Eventholding is a complex art, with many moving parts, and trying to capture them all in one article is daunting. Today I’m going to talk about foreshadowing and writing.
Foreshadowing is a term used to describe how an author can show their audience what’s going to happen later on within the story. It’s how they tip their hand. It can be an important tool, because it allows the author to put in plot twists, and for those twists to seem like they have a place within the story.
How much a reader likes the twist in a plot could be correlated to how much they can see the threads of that twist coming. If there is no evidence for the plot twist coming, it will likely upset your audience. If it doesn’t fit the narrative of the common stories we all know, if it just is so wildly unlikely to happen, your audience just won’t like it. On the other hand, if you’ve been tipping your hand too much, and they can see it coming at every turn, then they probably will be bored by the twist as well. You really need to find that balance, where they can’t see it coming, but once it happens, they look back and say “Oh, it was there all along, how did I miss that?”
And that’s really what foreshadowing is meant to be used for. The “it was there all along” moments.
So how can we incorporate that into our event holding, and writing for our events? The most common way I can think of that people foreshadow in events is through references to popular media. I can’t tell you how often I’ve been at an event and been going through a quest, and had someone realize that they were doing the plot of some show, comic, book, or anime, that they loved.
Tipping your hat to your influences, as a method of foreshadowing, can do a lot of the leg work for you. It will let the players that catch your reference know which direction you’re intending to go with your plot, and maybe even the mechanics of your encounter. For example I feel like every time we come across a door with runes around it someone says “Speak friend and enter.”
I do want to say though, that if you tip your hand too hard it can have the opposite effect, in that rather than understanding your tone and intentions, your players will just feel like you’re breaking their immersion by being too on the nose.
Here, let me give an example of what foreshadowing with pop culture references might look like, and you can decide if I go too far:
It’s Monster Island 7, you were conned into a lovely cruise vacation getaway that also had the promise of adventure: going out to a forbidden part of the sea because it was full of monsters. It happens to adventurers. You know it does. Your ship has wrecked. You’ve been fighting the waves for hours, mysteriously casting your raise deads on the corpses of your friends bobbing to the surface, when a ship that mysteriously looks exactly like the one that sank, rolls on up to you. You’re rescued and safe. Ish.
As it turns out it’s a pirate ship, and Captain Euron, a man with purple skin, white hair, and a black hula skirt, confesses that he’s in love with the Red Queen of a nearby island. He and his crew have been posing as a sea monster to stave off suitors. He promises he’ll transport you and the party to the island safely if you promise to be silent about the sea monster part, and can arrange for him to get a date with the Queen by sunrise.
Did I tip my hand too much? What was I referencing? How do you think that story should end? Let me know in the comments!
Before I end, I’d like to add a commentary on an important concept of foreshadowing. Chekhov's Gun, is the idea that if there is a gun on the wall in the first act of a story, it should be used to kill someone by the third act of the story. Applying this concept to LARP can be challenging because on the one hand, you want to give your player’s an immersive reality, and sometimes, in the real world, a cup is just a cup. However, thinking about Chekhov’s Gun when you’re decorating your dungeons, coaching your NPCs on what they should be relating to the players, and creating mechanics for your quest, can really change your perspective on what you’re writing. It speaks to relevance, and red herrings within a quest, if you want your players to get distracted by red herrings, throw in things that have no purpose but seem like they do. Personally, I don’t like this approach, it makes a clever PC feel cheated for getting distracted by something you put into the story. Red herrings happen completely on their own, you don’t need to plan for them. Rather, focus on linking up the things that matter within your quest, connect the pieces, and let your friends feel like geniuses for seeing it coming from the very first clue, that’s what foreshadowing is for.
I look forward to being able to see you on the field,
Keith “Saegan” Cronyn