Making Adventures/Campaigns About Stuff (Themes in Games)

[MGibster]

On its surface, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) was just about some dude who wanted to exact revenge on Captain Kirk for marooning him on a doomed planet. But if that's all the story had to offer it probably wouldn't be so fondly remembered as one of the better Trek movies out there. In Wrath we not only get a good action plot but the movie deals with several different themes including aging,* the self-destructiveness of vengeance, the inevitability of death, self-sacrifice, and friendship. Lord of the Rings isn't just a fun movie about a little man trying to destroy a piece of jewelry, it's got something to say about the environment versus technology, free will, and the corrupting nature of power.

I don't expect campaigns/adventures to be exactly the same as movies or novels. But does anyone design their scenarios or campaigns around a particular theme?

*It's funny that back in 1982 when William Shatner was in his early 50s that aging was one of the themes throughout the movie when compared to more recent movies. Today we've got Patrick Stewart in his early 80s playing Picard, Harrison Ford in his late 60s (and 70s if a new movie is being made) playing Indiana Jones, and I don't hear a lot of jokes revolving around The Rolling Stones being old like I used to 25 years ago.

 

[Malmuria]

Certainly! Last year I ran a Planescape campaign that took as its central conceit an aspect of the 2e book Tales of the Infinite Staircase, namely a disease called the iron shadow which sucked the creativity out of beings on various planes. This was metaphorical in my intention, as the thing they were trying to stop was a disease, one that made individuals into depressed, living zombies. I also took inspiration from Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, especially when it came to the whimsy of Sigil. The eventual cure they found was in recovering a magical lute, which the party bard eventually played to cure a iron shadow from a pseudodragon friend they made. It was all very cute and I'm 100% certain that the theme went over everyone's heads.

 

[Yora]

I think a very important part that often gets overlooked is that the rules of the system should not contradict the themes of the campaign. It's a more obvious problem in videogames where you might spend 15 hours carving a giant path of blood through literally a thousand faceless policemen, and then end up having doubts if it's the right thing to kill the ludicrously evil police chief who is taunting you with all the horrible things he did to innocent people, because is killing someone really making anything better? But you can still up with exactly the same issues in any campaign. The rules should work in a way that makes the actions that are appropriate for the theme also the most desirable thing in the mechanics. In particular the rewards that players get for doing certain things should be for things that are appropriate for the theme. A campaign about diplomacy should not primarily reward players for the amount of enemies they kill.

 

[Aldarc]

I have played around with themes a lot with Cortex Prime games.

One Cortex game I worked on was called "Blighted Lands" which took influence from Dark Crystal, Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Pirates of Dark Water. It's essentially about heroes fighting back a corruptive magical blight in the land and associated dark forces (e.g., blighted minions, etc.), which obviously has some power corrupts and environmental themes of the aforementioned media properties.

Another Cortex game I am working on intermittenly is Virtues of Valizia, which plays with themes of virtue and vice, Machiavellian politics, ambition, and social change/transitioning in a fantasty version of a Renaissance Pseudo-Venice.

It's quite easy IMHO to design campaign themes into the tools and mechanics of the character sheet with Cortex Prime.

 

[Professor Murder]

RPGs are collaborative stories, and as a result how they approach themes can be different than a work written by a single author. Even narratives created by a team of writers, like most modern television or films, still have a guiding vision who has a final say in theory in the form of the director. What I mean by all this is that themes don't just come out of what happens to characters or what makes up their world, the elements a GM contributes, but by the choices and actions of the PCs as dictated by the players. As a result, RPGs may be better suited to broadly examine a given theme, rather than attempt to take a definitive stand on it. The GM can craft the framework of the narrative towards a given theme, and then how the theme is explored lies in the players hands.

