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Yora
2017-11-11, 12:39 PM
After many years of running games and creating worlds in druids and barbarians wilderness settings, I've finally somewhat run of of steam. I still like the style and concept, but the enthusiasm and creativity has become somewhat worn out. Which I think is a great opportunity to take a look at other settings that I've not really given that much attention to. And pretty much all my favorite books, movies, and videogames are actually eithe Dark Fantasy or Lovecraftian monster sci-fi. Now I really want to try out how this would go as a dedicated longish-term campaign. :smallsmile:

But I've actually never run anything like that. :smallconfused: I've done the occasional monster in a dark forest adventure, but that was stuff going for a single session. I think doing a proper Dark Fantasy campaign in a Dark Fantasy setting will require a lot more thought and consideration to not become worn out very quickly. Or wear out the players.


This really is a first scouting of the field for me, so I am not even quite sure what to ask specifically. What is out there for these types of campaigns and what have people been doing with the concept that worked or that didn't? Are there major differences to other kinds of fantasy campaigns one really should know about and are there any common mistakes?

Lord Raziere
2017-11-11, 01:24 PM
well first thing to know about dark fantasy:
your magic has a price. the wizards in a dark fantasy setting HAVE to have prices to their magic to make sure they don't screw things up by pulling a spell out of their behind that screws up the darkness of the setting with some easy magical solution. maybe some spells require a blood sacrifice, maybe some require sacrificing lives, maybe some magic involves dealing with demons, point is, you can't be an all-solving wizard in a dark fantasy setting, your magic is not above the darkness or consequences. the only thing above darkness is the choices you make to be a good person, there is so substitute for that. it can be as powerful or as weak as you want, but what it can't be is lacking bite.

second of all, actual medieval politics and social structure. use them. nobles are scheming backstabbing jerks, kings are politicians trying to control a herd of power-hungry cats who may or may not obey them, commoners are people who keep their head down and be silent unless spoken to or face the consequences, all barbarians are people one raid away from being orcs you kill so that they don't rape pillage and burn, and racism towards fantastic people is not an excuse for consequence free killing but an actual problem that causes no end of suffering because people are jerks and idiots like that.

third, don't go too dark. let there be hope in some manner, or your just going to end up with grimdarkness.
there is good in the world, it just doesn't often take the form of something shiny, white and obvious. the good people are there, but the universe doesn't grant them any special holiness for being so. their efforts matter but they aren't going to get angels coming down to thank them for it any time soon. holy magic can still exist of course, but its not going to be something that can solve all the problems with the setting.

in short try to be as reasonable with your darkness as you can. show enough to make sure they get the setting is one where they can't assume everyone that isn't a monster is inherently good, but not too much to make them unable to play.

Mr Beer
2017-11-11, 05:26 PM
Warhammer is probably the classic fantasy RPG setting to take a look at. It's a messed up world but doesn't have the volume-set-to-11 grimdarkness of 40K.

A Song of Ice and Fire is a good source for how the ruling classes operate in a dark world.

If you like Lovecraft, why not mash it up with fantasy?

Kaptin Keen
2017-11-11, 06:16 PM
To me, dark fantasy is more of a theme than a play style. Rather than Warhammer - which I dislike in a vague sort of way - I'd recommend Dark Sun, Ravenloft or Planescape. Planescape is less dark in principle, but it will do what you want it to do.

I never cared for the mechanical we'll-force-the-dark-down-your-throat things. Sanity, Corruption, all the checks you need to roll and tables you need to consult bore me. In my experience, fluff and description is all it takes to make a setting dark.

2D8HP
2017-11-11, 07:50 PM
Well for "Dark", i'm partial to using rules from Cthullu Dark Ages, Mythic Iceland, and Stormbringer.

Lamentations of the Flame Princess could work well too.


But I'm guessing that some flavor of Dungeons and Dragons will be used.

Fine. Darksun and Ravenloft have some elements you may steal be inspired by.

Unlike Space Invaders or Chess, changing default assumptions is allowed, but is nice to give players a heads-up that you are going to change assumptions.

For example; if I was to do "Dark D&D" if I'm the DM, I only allow humans and half-humans as PC's, and the assumptions would be:



Most anything that is not a human dirt farmer is monstrous (and they are as well, when the Druids tell them the harvest demands a sacrifice):

https://resizing.flixster.com/V6duubU8VhV-GcC9bJSLCxmIRcg=/300x300/v1.aDsxMDY2NzQ7ajsxNzUwNjsxMjAwOzM3ODA7MjgzNQ

https://resizing.flixster.com/nnf-f5Ji_-PFTY8WcUqkcTm09FY=/300x300/v1.aDsxMDY2NzU7ajsxNzUwNjsxMjAwOzM0NTI7MjMzMA

Dwarves are underground dwellers who make cursed items (The Ring des Nibelungen (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Ring_des_Nibelungen)),

Elves are child stealing near demons ( the "Fair Folk" (https://www.tor.com/2015/10/21/five-reasons-not-to-piss-off-the-fair-folk/)).
"Elves are terrific, they bring terror"

When in doubt, just assume that they're going to torture and kill you.

(Basicly all Elves are pasty Drow/Fey)

Goblins?

Steal your cattle, and poison your wells in the night.

Kings?

Take your crops, and maybe your children for their wars.

Gods/Goddesses?

Out of spite they turn you into spider or a tree, and make you suffer eternally.

Best to stay in the fields you know, keep your head low and escape "the high ones" notice.

Failing that?

Grab some iron, and cut the bastards!


I'd tell my players that:

"Your PC's don't know what's in any D&D book, they know the Fairy tales of the Grimm Brothers, Greek and Norse myths, and to cross themselves and touch iron when the speak of 'the kindly ones'"

"Your race is human, or close to one, with a background of "has sword wants loot"


"Now past some tree roots blocking it you see an opening that's leading underground...."

:amused:

Thrudd
2017-11-11, 09:00 PM
What exactly is the type of thing you mean to run? A certain type of "dark" narrative in a fantasy world? Any sort of "horror" narrative with supernatural elements? Is it fantasy with a sort of creepier-than-normal vibe? These aren't precise terms.

I think the place to start, no matter what setting or theme, is decide what sort of motivations/goals should be present for potential characters, which involves imagining what sorts of roles characters have in the game world. Are they going to be paranormal investigators? Occult experts seeking knowledge, or exorcists dedicated to hunting demons and ghosts and possessed? Explorers or treasure hunters who happen to be in a world full of scary monsters that they generally won't be able to defeat without supernatural aid? They need to be the sort of people who will always be looking for and going into situations that precipitate the situations you want to run.
Once you have an idea of the characters' roles, you can start planning the sorts of scenarios that will engage them. This is all heavily predicated on the system you choose to use, of course.

Yora
2017-11-12, 02:47 AM
Unless a group is already commited to a D&D system and wants to make it work in a Dark Fantasy campaign (which can be done, going with the popularity of Ravenloft and the modest success of Midnight), it's not a game that particularly springs to mind for that purpose to me. There are several aspects that work more against the premise than for it:
First, there is the idea that a green weakling can become a one man dragon slaying army. I think it's better to have the heroes either stay mostly mundane forever, or to be elite demon slayers from the start. If fighting monsters only takes a couple of months or years to take to perfection, then the monsters don't feel like a real threat to society as a whole. Typical D&D adventurers are generally rare because the huge profits of treasure hunting come with an insane degree of risk that for most people is not worth it. But if monsters are actively threatening communities the need to become heroes is much greater. To make monsters a real threat, monster hunters either have to be rare or barely efficient.
Secondly, there's the approach to magic. Magic in D&D is always something that can be systemized and fully controlled by most PCs. It's a reliable tool for all situations, which I think doesn't fit Dark Fantasy very well. To make the supernatural threatening, its exact rules and nature need to be unclear to players.
And third is the abundance of creatures that is expected in a D&D campaign. One aspect is the same as with magic, in that it work better if the nature, powers, and strength of monsters is uncertain. D&D is highly systematic with them. And I don't see a broad and colorful range of races work that way either. Middle-Earth is going through periods where it's pretty Dark Fantasy at the times when the books take place, and Warhammer and The Witcher also have elves and dwarves. But these are all very restrained with their races compared to how D&D has evolved. I would limit it to half a dozen races, and that's not just for character options but for the whole world.

All these things have been attempted to adress in various ways in the past and if you really like to play D&D and give it a Dark Fantasy tone, it can be done. But it doesn't really make itself a good first or second choice.

I am with Kaptain Keen that I don't care much for sanity/corruption mechanics. As with horror games, it just feels very underwhelming to tell the players "the dice have determined that you are now afraid". It's much better when the circumstances of the scene make the players feel that their characters should act afraid.

Unlike gore and violence focused Grimdark (I still can't believe this has become an unironic genre), I think that Dark Fantasy works more with a general and pervasive anticipation that something really bad is going to happen. Heroes try to be alert and avoid triggering escalations, but a lot of it is outside of their control. When bad things happen they have to try to minimize the disaster. Because of this I lean towards lighter rules and more narrative systems. More responsibility should be given to the GM to make the right calls for what is an appropriate consequence than leaving it to a rigid framework of rules that determines specific outcomes. Dark Fantasy and horror simply aren't fair competitions where the players play by known and fixed rules. Unexpected things happening and heroes not being in control are the whole point of the exercise.

Lord Raziere
2017-11-12, 03:20 AM
might I recommend Dragon Age? its dark fantasy and has a ttrpg dedicated to it, while still having its heroes that change things for the better. the magic in it while being usable is horrific enough to have it costs and problems for everyone and nowhere near as possible as vancian casting, and the races in it have the right amount of grittiness and realism to them to make them fit.

Arbane
2017-11-12, 03:56 AM
Just remember: You can't force the players to care. Make things too awful, and they'll give up trying - and probably give up showing up for the game.

Yora
2017-11-12, 04:05 AM
might I recommend Dragon Age? its dark fantasy and has a ttrpg dedicated to it, while still having its heroes that change things for the better. the magic in it while being usable is horrific enough to have it costs and problems for everyone and nowhere near as possible as vancian casting, and the races in it have the right amount of grittiness and realism to them to make them fit.

I would actually go with Dragon Age over the generic Fantasy Age. Fantasy Age is so generic the book comes across as a fluffier version of Forgotten Realms. Not even sure about the differences in actual rules, but I always find it hard to hit the right tone during preparation when the style of the rulebook works against you.

I could also see Barbarians of Lemuria work really well.

I'm leaning towards something Powered by the Apocalpyse myself. (Though not Dungeon World, which is too much of a D&D emulation to me.) Apocalypse World would require some tweaking of the classes, but I'm not sure if there's any fitting fantasy variant already.

Guizonde
2017-11-12, 10:26 AM
i'd second whfrp, perhaps not the fluff if you don't like it, but the mechanics are a)brain-dead easy to get the hang of, b) it's high-lethality which always lends itself to grim prospects when your barbarian loses a leg, c) magic is no joking matter, and d) it's very very very fluff intensive. fluff dictates how you level up. no dips or powergaming as seen in dnd. you want to have a troll slayer? you'd better have a suicidal character that killed a troll in order to get to it. that doesn't mean you can't powergame (because math...) but if you get "axeface the pit mauler", the dude has a sufficiently violent backstory to back up his incredible stats (along with a few insanities and crippling wounds).

what i'm seeing in the comments reminds me a lot more of survival-horror-in-medfan than dark fantasy. honestly, for dark fantasy, i'd say: magic is dangerous, life is short and brutal if you're not careful, and beware of the dark. for example, drizz't isn't dark fantasy. in dark fantasy, a dark elf means trouble and nobody in their right minds will help them out of fear they'll get backstabbed (and they will). wizards are feared by everyone no matter their level. undead are rare but potent and are usually solved by burning everything to ash. illnesses are not solved by a potion of cure disease but something that can annihilate a village.

ravenloft might be the dnd go-to for dark fantasy, but from my limited experience there, it felt more like "dnd meets cthulu". i don't have a problem with that, but it's not exactly what springs to my mind. it's just too heavily ingrained in the alignment chart for it to work. i like to think of it as "pragmatism goes beyond law-chaos-good-evil when your survival is at stake". like, why can't necromancers have a sense of humor? why is black tentacles an evil aligned spell? why is helping the widow and the orphan a good act? for all you know, said widow's husband poisoned the king's brother and she was in on it!

for dark fantasy, think like "hard mode medfan with added consequences". it's not a realm solved by plot, but by smarts and the occasional genocide. it's an atmosphere of vigilance and xenophobia (as in fear of the unknown), with a serious tone. that pixie over there could be packing a mini-nuke ready to destroy a city hall for all you know. better to shoot it, stab it, burn it, and throw holy water on it just in case. morality has its place. the standard dnd alignment dichotomy has not. good people will do awful acts for the greater good, and evil people can be really nice sometimes. ivan the terrible and vlad tepec spring to mind, they were loved by their people and feared by their enemies because they kept their kingdom fed despite both being total psychopaths.

it's not necessary to go full edgelord on it, and i won't recommend being an edgelord about it if you're older than 13 years old, but open up a history book by a reputable author and imagine what life was like during the past crises of the world. the mass panic during the salem witch trials, being a protestant during the st.bartholomew's day massacre, being a farmer during the 100 years war... there were good things happening too, but everyone thought about the biggest and most imminent risk factors to their well-being first.

... now imagine marauding gnoll warbands are a thing. :smallamused:

Anonymouswizard
2017-11-12, 12:31 PM
might I recommend Dragon Age? its dark fantasy and has a ttrpg dedicated to it, while still having its heroes that change things for the better. the magic in it while being usable is horrific enough to have it costs and problems for everyone and nowhere near as possible as vancian casting, and the races in it have the right amount of grittiness and realism to them to make them fit.

Nitpick, Dragon Age is really a mixture of Dark Fantasy and High Fantasy. It's essentially the end result of changing a dark fantasy world to allow your traditional Bioware party to run around.

Thoughts:
-I agree on Sanity mechanics being bad, most players will ignore what the numbers say and just play their character as makes sense. Some sort of metaphysical corruption track could work though, I'd go for softer measures (you know register as evil on spells, take damage from silver, that sort of thing) rather than 'you become an NPC'.
-PCs should have access to relatively easy magic, or at least a buffer before things start going to wrong. This might be 'cantrips are weak and safe' or it might be 'you can cast ten points of spells a day before the blood sacrifices inflict hp damage', or whatever.
-Styling is more important than mechanics. While D&D style magic is going to be a bad fit (and I believe that Lamentations of the Flame Princess is moving away for that reason) you can run dark fantasy with GURPS, Savage Worlds, Fate, and PbtA. Just be willing to restrict magic as needed for the setting.

Lord Raziere
2017-11-12, 12:34 PM
Nitpick, Dragon Age is really a mixture of Dark Fantasy and High Fantasy. It's essentially the end result of changing a dark fantasy world to allow your traditional Bioware party to run around.


I do not see how this is a nitpick or a problem.

Lazymancer
2017-11-12, 12:48 PM
I think that Dark Fantasy works more with a general and pervasive anticipation that something really bad is going to happen. Heroes try to be alert and avoid triggering escalations, but a lot of it is outside of their control. When bad things happen they have to try to minimize the disaster.
You seem to be trying to emulate books. However, IRL this might paralyze players with paranoia and indecision - which is fine only if used in moderation. Constant inability of PCs to do things in a predictable manner causes more harm than you might expect.


Because of this I lean towards lighter rules and more narrative systems. More responsibility should be given to the GM to make the right calls for what is an appropriate consequence than leaving it to a rigid framework of rules that determines specific outcomes. Dark Fantasy and horror simply aren't fair competitions where the players play by known and fixed rules. Unexpected things happening and heroes not being in control are the whole point of the exercise.
I think this is a rationalization. You can have known and fixed rules (at least, no different from HF). The problem of DF-games (as opposed to Heroic) is that restricted (magic/heroic) content needs to be replaced with mundane.

Consider usual cycle of development within Heroic D&D:
1) PCs acquire magic items, personal power, and wealth through adventures
2) Wealth is used to acquire magic items and personal power (especially, GP=XP)

Now, shift to DF: remove magic items and personal power. As a result, you get wealth as prime reward (much higher share than in HF), but nothing to spend it on.

Either there should be little to no development in DF, or there have to be rules on spending wealth on something else.

Consider common methods of "doing things" within Heroic D&D:
1) Magic items, spellcasting, and brute force provide predictable outcomes
2) Complex socio-economic interactions are deeply with "GM fiat" territory

Now, shift to DF: remove magic items, make spellcasting unpredictable, restrict brute force. As a result, you'll get little to no meaningful (predictable) ways to interact with setting.

Either players should be comfortable with the actual game being freeform, or there should be more rules on socio-economic interactions.


In both of the situations there is a simple solution and a complex one. And complex requires a lot of developed content - which is rarely present. I.e. it's not that the genre demands this, but there rarely is an option to go for anything, but rule-light approach when it comes to Dark Fantasy.

Yora
2017-11-12, 01:10 PM
When it comes to darkness, I am leaning more towards noir style intrigue and treachery than savage violence. I don't want to deal with piles of mutilated corpses and cannibalistic torturers. I'm happy enough with a low key sense of dreariness rather than all out bleak despair. I would much rather have a single demon posssesed person than a howling horde of devils rampaging through the countryside. Something like Elric, The Witcher, or the darker sections of Bilbo's and Frodo's adventures (Goblin Town, Mirkwood, Barrow Downs, Weathertop, Moria, Dead Marshes, Shelob; lots of nice stuff). And I also really like Thief, especially the first game, which has the most evil magic in it.

When considering how I might do a campaig based on that, the first question that comes up is how to describe to the players what kind role their characters will be playing in the campaign. On the one hand, it seems to be a setting where outright mercenaries would be fitting in really well. Sellswords and thieves would be right in their element. Yet on the other hand, I feel like a dark campaign needs to be more personal than a regular one, and swords for hire is about as impersonal as it gets.
Getting an adventure going should be easy enough. The PCs got hired to do something. But how would one best go about to get the characters drawn into things so that they become personal? Any ideas?

RazorChain
2017-11-12, 01:20 PM
I've been running a Mythic Europe campaign for almost 2 years which is pretty dark.

Dark in the sense that it's more like the real world than anything else. People are selfish, those who are fanatics get holy powers...not because they are so good....but in their unhealthy belief in the divine and they'll use those powers on non believers.

The faeries and the monsters out there aren't particularly more dangerous than humans but the players don't have a stat book or a monster manual as I just go straight to the myths, legends and folk tales.

Cu Sith isn't a fluffy elven dog but a monster that will kill you at the third howl while chasing you, at the sign of the fair folk run and ring those church bells to scare them off. It is the fear of the unknown that makes the players paranoid when going against monsters as they can't really predict how powerful they are.

