So I was thinking about Spirit of the Century and the world creation podcast from Thats How We Roll (Faith, Faces & Fingerprints). And I thought it was an interesting concept and was going to try it out, hopefully in the near future and the idea of the Campaign Aspects occurred to me.

(laying some groundwork) The fortune teller stunt allows a player to make an obscure fortune cookie phrase and turn it into an aspect that anyone can pay a fate point and tag or invoke as normal. What if during world creation you made a few aspects that campaign wide in scope and duration. These are things that set the theme of the setting.

Things like “Good is good and evil is evil” or “The right thing for the wrong reason” could define how good and evil interact in the setting. It’s a simple expansion the of the aspect concept to attach them to organizations. For example give the evil organization the aspect of “Wears a black hat” or “Promotion through attrition”.

Those aspects say a lot about pseudo characters within the world, but the campaign aspects are about genre conventions and the enforcement of those. I might even grab a set number of campaign aspects: One that talks to the morality of the campaign, others that says something about mood, hope/pessimism, scope, etc.

So for Nephilim Song 1924, I might have campaign aspects of: “You aren’t crazy, but you still need to be stopped”, “Conspiracies within conspiracies” and “While I breathe, there is hope”.

Some effort should be applied to make sure that the aspects really do limit and can’t carte blanch be applied to all situations, but other than that their presence should get the players to enforce the conventions of the genre.

Anyway just some quick thoughts.