 

[Yora]

While the campaign I am currently preparing is a classic dungeon crawling West Marches game that doesn't have a story as I am concerned as the GM, I am still setting up the environment to express certain ideas, and working out behavior patterns for NPCs and monsters that reflect that. Whether the players will interpret their experiences in that world the way that I see it will remain to be seen.

The main idea that goes all the way back since I first started working on that setting is that humans are really only the center of their own world immediately around them, but actually matter very little in the bigger picture. In the middle of the Sahara or Siberia, or anywhere in the depths of the ocean, traces of humans can be found quite easily, but they are really a tiny factor in what is going on in those environments. Small unassuming plants or little bugs, or just simple natural erosion govern these environments in much greater ways than humans, and have done so for millions of years and not just a thousand or so. The impact of humans becomes even smaller when you get to the Moon or out to other planets, and is completely meaningless to other stars. If the Earth were to disappear tomorrow, nobody in the universe would notice. And 10,000 years from now there might only be a few dozen people who have any knowledge of anything that might happen today.
To work that as a theme into the setting, I made mortal civilization very small and very young. People have been using writing and smithing for only one or two thousand years, and they only got it so quickly because they found remnants from ancient supernatural civilizations that showed that the basic concepts are possible.
And they are all gone. Except for the most recent one almost entirely forgotten, but there are still many overgrown ruins covering the world, which clearly were build by different peoples from different ages. Current city states are mostly build in the ruins of earlier cities, and people see new cities appear and old ones collapse all the time. The passage of natural cycles is greatly accelerated in this world so that local climate and regional environments can change very quickly. These are things entirely out of the hands of people and instead the domain of nature spirits, and these spirits really just don't care how their constant, though gradual, changes to the environment impact mortal settlements. Cities falling when their rivers dry up or they fall into the sea and people moving to other places that recently have become very hospitable is part of the way of life. People see it all around them that everything they make is likely to be gone in two or three centuries, to be forgotten and swallowed up by the forest like everything else. The works of mortals are temporary, only the forest is forever. As they understand is, this is how it's always been, and how it always will be. Their religions don't deal with the creation of the world or its end, and there is no concept of an afterlife.

Another topic that I find very interesting is violence in non-state societies. Particularly vengeance is something that usually seems like something that should destroy everyone involved very quickly, but over researching the topic over many year, I found that this is largely because vengeance as we think of it today has become something quite different from what it was in non-state societies. Most importantly, the purpose of vengeance is not punishment or justice, but a means to prevent violence and crime. Vengeance is not something that is pursued primarily because you're angry and hate those other guys, but something that must be taken for your own future long-term safety. Vengeance has to establish that people don't get away with their crimes and show that whatever they did in the first place was not worth it. In states, this is taken care of by police and courts. But when there is no state and no higher authority that claims the "monopoly of violence", then there is no one else who could take care of it. To protect your group from future crimes, you have to let everyone know that anyone who tries it will regret it. Even if doing so will cause your own group much more damage than the initial crime did. Because if you let it slide and your enemies get away with it, then it's an invitation for everyone else to target you as well. Also, the people most suited to prevent people from committing crimes are their families. To make sure all families keep their own troublemakers in check before they commit a violent crime, their own heads need to be on the chopping block as well. Even if they don't like a troublemaker and won't miss him much if he gets himself killed, he's their responsibility and they will pay the price if they don't deal with it adequately. It doesn't have to be more people getting killed, and reparation payments can take the place instead. But those payments really need to hurt economically to be effective retribution. In reality, it seems that a lot of bad blood feuds start with a minor incident that still requires reparation, but the whole thing escalating when the agreed upon payments aren't made in time and people start to help themselves to the pigs or sacks and grain they are owed.
Many typical fantasy adventure settings are environments in which there is no central legal authority, and where there aren't (should not be) any prison to serve prison sentences. And in these settings, vengeance should be a big deal, especially given how much player characters get involved in violence. I think the whole weirdness about the nonchalant everyday presence of extreme violence in fantasy games could be addressed in very interesting ways by having an established system of vengeance that NPCs actually follow. Almost no NPCs the players might encounter will be completely isolated. Every time an NPC is getting killed, there is going to be someone somewhere who's going to be really angry about it. Players might be able to leave no witnesses and don't leave any clues that it was them, but I think it will be very interesting to make players always be worried that someone might find out and that there might be retribution coming. No matter how justified they think their own actions were. I want there to be a lot more saber rattling and angry shouting from a distance, with a few arrows being shot before the other people disappear back into the trees.

