Countdowns can also be used to track long-term events during a campaign; you could count down towards the overthrow of a nation, the death of a powerful mage, or anything else that might take more than a few sessions to come to bear.

While you can use a die for long-term countdowns, it’s often easier to make a countdown track to record progress across multiple sessions. To do so, decide how far out the event should be (usually between 4 and 12 ticks), and on a piece of paper, create small boxes for each tick. Then, starting from the first and working towards the last, write some events that may occur along the way that foreshadow the final event. These steps can alternate between softer and harder moves to give a sense of variety and growing tension.

[EXAMPLE IMAGE OF LONG TERM COUNTDOWN]

Advancing a Long-Term Countdown

During a short rest, you should generally tick a relevant long-term countdown once. During a long rest, you should generally tick down a relevant long-term countdown twice.

When you tick the countdown, let the consequences ripple down to the PCs, building tension as events unfold. Often, you can reveal this progression through something the PCs witness (such as the banner of a rival leader painted on the castle, or conversations overheard in the marketplace about the strange lights NPCs saw in the sky last night). Other times, you might cinematically cut away to a scene the PCs are unaware of, narrating the accelerating effects to the players. This is best done with countdowns where the characters already know about the events surrounding the countdown, so that players aren’t asked to completely ignore out-of-character knowledge.