The Looming Context

Informing Play with a Single Sentence

May 20, 2025

The ‘looming context’ is as made up as it sounds. It is my shameless attempt to contribute to the lexicon of TTRPG design, one that I previously didn’t have the confidence to dive into in a public forum. But when someone as smart as journalist (and my roommate) Rowan Zeoli cites you in a Rascal article, you start to think you might be onto something.

What is it?

If you want to read a more detailed explanation on the looming context, along with a set of great examples, I highly suggest you read Rowan’s piece (linked above). Still, I will take a stab at defining it here:

The ‘looming context’ is a piece of information presented at or towards the beginning of a game text that informs the way you engage with that text throughout play, despite no direct interaction with that information through the game’s mechanics.

My favorite example comes from For The Queen:

“She chose you because she knows that you love her.”

This single sentence informs how you engage with every single question in the game. As Graham Gentz (who has this as a tattoo!) recently put it to me, “it is the whole game in a single sentence.”

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Does the looming context have to be a single sentence? I don’t think it does. But for the sake of this discussion, let’s stick with one sentence.

Building your Looming Context

Finding your looming context begins with the answering of two questions:

What is your game about?
But what is it really about?

The looming context is likely to be found in the answer to that second question. It is within the deeper layer of experience that you want players to have, beyond what the mechanics ask for directly.

Choice and Perspective

Let’s say we’re designing a duet game about Little Red Riding Hood. It’s a prompt-driven game about a little girl’s conversation with her grandmother, who is secretly the Big Bad Wolf. We want this game to lean into the horror and tension of this conversation.

What is our game about? The layers of conversation between a child and a monster.
But what is it really about? Being lured into a trap and not realizing until it is too late.

So our looming context might be something like:

The little girl does not realize her grandmother is dead until it is too late.

This sentence now informs (or looms over) the rest of play. No matter how wolf-y the Big Bad Wolf player gets, the little girl player will respond with the innocence of a child, keeping the tension alive until the game’s final moments.

Is there a sentence from your favorite game that has had a major impact on the way you play?

Looming-ish Context

Does your game need a looming context? Maybe! The exercise of creating a potential looming context will make your game stronger, if only in clarifying what it is really about. But you don’t need to stick to the strict parameter of not engaging with it later in the text.

My dirty little secret is that none of my games have a looming context. Though this article certainly does:

The ‘looming context’ is as made up as it sounds.

— Elliot

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🗞️ News Worthy

Elliot Davis wins the Diana Jones Emerging Game Designer Award along with Marceline Leeman, Ashraf Braden, and Lyla McBeath Fujiwara.

Mythworks launches its crowdfunding campaign for Slugblaster: Slime, Warp, and Solder, the first expansion for Slugblaster tomorrow, Wednesday, May 21st.

Planet Arcana announces its first campaign will be concluding this fall after more than 4 years and 100 episodes.