My games have are notoriously political and backstabby and drift into "grimdark" - even the high-fantasy games. I have to actively keep things "light" and "adventury" for some of my players who cast a dubious eye at me when I'm purposely trying to just be "swashbuckling".
What works have influenced your games in a dark manner? and how so?
I'm a big fan of Elric, Conan, Black Company (and Myth games), SoIaF and Malazan BotF, and so are my players, so my games often tend to be like that as well, heh ;). For secondary influences - Witcher series (which I like the short stories, but dislike the saga) and a few animes - Berserk and Claymore notably. Probably a good dashing of darker moments from our own history, and mythologies.
Two "darkest" influences'd probably be Black Company and a few games of Crusader Kings/Europa Universalis. After you assassinated your first granddaughter so that the lands you fought a bloody civil war with your half - brother, and later donated it to your son (who had just died from typhus) return to the main line of the family, you suddenly realise that there were people who really took those sorts of decisions...and they may have taken them with just as much of an ease as you just did.
Edit: And yeah, I started with WFRP as well, which probably perverted my tastes a bit in RPGs as well. Though that's common in Poland, where WFRP is usually the introductory game.
Cut my roleplaying chops on Warhammer fantasy, so grimdark black humour is pretty standard for me. Also a big fan of Tolkien, who didnt shy away from the dark stuff.
Real life.
Mostly, the goddamn motherfucking news, but also several seemingly endless nights of little sleep and frantic work as a emergency and trauma surgeon in an inner city hospital.
WFRP and CoC and WoD may be all grim and dark, but they ain't got shit on real life. The Bad Things that are actually happening all around us help contextualize the shit we read about in games or fiction, and doesn't even register anymore. You witness a family's reaction to a loved one's death of a stab wound during an armed robbery, and suddenly "a few bandits making a nuisance of themselves in the countryside" sounds like an urgent and horrific threat.
Sesame Street and Barney
I'm more of a 'Black Humor' type of dark. Usually I run some shade of gray in terms of stuff, for lack of a better term-the main fantasy world I have is definitely not happy-idealistic land but it's not doom and gloom. I mean I'm a fan of Berserk(I'm not into too many manga series-Berserk, Hokuto no Ken, Souten no Ken, Devilman, Riki-Oh Child of Destruction) which are all pretty dark but I more pick little influences here and there from those, but then mix them with my videogame influences which run all over the place. Darksiders, despite being After the End, I wouldn't call a grimdark game and indeed uses a lot of dark humor which I like and mix in. Other dark stuff would be Lovecraft but I actually don't have a ginormous amount of his influence in my main world, maybe bits and pieces with some of the more evil deities.
Tolkien and Howard sneak in.
Stuff like my influences from Zelda and Ys sort of balance out the dark. Generally I run a 'Sometimes shit can get really bad, and some places can be really nasty, and there's definitely some over the top violence in some of the backstories and areas but it's not ALL bad, and there are decent people out there doing their thing too,'
I also admit to having influences from Hideo Kojima, so sometimes stuff can get a bit apeshit. :p
I guess the short answer would be 'Some bits from some dark stuff I like but it never gets to the point of hopeless.'
I like my games to veer into vengeance fueled Viking soap-opera, so I go for old epics, stylish violence and lots of backstabbing, like the show Profit.
Define "dark".
I'd have to go with the Omen, Exorcist, The Ninth Gate, general corrupt powerful people meddling with forces they don't understand for amusement. Movies like Paranormal Activity which are the Cthulhu of the crystal gazing incense snorting community are good too.
Oh and fairy tales too were a big influence on me. Inm not talking about bowdlerized Disney stuff. Fairy taleswere the horror stories of earlier generations. There's a good reason I refer to films like Nightmare on Elm Street, Silent Hill, and The Dark as "modern fairytales". Del Toro gets this. Pans Labyrinth and Dont Be Afraid of the Dark are, to me, closer than any Disney adaption to the stories I read as a kid.
The Shining, Jerusalem's Lot, the gunslinger (original) and more by Stephen King. Alien and Aliens movie. Heavy metal and hard rock like Dio, Hinder, and Halestorm.
Quote from: The Butcher;723489Real life.
Oh this! Want to colour your BBEGs armies and make them sound nasty? Research Cambodia's Killing Fields.
Add some Medieval torture techniques.
Put some spooky-weird in from Clive Barker.
It makes Kult look like Fisher-Price Roleplaying.
Quote from: TristramEvans;723512Oh and fairy tales too were a big influence on me.
