RPGaDay: Theme

Matrons of Mystery has instructions on how to write an adventure.  The first one I tried to write was a bit of a struggle.  When I saw the adventure one of my playtesters had written, I realised that that was because I'd failed to follow my own instructions.  I tried it again, and this time got it right.

Step one is to pick a theme.  Everything else flows from there.  So I've been wondering how much this applies to my scenario writing in general.

Most of my Liminal scenarios come from some specific piece of geography or history and thinking about how that might interact with the Hidden World and what problems it could cause.  But at some point, a theme will become apparent that helps put the details together.  Sometimes the theme is that piece of history or geography; sometimes it's something related, even if the link is a bit tenuous.

Alien as a game has pretty strong themes of its own, and making use of them has proved useful in writing my scenarios.  Both my scenarios have started in the same way: by looking up some obscure bit of nature, and figuring out how Weyland Yutani could attempt to monitise it, and how that could go wrong.  Keeping my scenarios tied into this theme of rampant capitalism is how I try to keep the games feeling like Alien without necessarily having to include xenomorphs - backed up, of course, by an excellent system.

I would really like to write adventures for Kult.  Given that starting with a theme and building on seems to be an effective way for me to work, it's about time I gave it a go.  Matrons of Mystery is pretty much the opposite of Kult, but the lessons I've learned from it can still be put into practice.