(From a practical standpoint, this can also be a good place to wrap up for the night so that everyone - including you! - can have some time to think about what they want to do next.) When you look back at a campaign, these milestones will chart out the course you’ve all taken together. This helps to solidify a sense of accomplishment - the idea that a new milestone in the campaign has been reached. In other cases, like the end of Session 19, you might want to break at the point where a scenario has reached a definitive conclusion. Those significant character beats - particularly if the characters themselves are thinking deeply about how things turned out - are a good place for a session break because it lets the players live long in that moment. At the end of Session 21, for example, we closed on the resolution of some pretty heavy stakes for the character of Dominic. It’s a great way of ending a session, because it makes the players eager for the next session.Ĭliffhangers are not the only effective way to end a session. What makes the cliffhanger desirable as a dramatic technique is that the players immediately want to keep playing, while simultaneously denying that to them. (As I point out in Part 5 of The Art of Pacing, cliffhangers also don’t always have to come at the end of a session: If the group has split up, you can create numerous cliffhangers by cutting from one group to another.) This particular cliffhanger is basically a combination of both types: The escalating bang of the demon’s arrival has both changed the nature of the scene and put the PCs in jeopardy. If you cut more or less on the exact moment that the escalating bang is revealed, the anticipation of the cliffhanger is based on being uncertain about where the scene is going and also the eagerness of wanting to take action in the new reality presented by the bang. This is the point in a scene where the stakes are either precipitously raised to a whole new level and/or when the stakes you thought the scene were about abruptly change into something completely different. I discuss escalating bangs in The Art of Pacing. The anticipation of the cliffhanger is based on desperately wanting to know the fate of the things we care about. Unresolved peril is fairly self-explanatory: The PCs - or people/things they care about - are in a state of jeopardy and we “leave them hanging,” uncertain of the outcome. There are all kinds of cliffhangers, but two significant ones for RPGs are unresolved peril and the escalating bang. It carried a vicious looking axe with a blade that gleamed in the sun.Īlthough this is not well-represented in the campaign journal, I actually ended Session 22 in a cliffhanger: The demon showed up, shouted, “Who dares?!”, and that’s where I wrapped up the night.Ĭliffhangers are great. Above, on a balcony in the tower directly above them, a demon with a goat-like head was floating several feet off the ground. “WHO DARES TO VIOLATE THIS SANCTUARY OF CHAOS?” In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 23A: Let Slip the Dogs of Hell
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