You’ve got a big boss fight lined up. You want it to be scary as hell, with the players fearing for their character’s lives, while still invested enough to take on the beast. Any player who has glanced at the Bestiary or Monster Manual probably isn’t going to be amazed when you drop a description and tell them to roll initiative. That all changes when you’ve spent time foreshadowing the evil power that seeks their demise.
An easy way to foreshadow is to include the big bad villain in earlier encounters, with it pulling its punches and fleeing the scene early. There’s certainly a place for nerfing an encounter, but what if your Big Bad could hand out a beating, gain a reputation for ruthlessness, and leave the PCs alive to stew in the sting of their humiliation?
It would be a perfectly delectable nightmare. Continue reading “Foreshadowing through Nightmares…”