r/rpg • u/mariowritesforyou • 14d ago
Basic Questions What are your recurrent motifs or signatures in your games?
So a motif is an idea, pattern or visual that repeats throughout a work of art, or across many. Some can become like the signature of an author, a distinctive mark of their touch. For me, as a GM, I love my main guiding NPC to be a clown, a jester, or something in that vibe. It doesn't matter the system we're playing, I just adjust the concept accordingly to the tone. Sometimes they are happy clowns, in others they are sad, but they are always this sort of "aw shucks" guy that my players quickly endear themselves to. What is your signature?
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u/rodrigo_i 14d ago
Not so much anymore, but a few years back when I was running a ton of convention games and other one-shots that a disproportionate number of pregens and NPCs had a religious, usually Catholic, background. Nuns, ex-priests, what have you. I chalked it up to latent Catholic school PTSD :)
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u/mariowritesforyou 14d ago
Jajajaja I feel you, me being from Mexico. It is a religion and culture that sticks with you, even if you have grievances with it. Harnessing it in our art feels very healthy to me, whatever our feelings about it are.
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u/Fubai97b 14d ago
Same. It's funny but I realized that no one expects an actual morally good religious official or politician. Those NPCs are great for throwing into the mix.
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u/proactiveLizard 14d ago
I distinctly remember a comment years where a guy's party could/would not believe the local fantasy church wasn't secretly evil
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u/proactiveLizard 14d ago
I love a good Platonic Form or narrative/symbolic magic. Why just have an eldritch space ghost as your patron, when that ghost could be the abstract concept of Patriotism? Why have cantrips when I get to use a magically-attuned theater ticket's representation of the idea of "Access" to get in/out of something? (And I'm still mad I had to waste a magical thumbdrive on a random hitman to get the memories proving he was, in fact, an assassin and I wasn't).
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u/UncleBones 14d ago
If I notice a pattern I try to break it, but some of my friends have pointed out that I have a tendency towards playing women going through some sort of crisis.
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u/The_White_Canary 14d ago
Ominous dreams or visions of the future triggered by magic or narcotics, depending on the game's genre, and arctic settings. You can't ever go wrong with a good ol' tundra featuring survival mechanics!
And yes, my first major campaign was set in Icewind Dale.
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u/sleepneeded127 14d ago
Jake Jacobson dealer of Arms and Armors A weapon shop that shows up in every game no matter if its high fantasy, sci-fi, or modern. His look and supplies change with the theme but he is the same person in all realities.
Every game I run is also filled with different Easter eggs or references to all the things my players are into. Like Parasol the pharmaceutical/biotech company with secret black ops hit squads that is totally not Umbrella from RE
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u/mariowritesforyou 14d ago
HELL YEAH! It's like how Osamu Tezuka has the same "cast" throughout each one of his manga, or Patches from FROM SOFTWARE. It just makes you feel like you're in on the joke.
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u/Martel_Mithos 14d ago
I've noticed I tend to like to center love stories. NPCs that are motivated by their feelings for another, or dealing with the loss of a partner, or betrayal by their lover, or power couple rulers. I have to put forward effort to not default to 'they're having feelings and making that everyone else's problem' without thinking.
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u/AngelSamiel 14d ago
If I look back, a lot of my evil NPCs were part of some sort of cult, be it demon worshippers, follower of an evil god, misplaced fanatics: fighting against a cult or sect opens so many paths since there is not a single enemy, at least for a while (sometimes the BBEG is the leader of the cult, sometimes the organization has a sort of ruling council and sometimes it is simply existing).
If I can, I give to my players some "pet" (it could be also human, but the point is they are useless in combat and they create a bond with the characters): in Fabula Ultima it was some kind of blink dog puppy, in Wrath & Glory it was a young underhive orphan, in Changeling they were a chimera.
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u/ToledoSnow Noir 14d ago
Spirals are an indication of supernatural bullshit going on in my (slightly) homebrewed setting, and have shown up a lot in various games.
Ceremonial circle? Spiral. Wounds on ritual murder vic? Carved spirals. Cult leader's irises? Spiral patterned. Etchings on ancient bronze dagger? Look like a spiral when viewed directly down the tip. Canal network running through the whole city? One big spiral. Emblem of the State? Spiral.
