At the start of the project, I was given a description:

Mordeth are a stout, heavy race. They are shorter than humans, but significantly tougher and stronger. Their bones are thick and their muscles tightly packed. They are covered in leathery, brick red flesh. The Mordeth brain is located inside the chest, and like all the major organs, it is protected by their thick ribs and strong muscles.

A Mordeth’s legs are connected near the top of the blocky torso, with the body suspended from there.  This is somewhat analogous to a human’s legs being attached at the shoulders.  The arms are then floated in sockets connected to the top, outside of the legs.

As a result of their rugged build, it is difficult for most races to compete with the Mordeth in physical combat. However, the same features that make them strong and enduring also leave them clumsy and slow.

Mordeth possess senses similar to humans, but their eyes are located on a nimble stalk which allows them to see in 360 degrees. Their thick skin prevents them from having a well-defined sense of touch, but developed nerves on their feet allow them to feel the vibrations of creatures moving around them.

Like most races, Mordeth have both males and females, however to most races they are utterly indistinguishable. Females will deliver live birth to small litters of Mordeth — usually one to three. The young will immediately be removed from the mother, assessed, and incorporated into the order of society with an assigned rank and task for their life.

Mordeth are omnivorous, but prefer plants to meat. Though they are physically powerful, they are neither swift nor witty enough to hunt most animals native to their homeworld.

Armed with this description, I worked up a page of preliminary sketches. When doing a project like this, I want the anatomy to be as convincing as possible. That means figuring out how masses relate to each other, how bones and muscles (if there are any) are arranged, how such a species would wear clothing, etc. This alien was far more challenging than the Asta (the previous Featured Art piece), since the design was non-humanoid. I needed to create an armature for the unusual leg and arm joints. The torso is suspended from the legs, and the arms are mounted just above and behind.

Here is the sketch page:

After this, we then do a number of back and forth emails, refining the concept. You can see from here that compared to the final work, one of the things that Dan requested was much beefier muscularity. He wanted these things to look like they could casually tear you apart, even though they are shorter than the average human.

Once we worked out the details, I started on the final image. Here was the first proof, basically a work in progress. A lot of details are not yet present.:

The gist of the response to this was that he wanted a redder color. This is pretty simple to do with Photoshop’s Hue and Saturation controls.

The second proof was far closer to finalized:

Dan wanted two specific changes. One: remove the teeth. Not difficult. The second request was a bit more challenging. He felt (rightly) that the eyes looked a bit too much like Googly Eyes. He wanted something more alien. So I did some reading up on the various types of eyes found in  nature, trying for something A) alien, and B) useful. In general simple eyes (like ours) are better than compound eyes, at least in terms of resolution. However, really large compound eyes could approach human acuity. Then I discovered the Mantis Shrimp, which has possibly the most complicated and remarkable eyes in nature. The Mordeth doesn’t need to have exactly the same eyes, since that level of anatomical detail is pretty specialized and beyond the needs of an artistic conceit. But they could echo the design, perhaps possessing a few of the same qualities as mantis shrimp eye. To begin with each eye has three separate imaging systems, giving each one independent trinocular separation. It is theorized that the mantis shrimps eye complexity makes up for it’s miniscule brain power by doing a lot of the image interpretation “up front” as it were. For the Mordeth, this would make sense for a creature whose eyes are so far away from its brain.

Anyway, here is what I came up with:

Once these details were worked out, I presented the final proposed anatomy:

But we weren’t yet finished. This is an ongoing project, which will eventually contain a large number of alien designs. Not all aliens run around without clothes, and clothing is an important cultural artifact. We decided that for humanoid aliens such as the Asta, a detailed surface anatomy wasn’t really necessary. But for a decidedly non-human physiology, we needed both anatomy and clothing. So the final step was to envision how such an organism would clothe itself. This was added as a number of separate layers in Photoshop.