 

[dragoner]

This main theme is the plot of the story, adventure, etc.. I use it all the time, that is what we do in sesh 0, figure out what we are doing. I give a variety of ideas, depose the leader to become leader? A campaign of intrigue. Maybe be pirates, or go hunting pirates? Badgers? We don't need no stinkin' badgers! Explore new worlds to find alien ruins filled with strange and terrible artifacts as either looters, or a Secure, Contain, Protect protocol mission? These would be the notes I jot down before starting. Stealing ideas from books and movies are a great resource.

 

[BookTenTiger]

I love, love, love, love, love themes in campaigns and adventures!

A lot of times when I'm building a campaign world (which I do at the start of every campaign), I try to figure out the Main Theme of the Campaign World... this is usually some sort of conflict: Civilization vs Nature, Magic vs Technology, Entropy vs Chaos, Slobs vs Snobs, etc.

This theme gives me a general way to differentiate different areas and NPC's of the world. Let's say I'm doing a Slobs vs Snobs campaign... and I have three main "zones" of the campaign world. There's Slob Zone, Snob Zone, and a mixed Slob/Snob Zone. The Slob Zone could be an area of land where many rugged adventurers gather, lots of dungeon, few rules, smoky smelly taverns where everything goes... The Snob Zone could be a vast city ruled over by Academic Wizards and Nobility obsessed with fashion and etiquette, where the punishment for being low-class is DEATH. And in between is a series of villages, being harassed both by slobby swords-for-hire and snobby noble guards!

HOWEVER, as a campaign progresses I find I start basing my themes around the characters and their interests. For example, my current Kingdom-Ruled-by-Vampires game started with the theme of "Fight the Power" (the vampires are all corrupt land barons, evil dogmatic bishops, and other people of oppressive power), but it's started drifting to a theme of "Power Corrupts" as they find out even the Gods of the world are simply powerful, but fallible beings. That wasn't the original plan, but I basically listened to what the players were saying might be going on, and made that the truth!

 

[MGibster]

RPGs are collaborative stories, and as a result how they approach themes can be different than a work written by a single author. Even narratives created by a team of writers, like most modern television or films, still have a guiding vision who has a final say in theory in the form of the director.

Oh, yeah. I participated in an Esoterrorist campaign where some of the themes were forgiveness, reconciliation, and coping with the loss of a family member. One of the PCs had one final chance to reconcile with his brother before he passed into the great beyond but just refused, obstinately saying this was all his brother's fault, and pretty much telling him to "eat a bag of %$#$." This was a final chance for him to make his peace with his brother before crossing over into the afterlife but this wasn't the type of player who was into that kind of thing. So, uh, the campaign ended on an anti-climatic note as failure to reconcile kind of turned his brother's spirit into an abomination someone else would have to deal with in the future.

An author, or authors, can at least get all the characters onboard to work within the them. As a GM, you really can't force the issue. If the player isn't interested in the theme there's not a lot to do about that other than find another theme.

 

[pemerton]

But does anyone design their scenarios or campaigns around a particular theme?

No and yes.

No: in dramatic/thematic play, I prefer the theme to emerge from the way the players build and play their PCs in the context of the system. Some systems are better at this than others.

Yes: I prefer RPGing which is theme-laden.