But most important is beliveable NPC's that don't have silly goals. Hard choices where no choice is obviously right but just different, or grey moral choices. The prospect of losing, not your life but just sometimes the bad guys win and get the better of the PC's. Consequences for the players actions, my campaign is literally 50% just a cascading waterfall of consequences of the PC's actions.

IME using a system that doesn't use an insane powercurve helps a lot.

RazorChain
2017-11-12, 01:31 PM
You seem to be trying to emulate books. However, IRL this might paralyze players with paranoia and indecision - which is fine only if used in moderation. Constant inability of PCs to do things in a predictable manner causes more harm than you might expect.


I think this is a rationalization. You can have known and fixed rules (at least, no different from HF). The problem of DF-games (as opposed to Heroic) is that restricted (magic/heroic) content needs to be replaced with mundane.

Consider usual cycle of development within Heroic D&D:
1) PCs acquire magic items, personal power, and wealth through adventures
2) Wealth is used to acquire magic items and personal power (especially, GP=XP)

Now, shift to DF: remove magic items and personal power. As a result, you get wealth as prime reward (much higher share than in HF), but nothing to spend it on.

Either there should be little to no development in DF, or there have to be rules on spending wealth on something else.

Consider common methods of "doing things" within Heroic D&D:
1) Magic items, spellcasting, and brute force provide predictable outcomes
2) Complex socio-economic interactions are deeply with "GM fiat" territory

Now, shift to DF: remove magic items, make spellcasting unpredictable, restrict brute force. As a result, you'll get little to no meaningful (predictable) ways to interact with setting.

Either players should be comfortable with the actual game being freeform, or there should be more rules on socio-economic interactions.


In both of the situations there is a simple solution and a complex one. And complex requires a lot of developed content - which is rarely present. I.e. it's not that the genre demands this, but there rarely is an option to go for anything, but rule-light approach when it comes to Dark Fantasy.


I must disagree. Dark Fantasy doesn't need to focus on loot, magic items or personal power. A lot of spellcasting rules rely on dice rolls but more often in Dark Fantasy the theme is power has a price.

Let's take a look at for example pulp, you may not have access to magic, you maybe can't just kill your problems and you have no magic items BUT it doesn't mean that you can't interact predictably with the setting.

Archpaladin Zousha
2017-11-12, 01:31 PM
i'd second whfrp, perhaps not the fluff if you don't like it, but the mechanics are a)brain-dead easy to get the hang of, b) it's high-lethality which always lends itself to grim prospects when your barbarian loses a leg, c) magic is no joking matter, and d) it's very very very fluff intensive. fluff dictates how you level up. no dips or powergaming as seen in dnd. you want to have a troll slayer? you'd better have a suicidal character that killed a troll in order to get to it. that doesn't mean you can't powergame (because math...) but if you get "axeface the pit mauler", the dude has a sufficiently violent backstory to back up his incredible stats (along with a few insanities and :smallamused:
Isn't there that Zweihander game that's basically "Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay with the trademarks scrubbed off?"

Might be just the ticket for someone who wants the rules and grit, but doesn't want to specifically play in the Warhammer setting.

Lazymancer
2017-11-12, 01:43 PM
Dark Fantasy doesn't need to focus on loot, magic items or personal power.
Yes. The point was that this focus (common to HF) needs to be replaced with something.


Let's take a look at for example pulp, you may not have access to magic, you maybe can't just kill your problems and you have no magic items BUT it doesn't mean that you can't interact predictably with the setting.
And you have a very high awareness of pulp setting. You do know how phones work, that the police can usually be bribed, and that martians are (usuallly) not lurking under the bed. You don't need additional information, the one DF has to provide.

Yora
2017-11-12, 01:50 PM
You seem to be trying to emulate books. However, IRL this might paralyze players with paranoia and indecision - which is fine only if used in moderation. Constant inability of PCs to do things in a predictable manner causes more harm than you might expect.
Very good point. It's annoying enough when players can't decide which of two identical doors to open first. I can see how this can completely crash a whole adventure.
One way I would approach this is to work a lot with time limits. NPCs are not idle and wait for the PCs to show up. Any debating about what the players want to do is considered in-game conversation and the clock keeps moving. (Discribing things and clarification questions don't count, obviously.) When the PCs are back at their home base or have set up camp for the night and are discussing their plans for the next day, I don't see a problem with them having really long conversations about it. But during encounters or while in "hostile territory", the clock should keep ticking.

And when the game seems to have caught on a snag, always go with Raymond Chandler: "When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a crossbow in his hand."


But most important is beliveable NPC's that don't have silly goals. Hard choices where no choice is obviously right but just different, or grey moral choices. The prospect of losing, not your life but just sometimes the bad guys win and get the better of the PC's. Consequences for the players actions, my campaign is literally 50% just a cascading waterfall of consequences of the PC's actions.
Also fully in agreement here. For players to actually feel the urgency and dread, the problems have to feel real. If someone were to actually do those things, it would actually be horrible.

I think it goes almost without saying that "failure is always an option". That the villain will be stopped in the last moment should never be a given.

Frozen_Feet
2017-11-12, 02:29 PM
Let's get one thing out of the way first: pretty much all editions of D&D have necessary rules for running Dark Fantasy. If you want to avert option bloat and power creep of later editions, use BECMI or equivalent retroclone, such as Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

So don't stress about the rules.

Pretty much all the real work is in deciding the setting and designing the scenarios. So are you thinking of using an established setting or making a new one from scratch?

RazorChain
2017-11-12, 02:56 PM
Yes. The point was that this focus (common to HF) needs to be replaced with something.


And you have a very high awareness of pulp setting. You do know how phones work, that the police can usually be bribed, and that martians are (usuallly) not lurking under the bed. You don't need additional information, the one DF has to provide.

You are under the assumption that the players know only high fantasy, a lot of people play different systems and settings. The group I started with in a Dark Fantasy had very little prior RPG experience, 3 had no experience from TT and 3 had played D&D 5E for under a year. I didn't have to replace anything as the system I'm running adheres to realistic expectations and so does the world. There are no phones, the city watch can be bribed and there maybe a faerie hiding under your bed. To interact with the world you need a character and basic understanding of the rules and what your character is capable of.

Yora
2017-11-12, 03:00 PM
I'm going very much from scratch myself. I want to throw my creative energies into something new and a Dark Fantasy campaign seems just like the perfect thing to me. Still working on a concept but I've got some decent general ideas (http://spriggans-den.com/2017/11/12/dawn-of-a-dark-world/) so far.

I've been browsing around for advice on horror campaigns (not much to be found on dark fantasy it seems), and some of it seems like it should also work very well here:

- Since in a more intrigue based game there won't be a lot of fights with generic mooks, you can populate each adventure with only a small cast of NPCs but prepare them with a good degree of depth and detail.

- Dark fantasy thrives on jumpiness and suspicion. Evil does not have to stay confined to the dungeon. If you poke around in other people's dark business, it will follow you home. Once a villain or dark force is engaged, nowhere will be fully safe until they are destroyed. And you can never be fully sure that you got every last one of them.

- If you don't do a room by room exploration of large underground complexes, the maps of adventure sites don't have to be very large. You could have a large ruin, but only a small handful of rooms in which something directly relevant to the threat of the adventure have to be described in detail.

- Don't let the players have a good look at the evil they are dealing with until it's dead. It's always better if they only have a general idea of what they are dealing with, but can't be sure that all their assumptions are right.

- Also, at the end of the day not everything needs to be understood. Where it came from, what it wanted, and even what it was might be left unsanswered by the end. What the players need at the end of an adventure is some sense that the nightmare is over and that for the moment things are back to normal. If you overexplain what they have faced in the past, it leads to the assumption that there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for what they will be facing in the future.

- Sometimes, bad things happen completely outside of the players control. When things keep happening even though the players explitily took precautions to prevent them, then it will very quickly get frustrating and feel like the players don't have any agency at all. If you keep throwing bad things at them that could have been avoided with more attention, it might probably lead to players getting overly cautious and the campaign slowing to a crawl. If someone they know gets kidnapped or eaten, or some of their stuff destroyed, it should be things that they couldn't have possibly seen or prevented.

In addition, I think that maybe making the PCs explicitly heroic instead of ammoral loners might actually work better for tales of heroism against overwhelming odds. Motivating a bunch of mercenaries can be really hard. It would be a lot easier if the players are alredy on board with wanting to prevent worse things from happening. If they don't care if more people die before they collect their reward, I don't see the players really feeling the dread of not being able to solve the crisis in time.
I think with an ongoing campaign, it's probably also much better to have most adventures end on a positive note. The players should feel like the hardship they've gone through was totally worth it and they gladly do it again, because they get clear confirmation that they made a big difference for the better.

Lazymancer
2017-11-12, 03:07 PM
You are under the assumption that the players know only high fantasy, a lot of people play different systems and settings. The group I started with in a Dark Fantasy had very little prior RPG experience, 3 had no experience from TT and 3 had played D&D 5E for under a year. I didn't have to replace anything as the system I'm running adheres to realistic expectations and so does the world. There are no phones, the city watch can be bribed and there maybe a faerie hiding under your bed. To interact with the world you need a character and basic understanding of the rules and what your character is capable of.
Honestly? I don't understand what are you trying to prove or disprove.

RazorChain
2017-11-12, 03:16 PM
Honestly? I don't understand what are you trying to prove or disprove.

You are alluding to that moving from High Fantasy/Heroic Fantasy to Dark Fantasy that loot, magic items and personal power needs to be replaced by something else. I'm just pointing out that a lot of systems/genres don't focus much on these things. I'm pointing out that a lot of players have experienced other systems/genres that don't focus on these things.

2D8HP
2017-11-12, 03:18 PM
Something like Elric,@Yora,

While I don't know PbtA well (I have ]Dungeon World on a shelf somewhere, but my never having anyone to play it with limits my learning much about it), but from what you ask for Chaosium's Stormbringer really seems to "check all the boxes" for you.

Here is the review that I've found thaf seems to go deepest into the "mechanics":

review of Stormbringer (http://projects.inklesspen.com/fatal-and-friends/traveller/stormbringer-5th-edition--elric/) that I've been able to find.

I really have a hard time in reading PDF's, but here's a
Quick start Magic World PDF (https://www.chaosium.com/content/FreePDFs/Magic%20World/Magic%20World%20Quickstart.pdf)

the rules of which I'm told are based on Stormbringer.

Lazymancer
2017-11-12, 03:37 PM
@RazorChain: Yes. Yes. And - yes. I agree and I am aware of all of this.

Frozen_Feet
2017-11-12, 04:40 PM
@Yora: your sketch of your campaign setting seems to be drawing inspiration from many of the same things as mine, and presence of God Kings excluded, sounds similar to Pre-Imperial era of mine.

So what I've been doing: I've ran my games in my setting using LotFP and incorporated many LotFP modules in it, such as Weird New World, Tower of the Stargazer and Hammer of Gods.

The reason why you've probably been running to advice for "horror games" is because "dark fantasy" isn't really a specific thing. The "dark" part really is just placing emphasis on the cynical and unsettling aspects of the fantastic. For example, Middle-Earth is ur-example for modern high fantasy, but the dark parts, such as Mines of Moria or Shelob's lair from Lord of the Rings, could be straight out of a horror novel.

Keep that in mind. For example, the difference between My Little Mermaid and Lovecraftian Deep Ones is in how you approach the creature, not what the creature is. And the creature can easily cross from the former category to the latter as you reveal more information of it.

This is what I've been doing in my games. There is the familiar, approachable, level of fantasy, and then there's a layer of specific, unsettling knowledge beneath that layer which puts everyday interactions in a different light.

For example, because basic LotFP had elves, elves were a PC option in my games. So elves are pointy-eared, Chaotic Fighter/Magic-users. But what were they beyond that? Well the first thing that usually was revealed to the players was: elves don't really have souls. They are meat-puppets held up by otherworldly powers. Second was that Eskuits, a tribe of arctic aboriginals, are mortally afraid of and hate elves. Why? Because the elves in the wilderness (as opposed to primarily urban PC elves) eat people. Pointy ears are sign of the Devil to those who actually have to deal with the wild elves.

Just a few of simple facts which made the presence of elves within the player character group have much darker implications.

I think your setting already has good few aspects where you can do the same. The God Kings are obvious candidate. I would suggest, and suspect that you already are doing this, to come up with a different "Path to Power" for each God King, explaining why they have transcended mortal limits while others have not. And try to make all of them sufficiently dramatic, costly and repulsive that even fairly amoral, opportunistic player characters would go "NOPE" if they found out.

The webcomic Kill Six Billion Demons might give good inspiration on this regard.

Yora
2017-11-13, 01:19 AM
I'm actually leaning strongly towards not explaining at all. God kings are not meant to be fought and their power can not be attained by PCs. The revised version of Dark Sun explained what the sorcerer kings exactly are and why they exist, and it's widely considered inferior to the orriginal version. Dark Souls also does really well with not fully explaining anything.

Actana
2017-11-13, 04:25 AM
If you're looking for a PbtA game about Witcher styled game about investigating monsters and fighting them, you could do worse than Monster of the Week. While made for modern settings, it's still easily converted to fantasy settings. It makes combat always dangerous, as the move to Kick Ass (ie engage in physical combat) also always deals damage to you if the circumstances are appropriate, and monsters deal more damage than the PCs, generally speaking. It takes cunning and planning to defeat the monster without risking your own life each time.

That said, if you don't want the investigation parts, then it's possibly not what you're looking for. But the mechanics would seem to fit a Witcher game to the tee.


While there's a lack of fantasy PbtA hacks (Dungeon World really seems to make everyone afraid to try it), there are a few others out there with a tighter focus. City of Judas is a dark fantasy game about a company of mercenaries operating in a heavily fictional Jerusalem in the middle ages. Very focused on that particular concept and setting though.

Legacy - Life Among the Ruins, while originally post-apocalyptic, had a stretch goal in its recent kickstarter about a fantasy setting Free From the Yoke, which is about a frontier nation recently released from under Imperial rule. It's about building up society and the squabbles that ensue, and I think it might work for a dark fantasy game with a specific scope if you like that kind of a premise.

Frozen_Feet
2017-11-13, 06:54 AM
I'm actually leaning strongly towards not explaining at all.

There's a difference between no explanation, partial explanations and full disclosure. I'm not advocating for the third, I'm advocating for the second: that if player characters really look into it, they will unearth nuggets of information that cast daily interactions in an eerie light.

That the God Kings are not truly divine, and that magic can be used by anyonr, and that they used to be mortal, are already examples of this... or would be, if the concept wasn't a cliche. (By which I mean, to player characters this revelation might be shocking, but to players themselves it's gonna be Tuesday, because this trope is so prevalent in fantasy.)


God kings are not meant to be fought...

That doesn't really enter into what I said. The hidden information the PCs find doesn't need to hint at the God Kings being defeatable. On the contrary, it can be the opposite, hinting at additional reasons why they are undefeatable, or why defeating them would be a really bad idea.


...and their power can not be attained by PCs.

Sure, but why?

There's a world of difference between PCs being unable to attain the power because they have no clue how to, and PCs being unable to attain power because they know attaining it is impossible for whatever reason.

Kenny Ackerman was planning to backstab the Royal Family of Paradise Island, to gain power of the Original Titan. But at the last moment, he learned that this power can only be used by those of the Royal Bloodline.

Also remember, I'm suggesting that each God King has a different reason of being where they are. Nothing is quite as delicious as false hope created by partial information. Knowing for sure that they can't gain powers of one God King, but also knowing this reason can't apply to others, can keep the characters futily searching for power for extended periods, and potentially committing heinous crimes, all for nothing.

(Really, just the revelation that each God King is different type of being, even in absence of knowledge of what those types are, could be a game-changer. Let's start with the assumption that great many underground cults are searching for the way to become a God King. But the reason they're failing is because "God King" is not a singular thing, it's an artificial category lumping together vastly different things. There is no such thing as a God King and hence the entire concept of the way is flawed.)

Aran nu tasar
2017-11-13, 08:25 AM
I'm leaning towards something Powered by the Apocalpyse myself. (Though not Dungeon World, which is too much of a D&D emulation to me.) Apocalypse World would require some tweaking of the classes, but I'm not sure if there's any fitting fantasy variant already.

There are a bunch of dark fantasy hacks of AW, although as far as I know none of them are finished. There's Fallen Empires (http://apocalypse-world.com/AW2ndEdFallenEmpiresPreview.pdf), which is a reskin of AW made by Vincent Baker. There's Apocalypse World: Dark Ages, which I can't track down a copy of right now, but was a playtest document for a medieval hack by Vincent. There's Eye of Chaos (http://www.onesevendesign.com/chaos/eye_of_chaos.pdf), made by John Harper. There's A Storm Eternal (http://svirfnebl.in/astormeternal/), also John Harper (along with Paul Riddle (Undying), Sage LaTorra (Dungeon World)), which is a hack of AW:Dark Ages.

Pretty much none of those links are going to be self-explanatory, so if you don't already know how Apocalypse World works then they will be downright useless, and even if you do it's going to take a decent amount of working out how everything fits together. Except Fallen Empires, because it's a pretty straightforward reskin.

Also it might be worth keeping an eye out for Band of Blades when it comes out - it's a dark military fantasy hack for Blades in the Dark, Black Company style. Nothing publicly available though; I know it is in the early stages of playtesting but I don't have any more info than that.

Yora
2017-11-13, 10:50 AM
I downloaded Fallen Empires. I need to go through this in detail later.


Also remember, I'm suggesting that each God King has a different reason of being where they are. Nothing is quite as delicious as false hope created by partial information. Knowing for sure that they can't gain powers of one God King, but also knowing this reason can't apply to others, can keep the characters futily searching for power for extended periods, and potentially committing heinous crimes, all for nothing.

I see. I think we're merely having somewhat different ideas of which directions this could be taken. In something more high-magic, like Elric, I can see god kings taking a quite prominent role, even if unseen in the background, and players aiming very high in their pursuit of magical power. Also a really cool campaign concept.

I'm leaning more to something more low-magic with the god kings being mostly flavor. Maybe partly out of tradition, as I've always been focusing on very low-power fantasy so far. But there also is a really nice appeal of having global and cosmic machinations playing into a story. I'm still very much undeciced about that. I think this will emerge over time as I refine what themes and archetypes I want to work into the setting the most.

RazorChain
2017-11-13, 11:39 AM
I downloaded Fallen Empires. I need to go through this in detail later.



I see. I think we're merely having somewhat different ideas of which directions this could be taken. In something more high-magic, like Elric, I can see god kings taking a quite prominent role, even if unseen in the background, and players aiming very high in their pursuit of magical power. Also a really cool campaign concept.

