Re: OOC thread #1
Just thinking aloud about my Tomb of Annihilation game, which hasn't restarted yet.
Have either of you ever tried introducing recurring motifs in your games, that symbolise certain themes you wish to explore through the game?
Way, way back when I was planning to run ToA the first time, I had a few themes which I thought would be interesting to explore. These weren't tied to any of the PCs directly. I had already run a Session 0 where we explored the PCs' values and bonds, and I had come up with a list of potential "Sources of Tension" that would engage each PC, already. The themes were more targeted at the players themselves. I thought the world would feel more real and consistent if things could be tied together with certain ideas.
The first was hubris and the idea that history has not ended. I wanted to explore the glory of Chult in its prime, and how far it had fallen since then. And I wanted to draw parallels between this and the world the PCs were living in now, and the hubris in assuming it's somehow more permanent or resilient.
I thought of doing this by featuring again and again fallen monuments, both of ancient and modern Chult. I also wanted to introduce old Chultian currency, utterly worthless, but not that dissimilar at all in form or appearance from the coins that the PCs are using themselves.
The second theme was abandonment. I always found the idea of Chult having been abandoned by Ubtao such a tragic story, and I wanted to highlight this. I'm not really sure how, at this point, other than having recurring appearances of clerics of Ubtao who have no power, because the god whose power they ostensibly draw on isn't there. Maybe I could repeatedly bring in lost objects, or lost children?
This theme actually could resonate with the PCs too, because two of them could be seen as having been abandoned, albeit only one intentionally. One of the PCs is an albino drow who was abandoned because of his light skin. The other is a Kenku whose adoptive human mother was dying and left him because she didn't want him to see her suffer.
The third theme was rampant inequality and economic exploitation. The PCs/players caught on pretty early to the idea that the people who were suffering most apparently from the Death Curse were those wealthy/powerful enough to afford being raised from the dead in the first place. Again I'm not really sure how to bring this in. Previously, the PCs had had encounters with obscene displays of wealth on the streets of Port Nyanzaru, and of course there is the fact of their patron being a very wealthy and powerful figure.
This theme could also resonate with the PCs because one of the PCs is a junior member of their patron's family, who became indebted after a scandal, while another PC is actually a member of the Flaming Fist, and is unknowingly being used as a tool of exploitation himself.
There's a fourth mini-theme, which is colonialism and post-colonialism. I haven't done much with this, but I think it's come up naturally with Chult being recently decolonised, and Singapore also having been a colony once, until 57 years ago. I've had all the wealthiest people in Port Nyanzaru speak Common with a non-Chultian accent, while ornamenting themselves with ancient Chultian dress that nobody in Chult actually still wears. I've had temples to Chultian gods refurbished as taverns and shops, even as statues are erected to supposedly legendary Chultian heroes who don't actually feature in any authentic lore. All very relatable to us postcolonial folk, trying to form new narratives out of a history and a culture from which we were dispossessed, but inevitably failing because dispossessed means dispossessed: it's not ours anymore.
So yeah. Lots to brainstorm.
Ultimately I think it's the "Sources of Tension" that I came up with for the PCs that really matter, and that will drive the story, but I think themes are important to world building too. So we'll see.
This message was last edited by the player at 14:31, Mon 04 Apr 2022.
