We talk about tone in writing a lot. We also use it to describe the general atmosphere and gravitas with which we approach campaigns. Tone can be whimsical, gritty, haunting, or noble.
Style is what I say to my players when I'm talking about what set of house rules or expectations mechanically we all bring to the table and agree upon before starting a game.
Genre is -- to me -- separate from tone. Some people say gritty is a genre; I disagree. Instead, genre is horror, pirates, eldritch, knights and castles, space opera. It's what I use to determine what pop culture references I'll make when I'm explaining the conventions of the world to my players. If we're in a swashbuckling genre with a gritty tone, it might be a pirate-laden seafaring campaign with seedy, dark ports of call and emphasis on survival at sea. There'll be a shipwreck, stranded-on-an-island part of the campaign where the players face down a weird cult performing sacrifices to an all-but-forgotten sun goddess. But if the tone is whimsical, it might look more like Pirates of the Caribbean.
This came up last night when three of my players and I decided to perform a tabula rasa on our games and we retired any and all loose character sheets floating around in their folders. Any one shots we'd done, the previous campaign, and even our Waterdeep heist -- which we're about halfway through, but it isn't scratching the collective itch any more -- are all in a safe binder in the office where they'll stay until we run our current adventure.
Now, we're playing a post-"apocalyptic" mid-industrial fantasy world with magic and machines, like a rural Eberron without the dragonmarks and scheming houses. We discussed tone, and agreed it would fluctuate according to what the story demands. For style, we decided on what I call New Game+, which is basically normal DnD with some journey rules, the long rest variant from the DMG, the option to play homebrew classes, and some other minor tweaks to inventory, initiative, and so forth. My players decided that technology was cool and they all made characters that are decidedly technological in some way. We began at 2nd level.
My wife is playing a druid subclass called the Circle of the Keeper, which Wild Shapes a bonded familiar rather than themselves. We flavored her familiar as a machine inhabited by a nature spirit, like a wood-and-metal Pokemon she can shift into any normal beast shape option. It hangs out in ferret form most of the time, and she found it in an old beat up plane she's trying to restore.
Two of my players formed a joint backstory: one is a gnome artificer fleeing an accident they caused which resulted in the death of their daughter, who settled on the surface world in a small agrarian village to escape the shame of their actions. We decided to use the revised Artificer rules from Unearthed Arcana.
They discovered the other character, a warforged seeker (which is a ruin-delving Lara Croft/ Indiana Jones half-caster) who participated in the apocalyptic war that scattered technology across the world. They don't remember anything before their deactivation, but that was so long ago that it hardly matters for the character anymore (or so they think).
I plan on starting them out doing some quests involving a "nature spirit" living near town, which is actually a drider druid that lives in the sticks and scares kids that play too close to the woods. We'll see what other plots we scare up. In all, I think the game is fresh and new and isn't just another fantasy game, which should help my herd of cats keep interest for a while.
Just an update post on current IRL games. There's not much to this post, so it feels a little shitty to be posting it without providing usable material or information to anyone reading. I put that diddy about tone and style at the top so I could trick myself into believing I wrote something worth reading today.
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