I'm leaning more to something more low-magic with the god kings being mostly flavor. Maybe partly out of tradition, as I've always been focusing on very low-power fantasy so far. But there also is a really nice appeal of having global and cosmic machinations playing into a story. I'm still very much undeciced about that. I think this will emerge over time as I refine what themes and archetypes I want to work into the setting the most.


I agree, in various Dark Fantasy campaigns, and Dark Fantasy is my forte, I have used a Demon King, An Vampire King, Dread Lords and etc. The point of the game isn't for the PC's to get powerful enough to punch them in the eye and steal their power because then we're back to D&D powerfantasy.

These beings exist in the background and the PC's might tangle with their agents.

Yora
2017-11-13, 12:06 PM
Administrator-priests are something that I can totally get behind. Both as antagonists and as mysterious ladies who show up with two huge silent tempalars and a simple job to offer.

http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/42f4616178d35589fd45d37bb67252d0.jpg

Or both. :smallamused:

Actually, I do quite like much of the quest design in DA2, even though the world doesn't do much for me.

Frozen_Feet
2017-11-13, 01:02 PM
I see. I think we're merely having somewhat different ideas of which directions this could be taken. In something more high-magic, like Elric, I can see god kings taking a quite prominent role, even if unseen in the background, and players aiming very high in their pursuit of magical power. Also a really cool campaign concept.

I'm leaning more to something more low-magic with the god kings being mostly flavor. Maybe partly out of tradition, as I've always been focusing on very low-power fantasy so far. But there also is a really nice appeal of having global and cosmic machinations playing into a story. I'm still very much undeciced about that. I think this will emerge over time as I refine what themes and archetypes I want to work into the setting the most.

In my experience, if there's a big figure of authority (God King, Emperor, whatever), the probability of a player-character-combination becoming self-righteous, greedy or ambitious enough to take that authority on steadily approaches 1 the more games you play in your setting. So even you don't plan to have the God Kings be at the fore front of your campaign, it pays to think about it, as it makes it easier to answer why the status quo of your setting exists.

For example, even if the player characters themselves are not interested in usurping the God Kings, they might run afoul of a cult, conspiracy or a bunch of barbarians trying to do that. As the number of such factions grows, the question increasingly becomes: why are none of them succeeding? And while this may lead to revealing something of the God Kings, it may just as well reveal something about those factions. The barbarians standing in opposition to the God Kings especially could have a fair few skeletons in their closet. For example, what was the role of those barbarians in the destruction of those ruined cities which lay underneath contemporary ones?

Yora
2017-11-13, 02:20 PM
I'm still in the process of trying to find my stylistic center with this, and this threat really helps a lot.

I think, when I really boil it down to the very essentials of what inspires me, it's dark forests, rotting swamps, and misty lakes, with shadowy horned figures stalking through the fog. Narrow alleys at night are also nice.

That doesn't really mesh that well with "great kingdoms" based on "the eastern mediterranean sea". But the idea of powerful immortal leaders is still a great one. I think these two elements can be combined by going more with something like Galadriel and the Witch King of Angmar, Flemeth from Dragon Age, the Darklords from Ravenloft, or Ra in Stargate. I think city states (as in Dark Sun) might work better. Making them the children or messengers of actual gods would still give them as much political and religious power and a loyal caste of priests. At this lower power level, I feel more comfortable with the players actually encountering them and perhaps getting drawn into their plots.

For a more sneaky and less fighty campaign, intrigue and treachery are a great source of conflict and adventure. And plotting relies heavily on factions. Factions with conflicting goals and a ruthlessness to mercilessly exploit others for their goal. Specifically PCs. To combine those with forests and swamps, good goals would be to get assistance or even control over dark spirits that live in the wilderness, or to steal their power and that of dead (or soon to be dead) sorcerers who have been in hiding from the priest lords who didn't appreciate them getting too powerful.

Thinker
2017-11-13, 03:26 PM
My favorite type of game to run is of the monster hunter variety. This tends to include a lot of common tropes with dark fantasy. In my estimation, you need mechanics that support eight things:
A feeling of suspense - Dread does this with a Jenga tower, but there are other ways to approximate the sense of suspense. You can use a deck of cards. Leave only the face cards and the jokers and make it so that drawing a joker leads to a bad situation for at least one of the players. Anytime the players take a long time completing a task (searching a room, interviewing a witness, haggling for a spot on a ship, etc.), the player who performed the action must draw a card. If multiple players are involved, they must all draw the card. The situation can be as dire as a blighted bear bursting from the bushes and attacking the party or as subdued as strange lights being spotted at the bog's edge. Similarly, you can setup a tracker with a token. When the token moves from the first position to the sixth position, the badness happens. The point is, the players should be aware that something bad is coming, that it is getting closer, and that they cannot stop it.
Everyone is expendable - The players should know that their characters (and their belongings) won't last long. Take away their arms, their armor, and their lives (not necessarily in that order). Don't be arbitrary about it, but don't be especially forgiving either. Your system should support this sort of character churn.
Get them invested in the world - Give them friends, or at least contacts, that they can rely on. When bad things happen, they're the first to be affected. It might just be a mob burning down their favorite inn to get at a fugitive hiding out in the basement or it might be a lynching of their favorite bard who always had rumors to share.
Evil is easy, good is hard - Reward the players for being wicked, punish them for being good. That traveler they helped on the road? He was a murderer and has just killed their friend, the barmaid. The orphanage that they destroyed to banish the warped soul of Icarus? It was hiding a cool, magical sword.
A cost - The players should always be allowed cool moments and chances to shine, but in a darker setting, they should be tempered with cost. Jack Sparrow resurrected the Black Pearl from Davy Jones' locker, which was only put there because he refused to transport 100 slaves. Now, he has to send 100 more to Davy Jones. I'd say that performing the mundane should generally be safe from cost, but give everyone access to some kind of power that they can tap into or tempt them with deals from demons, djinn, and forest monsters that will eventually be turned back on them.
A sense of powerlessness - You should still let the players win when they're clever, they've paid the price, or when they toughed it out. But, they should always have the feeling that victory is only a pause in despair. They've saved the village from the werewolf and exposed his flesh-eating family, but just as they're celebrating, the Witch of the West rides into town, condemning all who pass under her gaze to being turned to stone.
Connect the characters - Give the characters reasons to be together like serving in war together, being related, working a job together before, one saved another. Make some bad connections, too - one has a dark secret and another knows what it is, one betrayed another, etc.
Give the characters desires - Encourage the players to come up with desires for their characters. Make some of them competing objectives if you can.


Don't use DnD - it's the antithesis of all of these things (not that DnD is necessarily bad, but it's clearly going for a more heroic vision). I like Powered by the Apocalypse games, but I'm sure you could also use FATE, GURPS, or some other system to support the above. Make sure that your players buy in to these things first - there's nothing worse than a player thinking she's going to play a paladin who saves the prince with a three page backstory who dies two sessions in and doesn't do anything heroic.

Yora
2017-11-13, 05:10 PM
I always find personal connections difficult in RPGs, but then I mostly ran nomadic treasure hunters campaigns. I think probably the best way to get the players invested in NPCs it to make it really useful to repeatedly go for them for assistance. "Let's go see the old man at the fish market" as a first response to a question might seem a bit easy at first and not really like the players putting much effort into finding the answer themselves, but if you give them at least something useful return most of the times, it makes that NPC matter to them and it also leads to the game progressing swiftly instead of the players feeling stuck.

Deals with dangerous spirits is a great idea. Like I said, I like intrigue stories where the heroes realize they are getting exploited and spirits can play that game just as well as influential mortals. As with the previous point, it can very well be allowed to be an easy and reliable way to make progress for the players. It can send them on side quests, put them into debt, and again boosts personal interaction with the inhabitants of the setting. If it makes them go to places they would not want to go and worry about something comming back to bite them at really bad moments, that's a huge plus for such a campaign. Making spirits relatively easy to find and eager to make deals seems like a great and fun idea.
It's also another one of those things where I think it will work much better without any associated mechanics and die rolls. If the players know that the outcome of a deal depends on a dice roll they will look at their modifiers, and if visible dice rolls, and make assumptions that they succeeded or failed. But if a treacherous spirit simply says yes and gives them what they asked for, it will always be with a huge amount of doubt that they just made a really bad choice.

Mutazoia
2017-11-14, 03:39 AM
Might I suggest taking a look at the Midnight campaign setting. In a nutshell, it's a "what if Sauron had reclaimed the One Ring" setting. The world has it's pants around it's knees, and is grabbing it's ankles, and the PC's are basically just fighting to reduce the size of the incoming pineapple by a few centimeters.

Guizonde
2017-11-14, 01:36 PM
Might I suggest taking a look at the Midnight campaign setting. In a nutshell, it's a "what if Sauron had reclaimed the One Ring" setting. The world has it's pants around it's knees, and is grabbing it's ankles, and the PC's are basically just fighting to reduce the size of the incoming pineapple by a few centimeters.

i loll'd. also, is fatal involved in this? because those charts are disturbingly extensive.

Yora
2017-11-14, 02:02 PM
This discussion had me remember a series of four posts at Against the Wicked City (#1 (http://udan-adan.blogspot.de/2016/06/romantic-fantasy-revisited-1-what-it-is.html), #2 (http://udan-adan.blogspot.de/2016/06/romantic-fantasy-revisited-2-why-would.html), #3 (http://udan-adan.blogspot.de/2016/06/romantic-fantasy-revisited-3-how-do-i.html), #4 (http://udan-adan.blogspot.de/2016/06/romantic-fantasy-revisited-4-so-what.html)) about how Joseph draws for his campaign from works that are sometimes collectively refered to as Romantic Fantasy. Don't be fooled by the (really poorly chosen) term, his Wicked City is hands down the most nightmarish place I've ever seen in RPGs. If Midnight is "what if Sauron had won", then the Wicked City seems to be "what if Sigil were to turn into Silent Hill". Or perhaps, "what if Bloodborne were set in Asia".

And reading through it again, it very much sounds like a pretty spot on description for The Witcher as well. If you want to take a Dark Fantasy campaign into that direction (which I totally do), it's a very good read.

Yora
2017-11-15, 01:09 PM
A specific question to all of you: What are your thoughts on approaching magic in a Dark Fantasy context?

I believe there's a general consensus that mages shouldn't be straightforward magical artillery raining fire and lightning upon hordes of enemies. But beyond that? Many people like magic to be somewhat insidious in nature, but how could this look in practice?

Piedmon_Sama
2017-11-15, 02:33 PM
A specific question to all of you: What are your thoughts on approaching magic in a Dark Fantasy context?

I believe there's a general consensus that mages shouldn't be straightforward magical artillery raining fire and lightning upon hordes of enemies. But beyond that? Many people like magic to be somewhat insidious in nature, but how could this look in practice?

Something like Full Metal Alchemist, maybe? There's nothing inherently "evil" about alchemy, but people being people it gets used for a lot of very messed up stuff in that setting. Cities of people sacrificed essentially to create a single orb of power; peoples' bodies (and souls) twisted in nightmarish ways, other perversions against the natural order. You might think Alchemy was some kind of black magic but in reality it's just a tool often used by the desperate, or people possessed by some kind of ideology or obsession.

I think that's what I'd emphasize. Magic may offer various kinds of power but the buy-in has to be steep enough (like, decades of toil and study) only the very determined (to the point of mania) ever become accomplished at it.

e: Like, let's say in your campaign one of your players wants to play a Magic-User. The next thing you say should be "why did they want to become one?" because the idea should be, being a wizard (or w/e) is too difficult for anyone to do it just because they liked the look, or they're lazy and wanted a spell that finds their keys. You don't get there without having some kind of driver like "I want to return someone I lost to life," "I want to change the world in a big way," "I want to become something more than human," etc. Magic users are people with this big driving ambition they'll do almost anything for---almost inevitably as the cost rises, it begins to hurt those around them...

Frozen_Feet
2017-11-15, 03:08 PM
A specific question to all of you: What are your thoughts on approaching magic in a Dark Fantasy context?

I believe there's a general consensus that mages shouldn't be straightforward magical artillery raining fire and lightning upon hordes of enemies. But beyond that? Many people like magic to be somewhat insidious in nature, but how could this look in practice?

Let's discuss this in the context of a simple system of magic I put together, based on common rules shared by real and fictional systems:


Related, let me renumerate the four laws of magic which I feel will 1) lead to comprehensible magic system with clear limits and 2) feel magical to players in the real world.

1st rule: rule of symbolism: a thing which appears similar to a thing, can be used to affect that thing, AKA manipulation of symbols manipulates reality.

2nd rule: law of contagion: things which have been in contact, remain connected. You can use part of a whole to affect the whole.

3rd rule: mind over matter. Thoughts and emotions have direct impact on reality. Corollary to this is that a mage must be thinking of the effect they desire and fully intend it for magic to work. Rule of thumb: "there are no accidents in magic".

4th rule: no ontological inertia. Effects of magic only remain as long as the caster is focusing their thoughts and emotions, or, if the target is another conscious being, as long as the target can focus their thoughts and emotions.

Example spell A: the Voodoo doll.

First, you acquire a symbol of the target person: a doll in their likeness. Second, you create a connection to that person, by acquiring a piece of their body: a strand of hair, a drop of blood, a toenail etc. Third, you must harm the doll with the intent of harming the real person. If your intentions are true, the person will now suffer pain. After this, two things can happen. If the target is unaware of the curse, the pain will cease once your attention on the doll ceases. If you get the target to believe they are cursed, then their own belief will keep the curse going even when your attention is elsewhere.

Things which can go wrong with the spell:

- your symbol is lackluster; it does not bear resemblance to the right person
- you lack real connection to the target person; the hair, the blood, the nail, is from someone else
- you lack real intent to harm. Again: "there are no accidents in magic". If you don't truly wish to stab a person with a needle, it does not matter how many needles you stab in your doll.
- the target refuses to believe they are cursed. You can still affect them when your full attention is on the doll, but you cannot make the curse "stick" to cause a lasting change in the target's life.

How to break the spell:

- destroy the doll without intending harm to the person the doll is made of. This destroys the symbolic connection between the doll and the target. To be on the safe side, it helps if you at the same time proclaim and honestly believe the doll has no connection to the person it is made of. If you feel at any level that harming the doll equates to harming the person, this is obviously very dangerous. You might want to get a complete stranger to do this. It's easier to think a doll's just a doll if you don't know it's off a real person.
- remove the body part from the doll. This breaks the connection between the target and the doll.
- make the spellcaster feel pity towards the target. They cannot cause them harm if they do not honestly wish that. It also helps if the target believes the spellcaster does not honestly wish them harm.
- convince the target that they aren't, and can't, be cursed. This makes it impossible to make a curse "stick", and provides resistance to the spellcaster's tricks.
- if the target's own belief is upholding the curse, give them the doll so they can themselves remove the pins and destroy the doll, hence verifying the curse is over.
- kill the spellcaster, preferably in sight of the target.
- if the target's own belief is fueling the curse, make them suffer amnesia.

Example spell B: shapeshifting

First, you make yourself into a symbol of the thing you wish to change into. Second, you place upon yourself or consume ("you are what you eat") a piece of the thing you wish to turn into. For example, for turning into a wolf, dressing in a wolf pelt serves both purposes. Now, while honestly wanting to be the thing you wish to change into, act like that thing. You change back once you honestly wish to be human again and cease to act like the thing you changed into.

Things which can go wrong with this spell:

- your symbol is lackluster; neither you nor your actions bear resemblance to the thing you wanted to change into.
- the thing you consumed or placed upon yourself is of the wrong creature, so you don't have a connection to it. Do n't use a bear pelt if trying to turn into a wolf.
- you don't actually know what the thing is really like, so you can't honestly intent to become it either. If you know nothing of how real wolves act, you can't change into one either.
- the thing you turned into does not or cannot have a comprehension of what it's like to be human; a human may know both what it's like to be human and what it's like to be a wolf, but a wolf might only know what it's like to be wolf. This makes it difficult to change back on purpose. (One of the few corner cases of a spell being "permanent". Pro tip: don't turn yourself into an inanimate object!)
- the thing you turned into would not want to turn into your past form. For example, dragons are arrogant creatures and see humans as inferior. Not in a million years would a dragon want to be a human, a dragon just wants to be dragon.

How to break the spell:

- kill or destroy who has been changed. This, at latest, ends the spell and restores the thing to its original form.
- convince the changed thing that they'd really be better off in some other form, hence breaking the intentionality upholding the spell. For example, if the spellcaster-turned-wolf is faced with reality of a human they loved now scorning or fearing them, they may wish to not be wolf again.
- countespell: disbelieve the transformation really hard, acting like its all smoke and mirrors, and convince all others to follow suit. Note: this is dangerous if even little doubt remains in your heart. It is hard to disbelieve a wolf when its biting your throat. Usually only works if you know the thing is really under a spell, such as through witnessing the initial transformation.

Let's first discuss God Kings again. Remember how their subjects are putting their symbols on every damn thing? That's an attempt, by them, to invoke the first rule. Their faith in their Kings' ability to protect them is invoking the third rule.

The presense of a King's symbol, is the same as a King's presence. As long as the people believe a King will keep them from harm, they will.

But what if this belief ever falters? That is when the fourth rule comes into play and the realm of a King collapses. "Without faith, the Cross is only iron." If people lose their faith in their King, the symbols cease to have power, and all the spirits they are holding back will pour in.

Or what if people forget what the symbols stand for? Same thing. Hence, the symbol must be reinforced, its meaning must be made clear to all, burned into the minds of people with force if no other method suffices.

Now, one law is still unaddressed: the second one. What is the connection between the symbol, the people and their King? It could be as simple as a King regularly touring through their realm to touch these symbols. It could be some symbols, those with real power, come directly from the King and have their literal blood and sweat poured into their making. Of course, this would also be dangerous, as such connection could be used against them. Or, it could be the people and their King are related, and the symbols only work in the hands of those who have Royal blood flowing in their veins.

There are many potentially sinister implication of this. First, all those areas where a King's influence is vaning and spirits are moving in? Every haunted house, every dark grove where bad things happen? It's because one of the four rules is being broken. Maybe people are losing faith. Maybe the King, itself, is losing faith or ignoring their realm. Maybe the King's symbols are being annihilated, or worse, the meaning behind them is being annihilated, causing people to forget what they stand for and hence causing them to lose their effect. Maybe the connection between the King and their subjects has been broken, causing the wards to fail despite all other steps being followed. A haunted house could happen, because a noble's son was illegitimate, and did not have Royal blood in them. Or because the symbols sold to them were frauds, not made nor blessed by the King.

Of course, a working symbol of a King can be just as horrifying. Again, a symbol's presence implies the King's presence. Do you want your King to know what you're up to? Your hidden thoughts and dirtiest secrets? If not, you will have to forego having their symbols around... possibly making you vulnerable to spirits of the dark.

Guizonde
2017-11-15, 03:41 PM
A specific question to all of you: What are your thoughts on approaching magic in a Dark Fantasy context?

