[Discussion] New Themes

[Wycliffe]

I would argue that the failure of the Realms had a great deal to do with the people entrusted to create them. Something we may forget is that we had something like four Realms, and each one was given to a prominent Lazarene (Rog, Funk and Harm among them, IIRC, and one other) to do what they wanted with it. Instead of completely organic development, what we ended up with was one or two Realms developing as the brainchild of whichever person controlled it, and the others dead in the water because their people didn't put any effort into it. The Realm leaders all ran in completely different directions, which gave the region no real sense of a unified culture- just four different, unevenly-developed fragments of one.

I believe we could make something like that work again, but it could not be structured in the same way, which gave too much free rein to the people to whom the Realms were assigned. And given that I don't think the appetite right now is to focus our regional efforts on developing something that deep or complex, it might be much simpler to abolish official theming.

We have some scraps of a sense of regional identity. We tend towards green, and we like to use the phoenix. The rest can kind of flow from there, I think.