These too. Having people dance themselves to death in red hot iron shoes.
Real world politics in the late 70s and early 80s supplied most of the grim we needed for our games.
I don't run just one campaign, so like usual my answer is "it depends." Primarily, on which campaign I'm running. For example: My "horror" super heroes game is based on Moon Knight, Werewolf By Night, Ghost Rider IV, the later Midnight Son's/Ghost Rider V stuff, among others. For my classic heroes game it will be Spider-Men, X-men, and the like.
While I'm planning on some other stuff with different references...
Quote from: flyingmice;723490Sesame Street and Barney
Especially the cookie monster! The very definition of grim-dark.
Quote from: One Horse Town;723591Especially the cookie monster! The very definition of grim-dark.
Muppets used to scare the shit out of me. Something about their giant mouths and gimlet eyes... very Candle Cove...
Quote from: BarefootGaijin;723570Oh this! Want to colour your BBEGs armies and make them sound nasty? Research Cambodia's Killing Fields.
Ha! Yes, I was going to say history as well and use the example of when the world my players stopped at was Cambodia in it's death throes.
"
In one incident at Kompong Cham on 29 March, however, an enraged crowd killed Lon Nol's brother, Lon Nil, tore out his liver, and cooked and ate it."
Quote from: dragoner;723593Ha! Yes, I was going to say history as well and use the example of when the world my players stopped at was Cambodia in it's death throes.
"In one incident at Kompong Cham on 29 March, however, an enraged crowd killed Lon Nol's brother, Lon Nil, tore out his liver, and cooked and ate it."
Want your paladins to understand why orcs are smittable? Have them do shit like this. Seeing a tree with children nailed to it, or an ox cart full of heads, will surely clear up any problems of "they are big hairy green humans". There's a list of UPA's execution/torture methods, which raises hair on my neck. I admit I always refer to it when needing some hardcore blood&gore drop.
A list of gruesome inspirations. (though you'd need Google translate to run it, heh). Slightly NSFW as there's a body of a woman there, but she's clothed and not mutilated.
http://dziennik.artystyczny-margines.pl/zestawienie-362-metod-tortur-stosowanych-przez-upa-na-polakach/
Quote from: Rincewind1;723598Want your paladins to understand why orcs are smittable? Have them do shit like this. Seeing a tree with children nailed to it, or an ox cart full of heads, will surely clear up any problems of "they are big hairy green humans". There's a list of UPA's execution/torture methods, which raises hair on my neck. I admit I always refer to it when needing some hardcore blood&gore drop.
Yes, my grandmother was born in Laibach. I remember casual conversations about the land being karst, that had holes where the Serbs (and others for sure) threw the corpses.
Funny, first D&D game I played was being brought into my sister's game as a fill in player, and I chose a Paladin, thinking he was a soldier from Rheinland-Pfalz, and my sister said "no, it is not like that." With a big eye roll.
Quote from: dragoner;723608Yes, my grandmother was born in Laibach. I remember casual conversations about the land being karst, that had holes where the Serbs (and others for sure) threw the corpses.
Funny, first D&D game I played was being brought into my sister's game as a fill in player, and I chose a Paladin, thinking he was a soldier from Rheinland-Pfalz, and my sister said "no, it is not like that." With a big eye roll.
Hah, you're not the only one - I was confusing the two as well at some point :D. Interestingly enough, there was an office of Palantin in Polish court of early Piasts - it was disbanded after (as usual) one of the Palantins tried to seize power.
Of the three genres I most often GM...
Fantasy: Harry Potter, or maybe some of the gloomier Zeldas.
Supers: Young Justice. The cartoon, I mean, not the (lighter) comic.
Horror: Junji Ito. I am not nice or friendly when it comes to horror games.
Quote from: Rincewind1;723610Hah, you're not the only one - I was confusing the two as well at some point :D. Interestingly enough, there was an office of Palantin in Polish court of early Piasts - it was disbanded after (as usual) one of the Palantins tried to seize power.
It is an odd word, for I know in the eastern roman empire (Byzantium), they often separated forces into Palantines (or fortress troops) and Borderers, mobile troops like Kataphractoi, who in turn are compared to Charlemagne's Paladins. Go figure. :confused:
Quote from: Rincewind1;723598Want your paladins to understand why orcs are smittable? Have them do shit like this. Seeing a tree with children nailed to it, or an ox cart full of heads, will surely clear up any problems of "they are big hairy green humans". There's a list of UPA's execution/torture methods, which raises hair on my neck. I admit I always refer to it when needing some hardcore blood&gore drop.