I believe there's a general consensus that mages shouldn't be straightforward magical artillery raining fire and lightning upon hordes of enemies. But beyond that? Many people like magic to be somewhat insidious in nature, but how could this look in practice?

oh, i've no problem with flak-canon wizards in dark fantasy. it's just that the more ammo you throw at your victims, the bigger the risk of a shell going off in the tube....

frankly, the weaker the magic, the less harsh effects it should have. for example, a firestorm spell going wrong should feel like a fair amount of tnt going off inside your waistband (and spraying said contents of waistband across a football field). a sleep spell getting sizzled? you'll feel drowsy for an hour, if that? i like my telekinesis a lot (and has helped my caster teammates innumerable times), and that is consecrated bread to a dm with a sense of humor. once, a small tk misfire resulted in the caster getting his nose pinched for 40 minutes. the player spoke as if his nose was stuffed and took a hefty hit to most social interactions. levitating a mook would probably mean hovering in place due to wedgie-power. basically, give the wizard all the gamebreaking potential of dnd, add a bit more just in case, and make the risk/reward a straight up 50/50 chance. sure, you could disintegrate the castle, but are you willing to pay the price? you can totally charm the pants off the bouncer guarding the tavern, but do you really want to fall in unrequited love with him if it fails?

or, you can always make sure that magic leaves stigmata. my personal favorite? odd eyes. slit-pupils, mismatched eyes, cloudy eyes... the more you use, the more the effects manifest on you.

Yora
2017-11-15, 04:08 PM
In Symbaroum, characters get temporary corruption points for casting spells and permanent corruption points for learning spells. If you belong to one of the four established traditions, then you have the ability to supress the corruption caused by spells associated with the tradition. Any time your total corruption exceeds half your maximum, you gain 1-4 permanent corruption and show visible signs of the corruption. Casting a spell outside of your tradition caused 1-4 temporary corruption and your maximum is probably something like 12. If you reach the maximum, the character turns into a monster, permanently.
That really gives you not a lot of room to spam spells outside your mastered traditions in combat, or playing an independent mage. You probably already have a permanent corruption of 2 or 3 from knowing some spells, and with bad rolls you first go to 7 temporary and then to 7 permanent/11 temporary and you're almost done for. Maybe I got it wrong (just started reading), but that sounds like a considerable price to pay for magic. (Of course, if you master a tradition you can use that one without any real risk.)

When it comes to magic having a price, I think backfires are rather weak or too dangerous. The nice thing about a corruption system like this is that you know in advance that you will have to pay and how much you will have to pay. With a backfire chance, you only have to pay if it goes wrong. And if the price is too high in case of a mishap, then using it at all might be too dangerous. Managing your corruption level feels much more interesting to me, because it's only slightly bad, but all the time.

I think the idea of magic is evil and turns you into an insane undead monstrosity is somewhat overdone, though. An interesting reskinning would be that magic makes you lose your humanity and assume traits of the fey. Mages simply become weird over time if they are not careful, and eventually they get consumed by their magic and disappear into the otherworld to continue existence as something else. Equally as problematic for players, but it makes magic more weird than evil.

War_lord
2017-11-15, 07:39 PM
You don't necessarily have to have magic that always ends up killing or driving the user insane though, that runs the risk of making playing a mage unappetizing to your players. Rather, magic is relatively safe when used within a certain framework, but there's a great temptation to power through abuse, shortcuts and meddling with dark power and that's what brings the downfall.

RazorChain
2017-11-15, 10:19 PM
In a game I played the magic user had a boundary, he could go safe and cast decent spells or he could overclock it and channel as much he could to get bigger results. The more power the magic user channeled the more risk of things going wrong. If the magic user was out of mana he could still try to cast spells just by burning his hit points, essentially using his life force to fuel the magic.


It is quite suprising how often people get tempted to reach for extra power even when they're risking disaster.

Arbane
2017-11-16, 01:16 AM
e: Like, let's say in your campaign one of your players wants to play a Magic-User. The next thing you say should be "why did they want to become one?" because the idea should be, being a wizard (or w/e) is too difficult for anyone to do it just because they liked the look, or they're lazy and wanted a spell that finds their keys. You don't get there without having some kind of driver like "I want to return someone I lost to life," "I want to change the world in a big way," "I want to become something more than human," etc. Magic users are people with this big driving ambition they'll do almost anything for---almost inevitably as the cost rises, it begins to hurt those around them...

If you go with something like this, check out Unknown Armies, it's a modern-day urban fantasy game, but the useful part for this is that it's built into the system that magicians HAVE to be dangerously obsessed power-addicts who'd stab their own mother if they thought it would get them a big enough hit of magic. (It also has a really good system for modeling sanity and the loss thereof, which might also be useful.)

Mutazoia
2017-11-16, 01:18 AM
A specific question to all of you: What are your thoughts on approaching magic in a Dark Fantasy context?

I believe there's a general consensus that mages shouldn't be straightforward magical artillery raining fire and lightning upon hordes of enemies. But beyond that? Many people like magic to be somewhat insidious in nature, but how could this look in practice?

I rather like the way magic works in Glen Cook's Black Company novels. Learning a mage's true name, and speaking it to them, strips them of their power, making their name the most guarded secret they have. They don't really have set spell lists...they build spells for the occasion on the spot rather than casting spell number 237B, and it can take centuries for a mage to get really, really powerful. Green Ronin did a D20 setting for the Black Company, and then later a splat for just the magic system called True Sorcery.

Anonymouswizard
2017-11-16, 06:35 AM
A specific question to all of you: What are your thoughts on approaching magic in a Dark Fantasy context?

I believe there's a general consensus that mages shouldn't be straightforward magical artillery raining fire and lightning upon hordes of enemies. But beyond that? Many people like magic to be somewhat insidious in nature, but how could this look in practice?

I'm going to split this into two seperate issues, effects and access/cost.

First off, what effects should a dark fantasy mage be able to use? Well nothings actually out of bounds, but you're unlikely to find massive storms of fire (that's more high fantasy). I'd go for more invisible and mental effects, magicians are more John Constantine than Doctor Strange. Illusions, mind control, potentially even up to disintegration, but most magicians are bending minds instead of unmaking objects.

For access/cost, magic should not be easy. It should require something, in the setting I'm currently designing everybody able to cast magic made a deal with a demon in order to know how to do so (still working out if I want to keep Clerics or not, if so the angels they deal with are just as amoral but much more orderly), the cost to this deal might be a 'mark' (an altered or missing body part, red hands is a classic) or a service rendered (which may or may not have been given when the campaign begins). There are other options, spells requiring sacrifices or causing corruption as they're used, but the basic idea is that magic should have a cost to get or use that most people don't want.

Lacco
2017-11-16, 06:51 AM
For the magic system (and also other things) I would suggest you check the Blade of the Iron Thrones. Overview of the magic system features:

Pool-based casting where sorcery pool consists of a derived attribute "Power" (that takes into account the attribute equivalents of Wisdom/Knowledge, Willpower and Body) and proficiency in given type of magic.
Magic is divided into lesser mysteries (Cursing, Prophecy, Scrying, Enslavement - illusions/mind control, Witchfire - "artillery", Mending - "healing" but also causing pain), greater mysteries (summoning of demons and summoning of spirits) and arcane secrets (stuff like snuffing out sun, causing plagues, animating the dead).
Every time you cast, you have to divide the pool between casting and containment check. One gives power to the spell, the other prevents the eldritch energies to affect you.
Fail the containment check and the effect is uncontained (and will complicate your life a bit or wound you) and you also gain taint. Taint lowers your ability to do magic (decreases your sorcery pool) and gives you the nice "tainted" aura which makes pleasant conversations hard. Acquire too much taint at once and it discharges itself - giving you a wound or temporary deformity (but the backlash will remove some taint).
Taint goes away slowly and accumulates easily if you get too careless.
For 1-on-1 sorcerer battles there is Duel of Wills - in which the two mages use their pure power against each other, trying to grind the other down with series of maneuvers.
If a sorcerer dies, he gets one last spell (if there is sufficient time) which is called "Dying Curse". At that point the sorcerer does not usually care about consequences and as such usually uses full dice pool for the casting...



As RazorChain stated, the temptation is there. And it's interesting to see it in work.

Lazymancer
2017-11-16, 07:13 AM
A specific question to all of you: What are your thoughts on approaching magic in a Dark Fantasy context?
Initially, I thought you meant Low Magic/Dark Fantasy combination (people usually don't separate those - hence recommendation on replacing magic options with mundane; LM is inherently more social), but that seems to be not the case.

If the question is about pure DF (understood as dystopian fantasy), then mages as "straightforward magical artillery raining fire and lightning upon hordes of enemies" are certainly possible within it. You don't even need the "price" system or anything else. In fact, even regular D&D can be left practically as is.

For example, there was some adaptation of the XP system (World of Prime, IIRC), where XP was a tangible resource that could be extracted from the dead. I.e. class levels are literally powered by the souls. Consequently, classed nobility levels up with souls of the peasantry (animals don't give enough XP to be relevant; dozen lions ~ 1 commoner).

Take this system to its logical conclusion (if you don't partake in genocide you are outcompeted and overrun by neighbours) and Sauron becomes redundant.


I rather like the way magic works in Glen Cook's Black Company novels. Learning a mage's true name, and speaking it to them, strips them of their power, making their name the most guarded secret they have. They don't really have set spell lists...they build spells for the occasion on the spot rather than casting spell number 237B, and it can take centuries for a mage to get really, really powerful. Green Ronin did a D20 setting for the Black Company, and then later a splat for just the magic system called True Sorcery.
A further (less clunky) development is Spheres of Power.

Yora
2017-11-16, 01:13 PM
First off, what effects should a dark fantasy mage be able to use? Well nothings actually out of bounds, but you're unlikely to find massive storms of fire (that's more high fantasy). I'd go for more invisible and mental effects, magicians are more John Constantine than Doctor Strange. Illusions, mind control, potentially even up to disintegration, but most magicians are bending minds instead of unmaking objects.

Seeing it put like this, I think that maybe the dominant forms of magic, that have a dark feel, are spells that take place inside the target. Be it mind control or harmfully altering the body of another person, or divination and shapeshifting on the side of the mage. Summoning of spirits and demons also blends in very nicely, but other than that, magic seems to be dominated by spells that take place inside of people. It's less visible, and at the same time more uncomfortable.

Thinker
2017-11-16, 02:37 PM
Seeing it put like this, I think that maybe the dominant forms of magic, that have a dark feel, are spells that take place inside the target. Be it mind control or harmfully altering the body of another person, or divination and shapeshifting on the side of the mage. Summoning of spirits and demons also blends in very nicely, but other than that, magic seems to be dominated by spells that take place inside of people. It's less visible, and at the same time more uncomfortable.

That makes sense. Dark Fantasy is a stone's throw away from horror. Horror is about mystery, suspense, and powerlessness. I would include any magic that adds to those feelings.

Thrudd
2017-11-16, 04:45 PM
Seeing it put like this, I think that maybe the dominant forms of magic, that have a dark feel, are spells that take place inside the target. Be it mind control or harmfully altering the body of another person, or divination and shapeshifting on the side of the mage. Summoning of spirits and demons also blends in very nicely, but other than that, magic seems to be dominated by spells that take place inside of people. It's less visible, and at the same time more uncomfortable.

Dungeon Crawl Classics has some great rules for dark and scary magic- magic users and clerics alike have some awesomely dark magic patrons, magic can go wrong, there are random quirks, and can end up cursing or mutating the caster, etc. It may be too close to D&D, but it is awesome for a "dark" themed setting imo.

Anonymouswizard
2017-11-16, 06:26 PM
Seeing it put like this, I think that maybe the dominant forms of magic, that have a dark feel, are spells that take place inside the target. Be it mind control or harmfully altering the body of another person, or divination and shapeshifting on the side of the mage. Summoning of spirits and demons also blends in very nicely, but other than that, magic seems to be dominated by spells that take place inside of people. It's less visible, and at the same time more uncomfortable.

My thoughts exactly.

That's not to say that those are the only spells that work, but it can take more work to feel dark. Buffs are relatively easy, give them noticeable physical effects beyond bulging muscles and creepy goes up.

Completely agreeing on summon spells being in, I'd actually make it easier to summon high level demons than normal. Much, much easier to make a deal with the devil there. This doesn't have to go to the level of Lamentations of the Flame Princess where the rules as written allow a 1st level character to learn and cast Summon Cthulhu (which I'm certain is unintentional), but there should at least be particular ways to summon specific mid tier nasties. Also curses, even fairytale ones can be nasty, but if you can pull of the 'dark prophecy' variety ('you shall die alone and unloved') so much the better.

Lazymancer
2017-11-16, 07:37 PM
where the rules as written allow a 1st level character to learn and cast Summon Cthulhu (which I'm certain is unintentional),
What makes you think it is unintentional? Quite a lot of LotFP modules incorporate similar world-changing events.

Anonymouswizard
2017-11-17, 04:02 AM
What makes you think it is unintentional? Quite a lot of LotFP modules incorporate similar world-changing events.

Eh, forgot that you can apparently use sacrifices and thaumaturgic circles to summon cthulhu with the normal Simon spell, my bad.

Thinker
2017-11-17, 08:36 AM
My thoughts exactly.

That's not to say that those are the only spells that work, but it can take more work to feel dark. Buffs are relatively easy, give them noticeable physical effects beyond bulging muscles and creepy goes up.



I'm not normally a big fan of many buffs in general. They usually bring about too much bookkeeping. It's a bit different when you are changing so many things that you basically look at a different character sheet since that's easy enough to switch between, but tracking 10 minute, 30 minute, or hour-buffs can be tedious. I don't see them adding very much to games either since the GM should typically take them into account for planning anyway.

Yora
2017-11-17, 03:01 PM
When it comes to spells and items, though this is really regardless of genre, I think if you bother with tracking them, then they should be changing what the character is doing. If the character keeps doing the same things as before but with slightly altered odds, it's not worth the trouble. If you do a straightforward buff, the effect should be significant, like +100% or more.
Buffs always become much more interesting when they have a highly noticable physical effect on the target. Increased damage and armor becomes much more interesting when the character doubles in size at the same time.

Anonymouswizard
2017-11-17, 04:29 PM
I'm not normally a big fan of many buffs in general. They usually bring about too much bookkeeping. It's a bit different when you are changing so many things that you basically look at a different character sheet since that's easy enough to switch between, but tracking 10 minute, 30 minute, or hour-buffs can be tedious. I don't see them adding very much to games either since the GM should typically take them into account for planning anyway.

Well yes, agreeing with you there. As I said, my favorite spells are illusions, they require more effort to use effectively but they have a lively low fantasy feel, followed by healing spells because I'm the most likely to play a priestly character (barring D&D style druids, don't like shape shifting, but I adore playing religious characters).

S@tanicoaldo
2017-11-17, 06:11 PM
I love dark fantasy, this are some important points to me:

-Magic has to have a price, a terrible cost that makes it a dangerous tool, it can be demonic or lovecrafitian in fluff but make sure dealing with spirits and otherworldly energies a thing only a few dare to do, and even less survive.

-Political factions, make sure that there is a lot of space for intrigue, the nobles want to keep the status co, the guilds wants to raise the service wages and keep to goods cheap, the merchants want to raise the goods prices and keep the service wages cheap, the clerics want to spread their faith and brand other faiths as heresy, all this factions are kept in check by an unstable balance that could be easily broken by the players actions.

-Keep religion a matter of faith and politics not of the supernatural, making gods , the afterlife and the nature of the soul something that can only be theorized never proved open space for religious corruption and intrigue, after all how can the temples of the all loving good god be full of corrupted priests if they are under the guidance and the watchful eyes of a very real and all good entity?

-Choose if you want a grey, a black vs. grey or a black vs. black setting. As one of my favorite fantasy characters ever, said:

"Let me give you some advice, Captain. It may help you to make sense of the world. I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides."
— Lord Vetinari, Guards! Guards!

I think that's all I can come up so far.

RazorChain
2017-11-17, 06:26 PM
-Keep religion a matter of faith and politics not of the supernatural, making gods , the afterlife and the nature of the soul something that can only be theorized never proved open space for religious corruption and intrigue, after all how can the temples of the all loving good god be full of corrupted priests if they are under the guidance and the watchful eyes of a very real and all good entity?


In my Dark Fantasy everybody knows the Gods exists. The problem is the Gods arent very forthcoming to their followers. Also they kinda are psychopathic narcissists and reward their most fanatical supporters with divine magic or miracles

S@tanicoaldo
2017-11-17, 06:34 PM
In my Dark Fantasy everybody knows the Gods exists. The problem is the Gods arent very forthcoming to their followers. Also they kinda are psychopathic narcissists and reward their most fanatical supporters with divine magic or miracles

Yeah, having clerics casting miracles in the name of the good is a big "No no no" in my book :/

Miracles can exist, but we never know if they are real miracles or if people just choose to belive they are miracles.

Then a major faith may say "It was a miracle and anyone who says otherwise is a sinner" and then well nobody expects what comes next. ;)

Dragon age did it very well, everyone has faith in the maker but there is no real proof that he is there, just faith, the cleric is not a "White magic user" but rather a member of a political and religious institution who fights for the sake of that organization a gains a lot of wealth, social and political power becuase of his position..

So often the clerics fall in the “Healer” or “miracle maker" spot but I think the “Moving masses by the power of fear, faith and rhetoric alone” is a much more interesting character, especially in a dark fantasy where the gods can’t comfort you directly.

Besides if a god is real and you can talk to it where does all the conflict form those delicious canon disputes and contradictions will come?

EDIT: Another tip, make most encounters mundane, and when a supernatural encounter actually happens make it special and unique, use weird, strange and twisted creatures not the usual monsters form the monsters manual.

RazorChain
2017-11-17, 06:48 PM
Yeah, having clerics casting miracles in the name of the good is a big "No no no" in my book :/

Miracles can exist, but we never know if they are real miracles or if people just choose to belive they are mriacles.

Then a major faith may say "It was a miracle and anyone who says otherwise is a sinner" and then well nobody expects what comes next. ;)

Dragon age did it very well, everyone has faith in the maker but there is no real proof that he is there, just faith, the cleric is not a "White magic user" but rather a member of a political and religious institution who fights for the sake of that organization.

So often the clerics fall in the “Healer” or “miracle” maker spot but I think the “Moving masses by the power of faith and rhetoric alone” is a much more interesting character, especially in a dark fantasy where the gods can’t comfort you directly.

Besides if a god is real and you can talk to it where does all the conflict form those delicious cannon disputes and contradictions will come?

EDIT: Another tip, make most encounters mundane, and when a supernatural encounter actually happens make it special and unique, use weird, strange and twisted creatures not the usual monsters form the monsters manual.

