Get your party beyond excited for the next session.
Cliffhangers are an incredibly powerful tool for your games. They create a serious psychological desire for closure, which makes people eager to return to the table. Sitting with that unresolved story also means they'l have time to roll it over in their minds, imagining all the possibilities. Ending on such a great moment also means your players are gonna remember what's happening a lot faster! So many reasons to use cliffhangers!
Yes, there are many types of cliffhangers for all kinds of stories. Some are meant to stay unresolved, leaving a meaningful question for viewers to ponder. Some are built on the entire story, where it leads to an epic twist. These are doable in D&D, but it's an integral part of the story that should be considered well in advance. What we're talking about is cliffhangers that threaten something the players care about, and leave that threat unresolved.
To lay out how to reliably produce these cliffhangers, we go to the Strategy Stateroom. The Steps are:
Craft the Cliffhanger, where you determine what you're going to threaten and how.
Build Tension, where you lay out three details that lead towards your cliffhanger.
The Big Reveal, Where you lay out the threat in as much dramatic glory as possible.
Drop the Bomb, where you give them that last crucial detail and then bring a drastic halt to the session.
Then we get weird in Tymora's Tavern, where we pit our D&D parties against each other. The twist? They're made up of our favorite cliffhanger rich TV series. Listen to us discuss said cliffhangers, which means plenty of spoilers, decide which team you think wins, then let us know so that one of us can rub the other's face in it.