What's your campaign theme?

[Lord Mhoram]

"Good truimphs over evil" "Faith conquers all"

I tend to run worlds that really work well with a paladin or two in the group, and a lot of extreme goody two shoes heroics and evil stomping, culminating in saving the world. The alignment system helps a world have the feel of an absolute, objective morality (that paladins are the exemplification of) that the good guys can cling too when all else fails them, and holding onto the light is what saves them in the end.

Don't have a lot of shades of grey in my world.

 

[Dagger of Lath]

My most recent game was "how we deal with failure". The entire campaign arc was the players sent to do a mission a previous group had failed. Each of the characters had some element of failure in their backstory, for example being on the losing side of a civil war. It was partly deliberate and partly the result of the character's choices.

Don't have a lot of shades of grey in my world.

That's intriguing. Very different to me and mine. The pure whites and black are very difficult to spot in my world through the shades of grey (though they are usually there).

 

[Ry]

My first big hit campaign had a theme of duty. My second big hit campaign had 2 themes: family, and coming of age. Up until then I ran some fun games with themes like "haphazard" and "evil is bad", but none lodged in my players' memories like those 2.

 

[DragonLancer]

Thinking about this after my post yesturday it occured to me that perhaps I do have a recurring theme which I hadn't considered - conseqences of action.

 

[Lord Mhoram]

That's intriguing. Very different to me and mine. The pure whites and black are very difficult to spot in my world through the shades of grey (though they are usually there).

Yeah.
My players, and myself, play for escapsim - and there are so much grey in the real world, when we game we want things a little more cut and dried. Same reason we play superheroes, and play them very four color - the good guys and the bad guys are ver y clear.

 

[Gold Roger]

Spoiled adventuring nobles

Old school dungeoncrawls

"Everything you do has consequences" isn't a campaign theme to me, it's a basic principle of DMing.

 

[shilsen]

"Everything you do has consequences" isn't a campaign theme to me, it's a basic principle of DMing.

I'd say it should be a basic principle of DMing. Considering some of the horror stories I've heard here and elsewhere, it often isn't.

 

[Herobizkit]

My current campaign is more of a sordid soap opera with a fantasy backdrop.

The main hero, Aiden Spier, is a half-celestial Paladin, descended from a race of extra-terrestrial angelic beings called Seraphim. He is the son of a king, destined to rule over his father's kingdom but also destined to leave the planet to return "home".

In the interim, he's got a love parallelogram going with three (and sometimes four) key NPCs. His ultimate goal is, well, I'll just abbreviate by saying "all at once" and leave it at that. At the same time, he's got a "coming of age" thing going as he gains more responsibility over his father's people and kingdom. PLUS, he's got a "age of discovery" theme going as he rules over an unexplored archipelago dotted with artefacts from his homeworld which, in the right (or wrong) hands, could quickly tip the scales of power to any random group of individuals who find them.

 

[Wraith Form]

The theme of my current campaign is "what is evil?"

Hunh. For my players it's "What is gold, and how can we spend it? ...Oh, wait--first, how can we find it?!?"

 

[Deuce Traveler]

I'm running two campaigns right now, one in Planescape and another in my own homebrew world.

The Planescape campaign is a simple "things aren't what they seem" theme. And I don't mean tired twists of betrayal. Instead, most of the monsters I put out for them to combat seem weak, but are actually ingenious planners that give the party a run for their money. Such as when my party got their first quest. It was a simple go-to-the-abandoned-building-and-clear-it-of-rats quest. The problem was that the rats were cranium rats. Poor adventurers... they got so complacent after those first few kills. Then the switches for the exits began to be closed by the uber-intelligent rat swarm. They never wanted to fight rats again after that.

My other campaign is being run here, and is called Last of the Dorinthians. Instead of the typical, save-the-kingdom theme, the party starts out as refugees fleeing the invasion of their country. So instead of saving the kingdom, they have to seek out a home for their people so that they don't become extinct. The theme to this is "Good and Evil Actions Under Desperation". It's partly political, with the players' actions determining how the other races treat the new refugees that lie on their border. Also, both PCs and NPCs have a lot of pressure to save their own people from enemies on the border. This gives the PCs a chance to justify their alignments and perhaps save other NPCs from falling from grace. I try to make it easy to make an evil decision, although that is rarely the best solution in the long run. I suppose a secondary theme is "salvation", although the story hasn't progressed far enough yet for the characters to see that yet. I also try to make the NPCs as complex as possible. They may be evil, or good falling into evil, but there is a reason for their fall that goes beyond taking over the world for the heck of it.