Foreshadowing

Remember what I said about the past.  Events of the past, and the present, make the future.

In this circumstance, let's have the players decide to surrender the wilderness and return to town.  They'll be the first to do so, for as the tale went, "none have returned" who sought this dungeon.  'Course, that could mean the players have found the wrong dungeon, and that there's one more dangerous and deeper in the woods than they went.  This could be a funny story, as the players come back to town crowing about their escapades, only to meet a grizzled old fellow, name of Renlo, who asks them a few questions before saying, "Ach, I know the dungeon you're speakin' of; me and my crew cleaned that place out some thirty years ago.  Everyone knows about that dungeon.  The one you were looking for, it's below the white mountain.  Were you under the white mountain?"

It's cruel, but effective.  But put that on a shelf, we're just going to talk about the players coming back to town.

Most games I played, for years and years, always assumed the town was going to be the same every time the players returned.  That sentiment is baked into the saw about how D&D can be shortened to town-dungeon-kill-haul-town, rinse, repeat.  But this is not a given.  Events do take place all the time, and a town will see more such events than most places in the game world, except a city.  People get arrested, buildings catch fire, new taxes are imposed, important people die of old age, visitors of one stripe or another arrive from distant places, natural disasters take place and so on.

For a period, in my late 40s, I found myself overusing a heavy-handed motif of turning over whole towns with great events, when the players just happened to be there.  I destroyed a city with a flood, I had the party come across a city under siege, I had a group of NPCs raise and enormous demon that slaughtered half the town, I imposed a pirate raid ... all designed to create a grand-scale dramatic moment that would capture the players' attention.  For the record, it works; but I definitely raided that cookie jar once too often.  I made a promise to myself to stop doing it.  Not that the players minded, but I felt that I needed to approach game play more subtly ... and nowadays I encourage the reader to do the same.

Suppose that, for a less heavy handed option, we'd like to have the players arrive back in town just as a peasant uprising is taking place.  That could be interesting.  The players find themselves surrounded by peasants walking in small groups at first, all carrying heavy farm tools, especially hoes and scythes.  Soon, they notice a few of the "farmers" are wearing some kind of makeshift armour, despite a lot of them without good shoes to wear.  Plus, everyone's moving in the same direction as the party.  Someone comes forward: "What're ya folks doin' here?  Are you mercenaries?"  The party answers that they're not, but a few more rustics come nearer.  "So, yer not fightin' fer the town?  Yer not takin' the barger's pay?"

Again, the party says no, they're not.  Some farmer says to the players, "So what's in the sack?" pointing at the bag full of silver and gold that the party has just collected from the kobalds.  The party make an explanation and some one else says, "If yer waitin' fer one of us ta pay ya, ya'll starve first!"  And everyone laughs.

Once upon a time, I'd have the party arrive at the moment the uprising was taking place, so they could see the peasants lighting the town on fire while knights on horseback slaughtered them like stalks of wheat.  The above is, um, more subtle.  It puts the players in a bit of a situation, especially as they're carrying all this treasure.  But I've done this kind of thing to players before and they get awfully threatened by it.  Bitter.  Because there's no good way to justify taking away the players' gold after they've earned it, or even look like that's something you might do, even if you don't intend to.

Subtle is good, but in fact we want more subtlety.  Rather than having the players stumble into a conflagration — which many online pundits will tell you is a GREAT way of getting the players' attention, and it is — I suggest a series of events that set up the great cataclysm, first.  Think of it as foreshadowing ... a storyteller's method of indicating something before it happens, by advancing material clues to the oncoming event with present-moment signs.  This is sweetest when the actual event's occurrence is made clear, but it's actual nature is not.

Let's take a simple, rather obvious and short-term example.  You're a union soldier sitting in your camp in Chancellorsville, in 1863, and you've been waiting all day for a fight that never seems to happen.  Suddenly, deer come bounding out of the forest and through your camp.  What does it mean?  Where are they going?

Foreshadowing.

In the example above, the indication comes minutes, even seconds before an upheaval occurs.  It's just as possible to set up events that won't take place until next week, next month, next year or even ten years.  It all depends on what we want to happen.

Now suppose we decide that something BIG is going to happen, eventually.  Let's say, a peasant uprising.  But for the sake of a better game setting, we'll put the actual fighting off to some point in the future ... say, three months.  From here, for us as Dungeon Masters, it's a thought experiment.  As we already know what the future is, the challenge is to invent things happening in the present, around the party, that makes sense in the context of a not-as-yet happened uprising.  Abuse of the peasants is a fairly obvious cause, and not hard to portray ... and has the added benefit of the players assuming that peasants are always being abused, so what they're seeing isn't that important.  Such failure to pay attention has value.  It's how we catch the players with their pants down.

Another factor we can invent is some faction whose role is to stir up the rebellion for their own personal gain; a group not made of peasants.  This faction wants to upset the status quo so that a few choice murders can take place and some person at the top of the heirarchy pyramid can have a tumble.  This faction is careful to conceal their plans, yet they can't help noticing that the party seems to be made up of tough outsiders who maybe don't care much about the town.  Perhaps, in some manner, there's the possibility of recruiting the party.

This is tricky.  Players don't like to work for other people, but the also don't like authorities.  This means they'll probably say no when asked but they won't snitch on the faction, either.  Done just right, expecting the players to snub the request, we can get it across that something's afoot in town, without actually saying what it is.

Okay, we need something to start the fire ... that is, act as a torch that stops a bunch of disgruntled peasants from complaining into their beer and motivates them to pick up farm tools to risk their lives.  It should be something really scary, something that threatens the peasants with losing something more important than their lives, or equally important.  Something like a sudden mass-recruitment of town boys, not as soldiers but as camp servants — who will nonetheless be taken far from their families and maybe never seen again.  Or perhaps a plague.  One or two cases to start, but who knows.  If you're going to die of the plague anyway, you might just as well die of a sword wound.  Problem is, a plague is likely to make the players run for the hills.  Even one victim can make a party too skittish.

Mind you, the party hasn't actually gotten back to town.  They're still on the road to town.  This is our opportunity to set the scene three months from now with something they see out there amid the fields and the trees.

How 'bout an animal plague?  That's not too threatening.  The players aren't animals, at least not yet.  And we can have a convenient mage or cleric make it definitely clear that whatever these cows died of, it's definitely not something that can infect humans.  Still, if cows die, that less food, and less food means starvation, and a town that won't provide food makes a pretty good way to get a rebellion started.

So there's the party, all concerned about dungeons and preening themselves on being the first to return from this one, observing a few dead cows, and imagining to themselves its no more important than the guy they saw playing with his two little girls on the road out.  Ho hum, sure is a quaint little road.  Wait 'til we get back to the dungeon with our new weapons and armour.

'Course, running a game this way asks for a certain DM skill ... and that we can talk about with the next post.