The Mordeth have a view of life similar to the Elizabethan Great Chain of Being, where everyone has a place, from Kings to peasants and down to rocks in the field, and that the universe works best when everyone recognizes and is happiest in their place. As such, I felt it was important that the Mordeth should have cues to other Mordeth as to their station, the equivalent of the different between coveralls and a power suit.

Here is the final illustration. I am omitting the sketch preliminaries here, since there were few if any differences between concept and final:

The patch on the “breast” is something I envisioned as a sort of “Here is who I am” kind of badge. It contains a number of symbols and writing to indicate station. Beyond that, the Mordeth wears a simple undergarment and an ornate tabard (Dan’s idea).

The Mordeth and Epoch of Rysos are © 2009 Dan Repperger, all rights reserved

into this:

There really isn’t much more to the Photoshop file than the black and white image you see in the first shot. Each design element is on a separate layer. Each layer has a series of effects that control things like beveling, shiny-ness, color and gradient, texture, drop shadows and so forth. Once the base design is achieved, the majority of time is spent in tweaking all of these individual layers and their effects to achieve just the look you want. This same design could have been made to look as if chiseled on stone or carved from polished gemstones without touching the base art, but only manipulating the layer effects.

This is an example of a common difficulty in historical fantasy game maps. There is a constant battle between accuracy and artistic authenticity. On the one hand, the customer wants a map that will look as much as possible like a map of teh time. They want a product which the player or gamemaster can hold and get that visceral feel of connection with the setting.

CLICK FOR MAP

In this case, Solomon Kane lived in the 16th century. The world was far from fully mapped. At the same time, much of the action is in the discovery and exploration of far-off lands, or strange hidden lands within places once mysterious and unknown, such as Deepest Africa. You will note that Australia is hinted at on this map, though it was not discovered by Europeans until the following centruy.

This is a nod to Accuracy and Utility. Though we want a map that looks like something Kane himself might have held, the players and gamemaster want something that they can use to accurately gauge distances, or spacial relationships between land-masses. They want the arcane and the familiar in one product. In general, these aims are incompatible, and the problem gets worse as you “zoom in” to larger scale maps. In a future post, I will show a portion of a map of the Eastern seaboard of North America that also illustrates this point.

The concession was arrived at in this map, that landmasses that had been discovered would be shown faithfully, even if they were not already fully mapped. The farthest north, the farthest south, and places like Australia would be faded and ghostly.

The rendering of the map was done as follows. I started with an outline map of the world, used with the permission of the Cartographic Research Laboratory of the University of Alabama. I converted this to Photoshop format and laid down some base colors, using the climate zones of the real world as a guide. It doesn’t look like much at this stage. The detail comes next.

In step three, I lay down the major surface textures of the world. At this scale, this is primarily mountains, hills and vegetation. These are each done on separate layers in the Photoshop document. By putting them on different layers, I can quickly and easily make changes, should I make a mistake. I don’t have to worry about destroying my forest work with a misplaced mountain range, for example. (For those unfamiliar with layers in an illustration program, imagine them as layers of clear paper. Each piece of paper is layered one over the other and each layer can contain different artwork. The final piece for this project had 13 layers, not including the type.)

You will also note that the surface detail I have painted does not look particularly naturalistic. The forms do not flow into each other convincingly. Once I have finished the rendering of the map, none of this artificiality will be visible. Especially since the printed product was destined for a standard 8.5″ x 11″ page. At this scale, minor details become obscured. The impression is the important thing. (You may remember that lesson from my last featured map.)

Now that the details are in, it’s time to make it all look pretty. I created a virtual piece of parchment (4 layers: for dirt, texture, color, and edge effects) and composited the map with the parchment, using Photoshop’s transparency tools to make the image look as if it was painted on the parchment. It’s all still editable. All of the preceding images were taken from the finished work, just by isolating the layers. Here is what it looks like when assembled.

