Recurring themes in your games?

[Anders]

Do you have any themes or phenomena which regularly recur in your campaigns, perhaps even so frequently that you could make a drinking game from it? Take a shot if the villain is an Ancient Cult. Every time there are zombies, take a shot. Etc. And they shouldn't be commonplace, so "people have to drink or they die" wouldn't be valid.

My main recurring theme is Ancient Gods of Chaos, very H.P.Lovecraft-esque. They may not play a major role in the campaign, but they're always there.

[alexondria]

I like conspiracies

[whswhs]

For a long while, a lot of my campaigns had ape references, sometimes serious, sometimes little jokes (for example, in one of them I brought on as a minor character a Texas oilman named Jake Bonobo).

A number of my campaigns have had pregnancy as an issue—either a female PC becoming pregnant or a male one impregnating a girlfriend. That fits, I suppose, into the larger context of player characters being sexually active, and into my tendency to look for real consequences.

Bill Stoddard

[Kromm]

Some of these are proper themes, while others are plots and still others are matters of characterization, but they're all recurring:

• Child or young-adult NPC turns out to be malicious . . . yet is charming toward the PCs, who love said NPC prior to the reveal (and maybe after).
• Entities from outside time and space (not always Lovecraftian, though that would qualify) intrude into normal reality.
• Evil action is needed, because mortal concepts of good and evil are equivalent ontological menaces when not balanced, meaning that an excess of good can destroy creation.
• Groups have cinematic or literary conventions inverted: healers are an evil cult, necromancers are lily-white and good, Red Cross is spreading the zombie plague, USA is the force of oppression, etc.
• NPC bad guy tries to hire/turn the PCs, and his deal isn't too good to be true, but entirely worth taking.
• NPC boss is built up as a combat monster and true survivor, but that's just good PR and he goes down with the first shot, just like anybody else.
• PCs' boss or organization betrays them, often through incompetence rather than malice.
• PCs get some downtime and have a party that ends up dominating an entire game session and producing memorable consequences.
• PCs learn of a massive destiny that encompasses them all.
• PCs' not-quite-defeated enemies from extremely diverse groups find common cause and band together to get revenge.
• PCs obtain a castle, fort, ship, spacecraft, or other huge piece of property and sideline the campaign for many sessions to turn it into a base.
• Potential menace seems so great that the players plan extensively . . . and as a result it all comes off without a hitch and the players spend the next few sessions worrying about it being "too easy."
• Space aliens invade.
• Visible scope proves much, much smaller than actual scope, and an abrupt change occurs that throws into stark relief the insignificance of events to date.
• Wishes or other sources of easy, permanent power are offered and look far too good to be true, but are genuinely a pure reward with no strings attached.
• Zombies lurk just off-screen in some place the PCs don't have to go, awaiting accidental discovery.

[RogerBW]

I feel my players should probably list my recurrent themes (and they are welcome to do so if they read this), but some I often think about are:

• Horrible greebly monsters just want to eat you. That's a perfectly reasonable thing for them to do, at least by their lights. Humans can be evil.
• The big bad is not as much of a combat challenge as expected: his interlocking network of minions and plans was the tough bit, not the guy himself.
• Lovecraftian entities always make it in somewhere.

[sir_pudding]

• A massive social or technological discontinuity with some past golden age.
• Mythos monsters or similar.
• An opposing group has motivations that at least some of the PCs agree with.

[Hemlock]

* NPCs have multiple Aliases/ Identies. Especially the BBEG.
* Not all monsters deserve to be slain. Some are helpful.
* Evil will try to cut down everything around it; including other evil. Good will cooperate with good and oppose evil. This is why good will inevitably win. If good is smart enough to pit one evil against another.
* The 'Kill everything' mentaility of Hack 'n Slash will often get you in deep deep trouble. Even killed.
* Interplaner/ Interstellar/ Interplanetary/ Interdimensional travel is necessarily rare and difficult.

[kaulesh]

• Overly-elaborate plot
• Game ends long before said plot comes into play

I've ran one game to completion so far and started at least two others. In each case, I either started out with a grand plot or used a prefab adventure and then thought up a grand plot that it could turn into.

In the case of the two games that I started, they just kind of fizzled out as a good number of play-by-posts do.

For the one that actually ended, we reached the end of the prefab. As I was just giving our main GM a rest and I told no one of my grand plans, they all thought that was the end.

[robkelk]

In my games, there's always a way to succeed without using violence.

It's never taken (EDIT: well, almost never), but it's always there...

[thorr-kan]

Strangely, the theme of my 2ED DND Al-Qadim campaign seems to be evangelism. Which shouldn't be weird. Religion's a big part of the setting, and I have two cleric players. But neither of them ever play social characters or are extroverts! Their roleplaying is convincing, their dices are on fire, and the NPCs respond positively.

They talk when they should fight, they fight when they should run, and they keep winning way above their weight class.

They're getting a REP.

It'll come back to haunt them. But probably in a positive way, since they've been really positive about it.