The group's in the middle of book 5 now, battling it out with Irovetti. Over the past few sessions I've made an effort to foreshadow the next book. I decided to have the queen of the kingdom (though a macguffin item she obtained) experience periodic visions.
Vision 1: She wakes up outside the House of Forgotten Time and makes her way in.
Vision 2: She finds herself in a long hallway where time seems to bend and shift, aging the walls and causing plants to grow and wilt. Ilthuliak the Black Wyrm appears and chases her. The vision cuts just as she attempts to head out the door.
Vision 4: She finds a child version of Hargulka who informs her that he is looking for Nyrissa and she should come along too. The Wriggling man attacks and Kid-Hargulka distracts him so she can go on and find Nyrissa.
Vision 5: She walks into a waiting room where she's given a number and told to wait her turn to go in. she takes a seat next to the other people waiting who include a drunk Stag Lord, a rather large owlbear with glasses reading Zuddiger's Picnic, and Vordekai the Cyclops Lich who's currently blind. When Vordekai's number is called, he asks the queen to check it for him and (beetlejuice style) she swaps the note and goes in instead.
So now she's about to talk to Nyrissa and...
I have no idea how this will work. I want to foreshadow the next book but I don't want to give too much away. Seeing as this is some sort of strange dreamworld I've established maybe the Nyrissa she meets is the loving part of her personality that was trapped in Briar. Then the two could have a talk. I guess I just didn't think this out enough. How would you roleplay her personality? And what would they talk about in your game?
Frightened little girl, but liable to lose her temper and sulk
Maybe on some kind of saving throw the pc gets a glimpse of what she has in store for the kingdom
I did lots foreshadowing when I ran it, but still felt the party where sufficiently in the dark
This AP by far the best I have been in for long term foreshadowing, hints at the future,etc. Long term campaign in same area ticks my boxes
I did a similar foreshadowing not too long ago. Here's what I did, via a powerful divination from a Thriae Queen:
Kyriaki leans forward slightly, and her antennae reach out and touch Elegy's forehead.
Suddenly she feels herself falling, and the room around her vanishes as if she'd dropped into a deep, black pit. The blackness around her, despite the dark, swirls with strange hues, different shades and pigments of black, taking and losing shape without much coherence for a few moments.Suddenly there is an explosion of color and light, and she finds herself bathed in the glaring rays of a prismatic sun.
She is exhausted, hot, thirsty, and dazed, standing in the middle of what appears to be a ghost town - complete with tumbleweeds. A low, sinister cackling echoes from abandoned terraces and forgotten houses around her. Above her, the glaring heat of a desert sun over cracked badlands stares down, red and lowering. As she wanders, listless and directionless in the desert heat, a shadow suddenly falls over her. She turns toward the source of this blessed shade only to see a tiny figure, a halfling-sized faceless gremlin or goblin, walking up behind her. Before she can speak, the figure doubles, triples, quadruples in size until it towers over her, giant-like. It reaches to grab her, and as it stretches, its body becomes emaciated and skeletal, its hands twist into bony claws, and its face contorts, the burning sun behind it suddenly piercing the creature's skull, giving it a single, hatefully-glaring red eye. A murder of crows surrounds them, plunging the world once again into darkness as cold, clenching claws grasp her.
She feels herself falling up, wrapped in a cocoon of frigid wings, before being carelessly deposited on cold stone. As she raises her head, she sees herself in some kind of barbaric feast-hall, a cavern lined with trophies of dead beasts of lore, ancient and primeval monstrosities slain by elite warrior hands. Where there should be carousing feasters are instead the skeletons of lizard-like humanoids.
As one the undead turn, empty eyes locking on first Elegy, then the far end of the feast hall. In a towering chair of skin and fur and bone sits a shadowed figure, with only two glowing orange eyes and a single hand, bluish-green and equipped with horrible claws, visible. Clenched in that malicious grip is a sword the size of a man, its blade barbed and serrated, its crossguard and hilt decorated with alien-looking runes. As Elegy observes, a third glowing eye - first orange, then baleful red - opens at the intersection of hilt and blade.
She is then deafened by the cry of a raptor, shrieking in her ears, and the world around her cracks and shatters like broken glass, then rains down on her and blows away as black feathers in the wind, that yet reflect light in countless innumerable colors like shattered stained glass.
She turns toward the source of the wind and sees a castle towering amongst spire-like stones, huddling in the depths of a forest and shrouded in a halo of darkness against the spring light. The wind intensifies, accompanied by the sound of wolves howling, and the windows in the castle fly open, unleashing a horde of bats, a swarm of black wings and smoldering red eyes.
When the bats have cleared, everything around Elegy has changed. The landscape is vibrant, alive, and filled with colors unnamable, a primeval realm of life and light unlike anything she has ever seen. The castle has been replaced by the realm of a fairy-tale princess, tall and gleaming spires and perfect ivory walls strewn with tapestries and pennants.
There is a sound like rushing water, and suddenly a sucking sensation, and as Elegy watches the world around her swirls - like water down a drain, except going upward - and the perfect fairy-tale realm disappears upward, infinitely high, disappearing into the night sky. And left in its place is barren sand and once again the scorching sunlight. In place of the castle she sees the gates of Dun Raige, its streets barren cracked earth, its buildings crumbling and rotten, its castle a ruin, and its population - human, halfling, kobold, ael, aranea - scattered skeletons in the streets.
All goes dark again, then Elegy awakes back in the hive, huddling in front of the queen.
The last three paragraphs hint toward the Castle of Knives, Thousandbreaths, and the bottling of the Stolen Lands, respectively.