Thank you for the kind replies!
I mainly went with a more generalized theme for the forums so that it could be not only easy on the eyes, but also multi-purpose. Some of the role-playing forums I had visited for inspiration were either far too hokey, slow (due to being high infested with large, unoptimized images), or terribly hard to read due to their color schemes.
I'll definitely look into sprucing up the icons.