Using Campaign Themes

In the context of a TTRPG, themes are the language spoken by your setting and your campaign. What are they saying to the players about the world, their place in it, their interaction with it? Themes can be great tools for a GM in guiding how to run an RPG campaign. Oftentimes as GMs we create a world, we write a storyline, and we come up with cool NPCs to bring to life. Themes are a tool that you can use to tie all of these things together into a cohesive whole. To use an analogy, if the campaign world is a stage and the PCs and NPCs actors, themes are the invisible hand of the stage crew: the sound, the lighting, the sets. The work that your themes do isn’t what’s in the spotlight, but it’s just as critical to running an evocative and memorable campaign as a good plot and engaging characters.

I use themes to guide how I describe the game world, actions in it, and the kinds of stories I tell within a game. Usually when I start a campaign, one of the first things I do is write theme statements to guide me. I will write six theme statements for each campaign, but it doesn’t really matter how many you use, I kind of just pulled the number out of a hat. Each theme statement is written as instruction to me as the GM, telling me how to present the game world, what kind of events happen, and how the world will respond to the actions of the PCs. I’ll give a couple of examples and look at how these groups of theme statements frame very different campaigns.

In John Harper’s heist game Blades in the Dark, the players portray a crew of scoundrels trying to survive and claw their way to the top of the criminal world in a cursed and haunted Victorian city. The Gates of Death are broken, the world is full of ghosts and demons, and there is no sun to be seen, it’s effectively always night. The themes I want to evoke for this campaign are dark and gritty, always looking at the price the PCs pay for any advance and the dire consequences of failure. Here is my list of theme statements from a Blades in the Dark campaign:

• We live in the Dark. Show the lives of the people of Duskwall, always in the dark, living among the dead. Remember that these two facts color every aspect of life here.

• Abject poverty and opulent wealth. Always show how far the characters can fall, and how far above and out of reach the city’s elites are. The masses of Duskwall crawl in the dirt while those on top stand on their necks, and woe betide anyone who tries to rise above their station.

• The strange and the supernatural. Show the granular details of demons, the dark arts, electroplasmic technology, and other weirdness. Contrast minutiae with the details of ordinary things. Get into the weeds. What do you see/hear/smell/feel/taste?

• The city has a stranglehold on you. There’s nowhere to go, there’s little room to move or breathe. You have to fight to grow, you have to grow to live or you’ll be ground up in the heartless and mindless machine that is Duskwall.

• Shades of gray. Everyone has an agenda - friends, allies, rivals, enemies, individuals, organizations. Nobody is really totally evil - but nobody is really good either. Corruption, dark secrets, and the dark arts are everywhere.

• Ripples in the pond. Every score affects multiple parties. This can do more than adjust the crew’s reputation with various factions; any score might advance or set back someone else’s agenda. Keep an eye on what different organizations are doing to reach their goals and how the crew’s actions can affect them. Remember to have these organizations’ actions ripple back to one another, too.

In Monte Cook’s science fantasy game Numenera, the players’ characters are adventurers and explorers in the Ninth World, a fledgling society built on the ancient ruins of eight great civilizations that achieved inconceivable scientific advances. The ancients traveled to other dimensions, infused the Earth with nanotechnology, and altered or harnessed the power of stars. The themes I use to portray this world focus on the elements of hope and the human bonds that ground the characters in this strange world, giving context and relatability to a setting where the weird is commonplace. Here is my theme list for a Numenera campaign:

• Surrounded by the Past…  The ruins and the artifacts of the prior worlds are everywhere. It’s common to build in ancient structures, use ancient artifacts, and make tools from the exotic materials of the prior worlds.

• ...With an eye to the Future.   The people of the Ninth World are at the dawn of an age, looking forward to a bright horizon. Rather than reconstruct the past, they seek to use the Numenera to improve their lives and build towards their future.

• The Human Touch.   In a world where the weird abounds and the possibilities are endless, people’s stories are grounded in their human elements - their struggles, their needs, their values, their loves, their fears.

• Across the Universe.   The reach of the ancients stretched to distant stars and even into other dimensions, and they left behind portals, ships, and other means of travel to these places. The stories of the explorers of the Ninth World may take them far beyond the surface of the Earth.

• Love and War.   There are great movements trying to shape the world, and driving these movements are people - people defined by their desires and their relationships. Every action they take touches someone or is influenced by someone.

• The Weird and the Dangerous.   The world is full of strangeness, and even traveling to the next village can be perilous. The Numenera themselves can offer unexpected complications or solutions in people’s lives.

In both of these examples, my theme statements focus on how the world is presented to the players. They inform me of how to describe the setting, how to build plotlines, and how to contextualize and incorporate the consequences of PC action into the world. As you can see from the contrast between the two sets, your themes can vary greatly from campaign to campaign, and defining your themes at the outset of a campaign will heavily affect the flavor and the players’ experience. Whatever framework you use to define your campaign’s themes, remember they are a key tool for evoking your world!