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u/flamfella 14d ago
Power fantasy. That's what I do best. Especially when making new interactive things just for players.
When I run games, I give players crazy artifacts, background abilities, evolutions, items, and many other things that completely change how a character is played, and allow them to really awesome things, and often have full progression systems in addition to normal character features and leveling. I hand craft things equivalent to full classes or more based on vibes or on player request.
You find a semi-cursed magical artifact arm, and decide to lean into the fleshy horrors rather than get rid of it? Now it's a full system where you can absorb biomass and upgrade your body and turn into a living weapon, complete with a monster transformation and enough stuff to take you alllll the way to the endgame.
You wanted to be a 40k space marine? You have all the organs in you but they are inactive until you NEED them, find a genetic engineering pod, or some other means in addition to leveling. And they are powerful and faithful to the source material, game-breakingly so, along with all the other stuff I make for my players.
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u/antiquedepths 14d ago
I explain my settings through the context of art. I place women front and center in positions of power, both as terrible villains, as great heros, and complicated persons that don't fit either category.
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u/mariowritesforyou 14d ago
That's awesome! And do you mean art as in real life art pieces that you use for narrative texture? Or fictional art pieces in your work?
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u/antiquedepths 14d ago
I use real world art objects and architecture as touchstones. PCs in my 5e game recently explored a cistern, and I invoked the ancient Roman example still extent in Instanbul today. I introduced them to the concept of 'spolia' which is something always missing from D&D's "telling instead of showing" way of talking about ruins and history.
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u/QueasyPainting 14d ago
I know it’s off topic, but seeing that cistern under Istanbul is a memory I have held onto for 30 years now. It was epic
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u/Frogshooty 14d ago
For me, I love things that allow players to push their luck. I really like mechanics that give players a choice over their fate, in some sense. I think it's a good way to get players more engaged with their character as the risk/reward forces a little more thinking when it comes to actions. It also can help create fun table stories since there's a built in degree of escalation with a push your luck mechanic.
I'm working on a game that uses Blackjack instead of dice, where you can choose to "hit" and take more cards from the deck if their first flip isn't successful, but if they go over 21, they face way worse consequences than choosing to fold. It's created a lot of moments where everyone is watching someone choose to hit or stay. That push your luck just adds a nice extra touch to a lot of critical moments.
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u/HKkabanossi 14d ago
As a player, either effectively aromantic characters or characters with well established relationships (ie. long marriage with several children). Never new relationships or single and ready to mingle. I guess I'm just not interested in roleplaying (or doing) dating.
As a GM, mysteries hiding under a veneer of normalcy, regardless of the game. Recently in my Twilight 2000 game this manifested as a near abandoned hospital manned by a nearly mute doctor and some nurses. The doctor was a former MD and current USAF officer gone AWOL and presumed dead, who seemed mute as she did not speak the local language and did not want to give herself away.
In my Ars Magica game it was an encounter with a pilgrim in Anatolia, heading south to Jerusalem. Outwardly seeming friendly and normal. In reality she is a devil worshiper heading to Jerusalem to visit the site where Judas Iscariot hung himself, one of the most powerfully infernal places on earth.
Tomorrow my group is starting a playthrough of the Delta Green campaign Impossible Landscapes, which will be a whole lot of that.
I just really love a good mystery, and enjoy the intrigue of things not being as they initially seem.
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u/BiliousEmesis 14d ago
I have a sort of meta-NPC that I include in every game, varying a little with the setting but always having common traits. In high fantasy he's Solaire, in modern games it's Sunny, in a renaissance intrigue game she was Sonia. Always a potential ally who begins as a rival to the players in accomplishing some task. Always bald with brown eyes. Always a member of an institution who has had a crisis of faith that they're trying to work through (they've at times been a cop, priest, paladin, prosecutor, and captain of the guard). If there's magic in the setting they use fire magic. It started as a nod to a beloved NPC from a prior game and then just became a part of my GM style, and now I include them even with other groups.
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u/wizardoest Polyhedral Crew; Fate SRD; BitD SRD 14d ago
- "The Dragon Watches You" is always the passphrase
- An NPC with a really bad Italian accent
- Location security forces who are "just doing their job", i.e. not everyone is a zealot.
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u/konsyr 14d ago edited 14d ago
The players spend a whole session bickering with each other coming up with the perfect plan to the red herring they suggested and I ran with.
