D&D 5E Wandering Monsters: Campaign Themes

[Plaguescarred]

Campaign Themes
Wandering Monsters
By James Wyatt

Since we’re building on larger concepts of late, James has chosen to address the topic of themes in D&D campaigns.

What themes do you use—if any?

 

[delericho]

My current campaign was originally going to be about "divided loyalties", but that hasn't worked out so well.

My previous campaign was about whether one particular religion (the Silver Flame), despite its obvious flaws, was a positive force in the world. That campaign went rather better, although I'm not 100% certain that that theme was presented as well as it might have been.

The other 'big' theme I've looked at has been the classic "a beast I am, lest a beast I become" from Vampire: the Masquerade. But that's going back a ways now.

 

[Plaguescarred]

My campaing theme currently involve the godess Shar and her followers plotting to spread chaos in the heartland and the heroes trying to stop her and also lift a lycanthropic curse she laid upon them, using the aid her sister Selune.


I usually give some thoughts to the type of villains and monsters that will run through my campaign along with plots or evens taking places in it. I think DMG should give some advices on using themes in your campaign.

 

[delericho]

I think DMG should give some advices on using themes in your campaign.

Well, yes, but...

Eh, I dunno if "My campaign uses lots of reptilian creatures" (to quote JW) is really worth taking up space for in the DMG. Indeed, a lot of list of themes mostly seem to be just very, very short plot summaries... and while there's no harm in having such a plot summary in mind when starting a campaign, I'm not sure they're worth expending much ink in "advice" for the DM.

Conversely, I do think there's a place for longer discussion of what JW terms "Literary Themes" in the DMG, though probably as some sort of "Advanced DM Skills" discussion.

(I've mentioned it before, but I found "Vampire: the Masquerade" to be an excellent resource in this regard - whereas before I'd looked at things from a very mechanical standpoint, that was the first time I really dug into it from a storytelling perspective.)

 

[dmgorgon]

I find that it's helpful not to have one big campaign theme from levels 1-20. It can drag on far too long and the players can suffer from a lack of accomplishment. It's much more fun to have several shorter campaign themes that are loosely connected. In my experience a theme shouldn't last for more than 10 levels. Pairing the PCs up against a 20th level Lich at 1st level is just asking for story problems.

 

[the Jester]

While campaign themes are a fine topic for discussion, I have no idea whatsoever what that article has to do with 5e's design. Nor is there even a nod to that discussion in the article.

Don't get me wrong- it's a fine article (for being, essentially, a list of a few themes). But I thought that WM was supposed to be about the work on 5e, so I found it disappointing.

You know what I'd like to see in a Wandering Monsters article? A discussion of the corrected monster math. Or, if it's in the cards, an article about the rehabilitation of some loser monster or other (tirapheg, umpleby, tojanida, phantom fungus) into something with a chance of seeing some use. Or, really, anything about 5e's monsters.

EDIT: Also, I find the idea that "exploring a world" is a theme on the same level as "there's an Elder God and a cult and..." to be kinda silly. Classic 1e-style sandboxes tend to NOT have a single theme, instead moving from one to another as the group moves from one adventure to another.

 

[KidSnide]

This article addressed a worthy subject, but didn't have much that's interesting to say.

First, the example themes at the beginning of the article were terrible. Look at them. Hardly any of them even mentioned the PCs. Dragonlance was not a campaign about the efforts of the Queen of Darkness. Dragonlance was about the Heroes of the Lance! Similarly -- although I can't speak in the same way to Wyatt's home campaigns -- I have to imagine that the campaign was really about the adventures of the PCs.

It can seem like a semantic difference, but many D&D campaigns are crippled in the conception phase by inexperienced DMs spending all their time thinking about what the NPCs are doing in the background when they should be focusing on the PC experience. The whole purpose of the DMG is to help inexperienced DMs turn into good DMs. Training DMs to boil down their campaign into a single sentence that doesn't mention the PCs?!? That's awful advice!

The 4e DMG advice isn't so bad. Personally, I think the 4e DM's material tends to get a little underrated.

As to literary themes, I'll confess, I love literary themes. Or, to be more accurate, I love themes that go further than a question of plot alone, whether that be a sub-genre theme (e.g. arabian, horror, renaissance) or a more conceptual theme (e.g. how powerful individuals deal with their own mortality, the effect of colonialism on both the colonizers and the peoples colonized). But the challenge for this kind of theme isn't thinking it up -- it's making it work in D&D. The article doesn't even touch on the kind of advice that a DMG might provide.

As to the poll, I know that picking on Wandering Monster polls is a little like hunting down wounded goblins, but wouldn't this poll be so much more useful if we could select all the answers that apply? There wasn't a single question that I didn't want to answer "yes, I think about all of these and you should provide assistance for all of them in the DMG."

-KS

 

[Jacob Marley]

EDIT: Also, I find the idea that "exploring a world" is a theme on the same level as "there's an Elder God and a cult and..." to be kinda silly. Classic 1e-style sandboxes tend to NOT have a single theme, instead moving from one to another as the group moves from one adventure to another.

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing while reading through the article.

...

The literary themes present an interesting discussion, but I think those themes works best when they emerge organically from the players decisions as they interact with the setting. I don't think the DM preplanning those themes produces a satisfactory gaming experience.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Wyatt is on the same topic I'm on about this week, it seems. Typing some very similar noise yesterday.

Though I imagine for sandboxy games, saying "My Campaign is About X" isn't the most useful thing to spend time doing (and really, any or all of the plots that he enumerates can be present in a sandboxy game -- in fact, the more the marrier!), for more narrative games, it really helps define the central conflict.

What I find is really useful is then to tie this back into character creation. If your campaign is about the conflict between the gods of Order and the primordial forces of Chaos, then this should echo in the characters that are played in these games. Backgrounds, classes, feats, whatever, any character made in such a campaign should bear the mark of that campaign. If you make Joe the Fighter in that campaign, then Joe should have some distinctive element that ties him into this conflict between divine order and elemental chaos.

Where that gets interesting is when you have an open field, and let the players select the conflict by choosing character elements. If you wind up with a party that selects elements related to evil deities, elements related to wilderness survival, and the terror of mortality, you have a ready-made campaign theme: evil gods of death and nature!

Which ties into the emergent quality of themes. Sometimes, the theme of a campaign isn't set from the outset, but emerges over time. This is perhaps another benefit of the first three levels in NEXT: lets the themes emerge organically in play.

I like themes -- conflicts -- as a guiding force for narrative games, and I think the ability for sandbox games to a la carte their themes is pretty strong point in favor of their inclusion, too.

Personally, I've done a lot more with what he calls "literary" themes than with just big epic central adventures, but I've also done games where I just make things up as I go along. I'd appreciate advice for literary themes, conflicts, etc., and as long as it's a light touch (with maybe some modules), I'm in.

 

[Savage Wombat]

Most of the examples seemed more like "plot" than "theme" to me. I guess they don't want to imply the railroading / story arc structure.

The last campaign I designed had a plot - recovering Tiamat's stolen bowl - but it also had themes and motifs relating to the female force of creation stolen by a male power. I can easily see this sort of thing being beyond the scope of an RPG manual, and that's fine, but I'd rather they use a different word than "theme".