Although I have been GMing since around 1986, I didn't really give any thought to the themes of my campaigns until perhaps ten years ago. For the first twenty-five years of my "career" as a GM, I had largely let my players make whatever character they wanted, and then ran them through a string of unrelated module, never bothering much with the theme of the campaign, or the motivations of the PCs: I presented a villain/treasure map, and it was their jobs as PCs to defeat that villain/kill whatever was guarding that treasure and take it.
Granted, most of those years were my teenage years when my players and I were just content with exploring dungeons and killing stuff and gaining cool magical items. Gaming was rare during my university and working years, until around 2008, when the re-release of Dragon Warriors led to me meeting Adrian on an RPG forum, which led to a regular Saturday gaming sessions at his place.
The first breakthrough for me came during the Lone Wolf campaign I ran for the group. The players were all playing the good guys: Sommerlending Knight, Kai Lord, Brotherhood Mage. I told the players:"think Star Wars, and you are the Jedi", and we went through a series of unrelated modules from that I stringed together. A few sessions into the game, I felt that the PCs were getting too bloodthirsty, often killing bad guys even after they had incapacitated them - we are talking about humans here, not Giak or Drakkarim. I addressed this in-game by having their masters comment on that they were getting closer to the dark side and urging them to exercise mercy and restraint to redeem themselves.
The campaign then continued with me using a Conan module, where the villain, in the guise of a priest of a good order, used the death of his predecessor, a much loved champion of the poor, to foment social division and call for violence against the rich - a mysterious monster was murdering innocent people in the city, and the priest was claiming that it was divine retribution for the sins of the rich. As the days went by, tension began to build and threatened to boil over into mass violence. The PCs went about investigating the murders, and came into frequent contact with the priest and the city leaders. The Kai Lord became sympathetic to the position of the priest, while the Mage and the Knight were suspicious of him and tended to side with the city leaders. Much of the sessions were just RPing, and I often had to toggle between the two groups as the party split to interact with the two sides.
When the final confrontation came and it was revealed that the evil priest had raised his predecessor as an undead to murder on his behalf, the Kai Lord was so enraged at this betrayal that he killed the priest, even after he was left defenceless by the others. I then ruled that because of this act, Kai had stripped him of his Kai Discipline powers.
The player was of course unhappy about the whole thing: first being conned by the GM, and then being punished. Fortunately for me, he did not quit the campaign, but soldiered on, redeemed himself, and his powers were eventually restored to him.
I look back at this campaign fondly because it was the first of my campaigns where I felt there was a theme that ran through the sessions. Even though I had not planned it that way to start with, the mere idea that this was "Star Wars, and you are the Jedi" probably guided the way I, and later my players, viewed the actions of the PCs. And the theme of Star Wars - at least the first six movies - was about power, corruption, fall, and redemption.
I have employed the idea of a campaign theme in some of my other campaigns: the theme of "deception" in my Sorcery! campaign, and that of "price of peace" in my Space Opera Season 2. I find that having a theme helps me to plan the sessions, in creating situations where the players, through their PCs, are confronted with the theme of the campaign.
Of course, not all campaigns need a theme, or will benefit from one. Some of my mini-campaigns are just play-throughs of classic TSR modules, and I think that for a funhouse dungeon like White Plume Mountain it is perhaps the lack of a theme rather than the presence of one that makes it so memorable.
The employment of a theme, while useful for a more GM-directed campaign, may work less well in a more player-directed, or sandbox type of campaign, where the theme may instead emerge from the plans and actions of the PCs.
In such a campaign, in place of a predetermined theme, it is more suitable to employ what Matt Colville calls a "central tension" for the campaign setting.
The central tension is perhaps implied in the original D&D, with the duality in alignment: Law vs Chaos. It is hard-baked into the White Wolf RPGs, where the purported aim of the various "X; The Y" games is to explore the tension in our modern society through the lens of some non-human being, whose non-humanity forces us to examine our own humanity. Or something like that. I've only ever GM'd Mage: the Ascension, and I not not sure I did it correctly.
Regardless of whether you use a central tension that comes with the setting, or whether you create one of your own, central tension is what creates drama and invites the PCs to act. Two sides are in conflict, or will soon be in open conflict, and the PCs have the choice to make on which side they wish to see win in this conflict, and how they choose will decide that.
How your players choose, however, will be decided by their characters' motivations, which will be the topic of the next post in this series.
1 comment:
Really interesting.
The "soul" of the campaign can come in many forms.
Some might see different levels of roleplay in the examples below.
The OldSkool D&D 101 package:
In a world where parties wander between woodland taverns looking for the next majick shoppe or dungeon, there's little to keep characters to a consistent morality.
* Alignment - and an implied threat to XPs or magic powers for going off track.
* The faraway presence of the King's guards - "But who's going to find out if all the witnesses are dead".
* Deities - for those characters who choose to follow one.
Somewhere down the line we decided that Roleplaying involved characters, motivations and backstories.
While sometimes abused "It's what my character would do", these provide a more detailed framework for personal morality.
Meanwhile, worldbuilding provided us with more than just Taverns, Dungeons and the Wild woods between.
Towns, cities and nations imply a degree of structure, heirarchies and professionals attempting to maintain authority.
* Characters may have a mentor, or be part of a guild, who may take a dim view of "using your skills for wrongdoing" - Penal;ties may involve loss of protection, banishment or a posse of your betters hunting you down.
* Those deities are more developed mow, and have temples, archclerics and other worldly types to stamp out heretical members.
* The town or city will have a guard and a system of law. Individual craft guilds may enforce their own laws on code-breakers. This isn't bad-bricklayers here, but Bards and Fighters signing on with enemy factions.
Perhaps the biggest change is that the "Monsters" have a lot more depth now.
Some have societies of their own, with family or clan ties.
That massacre of hobgoblins that got you to level four may have made you public ebeny No 1 for every hobgoblin this side of the great sea.
But, the ultimate morality lies between the player and his character.
If you are doing roleplay with dramatic intent (as opposed to Monty Haul hack and slash), you deserve a character with a consistent storyline.
A character that breaks oaths, disrupts his party and cannot concentrate on long-term goals misses an awful lot of dramatic and storytelling potential.
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