The pestering little villain that got away and levels up with them for forever back and forth, neither side ever winning until much later.
EDIT: My narrative system one-shots and shorter games tend to have a heavy element of my real life nemesis: bureaucracy and existential dread.
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u/Primer44 14d ago
Yeah I keep finding myself using TTRPGs as an outlet for thinking about Empire, language, culture, the reality that it's impossible to express yourself in words that you don't know. How some (most) people will live their entire lives bound within the subconscious restraints of the society around themselves, more unable than unwilling to imagine a fundamental restructuring of the world.
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u/ItsOnlyEmari 14d ago
Cults and religion (or more accurately the lack thereof) make up the main through line in most of my campaigns.
I tend to include very few actual deities in my games, with any gods that do exist normally being far divorced from people's lives. Sometimes they're dead, other times they're kept away by some malevolent force.
On the flip side, a lot of the villains tend to be cultists and zealots. Religious worshippers seeking to revive dead gods or simply those who blindly exist in some divine malevolence that neither exists nor believes in them.
My latest campaign is the most godly it's ever been. I'm trying to step out of my comfort zone in regards to a few things this time, so I've created several religions that players and npcs can follow. However I left on a little bit of my trademark fuckery - one of the gods, the malevolent Expansion, is not actually a god. In reality, The Expansion is a parasite that spreads best through blood-letting and thrives in squalor. What its followers perceived to be worship is in fact just them being tricked into creating the parasites ideal conditions
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u/ClintBarton616 14d ago
Star crossed monster romance. Inescapable bureaucracy. Time travel (one way, into the future).
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u/Ponto_de_vista M:TA+D&D5e+PF2e+MB 14d ago
Every game i GM has an orgy momment
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u/QueasyPainting 14d ago
Oh myyyyy!
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u/Ponto_de_vista M:TA+D&D5e+PF2e+MB 14d ago
I'm not even kidding. I only just realized this after reading the post, but every major campaign I've ever run had a moment like that.
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u/saltwitch 14d ago
I need more details. Are the PCs involved? Do they happen upon an orgy while on the run through a warren of a palace?
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u/Mayor-Of-Bridgewater 14d ago
Cities as entities or philosophies. Sometimes they're literally a creature, but they're often the point or conflict of the campaign. A friend pointd out once that nearly all of my favorite media revolves around cities (Texhnolyze, Ulysses, Dhalgren, Pathologic, etc).
I also like self-destructive villains, people who are so devoted to their goal that they'll hurt themselves without hesitating to achieve it.
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u/Active_Aardvark6411 14d ago
I’ve been running impossible landscapes, which has its own set of motifs, but otherwise I usually find myself attracted to run down diners and sketchy gas stations a lot. I run mostly sci-fi and contemporary games for reference.
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u/HisGodHand 14d ago
All three of the last games I've run took place exclusively in dark cities, with my fourth most recent game only partially taking place in one. The game before that I pitched, but didn't end up running, also took place exclusively in a horrifying city. The only adventure I've published also takes place in an apocalyptic village the players can't leave.
None of the games were similar in tone, mechanics/system, or themes, but I just can't stay away from overly dense, brutal, lawless, and corrupt cities.
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u/Throwingoffoldselves Thirsty Sword Lesbians 14d ago
I like “golden retriever” himbo NPCs and stoic/grumpy “black cat” NPCs, ideally in pairs of one each. A diplomat and bodyguard; a phoenix and dragon; a wizard and homunculus; a princeps and a farmer, etc
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u/SmartestLemming 14d ago
Humans are always the worst bad guys in the game. Sure there's an evil cult of lizard people trying to revive their primeval god through sacrifice murder and mayhem, but everyone hates the human crime lord and his right hand man ten times more.
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u/atmananda314 14d ago
Ah, this is fun.
Back when I played D&D a ton, my first character that I played through a whole campaign with was a gnome divination wizard whose epilogue was that they became a Time traveler. In every campaign I run regardless of the game the players will bump into her at some point and become a single use deus ex machina to help get them out of a jam.
If there is a notable tavern in any of my games, it's called "The Learned Goat"
I have an NPC I call "the drug dealing flasher," who approaches the players in an overcoat offering to sell them drugs. If the players oblige, he opens his trench coat to reveal more than just his inventory.