There it comes in the not very forthcoming part, the Gods arent answering your petty questions and if they are they might contradict themselves. Lets take the Nordic and Greek Gods, capricious jerks most of the time. If you read about myths most gods arent really nice.

If you arent venerating them they are punishing you with plagues and hardships.

Now some fanatic idiot is given power from the divine that validates that he's "right" and fun ensues.

Anonymouswizard
2017-11-17, 07:05 PM
Honestly? In my dark fantasy setting I'm considering dropping clerics as a thing and allowing medicine checks to restore HP once a day (based on it trading all those minor wounds and scrapes HP characters pick up that cause fatigue).

Another problem for dark fantasy, do we use a death spiral? I'd say yes give penalties after enough HP has been lost, but there's a good argument to be made for less bookkeeping.

RazorChain
2017-11-17, 07:18 PM
Honestly? In my dark fantasy setting I'm considering dropping clerics as a thing and allowing medicine checks to restore HP once a day (based on it trading all those minor wounds and scrapes HP characters pick up that cause fatigue).

Another problem for dark fantasy, do we use a death spiral? I'd say yes give penalties after enough HP has been lost, but there's a good argument to be made for less bookkeeping.

I'm running a Mythic Europe setting in medieval times using real world religions which I cant discuss on these forums. But if you have read Ars Magica then you'll get my drift.

I'm using Gurps so there is no cleric class only people who can work miracles through faith.

Death Spiral is more about grittiness but I tend to run them Dark and Gritty. So the PC's dont want to be hit because then they get stunned or crippled or unconscious.

Anonymouswizard
2017-11-17, 07:43 PM
I'm running a Mythic Europe setting in medieval times using real world religions which I cant discuss on these forums. But if you have read Ars Magica then you'll get my drift.

I'm using Gurps so there is no cleric class only people who can work miracles through faith.

Death Spiral is more about grittiness but I tend to run them Dark and Gritty. So the PC's dont want to be hit because then they get stunned or crippled or unconscious.

Eh, more referencing the fact that magic using priests are now an expected part of fantasy having.

And why wouldn't a dark campaign be gritty? Dark and gritty go together like lamb and mint sauce.

RazorChain
2017-11-17, 08:24 PM
Eh, more referencing the fact that magic using priests are now an expected part of fantasy having.

And why wouldn't a dark campaign be gritty? Dark and gritty go together like lamb and mint sauce.

Oh I agree on the lamb and mint sauce but you could run it differently if you so desire. You could pour ketchup on that delicous steak. Not to everyones tastes but could work.

I think magic wielding priests are kinda D&Desque. I prefer non miracle working priests who work through spirits or somesuch.

But I'm kinda warming up to the groveling miracle worker that has to plead to his god for miracles. The more he pleads the more annoyed the god becomes. I'm using the reaction table from Gurps. Just hope your god is in a good mood and your cause is righteous

War_lord
2017-11-18, 01:37 AM
You can have gods and Clerics in Dark Fantasy, gods can be just as petty and capricious as mortals. That's a feature of many historical pantheons.

Yora
2017-11-18, 02:30 AM
Well yes, agreeing with you there. As I said, my favorite spells are illusions, they require more effort to use effectively but they have a lively low fantasy feel, followed by healing spells because I'm the most likely to play a priestly character (barring D&D style druids, don't like shape shifting, but I adore playing religious characters).
I think illusion in Dark Fantasy work best when you think of them as hallucinations rather than holograms. They also exist in the minds of targets, they are not physically there for everyone to see, indistinguishable from real things.


Another tip, make most encounters mundane, and when a supernatural encounter actually happens make it special and unique, use weird, strange and twisted creatures not the usual monsters form the monsters manual.

Lamentations of the Flame Princess recommends running campaigns set on historical Earth for that very reason. Something like a medieval Lovecraft story. I like my strange humanoids and unnatural landscapes too much to do it myself, but I can see it working really well.

Anonymouswizard
2017-11-18, 06:51 AM
Oh I agree on the lamb and mint sauce but you could run it differently if you so desire. You could pour ketchup on that delicous steak. Not to everyones tastes but could work.

I think magic wielding priests are kinda D&Desque. I prefer non miracle working priests who work through spirits or somesuch.

But I'm kinda warming up to the groveling miracle worker that has to plead to his god for miracles. The more he pleads the more annoyed the god becomes. I'm using the reaction table from Gurps. Just hope your god is in a good mood and your cause is righteous

Oh, they're certainly D&Desque, but annoyingly that's now the 'standard' for fantasy gaming, to the point I've seen them shoved into middle earth. I'm more of a fan of doctors and adventurers resting to recover after relatively short missions anyway, I'd rather have all magic users act the same and just say that some priests learn magic.

But D&D clerics completely rub me the wrong way, the actually feel disrespectful to religion to me. But oh so may GMs won't let me play a priest without taking levels in the class, even if I want to be a Fighter instead. Let my god save me via coincidences, not via spell slots. (Although I have no problems with priests that learn magic, but it should be that way round not 'has magic because priest'.)


I think illusion in Dark Fantasy work best when you think of them as hallucinations rather than holograms. They also exist in the minds of targets, they are not physically there for everyone to see, indistinguishable from real things.

Yeah, I kinda assume all illusions are like that. It's more fun.

Satinavian
2017-11-18, 09:21 AM
Priests doing magic was a very normal expectation before some Christian theologians put a stop to it. Even the word "magic" is derived from a certain type of ancient priest. So i have no problem with that one at all.

For Dark fantasy i would want to have a lot of different kinds of magic tradition which are seperately to learn and can't really be combined. Yes, a person could learn different types of magic bt there should nearly no synergy in doing so. And all of them should require years to study.

Then magic should not be good or evil but it should have a sliding risk scale. There should be kinds of magic that are safe but somewhat limited and others providing more power but could fail horribly.

And the option (not requirement) of sacrifice should exist.


Oh, and gods sould exist but should never talk or makes their exact opinion known about anything.

S@tanicoaldo
2017-11-18, 12:13 PM
There it comes in the not very forthcoming part, the Gods arent answering your petty questions and if they are they might contradict themselves. Lets take the Nordic and Greek Gods, capricious jerks most of the time. If you read about myths most gods arent really nice.

Yeah, but they also didn't do miracles. all the magical things the Æsi had were stolen or given to them by the elves, giants and dwarf, even Thor's hammer wasn't created by him.


Honestly? In my dark fantasy setting I'm considering dropping clerics as a thing and allowing medicine checks to restore HP once a day (based on it trading all those minor wounds and scrapes HP characters pick up that cause fatigue).

That sounds like a good idea. :)


I'm running a Mythic Europe setting in medieval times using real world religions which I cant discuss on these forums. But if you have read Ars Magica then you'll get my drift.

I'm using Gurps so there is no cleric class only people who can work miracles through faith.

But why healing through faith? Without the need of the Divine/Arcane divide arcane magic can be used for healing.


Eh, more referencing the fact that magic using priests are now an expected part of fantasy having.

I think it's more a D&D thing.


But I'm kinda warming up to the groveling miracle worker that has to plead to his god for miracles. The more he pleads the more annoyed the god becomes. I'm using the reaction table from Gurps. Just hope your god is in a good mood and your cause is righteous

You see but asking your god for miracles and intervention is a very modern thing, it doesn’t' makes sense in a setting where gods are uncaring or jerks.


Oh, they're certainly D&Desque, but annoyingly that's now the 'standard' for fantasy gaming, to the point I've seen them shoved into middle earth. I'm more of a fan of doctors and adventurers resting to recover after relatively short missions anyway, I'd rather have all magic users act the same and just say that some priests learn magic.

But D&D clerics completely rub me the wrong way, the actually feel disrespectful to religion to me. But oh so may GMs won't let me play a priest without taking levels in the class, even if I want to be a Fighter instead. Let my god save me via coincidences, not via spell slots. (Although I have no problems with priests that learn magic, but it should be that way round not 'has magic because priest'.)

Why not use normal magic for healing?


Priests doing magic was a very normal expectation before some Christian theologians put a stop to it. Even the word "magic" is derived from a certain type of ancient priest. So i have no problem with that one at all.

For Dark fantasy i would want to have a lot of different kinds of magic tradition which are seperately to learn and can't really be combined. Yes, a person could learn different types of magic bt there should nearly no synergy in doing so. And all of them should require years to study.

Then magic should not be good or evil but it should have a sliding risk scale. There should be kinds of magic that are safe but somewhat limited and others providing more power but could fail horribly.

And the option (not requirement) of sacrifice should exist.


Oh, and gods should exist but should never talk or makes their exact opinion known about anything.

I think it's the world mage that comes from magus.

But you see asking for a miracle is not how ancient priests used to do it!!! That's a modern thing, ancient clerics used to use spells, seals and true names to bully and force gods and spirits to do their bidding by using the power of the meta-divine realm; the supplicant idea comes very later on.

Yora
2017-11-18, 12:40 PM
You see but asking your god for miracles and intervention is a very modern thing, it doesn’t' makes sense in a setting where gods are uncaring or jerks.

Not at all. That's what sacrifices are for.

S@tanicoaldo
2017-11-18, 12:45 PM
Not at all. That's what sacrifices are for.

No, that's not how sacrifices work!

http://eleven-thirtyeight.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/nothowtheforceworks.jpg

Yora
2017-11-18, 01:10 PM
Hate to say "Yes, it does", but what else do you suppose making sacrifices is for?

S@tanicoaldo
2017-11-18, 01:13 PM
Hate to say "Yes, it does", but what else do you suppose making sacrifices is for?

So basically in a faith with many gods the gods aren’t their attributes, they become their attributes, the god of the underworld was not born the god of the underworld it becomes the god of the underworld, the god of lighting is not naturally capable of using lighting but uses it as a tool.

All these gods emerge from a meta-divine realm, something that is more powerful and responsible for the creation of all things, gods included, so even the gods must abide by the decree of this force, the nature of this realm changes from culture to culture but it’s often related to a common substance or object on earth like earth, water, blood, gold or fire.

Since the gods themselves are subjected to this force the human clerics use this substance to tap in the power of this meta divine realm, sometimes the gods act as a medium between humans and the power above all, some times the humans use these powers to protect themselves against the gods or even force them to do something, that’s why sacrifices of blood, gold or the use of fire are common in these religion's rituals.

If you have time, I have found a very interesting lecture about it while tring to find a way to explain the above in a free yale course:

LINK (https://youtu.be/wRPqtGywkCw?t=9m) from 9:00 to 22:00 if you have some time to kill it's an awesome ride.

Lazymancer
2017-11-18, 02:15 PM
I think it's the world mage that comes from magus.
Magus was a word for a priest.


But you see asking for a miracle is not how ancient priests used to do it!!! That's a modern thing, ancient clerics used to use spells, seals and true names to bully and force gods and spirits to do their bidding by using the power of the meta-divine realm; the supplicant idea comes very later on.
There are plenty examples of sacrifices being explicitly provided in exchange for expected miracle. For example, Roman "do ut des". Or is it a modern thing as well?


Since the gods themselves are subjected to this force the human clerics use this substance to tap in the power of this meta divine realm, sometimes the gods act as a medium between humans and the power above all, some times the humans use these powers to protect themselves against the gods or even force them to do something, that’s why sacrifices of blood, gold or the use of fire are common in these religion's rituals.

If you have time, I have found a very interesting lecture about it while tring to find a way to explain the above in a free yale course:

LINK (https://youtu.be/wRPqtGywkCw?t=9m) from 9:00 to 22:00 if you have some time to kill it's an awesome ride.
Gods were personifications. People were trying to treat them like "other humans". Projection of inter-human relations. Humanization of forces of nature, yes? Which is why both negotiations, coercion, seduction, deceit, and even revenge against gods had their place.

What Kaufmann attempts to do is to present monotheistic basis as being standard for all religions. Imho, for non-scientific purposes. :smallmad:

I'd elaborate, but this is all irrelevant (though quite worthy of discussion), since it is unlikely for the setting to be used by anthropologists. It's the regular people. Consequently, setting should adhere to the biases regular people have.

S@tanicoaldo
2017-11-18, 02:22 PM
Gods were personifications.

That's my point, they weren't that's a mistake, Zeus is not lighting, he needs the Cyclopes to forge the lighting for him, Hades is not the underworld, he was forced to that position when Zeus took earth and sky while Poseidon took the sea.

Gods are not the things they represent naturally, they may have an affinity to it, but it's thanks to the influences of other forces that they gain the power to control it.


Magus was a word for a priest.

That's what I said :p

Lazymancer
2017-11-18, 02:37 PM
That's my point, they weren't that's a mistake,
Well, you need arguments to support your point. So far I see only ancient urmonotheism. Who of the modern scholars supports this position?

Also, please, attempt to separate rationalization (stuff people invent to explain why they are doing something) from the actual reason why people are doing it. All the lightning-forging myths are rationalization. There was no point in history when someone suddenly declared "Hey! Cyclops forged lightning for Zeus! Let's worship him as the god of lightning!"

Zeus was associated with lightning before people started talking about Cyclops forging things for him. Consequently, we have personalization of lightning evolving away from the lightning as such (through merging with other ideas) and becoming part of "a person that has affinity to lightning".

So - yeah. Hades was the underworld before the whole religion started taking shape we are familiar with now.

S@tanicoaldo
2017-11-18, 02:39 PM
Well, you need arguments to support your point. So far I see only ancient urmonotheism. Who of the modern scholars supports this position?

Also, please, attempt to separate rationalization (stuff people invent to explain why they are doing something) from the actual reason why people are doing it. All the lightning-forging myths are rationalization. There was no point in history when someone suddenly declared "Hey! Cyclops forged lightning for Zeus! Let's worship him as the god of lightning!"

Zeus was associated with lightning before people started talking about Cyclops forging things for him. Consequently, we have personalization of lightning evolving away from the lightning as such (through merging with other ideas) and becoming part of "a person that has affinity to lightning".

So - yeah. Hades was the underworld before the whole religion started taking shape we are familiar with now.


That's a good point. Yeah.

RazorChain
2017-11-18, 02:52 PM
Yeah, but they also didn't do miracles. all the magical things the Æsi had were stolen or given to them by the elves, giants and dwarf, even Thor's hammer wasn't created by him

You are quite right that most of the magical items the Æsir had was created by dwarves, therefore we have crafting dwarves for evermore in RPG´s. But Odin was the god of magic and made the runes that could and was used for magic ritual. But people did use blót to do sacrifice to the Æsir to appease them and goðar were both chiftains and priests in scandinavian culture.




But why healing through faith? Without the need of the Divine/Arcane divide arcane magic can be used for healing.


You see but asking your god for miracles and intervention is a very modern thing, it doesn’t' makes sense in a setting where gods are uncaring or jerks.

Well I'm running a game based on the real world so miracle healing has it's tradition. Ordinary magic can heal as well but cost more resources. There are lots of systems that allow arcane magic to heal but systems that are based on niche protection....or classes usually relegate one class to healing. The Divine Intervention is much, much, much older than modern day and are miracles. To be a saint you have to have at least one miracle to your name. Greek myths are just about full of divine interventions where the gods are meddling in mortal affairs for good or ill.







I think it's the world mage that comes from magus.

But you see asking for a miracle is not how ancient priests used to do it!!! That's a modern thing, ancient clerics used to use spells, seals and true names to bully and force gods and spirits to do their bidding by using the power of the meta-divine realm; the supplicant idea comes very later on.

Magus is the word for mage in latin, but magus is used both for a wise man and a magician and the only priests it applied to were Zoroastrian priests. No the supplicant role has always been there appeasing the gods. The bullying, true naming of spirits etc belongs to magicians. There is very rarely or ever that you force a god to do your bidding.

Yora
2017-11-18, 03:17 PM
I've been starting to think about planning adventures, which I always had difficulties with, regardless of setting and genre.

What are the basic ingredients that are needed to give a campaign a dark feel and also make well playable? The main purpose of a campaign and a setting is to have the players do things. Yet I think many aspects that are commonly considered dark in fiction actually tend to get in the way of players doing things. Unbeatable foes, unexpected treachery, no hope of success, villlains that are always a step ahead, extreme risk, lack of resources. Players don't want to play out a story that has been prepared for them in which their characters suffer for their poor choices. Players want to do the smart thing that makes their characters avoid traps that have been set up for them. If players think that their goal is to outsmart the GM you have a recipe for endlessly debating every tiny detail and ultimately deciding to do nothing and see what happens. It's already a big problem to begin with and the factors are even amplified when you let the players know that the risk is higher and their chances of success lower than usually.
So what can be done about it?

Since overbearing caution and indecisiveness are likely to become major problems, I think it might actually be needed to give the players a lot of confidence in their ability to handle or at least survive almost anything they could run into. A game, and especially a dark one, needs tension. Usually in fiction it's the fake threat of the hero being killed, but in an RPG the threat is actually real, which leads to much more sensible caution than you have in books and movies. But what could work is to create tension by having someone else being at risk of getting killed? Whichever way the characters act, they will probably survive. But if they perform poorly or don't act at all, someone else is going to snuff it. Under these conditions, acting rashly is the better choice to staying put.
The big question is how to make the players care about other NPCs? I think this might actually require that all the PCs are commitedly heroic. They can't be selfish and they can't be too vulnerable, unless the theme of the campaign is to fight for your own survivial at all cost. (Which admitedly is also a valid option.)

Any ideas how to get the players invested in the people of a world that actually rather unpleasant and not too welcoming?

Satinavian
2017-11-18, 03:44 PM
I think it's the world mage that comes from magus.Which is the latinized version of the name of some kind of Zoroastrian priest.

But you see asking for a miracle is not how ancient priests used to do it!!! That's a modern thing, ancient clerics used to use spells, seals and true names to bully and force gods and spirits to do their bidding by using the power of the meta-divine realm; the supplicant idea comes very later on.Ancient priests did rituals all the time to appease gods or to bring them to do certain thinks. Basically doing this kind of ritual magic was all priesthood was actually about.

And yes, while that was more about knowledge and rules and less often about the priesthood making people into special relays for divine power, there is hardly any practical difference. It is just divine magic. No one cares if priests have a special bond with a god or living the life of a priest and going to all the crubicles a priest must perform gives you the power to do priestly stuff.


The big question is how to make the players care about other NPCs? I think this might actually require that all the PCs are commitedly heroic. They can't be selfish and they can't be too vulnerable, unless the theme of the campaign is to fight for your own survivial at all cost. (Which admitedly is also a valid option.)

Any ideas how to get the players invested in the people of a world that actually rather unpleasant and not too welcoming?Family and frieds are always good. You should have NPCs which are crealy on the side of the PCs and are actually nice to the PCs because of bonds. Those NPCs don't need to be good people or to like each other.

And you can have not heroic PCs too. They need obviously goals and you can link NPCs to those goals.

