Out Of My Mind

I’ve been listening to a great podcast called Shakespeare and Dragons. It’s a great worldbuilding series by an English teacher, who approaches world-building for rpgs, comics and stories from a dramatic viewpoint. He explores topics rarely touched on, or at least rarely explored in such depth and scholarly detail. He speaks extensively on things like tone and theme, and how they relate to story-building. He uses many examples from popular culture and the classics.
The latest episode, #7, deals primarily with how characters interact with a central theme. It has prompted me to explore the common themes in my own Savage Earth campaign. In this post, I’m going to list some of the major themes that I either engineered into the setting, or which arose unbidden from actual play.

The major themes I have noticed are:

1) Mystery
This one was planned from the start. The world itself is a mystery, of course. How did it get this way? Who were the demon kings? It’s been very difficult to only drop hints, since revealing my answers would be antithetical to the campaign. On a smaller scale, most of the adventures involve discovery. Players have secrets, NPCs have secrets, nations have secrets, even inanimate object sometimes possess secrets. Discovering these secrets are one of the things characters do most.
Actually, looking back on my world-building and gamemastering history, this appears to be a pretty popular theme with me. I ran a five year science fiction campaign in which the entire point was to unravel a series of mysteries and conspiracies.

2) Conflict
The first thought is well, duh, it’s an rpg. But I don’t mean combat or overt physical conflict. This is more social and political conflict. Every time I create a major social force or NPC, I try to create a roughly equal or at least prominent force or character who wants exactly the opposite thing. The real world operates this way, or at least any part of the real world that bears scrutiny.
Social and political opposition creates faction, or identification with cause. These are hooks that players can readily grasp and work with, which is one of the main reasons White Wolf was so spectacularly successful.
This is a very useful tool to lend an air of verisimilitude to a setting. I have seen many homebrewed settings where someone describes a kingdom or planet where nothing seems to be happening. By putting social forces at work against each other, you get the feeling that something is going on, even if the player characters themselves aren’t involved. The world feels alive and active.

3) Prejudice
This one was totally unexpected. In creating social conflict, the theme of inequity came up again and again. Originally, I had placed this in the world as a tool for creating contrast: The works of civilized man are made to look grand, by showing in sharp relief the lack of power and accomplishment in those who reject that society. I had no idea how often this would resonate with my players, and how many times this would create role-playing conflict. Modern role-players are products of their society, and the current, multicultural, post-civil rights world they live in shapes their reaction to social injustice. Were I running this game for Elizabethans 1, 2 (whose world view I based much of the civilized society on), it would be a very different game.
I have decided that if I ever do a revision of this campaign, I might downplay some of these elements, since they seemed to be disruptive of the types of stories I want to tell. There’ll be more on this when I discuss this at length later.

4) Self Interest
This is a minor theme, but one I have gleaned from analyzing the evnets that have come out in play. Most of the NPCs are motivated by personal interest. There are very few altruists out there. Everyone wants something, and frequently stories have hinged upon figuring out what a person’s motivations are for appearing helpful, or trying to play various interests off of each other.
The PC’s in the original campaign tend to be a little more conscious of the public good, but they are heroes, and that sort of behavior is what defines a hero. When I started the second campaign, which was a merchant caravan, this theme became much more important.

If players in the world, or even people who have just read the chronicles can glean further themes I might have missed, or just comment on what I’ve written so far, please comment here. I would highly suggest listening to at least episodes 6 and 7 of Shakespeare and Dragons to gain a better idea of what is meant by theme in this context. I’ll be expanding each of the points in future posts.