The final step is to put in all the type. (This image shows a detail area, with type in place and a close up of the parchment texture.) Photoshop is a great program, but it really isn’t designed to handle a lot of individual pieces of type. It wants to put each label on a separate layer. Thats’ really unmanageable and a nightmare to edit. So a link to the graphic is placed in a different program altogether: Adobe Illustrator. The Illustration workhorse has so many features that it really deserves a post of it’s own. Suffice it is an essential compliment to Photoshop. Here all of the labels are affixed to the map, the gridlines are superimposed, and that critical “KAC” signature is placed at the bottom.

A final advantage of using layers. This map had two final copies: one usable by the players, and one usable by the Gamemaster, who needs to know the location of mythical places Kane visited, of which the characters would be unaware. By placing the Gamemaster’s labels on a separate layer, I could generate a player copy and a GM copy with little trouble. This savings is of course passed on to the customer, and the second map was practically a freebie. (It might even have been thrown in gratis; it’s been a while since I did this.)

Once the customer approves, a final, printable copy with no layers is generated. (This is like I took all those pieces of transparent paper and fused them all into one image.) Why don’t I give the layered copy to the customer? Well, sometimes I do on request. But there is so much that can go wrong with a layered image. What if the printer doesn’t have the right font, for instance? Or what if the customer makes an experiment with the layers and winds up producing something unprintable? I use a lot of little tricks to make things work right, and they are not all immediately obvious. It’s also just a lot smaller and easier to transport and print.

Finally, once again, the finished image.

Rezolution City Map - Click for full image.

This map was created for Aberrant Games, for their Rezolution line. It was an emergency job, as the contracted artist had let them down in some manner. They needed a city sector map for a post apocalyptic, cyberpunk style world. I was given an existing piece and asked to copy the style. I don’t have re-posting rights for the sample, but I am allowed to feature the resulting map I created.

This is an example of a collaboration of Illustrator and Photoshop elements. 90% of the detail is provided by Illustrator. Most of this detail is implied. The aim was to create something that looked like a satellite image. To this end, there is no perspective to speak of, just a straight top-down view.

The buildings are actually simple shapes, with hairline outlines. The shapes all have a tiny drop shadow effect applied to them to give them the illusion of sitting on a surface. Illustrator allows you to apply a Style to an object, much like you would define and apply a style to text in a word processor. So I was started with objects based on this style. If they looked less than convincing, I could redefine the style and all the buildings would update to match. This made edits very quick and uniform. I always try to plan a project for efficiency. (You might notice a lot of repeated shapes.)

The resulting image however did not look convincing. It needed the sort of detail that makes a satellite image look real. As I sated earlier, this was a rush project, so I couldn’t really take the time to add the necessary fiddly bits to lend authenticity. Nowadays, I have several techniques using defined image patterns, but I hadn’t hit on that idea yet. Besides, part of the assignment specs required that some of the buildings be distinct and well-defined. Too much detail would tend to get them lost and make their unclear. To that end I decided to keep the buildings fairly smooth, and make the background chaotic and detailed instead.

I took some real satellite images from various sources and mixed and matched. There are real-world cities, as well as some badlands topology. I reduced them to a grayscale of similar value to the building pieces and used that as a backdrop for the whole project.

Finally, the project required the whole illustration to look like a computer display. I created a frame with a 3-D effect and devised a lettering style. Once again, in the interests of efficiency, the labels are styles. All I had to do was type the name and the round-cornered rectangular background creates itself. If I didn’t like the results (and I didn’t, for the first several attempts), I redefined the style and all the labels updated.

I liked the finished piece. It gives the illusion of exquisite thoroughness with very little actual technical detail.

This map is copyright Aberrant Games. Reproduced with permission.

For more maps and commissioned art, go to www.KACurtis.com

The original map was fairly simple, and designed to look like an artifcat produced within the campaign. In other words, it looked like something a character might possess, rather than a campaign document. The exception is that neighborhoods are labeled by broad categories, rather than what people would actually name them. This reflects the state of planning at that point. That level of detail simply didn’t exist.

