshadowing fails to impress (or be remembered), the PCs should always be free to turn and fight, or to strike out into the dark without a torch, or push on into the desert. A GM should keep it fair, but remember they warned the PCs about the risk. They should be ready to allow the dice to kill the PCs, or, if they want to send a message instead, to batter the party down and leave them for dead.1
Nothing teaches a PC to fear faster than to be treated as an insignificant bug, when terrifying foreshadowing is allowed to pay off. Maybe they are buried by a sandstorm, or bouncing off walls in the dark, or left for dead by a foe’s massive strike, not even worth finishing off. Maybe their character sheet has been attacked, and they lost something precious for their temerity. Maybe one of them is dead. Any way that they reap what they sow, players will quickly learn to feel threatened. They will tremble at the thought of a giant statue, steadily walking under the ocean towards them.
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Want to read more? This is an accidental series on building landscapes of fear around players in adventure games, which is distinct from fear in horror games.
Part 1: Fear of monsters is central to society. If NPCs fear, the players will too.
Part 2: Fear is an easy shortcut to player engagement.
Part 3 The first step to fear: making PCs care about failing. OSR and traditional RPG play cultures often fall short at this task.1 This latter option is especially useful, and fair, when the GM is unsure that the players remember the foreshadowing.↩
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