RazorChain
2017-11-18, 05:27 PM
One way is to make the players introduce the NPC's they care about via background. I do this all the time and is the driving force behind a character driven campaign.

As for choice paralyzis or indeciscions can be solved via trust. My players can trust that I'll pile it on them, bad things willl happen and they'll not always be victorious. They know the ride will be fun and interesting and their choices will matter and their characters will matter and they know I'll be fair.

In my group there will often be serious discussions in character how to proceed and consequences of their actions.

Dark and gritty isnt for everybody but one of my players professed she only liked happy fantasy with elves and unicorns, where the bad guys are EVIL and can be killed without second thought. Today she's hooked on Dark fantasy because she cared too much about the world and the npcs.

Lazymancer
2017-11-18, 07:39 PM
What are the basic ingredients that are needed to give a campaign a dark feel ...
I'd say, the PC can't be Heroes. Not in the Lawful Good Paladin sense.

Even if PCs are objectively acting as a bunch of violent psychopats, in Heroic Fantasy that can be pretended away, ingored - PCs are Good Guys. In Dark Fantasy there are no such excuses. PCs don't get to have High Moral Ground. Not by default, at least.


A game, and especially a dark one, needs tension. Usually in fiction it's the fake threat of the hero being killed, but in an RPG the threat is actually real, which leads to much more sensible caution than you have in books and movies. But what could work is to create tension by having someone else being at risk of getting killed?
First and foremost, you are jumping straight from "game needs tension" to "only death threat is tension".

Players want something to happen (or not happen), but result is uncertain. That's how you get tension. Specific thing players care about might not be limited to death alone.

Secondly, you can't equate death of NPC with the death of PC. The latter is qualitatively different from former: PC-death is undesirable primarily because it removes ability of player to do things, not because PC-death as such is undesirable (it is not unthinkable for player to suicide his character to make a new one).


The big question is how to make the players care about other NPCs? I think this might actually require that all the PCs are commitedly heroic.
See above. What DF media has committedly heroic heroes protagonists? At best, some become heroic (shortly before death).


Any ideas how to get the players invested in the people of a world that actually rather unpleasant and not too welcoming?
I'm not sure if there is one recipe on how to make everyone emotionally involved. The real question is: what your players care about?

Thrudd
2017-11-18, 09:19 PM
I've been starting to think about planning adventures, which I always had difficulties with, regardless of setting and genre.

What are the basic ingredients that are needed to give a campaign a dark feel and also make well playable? The main purpose of a campaign and a setting is to have the players do things. Yet I think many aspects that are commonly considered dark in fiction actually tend to get in the way of players doing things. Unbeatable foes, unexpected treachery, no hope of success, villlains that are always a step ahead, extreme risk, lack of resources. Players don't want to play out a story that has been prepared for them in which their characters suffer for their poor choices. Players want to do the smart thing that makes their characters avoid traps that have been set up for them. If players think that their goal is to outsmart the GM you have a recipe for endlessly debating every tiny detail and ultimately deciding to do nothing and see what happens. It's already a big problem to begin with and the factors are even amplified when you let the players know that the risk is higher and their chances of success lower than usually.
So what can be done about it?

Since overbearing caution and indecisiveness are likely to become major problems, I think it might actually be needed to give the players a lot of confidence in their ability to handle or at least survive almost anything they could run into. A game, and especially a dark one, needs tension. Usually in fiction it's the fake threat of the hero being killed, but in an RPG the threat is actually real, which leads to much more sensible caution than you have in books and movies. But what could work is to create tension by having someone else being at risk of getting killed? Whichever way the characters act, they will probably survive. But if they perform poorly or don't act at all, someone else is going to snuff it. Under these conditions, acting rashly is the better choice to staying put.
The big question is how to make the players care about other NPCs? I think this might actually require that all the PCs are commitedly heroic. They can't be selfish and they can't be too vulnerable, unless the theme of the campaign is to fight for your own survivial at all cost. (Which admitedly is also a valid option.)

Any ideas how to get the players invested in the people of a world that actually rather unpleasant and not too welcoming?

There's no sure way to get players to care about specific narrative elements (NPCs), at least not to the extent that it will generate a real sense of tension or suspense. I could pretend to care about NPCs or the game world in general, but there still needs to be a "game over" state that I am playing against. Maybe one way to do this is to tie "game over" to the NPC or NPCs that are threatened. Lose the village, lose the game, or people you're trying to protect serve as your "hit points", and the more people you fail to save the closer to game over it is. Failing must be a possibility and must have consequences or it isn't a game and there's no suspense, regardless of how good the story is. "Game over" doesn't necessarily mean stop playing, of course - start with new characters, or a new place not yet destroyed, or dealing with the consequences of the first failure.

Max_Killjoy
2017-11-18, 11:27 PM
So basically in a faith with many gods the gods aren’t their attributes, they become their attributes, the god of the underworld was not born the god of the underworld it becomes the god of the underworld, the god of lighting is not naturally capable of using lighting but uses it as a tool.

All these gods emerge from a meta-divine realm, something that is more powerful and responsible for the creation of all things, gods included, so even the gods must abide by the decree of this force, the nature of this realm changes from culture to culture but it’s often related to a common substance or object on earth like earth, water, blood, gold or fire.

Since the gods themselves are subjected to this force the human clerics use this substance to tap in the power of this meta divine realm, sometimes the gods act as a medium between humans and the power above all, some times the humans use these powers to protect themselves against the gods or even force them to do something, that’s why sacrifices of blood, gold or the use of fire are common in these religion's rituals.



There's nothing objective or historically universal about that approach to deities in any real or fictional setting.

RazorChain
2017-11-19, 12:26 AM
But D&D clerics completely rub me the wrong way, the actually feel disrespectful to religion to me. But oh so may GMs won't let me play a priest without taking levels in the class, even if I want to be a Fighter instead. Let my god save me via coincidences, not via spell slots. (Although I have no problems with priests that learn magic, but it should be that way round not 'has magic because priest'.)


This kinda reminds me of a gaming story about how the D&Desqe cleric was prevalent. A friend of mine was running Gurps for a group who was mostly used to D&D, one loudmouthed player manages to get his character killed and demands from rest of the players that they get his character resurrected. So the party trudges to this remote village in the middle of nowhere. The loudmouthed player tells the other player to take him to the priest immediately and pay him for the resurrection so he can enter play once more. The other players oblige, go to this shabby church and kindly inquire of the village priest if he can resurrect their friend, they are willing to pay. The priest looks at the body they dumped in front of him and tells them he isn't able to resurrect their friend for money but he'll dig him a hole for free.

Yora
2017-11-19, 02:08 AM
What DF media has committedly heroic heroes protagonists? At best, some become heroic (shortly before death).

Goody-two-shoes in shining armor are certainly out of place. You could say that the main point of distinguishing Dark Fantasy as a separate thing is to identify stories in which such type of virtous heroism doesn't work.
But there are plenty of characters who rush to save others from harm at a great danger to themselves and go to considerable length and efforts to do so while they could easily save themselves.
There is Jirel of Joiry, Geralt from The Witcher, Tyrion Lanister and Brienne of Tarth from A Song of Ice and Fire, A****aka in Princess Mononoke, Gerret in Thief, Alistair, Leliana, and Hawke in Dragon Age, and Hellboy and Abe in Hellboy/B.P.R.D. They don't fight evil for any personal gain, but out of a deep commitment to save others threatened by it.

Lazymancer
2017-11-19, 06:10 AM
... rush to save others from harm at a great danger to themselves and go to considerable length and efforts to do so while they could easily save themselves. ... deep commitment to save others ...
Garret literally kills innocent people to steal money they protect (I know, I did). Someone needs to rush to save others from him. Geralt and Tyrion also are hardly heroic in the sense you described:

I think this might actually require that all the PCs are commitedly heroic. They can't be selfish ...
There are specific others whom they want to save, but those are their friends. I.e. not exactly selfless actions.

I'd argue Princess Mononoke is not fully DF. Unfortunately, I can't comment on neither Jirel, nor Hellboy due to total and absolute lack of familiarity with both (are you sure Hellboy is DF?). Sidekicks from Dragon Age are not exactly protagonists and they didn't leave much of an impression.

This leaves us with Brienne. Who - while fitting heroic trope to a T - is a deconstruction. Being emotionally dependent on Heroic values (and, arguably, mentally unstable), she demonstrates the unsuitability of Heroic values to the world of DF.

Thinker
2017-11-19, 11:52 AM
I've been starting to think about planning adventures, which I always had difficulties with, regardless of setting and genre.

What are the basic ingredients that are needed to give a campaign a dark feel and also make well playable? The main purpose of a campaign and a setting is to have the players do things. Yet I think many aspects that are commonly considered dark in fiction actually tend to get in the way of players doing things. Unbeatable foes, unexpected treachery, no hope of success, villlains that are always a step ahead, extreme risk, lack of resources. Players don't want to play out a story that has been prepared for them in which their characters suffer for their poor choices. Players want to do the smart thing that makes their characters avoid traps that have been set up for them. If players think that their goal is to outsmart the GM you have a recipe for endlessly debating every tiny detail and ultimately deciding to do nothing and see what happens. It's already a big problem to begin with and the factors are even amplified when you let the players know that the risk is higher and their chances of success lower than usually.


That is common in heroic fantasy. You have to set the expectations for the game in the beginning. Make character creation fast and easy. Make sure people know that their characters can (and likely will) die. The quests won't be about stopping the bad guy; they'll be about reducing the damage. Some games even have the conceit that the bad guy is most likely going to win.



So what can be done about it?

Since overbearing caution and indecisiveness are likely to become major problems, I think it might actually be needed to give the players a lot of confidence in their ability to handle or at least survive almost anything they could run into. A game, and especially a dark one, needs tension. Usually in fiction it's the fake threat of the hero being killed, but in an RPG the threat is actually real, which leads to much more sensible caution than you have in books and movies. But what could work is to create tension by having someone else being at risk of getting killed? Whichever way the characters act, they will probably survive. But if they perform poorly or don't act at all, someone else is going to snuff it. Under these conditions, acting rashly is the better choice to staying put.
The big question is how to make the players care about other NPCs? I think this might actually require that all the PCs are commitedly heroic. They can't be selfish and they can't be too vulnerable, unless the theme of the campaign is to fight for your own survivial at all cost. (Which admitedly is also a valid option.)

Any ideas how to get the players invested in the people of a world that actually rather unpleasant and not too welcoming?
Giving the players a high confidence in their abilities only trivializes the dark nature of the game. "Oh, an ancient elder god? No problem!" You need to mechanically encourage the players to act. There are many ways that games can do this:
Powered by the Apocalypse games say when the players turn to you to see what happens, throw something at them. Basically, whenever the players are at a loss for their next actions, either make an event that will create drama in the near future (a guard running into the manor bloodied and dying; an explosion heard off in the distance) or throw something dangerous at them RIGHT NOW (the tavern door is blown off its hinges and the room chills as the wraith stalks into the parlor).
Dread does this by playing with a Jenga tower. Whenever the players perform an action, they remove a block from the tower. When the tower falls, the character dies. It is not uncommon for the monster to win in Dread. This mechanic also builds tension - the players can see the tower's base getting narrower. They can see it start to shake. They know that the next character to search a room or encounter a devil-dog might be the next one to die.
The Angry GM recommended a tracker of some kind that is tied to 10-minute activities (like searching a room or interrogating a suspect). Each step on the tracker is a step closer to something happening.
I favor using a deck of cards with a joker in it. Do an action, draw a card. If it's a joker, something bad happens and if not, discard the card. Shuffle after a joker is drawn. The players can again see the coming badness.
This suspense allows you as the GM to throw really bad things or bad choices at the players after a buildup of tension. Save the sacrifice to the dark god or save the village from the dark god's cult?

You also ask why the characters should care about the NPCs or the world in general. This is also answered by mechanics. Give the players XP for every one of their contacts still alive at the end of a session. Make them create some sort of in-character bonds with those contacts so you have something to pull on. Those times when something bad happens from the tracker above? Those are times you put their contacts into danger. Don't necessarily kill them right away, but if the dice work against the players, they'll miss out on XP by the end of the session (as a group).

Satinavian
2017-11-19, 01:03 PM
[list] Powered by the Apocalypse games say when the players turn to you to see what happens, throw something at them. Basically, whenever the players are at a loss for their next actions, either make an event that will create drama in the near future (a guard running into the manor bloodied and dying; an explosion heard off in the distance) or throw something dangerous at them RIGHT NOW (the tavern door is blown off its hinges and the room chills as the wraith stalks into the parlor).That produces fast paced action heavy games with lots of improvising. I don't think that is appropriate for dark fantasy.

This suspense allows you as the GM to throw really bad things or bad choices at the players after a buildup of tension. That is stuff for narrative heavy horror games. I don't think that fits dark fantasy either

For dark fantasy you want bad thinks in the world, problems without easy solutions where you have to think before you act and maybe dilemmas with sacrifices. Throwing random bad things for drama in doesn't really help at all. The bad things have to result from the player decision to give those decisions weight, not from some timer.

War_lord
2017-11-19, 01:42 PM
Goody-two-shoes in shining armor are certainly out of place. You could say that the main point of distinguishing Dark Fantasy as a separate thing is to identify stories in which such type of virtous heroism doesn't work.
But there are plenty of characters who rush to save others from harm at a great danger to themselves and go to considerable length and efforts to do so while they could easily save themselves.
There is Jirel of Joiry, Geralt from The Witcher, Tyrion Lanister and Brienne of Tarth from A Song of Ice and Fire, A****aka in Princess Mononoke, Gerret in Thief, Alistair, Leliana, and Hawke in Dragon Age, and Hellboy and Abe in Hellboy/B.P.R.D. They don't fight evil for any personal gain, but out of a deep commitment to save others threatened by it.

Geralt isn't heroic, he has a sense of right and wrong, and will intervene in situations where there's an obvious wrong being committed. But ultimately his only true loyalty is to his close friends and to Ciri. At one point in the books he is knighted after helping turn the tide of a battle... and then immediately deserts and loses it upon being refused leave to continue the search for Ciri. Tyrion Lannister's "good" acts all stem from his anger at being rejected by this father. Brienne's heroism and honor is constantly shown to be impractical in the face of the realities of Westeros. Garrett fights evil only because the city being destroyed would involve him dying.

One of the core themes of Dark fantasy is that the "heroic" solutions aren't the best solutions, and often the "evil" solutions have some merit or internal logic to them.

Yora
2017-11-19, 01:55 PM
Then let's forget about the term hero if it makes you feel better. What matters is that characters care about bad things happening to others and will try to intervene if it seems to be within their power.
You can have PCs who care only for their personal gain in a dark setting of course. But I feel that it makes it very difficult to prepare for a campaign that lasts for more than a few sessions until the players get bored with random mayhem and avoiding any risks for a bigger goal.

I happened to find this fairly long article on running Dark Fantasy campaigns (http://www.rpgjutsu.com/2016/02/15/dark-fantasy-the-horrific-end-to-heroes/), though it seems to deal exclusively with the grimdark way of things, and doesn't seem very good for that purpose either.

But I did get a couple of good thoughts from it, which could work quite well for grittier high fantasy:
- Potions are always a somewhat revolting experience. Not just a simple stat boost in a bottle, but a strange poison whose side effects outweigh the harm they do.

- Efficient and powerful evil authorities make a good constant threat that forces the players to be careful and use restraint. Killing bandits and monsters wont cause them any trouble, but if players try to make any changes that benefit the common poor, it will always greatly displease those people who are benefiting from such structural injustice. And PCs usually move on quickly while townspeople stay behind and have to deal with the consequences of having angered powerful evil people, so most of them won't be too happy about players going after the local rulers, lawmen, and crime groups. Whatever the players are doing to be "helpful", don't rock the boat.
This allows players to make a real difference for the better, but still doesn't let them make any real improvements. I feel that this is one of the central aspects of darkness. Things always tend to return back to the status quo, even if the old players have been replaced with new players. Trying to bring real change only leads to trouble.

- Similiarly, if the PCs still end up getting popular for their small deeds, it's going to make them enemies who see them as a threat.This invites villains to come for the PCs personally.

Somewhat unrelated to that, when it comes to preventing indecisions, I think what's really needed is that players feel confident that they won't be killed as the consequence of opening a door or going around a corner. First they have to see a threat and then be facing the choice of engaging with it or trying to avoid it. And when it comes to engaging danger, their confidence to be able to deal with it should be low.
I think this is something that can be accomplished by not having dark elder gods hiding in random treasure chests, and also not any lesser threats in situations where the players don't have warning of immenent danger. Then they will hopefully get used to it that they don't have to be afraid to open a door or enter a room. But I assume that player will take such things for granted, especially when expecting a darker and more dangerous campaign. The only way I can think of is to straight up tell the players at the beginning that they won't be suffering lethal damage from random doors and cobblestones.

War_lord
2017-11-19, 02:40 PM
Then let's forget about the term hero if it makes you feel better. What matters is that characters care about bad things happening to others and will try to intervene if it seems to be within their power.
You can have PCs who care only for their personal gain in a dark setting of course. But I feel that it makes it very difficult to prepare for a campaign that lasts for more than a few sessions until the players get bored with random mayhem and avoiding any risks for a bigger goal.

Most people care about bad things happening to others and will try to intervene if it seems to be within their power. That's everyone who's not a Psychopath. Dark Fantasy protagonists act over things that are important to them not out of any wider sense of heroism. Players carrying out random mayhem and avoiding risks is a matter of player investment, and can happen in any genre.

Aneurin
2017-11-19, 02:46 PM
Then let's forget about the term hero if it makes you feel better. What matters is that characters care about bad things happening to others and will try to intervene if it seems to be within their power.
You can have PCs who care only for their personal gain in a dark setting of course. But I feel that it makes it very difficult to prepare for a campaign that lasts for more than a few sessions until the players get bored with random mayhem and avoiding any risks for a bigger goal.

A bigger goal does not necessarily mean the characters have to care about other characters. Or at least, not care about a bunch of strangers in a heroic fantasy save-the-world deal.

Take Glen Cook's Black Company novels; the Black Company don't do what they do to save people. They're in it for the Company, for their brothers in the Company. They join the White Rose in the fight against the Domination not because they plan on saving the world, but because the Lady would annihilate them if they found out they'd had the Rose and let her escape. They don't set out to save Taglios, or end piracy down river from Gea-Xle; they do it because it's another step on the road to Khatovar, and returning the Annals. They don't set themselves against the Great General, the protector and the Daughter of Night because it's the right thing to do, but because the Company's leaders hate them a lot.

Having a goal doesn't mean doing nice things. "We will save the world because the world is where we live," is a perfectly acceptable goal. "We will save the world because lots of people will die"... kinda doesn't feel Dark Fantasy, at least to me. I'm not saying people can't be altruistic in dark fantasy games, but they should have more complicated reasons for doing things than "it's the right thing to do!".