Early Map of Tallon

Eventually, as the years of real time accumulated, details began to create themselves organically. The characters wanted to go to a different tavern, or wanted to buy a horse, or wanted a place to get cleaned up after a journey. Every business they went to or NPC they spoke to was given a location and maybe a quick notation. The city map began to grow. This became fun to do, and I would begin to add places they might be likely to go, or city infrastructure that might have a bearing on the action of an adventure (where are the guard houses, for example).

The map grew and grew. Eventually it became too detailed to display as a small graphic, so I tiled it and inserted hot links to all the write ups. What had been a prop now became a tool. As I grew more proficient with my graphics software (or as new capabilities were added), I tried to make the map as graphically pleasing as possible. The result is mark 2 (actually, tehre were several evolutionary steps, but they have been lost, or were never completed). Here is a tile from the on-line map as it currently stands:

City of Tallon Second Map

The rate at which new places and NPCs are being added has slowed down considerably, since the game has shifted to play-by-post, and the action has been primarily overland, but I keep returning to the map. It is now a pastime, an artwork as much as a campaign tool. The latest version (which is a long term work in progress is shown in excerpt below. Buildings are now rendered in detail, using graphic tools to simulate roof-lines and building shadows. Larger buildings are simply drawn in a more realistic format, although still essentiall graphic in nature, to keep the project manageable. Eventually, when this is finished, I will either simply replace the current map on-line, tile for tile, or possibly use a Google Maps interface, allowing players to zoom and click to their hearts’ content.

Work in Progress at comparable zoom

City of Tallon Work in Progress Detail

Now I have no illusions about this. It’s a project for fun. I’ll never detail every building, nor would I want to. No one is going to read the whole thing. But it’s just pleasant to create and creates a great sense of immersion.

“That’s fascinating Keith, but what does this have to do with maintaining mystery?” I hear you say. (Or maybe not, but I’m going to pretend you said it so I can go on with the pretense that anyone is reading this…)
By setting up Arthur as a deliberately controversial, and ultimately untrustworthy figure, I can use him to present information that has at once the ring of authority and the stink of a con game.

At the climax of his appearance, Arthur gives several conflicting tales of his origins. Up until this point, I had carefully been taking notes on each player’s pet theory on who he was and what he was up to. Now, I’m not really cheating. All along, I personally have known exactly who he was and what he was up to. But true to his character, he presents valuable information filtered through perception. Each player simultaneously hears his pet theory echoed back to him with tantalizing bits of extra knowledge. Each story has elements of truth, but are obviously irreconcilable. He claims to be a proto-Demon King, to be one of their servants, to be a spirit-ghost of a Demon King, and so on.
He tells them something of the origins of Iron John, of the enigmatic Church of Last Days, the Circlet of Gitche Manito, ending with the frightening hint that the Demon Kings are not gone, merely banished and may some day return.

Arthur was a unique creation, and a useful tool. Through him I guided character actions to places where knowledge could be given to them in great quantity, and at the same time kept them from achieving absolute truths. The characters found quite a lot of answers, but the essential mysteries stand preserved.

The central mystery in the Savage Earth is of course that of it’s genesis. Who were the Demon Kings? The Prometheans? What was the nature of their conflict? How was it resolved? Why does the world work the way it does now?
Of course, I’m not going to answer any of these mysteries here. That would destroy their usefulness. Instead I’m going to talk about why they exist, and specific tools I have used to reveal information without actually providing final answers.

The Demon Kings were created to provide a definitive break from the past. In a post apocalypse game, you have to decide how much of the before times you want to survive. In may case, since I wanted a sword and sorcery feel, I elected to have the past very remote and unknown. At the same time, I wanted to have ruins to explore and artifacts to find. To solve this equation would require very different time scales. So I elected to have civilization wiped out intentionally. These beings did their best to eradicate records, cultures and traditions of the people they had conquered. Thus I could have a knowledge gap concerning what came before, while keeping the time scale down to several centuries instead of millennia. Realistically, I have let quite a bit survive even in that time frame, but I have treated these instances on a case by case basis. The magical devotions practiced by the adepts of the Great Lakes region all deal with aspects of time, so it was reasonable to assume the preservation of key buildings or artifacts.
OK, now I’ve destroyed everything man has built in terms of culture and knowledge. I needed to bring it back up quickly enough to have civilizations with traditions and history, again without increasing the time scale. Thus the Prometheans came into the picture. Their primary campaign purpose is the Creator to the Demon Kings’ role of Destroyer. They provided a blueprint for civilization that allowed a rapid rise of isolated cities.

