How do I make my fantasy dark?

How do I make my fantasy dark?

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"Give me your character sheet."

Here's a few ways you can make your fantasy dark.
>1. Low lights in the room, if you are playing IRL.
>2. Sound effects and menacing music while the group is travelling through a dungeon.
>3. Foreboding music when the group is in a safe place/resting somewhere, like the impending doom you will soon be imparting upon them.
>4. Make every action count: if the enemy is still alive, they can still attack the party and inflict damage. Addendum: reduce the healing so that the party cannot traipse through a dungeon full health.
>5. There are things worse than death. If a character is downed, then they could get grievously maimed/wounded instead, lose an arm or a leg and get a significant disadvantage on their next dungeon explorations.
>6. Make combat lethal for the current level of the party. Punish stupid mistakes they make and keep the possibility of unfairness open. They cannot always win in a fight, sometimes they HAVE to retreat.

You turn out the lights.

You know Call of Cthulhu? You know all the other Shit people ignore about it and instead focus on muh Bat-winged Squid God? Take all of that, not the creatures, not the setting, but the Technique... throw about 10-20% of that in there, and that's what a good dark fantasy is.

Now, the problem is differentiating between the setting being difficult and you being edgy or an asshole. The setting is harsh but consistent, the odds are stacked against you but not impossible. Failure in your actions tends towards the worse outcome but not usually the worst one.

Oh, and use RuneQuest/Mythras, not D&D 5e for it, if you can. AD&D and 4e can probably handle it, but honestly the systems just tend too far towards Heroic Fantasy to really back the grit you want.

Put the setting in a Dark Age - things were better before, and now they're not, and there's plenty of evidence, and possibly even people who remember. A state of decline is a quick clue that the fantasy world is dark.

The Forces of Darkness™ abound - they're powerful, numerous or have a significant impact on the setting (even if your players never see them), or all 3 at once.

As says, making small actions matter, and making injury messy can help - it sets a tone that the players can't ignore the trivial stuff the way they might gloss over things in brighter fantasy.
This isn't essential, much like "muh morally grey" this can be a part of dark fantasy, but it doesn't have to be - you can have black and white high fantasy in a dark fantasy world, as long as you work on the rest of it.

Do what everyone else is doing, lotsa unnecessary rape and killing.

Mature themes, but don't go full grimderp.

Like, have slavery be perfectly legal in your setting. But don't go around describing in graphic detail how the slaves are raped/tortured/murdered all the time. Be damn discrete about it. Such as:

>Make sure they encounter lots of widows/widowers.

>Make sure they pass through a cemetery with just as many fresh graves as there are old on a regular basis.

>Have wanted/bounty posters set up in regular places where the PCs can see them, of vicious beasts that have preyed on people/children/livestock.

You can probably even turn this one into a nice sidequest on occasion.

>When fighting monsters in their lairs make sure to describe old bleached bones that are clearly human, but some of them are too small to be that of a full grown adult.

>All of the townsguard have old beat up equipment that has been patched up time and again.

>Many of the townsguard have battle scars, missing eyes/ears/fingers, limps, or even retired members with missing limbs.

etc. etc. etc.

Less milk

>How do I make my fantasy dark?
Honestly, just move halfway towards realism. People who constantly fight monsters for a living wouldn't logically have carefree, joyous or long lives. It's sort of like trying to figure out how to make a game that centers on a huge, bloody war gritty and depressing. The subject pretty much does that on its own if you let it.

Put LOTS of rape in it. Every woman gets raped, all of them. Even the children. ESPECIALLY the children.

The good guys are bad guys. They're unlikable assholes who rape people and murder strangers on a whim. Despite this they never suffer any consequences for their actions and the harm to their victims is either barely mentioned or described in sadistic detail.

There are no gays, as societal attitudes mean anyone who isn't straight and cis has been hunted down and murdered, or is in the closet because of the above. All the main characters use homosexuality as an insult.

Set it in a ripoff of Medieval Europe. Even though its a fictional world you made up entirely yourself you want it to be """historically accurate""" so there's no non-white people in it - not even moors or ottomans. Instead, replace them all with "fantasy races" whose descriptions read like thinly veiled racists screeds against people of colour and jews.

Have the protagonist be a witty charming badass who is always right, never loses and occasionally launches into speeches about how the nazis were right about other races being evil, citing evidence from the fantasy world YOU created. He happens to share all your opinions and political beliefs. His girlfriend is a thin blonde who somehow also has giant tits and can have their entire personality described in the letters: DTF. She is raped and murdered to motivate him to go on a bloodthirsty revenge rampage. He kills loads of people and doesn't get any character development whatsoever. By the end he's found another blonde blowup doll with no personality to cling to his knees and forgets all about the old one.

There. You're welcome.

Everyone is a rapist.

I wonder what fictional setting or work made you this upset.

You're under arrest for assaulting and battering a man of straw.

I recently re-read some Malus Darkblade. It wasn't this bad but it was up there. I can't remember the name of the book I read that was like this but it was BAD.

I WISH this was a strawman.

So the Sword of Truth series?

Make everybody black.

So basically play Warhammer 1ed

turn the lights off.

Wow, such vitriolic hate for white people.

I feel like this was a rewording of an old that-guy storytime from Veeky Forums that ended with discovering that the DMPC was Adolf Hitler and the guy whose house they were playing at was keeping mountain dew bottles as piss bottles.

Sorry. My bad... It was RPG.net. Someone must have linked it here.

forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?13446-A-Night-At-The-Inn-A-Day-At-The-Racists

turn off the lights

Basically, you make the paladin fall.