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Foreshadowing

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 33
The best payoff is sometimes the one that takes a long time to set up. The henchman hired at 4th level who betrays the party at 7th level is a long con, but it can have a huge impact if you’ve foreshadowed the betrayal in a way that seems obvious in hindsight (but which is tough to figure out ahead of time).

More practically, foreshadowing is often a clue that drops one or two sessions before the event you’re foreshadowing occurs. Some possible techniques:

Meeting a villain before anyone knows he’s a villain
Fortune-telling with a Harrow Deck
Telling the paladin that a certain town seems dangerous, even heretical
Having a madman complain about a certain locale or event in an over-the-top way
Having a sharp-eared PC hear something suspicious
Introducing omens and portents, such as dead birds or fiery comets

The idea is to make the foreshadowing creepy or unsettling, and vague enough that it doesn’t allow the party to prevent the foreshadowed event. The sense of horror when a PC realizes that he could have stopped something if he’d only put the pieces together sooner is a highly effective emotion, and one that roots the PC firmly in the game world.

When done right, foreshadowing ties in heavily with the idea of continuity. Instead of inventing a new villain every game, why not bring back an old one—appropriately leveled during his time away, of course—who already has reason to hate the PCs? Or you could throw a twist into the storyline by making the sweet maiden they saved in the first adventure turn out to be the major villain of the campaign. Such recurring figures make it feel like all the events in your campaign and even your world are somehow tied together, the story leading to some grand and inevitable conclusion.

Archives of Nethys

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Foreshadowing