Yora
2017-11-19, 04:00 PM
Most people care about bad things happening to others and will try to intervene if it seems to be within their power. That's everyone who's not a Psychopath.

Which is the difference between Dark Fantasy and Grimdark, I would say. :smallbiggrin:

Max_Killjoy
2017-11-19, 04:16 PM
For this sort of setting and story, the goals don't have to be big, they can be personal, and a heroic act can be something small instead of something world-changing.

Thinker
2017-11-19, 04:37 PM
That produces fast paced action heavy games with lots of improvising. I don't think that is appropriate for dark fantasy.
It really doesn't produce fast-paced, action-heavy games, though it certainly requires improvisation. It's a mechanic to make sure that the game keeps on moving. Things happening doesn't always have to be an action sequence. It can be as big as an ancient god awakening from a ten thousand year slumber or as small as the bar being out of your favorite beer, but the barkeep knowing where you can find some. It can be as action-packed as you want it to be. The only requirement is that it make logical sense with what has happened thus far in the story. The dragon shouldn't awaken until the players have heard tell of the prophecy about it awakening.



That is stuff for narrative heavy horror games. I don't think that fits dark fantasy either

For dark fantasy you want bad thinks in the world, problems without easy solutions where you have to think before you act and maybe dilemmas with sacrifices. Throwing random bad things for drama in doesn't really help at all. The bad things have to result from the player decision to give those decisions weight, not from some timer.
First off, it's not random bad things. It's always a bad thing based on the fiction presented up until that point and it is always relevant to the current context. If you're infiltrating a goblin encampment, the badness is going to be related to the goblins in some way (or to another group). You can also use it as an opportunity to reveal a dark or unwelcome truth - maybe the goblins aren't simple raiders, but are followers of a secret cult who are kidnapping people, not as slaves, but as sacrifices. In that case, the "bad thing" might be the players stumbling into the sacrifice chamber. Secondly, dark fantasy isn't just fantasy where everything sucks. It's much closer to horror than to the heroics of something like Lord of the Rings. Like horror, there is despair, suspense, and a sense of the the world unraveling around you. Finally, pacing mechanics are beneficial regardless of the type of game you're playing. Tying it to mechanics that affect the players in some way is the only way for the pacing to matter.

You might not like having consequences to the pacing mechanics and that's fine, though consequences are entirely appropriate for dark fantasy. Tie it to something good. Draw a joker and get bonus XP - build anticipation instead of suspense.

Anonymouswizard
2017-11-19, 04:43 PM
That sounds like a good idea. :)

Yep, especially outside a 'hp as meat' system. It means characters can recover from mistakes without being able to be reckless.


I think it's more a D&D thing.

The problem is that to most people the difference between 'fantasy gaming' and 'D&D' is nonexistent.

Now I love fantasy games without divine magic, where priests either don't get it or have to learn it the same as other people do. Or where priests have a monopoly on magic. But considering whenever I try to run such a game I get complaints about how it's not got D&D element X, which doesn't happen when I run science fiction, so I can't be asked to say 'D&D-style clerics don't fit, but that doesn't matter if you're using another system'.


Why not use normal magic for healing?

Honestly? Because it doesn't fit how most wizards in media heal people. It's 'my knowledge of the healing arts saved you', and while it could be represented by magic it could also just be having a really good Medicine skill, and I prefer the latter approach.


This kinda reminds me of a gaming story about how the D&Desqe cleric was prevalent. A friend of mine was running Gurps for a group who was mostly used to D&D, one loudmouthed player manages to get his character killed and demands from rest of the players that they get his character resurrected. So the party trudges to this remote village in the middle of nowhere. The loudmouthed player tells the other player to take him to the priest immediately and pay him for the resurrection so he can enter play once more. The other players oblige, go to this shabby church and kindly inquire of the village priest if he can resurrect their friend, they are willing to pay. The priest looks at the body they dumped in front of him and tells them he isn't able to resurrect their friend for money but he'll dig him a hole for free.

Yep, and sometimes people wonder why I don't rush into fights. My character might die, he's not going to want to be that stupid!

Satinavian
2017-11-20, 02:52 AM
It really doesn't produce fast-paced, action-heavy games, though it certainly requires improvisation. It's a mechanic to make sure that the game keeps on moving. Things happening doesn't always have to be an action sequence. It can be as big as an ancient god awakening from a ten thousand year slumber or as small as the bar being out of your favorite beer, but the barkeep knowing where you can find some. It can be as action-packed as you want it to be. The only requirement is that it make logical sense with what has happened thus far in the story. The dragon shouldn't awaken until the players have heard tell of the prophecy about it awakening.That is what tradidionally timeskips and downtime is for : Moving on to the next interesting event when nothing else needs to be done between.

But introducing new events for player inactivity means that the players don't get the opportunity to think things through, to let their charcaters do their everyday life inbetween or to process the things that have happened so far.
You need to have boring uneventful IT time to keep the important events rare and uncommon instead of just tuesday. You just don't have to play that out.

Secondly, dark fantasy isn't just fantasy where everything sucks. It's much closer to horror than to the heroics of something like Lord of the Rings. Like horror, there is despair, suspense, and a sense of the the world unraveling around you. Finally, pacing mechanics are beneficial regardless of the type of game you're playing. I severely disagree with that. Sure, the sense of a world unraveling is usefull for horror. But for dark fantasy you want the players to be invested in the world so decisions and consequences matter more. You want a world that makes sense, not one that feels surreal and about to be undone.

You might not like having consequences to the pacing mechanics and that's fine, though consequences are entirely appropriate for dark fantasy. Tie it to something good. Draw a joker and get bonus XP - build anticipation instead of suspense.Actually i don't see any need for metagame pacing mechanics at all for dak fantasy. Why would i want that here, what is the purpose ?

In horror games it is about adding tension. And having unknown bad events that are inherently unavoidable by ingame decisions but with ever increasing chance the more time goes by without one happening is usefull for horror But dark fantasy draws its tension instead from ingame events and works best as high immersion thing. Which means that unknown unexpected threats are useless, as the characters can't fear them, only the players can. And the threats should also not be unavoidable as that basically kills any tension and weight coming from the character decisions a player takes.


The problem is that to most people the difference between 'fantasy gaming' and 'D&D' is nonexistent.A surprising number of players on this board come from countries where D&D is not and has never been the most successfull RPG system. And from the rest many have played other systems.

Yes, we all like D&D examples because they are most widely understood worldwide and expeccially on an English language forum based on a D&D comic. But i would not extract fom that that most players here actually play D&D foremost or even that often. Nor that they are unaware of the difference to "fantasy gaming".

Mutazoia
2017-11-20, 03:30 AM
I severely disagree with that. Sure, the sense of a world unraveling is usefull for horror. But for dark fantasy you want the players to be invested in the world so decisions and consequences matter more. You want a world that makes sense, not one that feels surreal and about to be undone.

I think you are confusing "Dark Fantasy" and "Horror" here, as horror doesn't necessitate a (potentially) world ending plot, where as a (potentially) world ending plot is pretty much the staple for "Dark Fantasy". Think about every "Dark Fantasy" example you've heard of (games, novels, movies), and you'll find that a common trope is "the world is FUBAR unless the heroes do something". Now thing of every "Horror" example you've ever heard of. Horror most commonly breaks down into "Look at all that blood, wasn't that scary? The monster was behind the door, wasn't that scary? Are you scared yet?" Basically, "The Heroes run around fighting scarier monsters than usual."

In a (very basic) nutshell, "Dark Fantasy" is "there is something very wrong, and it's up to you to fix it, or it's going to get worse" where-as "Horror" is just going "BOO" over and over again.


In horror games it is about adding tension. And having unknown bad events that are inherently unavoidable by ingame decisions but with ever increasing chance the more time goes by without one happening is usefull for horror But dark fantasy draws its tension instead from ingame events and works best as high immersion thing. Which means that unknown unexpected threats are useless, as the characters can't fear them, only the players can. And the threats should also not be unavoidable as that basically kills any tension and weight coming from the character decisions a player takes.

Again, I think you might be a little off here.

Giving the players something to fear, whether they can do anything about it or not, is kind of the point. The characters are not going to sit around fretting about things...they can't....they only exist in our heads. So if WE are not fretting about things, neither are they. And you can build a hellofalotof tension in a game by giving the players a choice of stopping bad event A or bad even B, but not both. Letting them fret over which nasty consequences they get to deal with later does, in fact, build tension. Especially when those consequences start snowballing with other consequences. (Though you don't want to do that too much, or the players will start to get the feeling that they can't win, no matter what they do.)

Yora
2017-11-20, 05:41 AM
In a (very basic) nutshell, "Dark Fantasy" is "there is something very wrong, and it's up to you to fix it, or it's going to get worse" where-as "Horror" is just going "BOO" over and over again.
That's not a good description of horror. That is merely bad horror. Slaaher gore torture porn.


You need to have boring uneventful IT time to keep the important events rare and uncommon instead of just tuesday. You just don't have to play that out.
I severely disagree with that. Sure, the sense of a world unraveling is usefull for horror. But for dark fantasy you want the players to be invested in the world so decisions and consequences matter more. You want a world that makes sense, not one that feels surreal and about to be undone.
Dark Fantasy seems like a prime candidate for long run, serial episodic campaigns. The players face a threat and deal with it, but months or years later it comes back or a new threat shows up to attack whatever they had previously protected. It's not powering through once and being done, but having to fight over and over with no specific end in sight.

There are some really good thoughts on this here. (http://udan-adan.blogspot.de/2017/01/the-long-haul-time-and-distance-in-d.html)

Yora
2017-11-21, 01:45 PM
I would like to hear some thoughts on monsters.

Somehow I feel like less is more. When I sit down to write up a list of monsters to populate a Dark Fantasy world, it ends up being really short. All the many types of fictional wild animals don't feel like they are contributing much.
Undead of course work great, in any imaginable combination. But what else would you be using?

Lazymancer
2017-11-21, 03:27 PM
I would like to hear some thoughts on monsters.

Somehow I feel like less is more. When I sit down to write up a list of monsters to populate a Dark Fantasy world, it ends up being really short. All the many types of fictional wild animals don't feel like they are contributing much.
Undead of course work great, in any imaginable combination. But what else would you be using?
I'd be using humans, since I consider DF to be social flavour of setting.

However bad situation is, it's not DF unless someone is trying to stab you in the back.

Thrudd
2017-11-21, 03:47 PM
I would like to hear some thoughts on monsters.

Somehow I feel like less is more. When I sit down to write up a list of monsters to populate a Dark Fantasy world, it ends up being really short. All the many types of fictional wild animals don't feel like they are contributing much.
Undead of course work great, in any imaginable combination. But what else would you be using?

Anything you think is scary/creepy, your players might think is scary, or something you can make seem scary or creepy. Invent stuff. Does physical horror get to you? Use some grotesque deformities and mutants or creatures that have grotesque features. Is Cannibalism/being eaten scary? Throw some of that in there. Alien weirdness and unfathomable monstrosities? Use something like blobs/ooze and tentacles and teeth in all the wrong places. You get the picture. Think about the creepy movies and stories you've read, stuff you find scary, and translate it into the game.

Anonymouswizard
2017-11-21, 06:39 PM
I would like to hear some thoughts on monsters.

Somehow I feel like less is more. When I sit down to write up a list of monsters to populate a Dark Fantasy world, it ends up being really short. All the many types of fictional wild animals don't feel like they are contributing much.
Undead of course work great, in any imaginable combination. But what else would you be using?

My first thought is that monsters should be rare, because the more common something is the less scary it is. I myself tend towards humans and humanoid monsters, weird creatures are a bit too D&D for me to take them seriously, and I tend to restrict 'Eldritch Abominations' to the higher levels of both Law and Chaos.


Anything you think is scary/creepy, your players might think is scary, or something you can make seem scary or creepy. Invent stuff. Does physical horror get to you? Use some grotesque deformities and mutants or creatures that have grotesque features. Is Cannibalism/being eaten scary? Throw some of that in there. Alien weirdness and unfathomable monstrosities? Use something like blobs/ooze and tentacles and teeth in all the wrong places. You get the picture. Think about the creepy movies and stories you've read, stuff you find scary, and translate it into the game.

Oh yep. One of the thing's you'll notice missing from any monsters I create is any obviously missing parts or 'looks like it's rotting or wounded' elements, because I just find them icky instead of scary or creepy. I'm much more comfortable running a sentient gas cloud as a monster.

Although I do get weird ideas occasionally. Spoilered because I plan to use it if I ever run a fantasy campaign again.
Someone asked on a Facebook writers group what a monster made of light and destroyed by light would be like. I decided to interpret monster loosely, and came up with a propagating information pattern carried by a certain wavelength of light.

The idea being if this wavelength hits something, I think the original version was just living cells but I could see it done with inanimate objects as well, then that thing absorbs some of the information. Absorb enough of the information and you get 'taken over', the infected cell becomes a new source, communicates with other sources it can 'see', and eventually the entire organism is infected, which moves somewhere and attempts to shine on other organisms to infect them. The only way to disinfect a creature is to shine enough 'natural light' (read: sunlight) on it to cause 'noise' and stop the information pattern from significantly disrupting the cell's. Yeah, it's a bit of a handwave I'll develop more when I have to develop the creature.

How to use it? I'm not putting that in here, other than drop a source somewhere without natural light and let it happen. I certainly have plans for it that'll case the pattern to be a reoccuring, hard to eliminate 'creature'.

Lacco
2017-11-22, 04:18 AM
If we go by the Witcher, I would suggest to look up the "Eye of Yrrhedesh" book. An RPG published by Sapkowski - I'm not sure if it was translated into English, but if yes, it could offer an insight into his ideas.

Basically, the "monsters" are both animals (one of his suggestions for "special" monster is "swarm of hornets" - it can be fought off only by using fire, the other option is "run away") and things of legends. Since you come from Germany, you can check the large assortment of "beasts" (in Witcher, Sapkowski uses rübezahl from what I remember) from the local myths & legends. The important thing is to take what you know and change a thing or two for the players as surprise (e.g. the basilisk's sight does not do anything, but his breath is toxic/mandrake does not scream but produces a neurotoxin which causes hallucinations).

He even recommended creating "special" beasts (his example was a red "toxic" dragon IIRC).

Still, less is more, as you said, especially in dark fantasy. There should be only few of these mythical beasts, but they should be very dangerous if approached/fought on their own rules. On the other hand, there should be a lot of stories about such things (if we go by the rumors, every castle should be populated by an army of ghosts, the will-o-wisps kidnap a kid into marshes every week, and werewolves roam the countryside - but the ghosts are actually conspirators, the will-o-wisps are actually lazy parents and the werewolves are hungry dogs).

I observed that when they actually start finding evidence of a mythical beast after few of these, players tend to get really nervous... :smallbiggrin:

Yora
2017-11-22, 11:03 AM
Dark Fantasy is driven to agreat degree by treachery, deception, and the permanent threat of something waiting to jump you from behind. This is actually really easy to adapt to the design of monsters. You simply need some monsters that are not immediately obvious as such, being disguised as people or animals, or being outright invisible.
There's a lot of classics there: Werewolves, vampires, succubuses, wendigos, carnivorous trees, undead animals, swamp creatures, demon possession, changelings, witches, cults, animated corpses, and all of that.

Thinker
2017-11-22, 12:09 PM
Dark Fantasy is driven to agreat degree by treachery, deception, and the permanent threat of something waiting to jump you from behind. This is actually really easy to adapt to the design of monsters. You simply need some monsters that are not immediately obvious as such, being disguised as people or animals, or being outright invisible.
There's a lot of classics there: Werewolves, vampires, succubuses, wendigos, carnivorous trees, undead animals, swamp creatures, demon possession, changelings, witches, cults, animated corpses, and all of that.

In addition to those, you might have some success with hive-minds or mind-control (or a mix of the two). Some examples:
An ancient evil has infected the water supply, taking over the minds of the town-folk. The people don't know what is happening to them, though always feel tired and lethargic for some reason. It is only currently strong enough to affect them at night, but it is growing in power.
An herb that was mistaken for a medicine rapidly regenerates peoples' wounds, but it warps their minds and can even take them over if they are close enough to the plant that served as its source.
Voodoo-style zombies, complete with zombie master priest.

Lazymancer
2017-11-22, 01:46 PM
Dark Fantasy is driven to agreat degree by treachery, deception, and the permanent threat of something waiting to jump you from behind. This is actually really easy to adapt to the design of monsters. You simply need some monsters that are not immediately obvious as such, being disguised as people or animals, or being outright invisible.
There's a lot of classics there: Werewolves, vampires, succubuses, wendigos, carnivorous trees, undead animals, swamp creatures, demon possession, changelings, witches, cults, animated corpses, and all of that.
Evil is still color-coded for your convenience, no?

Lacco
2017-11-22, 01:57 PM
Evil is still color-coded for your convenience, no?

:smallbiggrin:

Nope.

In dark fantasy your local werewolf may be the guy who steals a sheep or two a year and "needs to be put down" because the peasants are afraid of him, but the real threat is the crazy fanatic who sends you on the mission to cleanse the area of evil/darkness because he wants to fuel his dark pact with demons with the deaths you cause... :smallbiggrin:

Anonymouswizard
2017-11-22, 02:04 PM
Evil is still color-coded for your convenience, no?

Certainly, if it's skin has a colour, including pink, it's probably evil.

Yora
2017-11-23, 03:23 AM
Yesterday I had an interesting idea that somehow never occured to me but is really simple. Not having another world from which the supernatural creatures come and where magical powers originate, but simply make them regular parts of the world where people and animals live.
For actual demons you probably need some kind of hell, but all the other nasties could simply be walking around in the trees beyond the fields and stroll closer during the night.I feel this makes for a more pervasive feeling of danger than punctual incursions from another world.

Anonymouswizard
2017-11-23, 06:09 AM
I don't think I have a 'monster dimension' bar Hell and Heaven with their demons and angels in any of my worlds, the closest is the void of space. Most creatures are natural to the world, the rest are artificial.

There is the portal to Australia, but that's to get rid of pesky high level PCs.

Yora
2017-11-23, 06:37 AM
When it comes to hero tales, I can't really think of any examples in which a hero is transported to a supernatural world through a ritual. To reach the magical places, one simply has to know where they are and walk there. They are places you can go to, though generally far away, which is the reason almost nobody ever goes there.

Spirit journeys could be an exception, but I think in those cases the spirit always leaves the body behind and actually stays in the same place while being able to see things that ar normally invisible to the eyes.

Actually different worlds seem to be mostly places where the souls of the dead go to, which are effectively completely cut off from the regular world with no real interactions.

I'm quite undecided what pick I want to go this for my own campaign. Both have their merits and interesting implications.