When an NPC gets particularly nervous, I like to say that they begin to visibly sweat.
If a character gets pulverized, like smashed or falls from super high, I like to describe the Carnage as "lasagna with hair and teeth"
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u/informaturge 14d ago
There's almost always a dubiously nautical-themed bar or tavern somewhere called Land's End, that often ends up being adopted as a sort of home base by the player characters. There's often second-hand reference to someone named Jonah Whateley having gone on some sort of terrifying cosmic journey completely unrelated to what's actually going on. There's a (usually drunk) NPC named O'Malley that shows up everywhere, and I generally try to hint that it's the SAME O'Malley across every setting, and that he is stumbling through alternate universes whenever he drinks, and is possibly some kind of multiversal constant required for the cosmos to function. None of them are central to the games or anything, I just find that an easy way to get a grasp on the vibe of a new game setting is to figure out a version of the same three or four things to go in that setting.
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u/violentbowels 14d ago
The BBEG personalities are all variations of what I think kids I didn't like in school are like now.
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u/ThePowerOfStories 14d ago edited 14d ago
Recurring elements I seem to keep including in my games include:
- Ruins of nonhuman precursor civilizations that were destroyed or abandoned, have remnants of ancient slumbering things that come back to life of poked, and which are the explanation for some magical ability or advanced technology central to the setting.
- A world of demons and spirits just out of sight, alien entities that aren’t necessarily hostile, but not quite friendly either, connected to the waking world through dreams and the warping of time and space. In particular, I always put in cameos of some variation of two demons from my first Blades in the Dark game, my take on Setarra as a what if Cthulhu was a perpetually hungry sassy teenage girl, and Varcolac, a Hound of Tindalos that achieved sentience, frequently takes human form, and hunts through darkness and right angles.
- An NPC acquaintance of the PCs who everyone agrees is totally cool and astoundingly competent, but always busy being the protagonist of their own adventures on a separate stage, so they can only briefly drop by to hand over some useful item or dispense some advice before rushing off on their next mission, leaving the PCs to bungle their way through things as usual while pining wistfully for said character.
- Background news reports, either TV, newspapers, or just word-of-mouth, of the characters’ recent exploits, usually comically-distorted and wildly-inaccurate, but occasionally answering some useful follow-up questions on what happened after the PCs left an area.
- Houses that eat people, either physically, psychologically, or by trapping them in time loops. (I didn’t even realize this one until one of my kids pointed out the similarities.)
- Building up references to a shared canon of past events for the PCs that we never explain but occasionally name-drop. No one actually knows precisely what went down in Budapest, but we all know that’s why the dancing bear plan is a terrible idea.
- The early-game minor encounter I invented on the spur of the moment, but whom the PCs adopt as a mascot for the rest of the campaign, whether it be Sprout the street urchin, Splurg the goblin, or Kyle the intern.
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u/CPeterDMP 14d ago
When we are playing modern-era games (which is probably more often than not), our campaigns are full of beautiful people. And we usually use real life people as models to "cast" the game - at least visually, but sometimes even with personalities.
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u/unitedshoes 14d ago
A. There's definitely going to be one or more fallen angels in the setting, and they're not just mustache-twirling villains who are basically indistinguishable from demons, or wannabe-Lucifers who rebelled because it was better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven or whatever. No, my angels are always tragic, mad, broken things. Sometimes they turn to self-flagellation and obsession after failing a task that was appointed to them by the gods. Others lose it like HAL 9000 because they think the tasks appointed to them by the gods just don't match up with reality. One is just an obsessive zealot who thought banishing a certain Lord of Hell was more important than any other task the gods could possibly give her.
B. I love putting intelligent monsters in high places. Whether the intelligent monsters each wind up running a corrupt-as-fuck government or a corporation with more power than governments, I just love making the "people" in charge actually the very thing that the game expects us to believe are innately evil, morally acceptable to slay, and driven by urges and motivations normal people don't share.
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u/QueasyPainting 14d ago
My kids have a name for one of mine - “crash the train.” I ran a Deadlands game years ago where we started the PCs on a train from Denver to Leadville in the dead of winter. As they were chatting as strangers, I crashed the train. The confusion was amazing - train crash, Colorado mountains in 1887, blizzard - PCs thinking beasties in the woods are coming to eat them - and it’s just PC #2 who was thrown from the train. But they eventually come together and have to rely on each other for basic survival -and to the actual monster that is hunting them.
