Most games start small, and get big.
Not all. Some cut straight to the big fight, the galactic scale, empires and civilizations. Some stay tightly-focused on the character issues and the street-level problems.
But most don’t. Scale increases over time; the party starts out dealing with small issues, gradually these become larger issues; and eventually the players are battling the forces of Eternity on the edge of Oblivion for the Fate of All Time And Space.
Number of Significant Capital Letters, I’ve found, also increases over time.
Managing that transition properly, I’ve found, is one of my biggest flaws as a GM, and it’s because I am addicted to the “big beat reveal”. I love, love, love the moment where some new element throws the entire plot so far into a new context, in which all of it adds up to a much larger threat/problem/situation than the players expected. What they thought was just an X is, in fact, Y, and Y is something to be very scared of.
Building this in a believable way is hard enough, if you’re going to play fair with the group. It’s hard to be subtle with foreshadowing, because anything you mention automatically calls attention to itself by the mere fact that you mention it. Talk about what music is playing on the radio, or the name of the apartment building, and you’ve made it, if not interesting, than at least important. Possibly a holdover from lecture halls — It’s assumed that anything I say may be on the test.
The other issue is springing it too early. For it to really work, it needs to simmer for a bit, and I am not known for my patience.
Just some thoughts.
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