Some of my terminology for thinking about this is taken from Robin Laws's Hamlet's Hit Points: https://gameplaywright.net/books/hamlets-hit-points/:

* The fiction is procedural if it concerns "a protagonist’s external or practical goal";
* It is dramatic if it "invests us in the protagonist’s inner goals".​

Dramatic fiction tends to be theme-laden by default, I think - the inner goals bring emotional resonance with them. Procedural fiction becomes theme-laden if the external or practical goal suggests something beyond it of emotional or symbolic. significance (eg blowing up the Death Star).

Examples:

* In a Rolemaster game, one of the PCs became addicted to a magic-enhancing drug. This led to a downward spiral of financial and social ruin. Overlapping with this, the system produced a series of big failures for him, which compounded his suffering. This moved from the procedural to the dramatic when the character had to make compromises with another PC, and agree to betray his city, in order to get healing for his addiction and support to overcome his other problems. The character achieved a degree of redemption when he fell in love with, and established a relationship with, a NPC. Then she was killed when one of the demons controlled by the other, formerly dominating PC , ran amok; this provoked a new spiral into bitterness and disregard of personal wellbeing.

* In another RM game, I (as GM) did set up situations to deliberately bring out a particular theme: inspired by Wagner's Ring Cycle, and adapting some AD&D and 3E D&D scenarios, I established a situation where the players had the opportunity to have their PCs step outside the cosmological boundaries that the gods had set for themselves, so as to help a trapped, "dead" god for whom they had developed an affection, and find a new solution to the problem of holding back an ancient evil. The action was predominantly procedural, but it reflected the PCs (and their players) rejection of karmically predestined outcomes, and in the climax of the campaign they came up with a series of novel solutions to their cosmological quandry, which satisfied the sentimentalist in me: the paladin PC, who had been willing to take the place of the trapped, "dead" god in holding back the ancient evil outside of space and time in the Void, was able to have a karmic duplicate of himself take on that role, while he retired to establish a monastery for training devotees of the dead god on the island which was the (stone) "body" of the "dead" god on earth; and another player brought his PC's romance subplot (wherein he had wooed a sorcerer the PCs had rescued from a demon) to a resolution, solving the problem of the inevitable exhaustion/corruption of an eternal guardian by having his family's generations bear the responsibility of guardianship instead, with hope and energy thus being renewed with each generation.

* In my 4e game, the players built their PCs following the defaults in the PHB (and later the other player-focused books) but I added two extra requirements: that each PC must have one loyalty to something or someone; and that each must have a reason to be ready to fight Goblins. By following and building on the players' leads, and their interplay with the default cosmology and thematic logic of 4e, the game evolved from a conflict against slavers and an attempt to reach peace with the Goblin raiders; to a thwarting of the demonic ambitions of Gnolls and cultists; to journeys in the Underdark in which the PCs brought ruin on the duergar, and killed Torog; to the sealing of the Abyss, the killing of Orcus, the liberation of the Drow from Lolth, and the (at least temporary) staving off of the Dusk War. Life and death, pragmatism and duty, and chaos vs law were the recurrent themes here in a predominantly procedurally-oriented game.

* I am a player in a (slowly) ongoing Burning Wheel game. The basic orientation of play is determined by my PCs Beliefs and relationships and similar character-establishing elements of the PC. For my paladin-esque PC, he has had key opportunities to establish his commitment to upholding the values of his order and redeeming his family; this action has been a mixture of the procedural and the dramatic (for instance when he burned the letters he found in an evil wizard's tower that very strongly implied the wizard was his mother's father). So far it is his sorcerer sidekick who has actually travelled further along a purely dramatic arc, as she started out motivated by a mixture of fear and somewhat bitter resentment, but through events has been able to realise herself as more self-assertive, more respectful of my PC, and ready to assist in the cause of liberating his homeland. My friend who GMs this game has never GMed before, but is very skilled at using the material and techniques that Burning Wheel provides, and following the leads I provide in the play of my PC and his sidekick.