Symbols and long running themes

Many long term games are based around very long term epic storylines. In my college game we did the whole Blackmoor thing with the alien spaceship that damaged reality or whatever, but one of my memories from that is stuff from years back suddenly having relevance. It was cool, but the basic fact was that I didn't remember the 'important' stuff since it was surrounded by others adventures.

This has been my observation in other games. It is often hard to make a huge epic storyline because for most of it you are concealing the huge epic storyline and trying to reveal it in small bits. The problem with this is that it can become remote and uninvolving. My last game was Shackled City and this had a massive overarching evil plot, but the players didn't really seemed very involved in that whole story till the end....

Anyway, my point behind this post was to introduce an idea I had for my next game. I am going to use symbolism. I have three symbols that I plan on trying to repeat throughout the game to help give a feel for things. I am not sure how it will all work out, butI am pretty sure at the worst it will be mildly amusing.