The most important element that many role playing games never address is that roleplaying involves creating art.  A role playing game is a creative endeavor designed to entertain which involves elements of theater; writing, acting and directing. Role playing requires the use of knowledge, skill and creative imagination in the production of entertainment that is enjoyable. A good game is a crafted thing and a good Operator has the ability to execute what he has devised.

Art is an expression of life and transcends both time and space. We must employ our own souls through art to give a new form and a new meaning to nature or the world…  The aim of art is to project an inner vision into the world, to state in aesthetic creation the deepest psychic and personal experiences of a human being. It is to enable those experiences to be intelligible and generally recognized within the total framework of an ideal world. –Bruce Lee

Good art evokes an emotion and a good artist can control what emotion he wishes the audience to experience. Tolstoy said “to evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then…  to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling – this is the activity of art.”  To make your game really come alive it must carry a “feel” or tone, a style expressive of a mood or emotion that permeates the work. A consistent tone helps to hold your Realm together. If your Realm is a Post-Apocalyptic world where life is cheap then random violence is a common occurrence and the tone is established by regularly testing the actor’s survival skills. If it is a horror tone you want to establish, then your planning will include descriptions of darkness, remoteness, and should include a building sequence of fear and false alarms. In a mystery, lots of detail is required so that the plots, characters, and events are peeled away like an onion, revealing the truth beneath.

Different episodes and scenes may have a different tone than the background tone of the Realm, but that serves to make those scenes stand out against the tone of the world. For example, if your group is a rough nomadic band of heroes that explore a dark and violent frontier then it will unbalance them to be called into the brightly lit refinement and political subtlety of the King’s Court.

Pacing is also an effective tool in handling the tone. If you only allow the players short pauses between the action scenes, they will feel your urgency and the sense of impending doom. If you stretch the pacing out and allow the players to wait for the other shoe to drop while surprising them with constant false alarms and red herrings, this can build tension. If they are waiting for someone dangerous to show up, then have a dim witted NPC quietly order pizza or bring back the NPC that was left for dead.

There are plenty of examples of artful writing out there in every genre, immerse yourself in them.  No artist ever works in a vacuum, and for writers that is doubly true.  Find good examples of the tone you are looking for and absorb as much of it as you can.  Take it apart and look at what elements are used to develop the feel.  What pacing and changes in pacing are used to reinforce it?   Take in as many examples of the stories you would like to tell and they will rub off on you.  With just a little knowledge of the tools of evoking emotion and establishing tone and some great examples at hand, you will see how easy it is to transfer those emotions to your players.