Now, I know I promised that this would be about maintaining mystery and I didn’t lie. I just needed to provide some background. You will notice that though the overall purpose of these beings (The Demon Kings and the Prometheans) has been laid out in game design terms, they were initially presented without that explicit language. Instead it was couched in metaphysics, religion and legend. Which brings me to my first tool.

1. Presentation.
When you wish to keep an aspect of your game world mysterious, remember that the information will not be presented to the characters in an easy digest form, nor do records necessarily need to be written from a point of view that is helpful to deciphering them. Remember, it took the work of armies of archaeologists working for generations to build up our view of prehistory, and much of that knowledge is spotty and presumed. They didn’t do their work by going to the library and looking up the answers. Your characters should not be able to either.
For instance, I created the Book of Standing Stones as a record of the Prometheans, their ideals, their great social plan, their tools of magical technology and so forth. In there, there is not one word of historical fact. No dates are given. No one is called by a name that might give a clue as to their origin. No cities are named. Thus, there is nothing that says, “The Demon Kings came from Mars and nuked New York City on June 5th, 2012, but were overthrown by a man named Fidel Rodriguez from the slave pens of Guadalajara, on September 4th, 2111.” Please note that none of these events are true; they are just for demonstration. Or are they? See how this works?
The character Tira Wolfsdaughter is deeply interested in searching out this mystery, specifically trying to find out more about how the Prometheans set up their social plan and moreover, why. She has had access to many different records, created for many different purposes. She has seen Books of Standing Stones from several widely differing cultures, read their Stones firsthand, travelled to many of these places, and talked to ancient beings. Though she has learned many facts, none of them add up to a coherent whole that could lead to something like the sentence above. Which brings me to my second tool.

2) Conflicting authorities.
Characters trying to seek out a mystery will seek out repositories of information in the form of books, artifacts, records, interviews, and educated guesswork. In the specific case of the history of the Savage Earth, I have gone to great pains to make sure that every authority they seek out has some part of the picture, but filtered through their own interests. The Bishop of Tallon will filter his knowledge through the divine revelation of the Church. Things outside of that doctrine will have little interest for him. The Archon of Tallon is genuinely interested in the differences between cultures and devotions, but looks upon them as a means toward an end of improving his own society. The General/Warlord is interested in them for tactical purposes. Each Book of Standing Stones is designed to produce a slightly different society. There are constants, such as the social hierarchy, but the tools to achieve that aim are different the world over. The resurrected spirit of Alexander Finn has extensive knowledge of the world before the apocalypse, but no clue as to when or why it happened. The Circlet of Gitche Manito (a time-viewing artifact) gives tantalizing visions of past events, but the presentation has clearly been shown to be colored by the perceptions of those from whom the visions were extracted. The Time Lords of Saginaw have all sorts of records of past events, but with annoying gaps and they are unlikely to volunteer information to outsiders.

The last tool for mystery management was specific to the campaign and deserves his own entry in the next installment: Arthur

Crossroads was a GURPS-based campaign that started with a simple premise: What if all stories are true? The premise was fulfilled by creating an area outside of all space and time where characters from any story could interact. At that time, we were still very much in the larger than life action mode, and the characters were all cut from adventurous cloth. We had a 12th century English knight, and android, a superhero, a noble ape-man, a cowboy, and so forth. Some were actual fictional characters, some were homages to actual fictional characters, and some were created wholecloth. The camapaign was not designed with a central mystery, but one grew out of the premise as the stories progressed. Who built the Crossroads? Who was the Storykeeper? (A god-like figure of serene sagacity who dwelt in a library that contained every possible book). Ultimately, “mystery” failed as a central theme because there was the very justified sense that we were “making it up as we went along”. It was a jointly run campaign, where anyone could take a turn that week as the GM. Often stories would arise from the damage control more experienced world builders had to exercise in order to curb the excesses of GMs with a less practiced sense of game balance. In that sense, the mystery didn’t work because there was no real mystery. No one knew.

