Foreshadows

Three things: where you planted it (Setup), whether you nudged the reader again in between (Reinforce), and where and how you intend to collect it (Payoff). With those, “planted and forgotten” stops being a memory problem.

It detects nothing and rewrites nothing. No foreshadow appears on its own while you write, and marking a payoff never touches the draft. You keep the record; the system computes the span.

Open Beats in the left navigation. The Foreshadowing Manager shares that page with the Pacing Density Curve (over its Chapter Color Blocks) and the two appearance heatmaps, and its sub-title reads “Setup → Payoff · scene span”. Foreshadowing no longer lives in the script’s right rail, and there is no separate “this chapter / global” split.

The list is sorted by status with warnings first, and each row shows a span bar: setup chapter at one end, payoff at the other, small marks for reinforcements. With no chapters yet it says so, and explains that scenes are needed to place a foreshadow precisely.

Open the create button; the detail panel runs:

• Title and colour. The colour paints the span bar; clear it and the bar colours by importance instead.
• Technique Type: Explicit Setup, Subtle Setup, Misdirection, Recurring Thread, Callback—Uncategorized until you choose.
• Hint strength: Obvious, suggestive, Hidden—how plainly the reader can spot the plant. Undecided by default.
• Importance: Main Plot, Subplot, Detail / Easter Egg.
• Expected Resolution / Effect and Notes; @ in the notes links characters, places, props or settings.
• Linked foreshadows chain a thread together, so the related ones are visible when you change one.

The Anchor Points field is labelled “Setup / Reinforce / Payoff”. Each anchor points at a chapter, scene, scene setting or content block; the granularity is yours, but a scene-level anchor is what makes the span read true.

A foreshadow can hold several reinforcements—add and remove them in that block. They mean “I reminded the reader again”; they do not change the status, only the count in the status overview.

Three habits that pay for themselves:

• Outlining: anchor at chapter level only. Decide “planted here, collected there”, and the span bar immediately shows how far apart they are.
• Drafting: pin the setup to a concrete scene and leave the payoff empty. It sits in the list as Awaiting Payoff until you reach that chapter.
• Revising: add reinforcements to anything that recurs. A thread reinforced three times and one planted once and left alone look completely different on the bar, so you can see which one the reader has forgotten.

Status is inferred, so you never maintain a second record that can drift:

• No anchors at all → Not Set Up.
• Only a payoff anchor → Set Up (the reversed case: ending written before the plant).
• Only a setup anchor → Awaiting Payoff.
• Both → Paid Off.
• Awaiting Payoff for too long → Overdue, the warning in the list. The threshold scales with length: from the setup chapter to the last chapter, it must span at least six chapters, or forty percent of all chapters—whichever is larger. A hundred-chapter epic is not nagged after five chapters, and a short piece still gets the warning.

Filters run All / Awaiting Payoff / Paid Off / Warning, and Awaiting Payoff includes the overdue ones. Ordering is always warning first, then awaiting, set up, not set up, paid off.

“This thread should pay off in chapter eight”, “note a foreshadow: the letter that was never sent”—the agent returns a confirmation card to create, change or delete a foreshadow (title, notes, technique, hint strength, importance, anchors, expected resolution, links). Setup and payoff anchors must point at real chapters, scenes, scene settings or blocks, and deleting a foreshadow never touches the draft. Up to 8 operations per card; one undo afterwards. The other direction is cleaned too: delete a chapter or scene and the anchors pointing at it are removed rather than left dangling.

• A span that looks wrong, or zero: check whether the anchors stop at chapter level. Chapter-only anchors can only measure chapter span.
• A filter that empties the list says so; switch back to All.
• Deleting asks for confirmation per entry; there is no batch delete here.
• An empty Beats page means the project has no chapters yet—create them in the script or the chapter outline first.

Appearance counting is explained in Characters; the curve and heatmaps in Reference modules overview.