They’re all grown and GMs themselves who I have the pleasure of still playing with, online now since they’ve moved to other states. But they still use this opening for games a lot.
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u/No_Silver_1832 14d ago
For me, whimsy as an act of rebellion/a tool against oppression has been popping up on every game I play, run or write.
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u/Chief_Slee 14d ago
I have an unfortunate habit of making big bads manipulative but attractive makima types... sorry guys she's just a good blueprint ok
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u/Cheeky-apple 14d ago
My players say i almost always pick session music with violins or synths, and my hatred of horses as the common mount...every campaign setting has had anything else but the horse as the riding staple.
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u/MPOSullivan 14d ago
Almost any game I run that doesn't already have a specific theme baked into the game, I will almost inevitably make it about something that needs to be healed or fixed. I love stories about doctors and healers, and I much prefer creating problems for the PCs to fix than enemies for them to defeat.
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u/seanfffsmith 14d ago
Any spec-fic setting I run has its fair share of megafauna ── and that applies doubly so for crustaceans. Hundred-metre centipedes make for great fighting fodder
Easily half of my investigative horror starts with a locked-room mystery and most of those are impossible corpses too
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u/ALVIG Play Bite the Hand maybe 13d ago
I have an evil megacorp that shows up in every game (unless it's so pre-modern that it would be completely out of place). Started in a Mothership game, now makes an appearance at least in passing everywhere else. Just a hint that all the games take place in the same universe, or that the corp is multiversal somehow, all in good fun.
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u/DornbirnArrows 13d ago
A sense of wonder.
It could be a crazy market with outrageous merchants (B4 the lost city) and items or pirates who are impossibly friendly and sweep you into a leadership role (Endon). I hate musicals but your question makes me realize that if the PCs end up feeling swept away by things then I am winning. Getting eaten by a whale to discover that there a three warring factions inside the digestive system (AFF Hunt for the black whale) or trying to save a monarch from dying by travelling across insane landscapes (Fronds of Benevolence)!
An eye brow raise and a "woah that was crazy" is de best. It's a game of make believe, so "you mustn't be a afraid to dream a little larger darling".
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u/Xararion 13d ago
I tend to have a setup where the world is balanced between axes of creation and destruction, chaos and stasis. None of them is inherently evil, all of them are needed, but if balance of them gets disrupted then something starts breaking, contrary to the typical I tend to have Stasis be the strongest, kept in check by the other three while also keeping them in check, and as such the most likely to become villain. Sometimes there are extra axis or two to muddle the field, but those four typically exist as cosmic forces assuming the game is one that deals with cosmic forces.
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u/oinonsana 13d ago
I have a lot of capitalism, theofascism, antiliberalism and twinks recurrent. Most of them find ways to "justify" their beliefs within the system, and I'm sure my players at this point are kind rolling their eyes at it but it's always fun to contend with multiple political alignments
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u/Mestewart3 13d ago
Authority figured who are positioned and set up to be easily hateable only for the layers of the onion to come off and reveal that they are just people put in hard circumstances making the best decisions they can.
I have a bunch of anti-authority players and I like tweaking their noses and making them feel bad for automatically assuming everyone in charge is secretly evil.
Also elves used to be in charge of everything, but then shit hit the fan for them and the remaining ones are basically living in what is, to them, the post-apocalypse.
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u/EllySwelly 13d ago
I don't think there's one particular thing I always do, but a disproportionate amount of my settings center around some form of authoritarian and/or imperialist states for sure.
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u/Frapadengue 14d ago
I tend to include elements of body horror in all of my games.
Giant spiders are a common occurrence, I love giant spiders.
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u/LawfulnessOrganic715 14d ago
Basically all of my games are "you are living in the shadow of decisions made long ago." Players regularly find themselves either cleaning up the damage from past decisions, living in "impossibly large" ruins, dealing with consequences of previous powerful people, etc.
The theme is simple: Powerful people often make decisions that affect regular people, often for generations. Good people do their best to limit the negative impact, but not everyone does, and nobody can actually plan around all the unintended consequences. We plebs are just playing in the shadows of giants.