Campaign Theme

When designing a new campaign, I have traditionally come to it with questions about the type of story I want to tell, or some notion of the characters involed, or something of that sort. "The Eberron Code" started with a core mystery (pretty much lifted from "The Da Vinci Code", though it went in a different direction from there); "Imperial Fist" started with the notion that the PCs would all be Imperial agents tasked with hunting down Jedi.

However, I've recently been considering adding another dimension to campaign building, which is the idea of adding a theme to the campaign as well as a concept. The idea here would be that the campaign would pose a question at the outset (or possibly start with a core statement of values, or philosophical stance, or whatever), and then all the major elements in the campaign would be riffed off of that theme.

For example, Spider-Man's theme can be best encapsulated with the saying "with great power comes great responsibility", and most of his enemies then reflect that as they use various forms of great power mostly without that responsibility. (And then, just to twist things even more, sometimes you get sympathetic villains who do try to act with responsibility, or allies who shirk that responsibility.)

Of course, one of the consequences of setting up a campaign theme is that it would extend to the PCs also - when creating a character, a player would be challenged to answer the question "how does this character fit in with the theme?" (and, of course, things like Inspiration should also be tied into the theme - in addition to gaining it for acting according to Ideals, Bonds, etc, the player should gain it for acting in keeping with the campaign theme).

At the moment, it's all a bit nebulous, and is robbed somewhat of relevance by the fact that I'm not planning another campaign any time soon. But I thought it was interesting nonetheless.