Hammercalled Rules Spotlight: Themes

One of the things I wanted to do in Hammercalled is include themes that allow the GM and players to collaborate on the sort of story that they want to tell. Since the game is intended to allow multi-genre play, I wanted to avoid having rules that are too heavily focused on any one particular theme or motif, but I want Hammercalled to stand out among the crowd of games out there.

The purpose of a theme is to give players and GMs a shared point of reference. Each theme can be simple ("sacrifice") or complex ("the pursuit of justice has consequences"). Pursuing a theme allows players to earn "Destiny", which is used as a sort of narrative currency (rerolling dice, introducing a consequence, or restoring resources).
The purpose of this is quite simple: it facilitates telling stories that go beyond simple dungeon crawls. By tying a reroll mechanic to narrative development, it allows more flexibility in how both players and game masters go about the process of storytelling.

However, because of the fact that the mechanic ties into mutable qualities, it makes it so that we're not just running into a situation where a game master feels like they have to do what we want them to do because we told them to do so.
Likewise, players are free to use Destiny on anything in the game, not just their own characters. They can help another player (or even sabotage another player, hopefully accidentally), cause a consequence on any event, or immediately heal or repair something to another character's benefit.

I don't have any mechanics to encourage this cooperative activity versus selfish activity, but I'm interested to see how it turns out in playtesting (Destiny is not a new feature, but the themes are, and before the themes rolled around Destiny was rare enough to not be a frequently used item).

Feel free to ask any questions about how themes work below, or check out the Rules Reference available through the link above. We welcome feedback and suggestions about how to improve these mechanics.

Image by Johnathan Chong, for the Hammercalled Roleplaying Game