Satinavian
2017-11-23, 10:37 AM
Yesterday I had an interesting idea that somehow never occured to me but is really simple. Not having another world from which the supernatural creatures come and where magical powers originate, but simply make them regular parts of the world where people and animals live.
For actual demons you probably need some kind of hell, but all the other nasties could simply be walking around in the trees beyond the fields and stroll closer during the night.I feel this makes for a more pervasive feeling of danger than punctual incursions from another world.That is how nearly i always handle it. I assumed that was the default way of doing things.

Lacco
2017-11-23, 10:53 AM
Well, my usual way is never to tell the players truth from whence the creatures came.

Even the creatures themselves are not sure in my case :smallbiggrin:

Anonymouswizard
2017-11-23, 11:22 AM
Well, my usual way is never to tell the players truth from whence the creatures came.

Even the creatures themselves are not sure in my case :smallbiggrin:

The problem comes when a Ranger not only actually invests in tracking, but heavily specialises in it. How far back can they go when they roll a 63?

Yora
2017-12-09, 04:37 PM
I have to say this thread turned out way better than I would have ever imagined. Building upon the many ideas and tips that I got here, I have a rough outline for a setting and campaign framework, that I think could work really well.

The landscape is based on the Baltic Sea and the surrounding lands of Northeastern Europe, while the culture, technology, and visual style is based on the 14th century and includes also Byzantine and Mongol influences. The people are all effectively human with only some aesthetic adjustments to make it all feel a bit more otherworldly. It's a region and culture I've never really seen used in fantasy. One that is in many regards very similar to the familiar Viking settings, but at the same time also somewhat exotic due to the Asian influences that are bleeding into it.

Magic and religion is so deeply interwoven that it is basically the same, a form of pantheistic mysticism. The universe is a single plane in which everything is infused by a universal animating life force. Studying this force through mystic meditation and esoteric rituals allows people to manipulate it and cast spells, but an ordinary mortal mind is not meant to handle such an unfamiliar way of thought and perception. Both the knowledge and casting of spells drives people insane, which can be countered by the study of various mystical traditions that let a mystic make sense of the eldritch chaos in their thoughts to keep their minds and humanity intact. But even study of the tradition only reduces these mind altering effects, which makes mystics much more susceptible to certain supernatural phenomena that can shatter their minds much faster than those of regular people. They are especially vulnerable directly after casting spells and can destroy their minds by using too much magic in a short time. (This is a straight up adaptation of the traditions and the corruption system of Symbaroum.) But even to the ordinary people, these mystical philosophies are a source of spiritual strength and comfort by visualizing the universal life force as something less abstract, like the moon or fire.

Mystics are the dominant NPCs of the setting. Be it as priests or as independent sorcerers and witches. They pay a lot of money for unknown magic items, ancient tomes, or the notes of other powerful mystics who have made significant discoveries and breakthroughs. On the one hand it gives them more magic power, which translates into political power, but on the other hand it also is very important for them spiritually. Of course, being a Dark Fantasy setting, they are all loath to share their secrets and will never willingly let them fall into the hands of their rivals. To some degree they are all corrupt, even the pacifistic priestesses of the Mysteries of Life. They might not harm you or set you up for certain death, but they will be economical with the full truth and exploit their pawns for their personal gain.
In this environment, the players can take the role of treasure hunters, mercenaries, thieves for hire, or even temple enforcers, who search for ancient artifacts and tomes, protect them from theft, or steal them from rival factions. It doesn't have to include outright murder by any involved party, but that's always a possibility.

The life energy is not distributed evenly and people are most comfortable in regions where it exists at relatively low levels and few supernatural phenomena occure. In contrast, spirits are most comfortable in regions of very strong life energy where nature can behave in very weird ways. Spirits and mortals tend to not get very well along with each other and regions that are home to large numbers of powerful spirits are effectively uninhabitable. Minor spirits lingering in the woods beyond the fields don't tend to be much of a problem, though.
Unfortunately for everyone involved, the concentrations of magical life energy are not permanent or stable. Like the weather, minor fluctuations occurre, but generally it's very similar from year to year. But in the long run on the scale of centuries, like the climate, these patterns shift. Sometimes this shift can happen in a matter of just a few years, making large regions effectively uninhabitable. As a result, ruins are scattered all over the world, the remains of cities and towns that had to be abandoned with its population rebuilding elsewhere or integrating into neighboring peoples. There are also cases where there are surges in magic that last only for a few days or weeks, during which the effect on the local inhabitants can be devastating.

While commenting on a post at Monsters and Manuals, noism pointed my at an older post about how The Revenant is actually taking place in a post apocalyptic setting (http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.de/2016/01/the-revenant-and-post-apocalypse.html). I've not seen the movie but looked up the scenes with the natives, who really are the last scattered survivors of a megaplague that wiped out civilization and brought an end to the world as they knew it. It's Canadian Mad Max. Reminded me quite a lot of Dead Man mixed with Apocalypse Now. (I also have to say, the music is the creepiest horror soundtrack I've come across so far.) I think this is exactly the way I want to portray areas that have recently been overtaken by the Weird. When a region can no longer sustain cities and towns, sometimes it happens so quickly that villages are cut off by the encroaching wilderness and try to stay put in the relative safety of their homes. Sometimes people are left behind in the evacuation, or they refuse to flee to safer lands. After a couple of years, their conditions are dysmal and they either have to make pacts with powerful spirts as their protectors or face certain extinction.
During migrations, some stuff is always left behind, especially when it was hidden and its hiding place not known to many. Paranoid sorcerers and witches often leave behind stashes of very valuable artifacts and it can take decades or even centuries before someone deciphers the clues in the scattered remains of their notes, long after their homes and lairs have been swallowed up by the weird wilds. That's a job for treasure hunters, mercenaries, and temple guards. Ideally it's going in, grabbing the stuff, and being back out before they run into anything bad. But there's always something bad. Not only spirits and monsters, but also survivors, be it pleading for help or as strange cults extremely hostile to outsiders.

This seems to provide a good backdrop for three types of adventure: City intrigue, sudden supernatural disaster, and expedition into the weird. All of which can get very dark, but in itself the regular inhabited regions and even the uninhabited stretches of wilderness where the forces of magic are low can be perfectly pleasant places where the characters can make their homes.

What do you think of this setup? Any potential flaws you are seeing or ideas that come popping into your had from reading it?

Yora
2017-12-16, 07:42 AM
I found this link (https://lmwhiteblog.wordpress.com/2016/09/19/dark-fantasy/) on writing Dark Fantasy, and I think pretty much all of it can be applied to running games as well.

RazorChain
2017-12-16, 11:45 PM
I found this link (https://lmwhiteblog.wordpress.com/2016/09/19/dark-fantasy/) on writing Dark Fantasy, and I think pretty much all of it can be applied to running games as well.

That was a great article. Loved it, kinda put words to what I have been doing instinctively in my Dark Fantasy games

Yora
2017-12-21, 04:09 AM
Does anyone have recommendations for existing adventures that have a high potential for adaptation into a Dark Fantasy campaign? The ones that I have on my list so far are The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun (a light and heat swallowing shrine under a strange black pyramid that the monsters don't go to), Against the Cult of the Reptile God (people going missing and occasionally returning strange, with a cult lair in a swamp cave), and Death Frost Doom (creepy tomb full of corpses and treasure with seemingly no guardians).

Yora
2017-12-24, 09:10 AM
I've decided that my campaign is going to be about dark forests and swamps and the supernatural beings that inhabit them. Looking at European fairy tales, my impression is that perhaps the major threat that underlies everything is unpredictability. Fey creatures follow strict rules, but their rules don't seem to make any sense. If you learn some of their rules you can use them to gain some power and control over them, but there is always the threat that you unknowingly make mistakes that grant the fey great power over you.
it's not the fey themselves who follow strange, barely understood rules, but also the land itself. Things just happen and you can't expect to get any explanation how they are possible. Talking trees and animals? You just have to roll with it. It also extends to the powers of fey and witches. When they are angry enough, they can speak curses that are very far reaching, like making everyone in a castle fall asleep forever, or turn large groups of people into animals.

Generally speaking, I would say that in such a campaign, magical phenomena and powerful curses don't need to have any game mechanics. They just are because the GM decides it's appropriate and it doesn't have to follow the rules for PCs casting spells at all. The problem is that unlike in an already existing story, the actions of the heroes aren't always what best fits the story, but it is up to the players to come up with something that they think might possibly help. And when things are completely unpredictable, they can't make any meaningful decisions.
So I think that at the very least, the unlimited potential of fey and witches should not apply to combat. You can't have a fight in which the opponnent can just instantly heal or be immune to everything, or the PCs will just drop dead or magically frozen at a whim. If a fight breaks out, then the rules of combat have to apply to all combatants. Of course the supernatural enemies can have special abilities, but they need to be clearly limtied abilities. Even if they players don't know what they are.
It also doesn't mean that the opponent needs to be easy to beat. What I think would be very appropriate is to have the big enemies be significantly stronger than the PCs, but also give them a significant weakness that tilts the odds in favor of the players. For that to work, I think it's best to have the magical enemies feel unthreatened by the PCs and not make any direct moves to kill or restrain them. A fey lord can simply have the PCs be unable to leave the castle or the valley and keep them trapped but roaming about freely until they do something that causes real damage.

A problem that I still see is how to avoid Deus Ex Machinas. If the magical enemy has a weakness that the heroes can exploit, it's probably a bit underwhelming if some NPC just tells the players what they have to do, as is actually very common in fairy tales. How else could the players find out how to harm a magical creature and negate its powers over them?

RazorChain
2017-12-26, 10:58 PM
Does anyone have recommendations for existing adventures that have a high potential for adaptation into a Dark Fantasy campaign? The ones that I have on my list so far are The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun (a light and heat swallowing shrine under a strange black pyramid that the monsters don't go to), Against the Cult of the Reptile God (people going missing and occasionally returning strange, with a cult lair in a swamp cave), and Death Frost Doom (creepy tomb full of corpses and treasure with seemingly no guardians).

I usually make my own adventures but I recently adapted Festival of the Damned to my Gurps campaign.

http://www.atlas-games.com/product_tables/AG0257.php

Yora
2018-01-06, 10:29 AM
I've come across a couple of interesting settings the last weeks, which also did remind me of others I've seen before.

Dolmenwood (https://necrotic-gnome-productions.blogspot.de/search/label/dolmenwood) is a Basic/Expert D&D that over has been released in small pieces in Wormskin over the past two years and is now getting a full sized book, possibly some time this year. Welcome to Dolmenwood (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/208099/Welcome-to-Dolmenwood?manufacturers_id=5606) is a good free sample that provides a very promising look at the setting. (Clicking on the preview shows the whole thing.)

Don't really know much more than that about it myself, but that's a book I am really looking forward to.


The forest of Dolmenwood lies in the little-frequented northern reaches of the kingdom of _____, under the rule of the Duchy of Brackenwold. Though men, with their fortresses and cathedrals, now claim dominion over this stretch of tangled woods, fungus-encrusted glades, and fetid marsh, other powers held sway here in ancient times and — some would say — remain the true masters of the realm.
Within the forest, the magical and otherworldly are always close at hand — rings of standing stones loom in glades hallowed by pagan cults of yesteryear; the energy of ley lines pulses beneath the earth, tapped by those in possession of the requisite secrets; portals to the perilous realm of Fairy allow transit between worlds, for those
charmed or fated by the lords of Elfland. Even the herbs, plants, and fungi of Dolmenwood have developed in odd directions, absorbing the magic which infuses the place. Some say that the waters are enchanted. Some say the stones and the earth itself. Perhaps both are right.

Midlands (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/225936/Midlands-Low-Magic-Sandbox-Setting) is another B/X setting for Low Fantasy Gaming, I looked at the game only once and didn't find anything noteworthy to make me consider switching to it, but Midlands is an awesome sandbox book. It's about 80 pages of setting, 40 pages of "GM tools" (speak: random tables) and 200 pages of simple adventure setups. 50 of them in total and really top notch.
The setting is a very familiar, but well above average European Sword & Sorcery setting with English, Vikings, and Barbarians, but also Roman/Carthaginans and something that very much reminds me of the Hyperboreans of the Hyborian Age.

At 8,30€ this really is a steal.

Midnight is an older d20 setting that everyone instrinctively describes as "Sauron won!" The gods have disappeared and the Evil God has been banished to the mortal world and immediately went to work to conquer all the lands with his armies of orcs. Helped by the fact that his orc inquisitors are the only clerics left in the world. Other magic barely works and at the current time he has conquered the majority of the peoples with the few holdouts probably not going to last much longer. Fun setting with plenty of books, though probably quite difficult to get a hold of these days.

Red Tide is another post-apocalyptic fantasy setting, this time of the demonic invasion type, again for B/X. An evil for has descended upon the world and turned everyone inside it into savage monsters. A few survivors who saw the end of the world coming fled to a group of isolated island whose rocks have the special property of repelling the fog, at least for now. Unfortunately for the survivors, the islands have already been populated by orcs and goblins who really don't feel like sharing the limited space. What makes the setting stand out from similar ones is that the main group of survivors are a Chinese empire, with a Europen group, elves, and dwarves being additional minorities in the new inhabitants of the islands. If I recall correctly, the gods are either gone or very distant and the only gods that provide actual useful power to their worshipers are the Kings of Hell.

Of Shadows of Esteren I don't know terribly much. It's a French game primarily known for having really good looking books. If the rules hold up to the same standard I do not know. The setting is a large peninsula inhabited by a native group of druidic barbarians and, once again, survivors of some great disaster that scourged their homeland. The two new groups are led by a powerful church and by an order of wizard-engineers. It's been a while since I had the chance to read parts of it, but the setting very much reminded me of the old Thief games with the Hammerites, Pagans, and Keepers as the main factions. Life on the peninsula isn't safe either, as there are strange primordial creatures of flesh, wood, and stone that have an unending hatred for humans.

Symbaroum is a Swedish game that is set in and around the borders of a forest that is inhabited, once again, by the survivors of an empire that has been destroyed by evil sorcerers and their undead hordes. The lands on the edges of the forest are inhabited by native barbarian tribes which the new kingdom tries to subjugate, while the deeper parts of the forest are home to powerful magical elves who really don't like mortals coming into their lands. The forest is said to be the location of an ancient lost empire and the new settlers have great hopes to reclaim many of the great wonders of the past. Also, magic corrupts everyone who uses and if overindulged turns mages into evil monsters.

My recollection of all these settings isn't very complete and often it has been years since I last read them or I have not fully read through them yet, so there might be some inaccuracies. But if any of these sound interesting based on these summaries, they should be very much worth checking out.

Max_Killjoy
2018-01-06, 10:44 AM
Midnight is an older d20 setting that everyone instrinctively describes as "Sauron won!" The gods have disappeared and the Evil God has been banished to the mortal world and immediately went to work to conquer all the lands with his armies of orcs. Helped by the fact that his orc inquisitors are the only clerics left in the world. Other magic barely works and at the current time he has conquered the majority of the peoples with the few holdouts probably not going to last much longer. Fun setting with plenty of books, though probably quite difficult to get a hold of these days.


I have a used copy from the FLGS. It's not bad.

Yora
2018-01-11, 02:37 PM
I was thinking about the survival horror games from the late 90s and 2000s today, and one thing they all have in common is how seemingly nonlinear the environments are and how much backtracking there is. While I don't advocate silly item puzzles to hunt for keys in absurd places, I think very nonlinear layouts for dungeons should be a huge contribution to creating a sense of isolation and expectation of bad things. The key is to have dungeons that are never cleared and that obviously change when players return to areas they have been to before.
If all the rooms are in more or less linear order (and a lot of dungeons are really just a long winding corridor with doors to rooms left and right), then players have to deal with whatever unpleasantries they encounter one at a time. They know that they are supposed to open a door when they come to it, or at the very least that the designer of the dungeon expects them to open that door at this point in the adventure. If they find a cell key in area 12 that opens the cells in area 8, they know that it was planned that they won't be able to get into the cell the first time they found it and that it was planned that they go back there and open it now. They know that there is a plan, and even when they end up facing a very intimidating enemy, they know that it was planned that they would at this point in the adventure.
The more you open up the layout of the dungeon, the more uncertainty you create for the players. It also increases the frequency of dead ends that force the players to go back to areas they have been before. And just because you did not get jumped by anything from a black pool the first three times you came through doesn't mean that there really isn't anything dangerous down there. In such an environment, making it to the other side of an unsettling area doesn't mean the danger had passed. It might still reveal itself later.

Mr Beer
2018-01-11, 09:09 PM
Yora, I haven't been through this thread to see if you already know this, but the forum member Galloglaich has the following link in his signature, to an RPG setting in the Baltic:

http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product_info.php?products_id=86214

Galloglaich is a beyond excellent poster, so while I haven't been through the material in question, it's almost certainly well worth the $8.

Florian
2018-01-12, 02:34 AM
@Yora:

I think you're sticking too close to a D&D mindset of challenges and how to overcome them. Fairy tales and the Cthulhu Mythos have something in common, by proposing two sets of "cosmic truth" and having them clash. Brothers Grimm style fairy tales (and in extension, Disney style) make heavy use of the "good citizen with moral values" trope giving all the tools and inspiration needed to overcome the fairy, which is always evil bei being nonconformist to human society. So yes, "Magic" is mostly a plot devise and a means to showcase the "otherness" of the faeries and their reality, it´s also important to point out that regular folks "in the know" cover a middle ground where they are outsiders themselves and can't be part of the "good society" because of that.

Transporting that to a "darker style" means establishing what "power" can be derived from following "our rules" and maybe exploring what happens when you turn yourself into an outcast to gain power by adopting "their rules".

Basic L5R example: Being a good little Samurai, adhering to Bushido will give an increased resistance to the Shadowlands and the Taint, while Jade will see you through and hurt the monsters - as long as your believe is true. At the same time, learning the Forbidden Lore: Maho (blood magic) is the first step to damning yourself, because understanding the subject matter also means you understand how to do blood magic.... well, road to hell, good intentions...

Yora
2018-01-12, 05:11 AM
A good example of this is iron as being a means to harm and repell spirits. Except for the very rarw meteoric iron, which is obviously highly mystical itself, iron is always made through human technology and the basis for the most advanced human technologies. Even if it's just a nail, it's a direct manifestation of human power that can outmatch the power of the wilderness.

The Symbaroum game has a system where the knowledge of spells permanently adds to your corruption score. Corruption is very much black magic associated with savage violence and undead, but the mechanic can work just as well when you convert the buildup of corruption to a loss of humanity. When you learn spells, and get exposed to powerful supernatural forces and attacks, you become changed and less and less human, until eventually you turn into a supernatural being that is fully at home in the magical world, fotever leaving the human world behind you.