The second campaign was the Solar Colonies. This was a campaign with a mystery built into the very foundation. The most important feature was that the mystery was known in nearly its entirety from the very beginning. The Solar Colonies premise was: A group of adventurers will slowly discover that mankind is being subverted by an alien, thought-altering microscopic organism. The campaign had a major conceit as well. (I’m not sure if “conceit” is the right word, perhaps Paul from IMWorlds can suggest the proper literary term). Anyway, the conceit was that the entire campaign would be conducted with a clearly defined beginning, middle and end. I’ll write more about this world in a future post, but basically, it had a loosely defined structure that the historical events of the campaign would follow. PCs could have an effect on the details, but the larger picture was too immense for them to directly effect. The players understood this from the get-go and it allowed me as GM immense freedom in the use of foreshadowing, motivations and small-scenario development. Again, more on that aspect later.
The campaign was designed around:

1. The discovery of the Spore (the aforementioned microorganism)
2. Proving the spore’s existence, fighting its effects
3. Destroying the spore itself
4. Rebuilding the damage left in its wake and,
5. The eventual discovery of the spore’s creators and their unexpected purpose.

Mystery was the theme, and its solving was the scope of the activity.

The Savage Earth plays with that theme a bit more. There are several central mysteries to the campaign, most of them historical: dealing with why the world is the way it is. Who were the Demon Kings? How was civilization destroyed? Why does the world operate with different physical laws than in the ancient times? The big difference here is that the mysteries are not there to be solved. Oh, a group of characters could make that their mission, but it is entirely nonessential to the premise of any campaign set in that world. The mysteries are there because I chose to have those particular elements remain hidden from the world at large.
By giving no one, hero nor villain access to the Big Picture, we arrive at a world that is much greyer in morality. Who’s to say anyone’s actions or opinions are unjustified? I as GM/Creator am aware of why people and groups act the way they do, but there is no need to reveal all of these things to the players. By keeping the Prime Movers of action hidden from PC and NPC and player alike, the world instantly becomes one of tension. Conflict is implicit everywhere because no one has The One True Answer. Do gods exist? Maybe. Are the Demon Kings truly gone? Maybe. Is the Path of Prometheus justified? Maybe.
In particular the last question is the one most players will come up against. The Path of Prometheus is the code of behavior,the cultural touchstone of the primary campaign area. It makes no claim to morality or ethics as they are understood in a modern context, merely that they are the best way in which a society can function. Certainly following the path leads to a powerful society that can make the best use of the new physics that underlie the world, but there is no sense of social justice in them. Why does the world seem to work to serve this plan? Characters have spent many adventures examining aspects of this question, and although they have learned many fascinating things, the ultimate answer remains out of reach.

It’s a delicate balancing act, in a sense similar to the Moonlighting Syndrome. For readers unfamiliar with the series, Moonlighting was a television show that built up fantastic ratings by the building sexual tension between the two main characters. Once they finally consummated their relationship, the ratings tanked. But tension can only be tightened too much before it snaps. Trying to maintain the mysteries of the Savage Earth is difficult in the same manner. If I make the answers unattainable, players can lose interest. If they are revealed, much of the tension is lost. I have survived by several means. Some players are uninterested in solving ultimate mysteries. That’s easy; we just ignore them and deal instead with adventure in the world the mysteries have created. For characters who have actively sought answers, the game becomes one of bait and switch, distraction from purpose, or adding ever more layers to the onion.
The next post will deal with specific examples of how I have used these tools to maintain mystery, and dramatic tension.

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.