Except of course those things were all done by humans who were neither green or hairy... well maybe on the inside.
Robert E Howard penned this little ditty that sums it up nicely
Visions
I cannot believe in a paradise
Glorious, undefiled,
For gates all scrolled and streets of gold
Are tales for a dreaming child.
I am too lost for shame
That it moves me unto mirth,
But I can vision a Hell of flame
For I have lived on earth.
Quote from: tenbones;723476What works have influenced your games in a dark manner? and how so?
Real Life, like a lot of others here. Working Security for 6 years off and on has shown me some truely shitty and stupid human behavior.
History, I thought that the Joy Division was just a goth band until I looked it up.
The News, I steal more material from the nightly news than any other source.
I've always liked horror movies, true crime, post apocalyptic tales... so my taste starts off grim and gets darker from there. Lovecraft and Camus and Kafka and Bruno Schulz delineate the 'what's out there'... and movies like Martyrs and A Serbian Film... and real life/history... set up the 'what's next door'.
I've been thinking that's probably the main source of friction between myself and the guys I play with... since they don't like anything much darker than The Princess Bride and various Disney musicals.
Real-life duels (http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Violence-Early-Modern-France/dp/0199290458) make movie swashbucklers look like kids playing tag.
James Ellroy's fiction.
For me, real life history and anthropology, both ancient and modern. There's no fantasy literature out there that isn't mimicking, or excelled by, something human beings have already done.
Real-life, definitely.
But when I'm going with something more fictional and outlandish, I've found Shingeki no Kyojin and the new Battlestar Galactica (first season only) to be particularly good. I'm a big fan of desperate post-apocalyptic situations where humanity seems doomed to being replaced by someone else.
The "darkest" influence on my homebrew setting would be the real-world Yugoslavian wars.
Ethnic identify is very important to its people, as my world is entirely humanocentric. It is all set beneath a thin veneer of the Renaissance, but a particularly low magic world.
The theocratic empire of Goth Moran has ruled over the tiny republic of Walstania for nearly two hundred years. Walstania sprouted upon the souther-most tip of the continent, a land rich in resources, steadfast in identity but sorely lacking in direction. Despite a shared ancestral background, they have different perspectives on ethnic superiority and style of government. Their religious identity differs greatly from one another. This has bred war, rife with terrorism and suicide-style "bombings" with blackpowder-laden vests by Walstanians in response with Goth Moran's state-sponsored pogroms for ethnic cleansing and gulag-styled prison camps. Sufficed to say, neither country really knows who started it, nor is there an end in sight (or wish to do so).
So, yeah - grimdark but without the black humor.
I get my "grim darkness" and my "dark grimness" from the same place Gary Gygax did.
The Dying Earth.
Seriously -- have you ever READ that shit? Yeah, lots of fascinating ideas and stuff, but I don't think there's a really "good" character other than Guyal of Sfere. Turjan is probably the best of the wizards, being only MODERATELY a shitbag. But by the time you get to the high-level wizards of Rhialto the Marvelous, they are actively horrible people.
Add to that Poul Anderson's "Broken Sword" and "The Seven Geases" for its portrayal of blind, uncaring fate, and you've pretty much got all the dark grimness and grim darkness you need.
Quote from: Old Geezer;723861I get my "grim darkness" and my "dark grimness" from the same place Gary Gygax did.
The Dying Earth.
Seriously -- have you ever READ that shit? Yeah, lots of fascinating ideas and stuff, but I don't think there's a really "good" character other than Guyal of Sfere. Turjan is probably the best of the wizards, being only MODERATELY a shitbag. But by the time you get to the high-level wizards of Rhialto the Marvelous, they are actively horrible people.
Add to that Poul Anderson's "Broken Sword" and "The Seven Geases" for its portrayal of blind, uncaring fate, and you've pretty much got all the dark grimness and grim darkness you need.
When it comes for portrayal of uncaring fate I usually go back to the original concepts of Nemesis, so old tragedies ;). But I second the Broken Sword and Seven Geases, excellent pieces. I admit a personal weakness - I always drop in a cursed weapon in such a vein, if there's a particularly bloodthirsty or dedicated PC in the party.
Quote from: Old Geezer;723861I get my "grim darkness" and my "dark grimness" from the same place Gary Gygax did.
The Dying Earth.
Seriously -- have you ever READ that shit? Yeah, lots of fascinating ideas and stuff, but I don't think there's a really "good" character other than Guyal of Sfere. Turjan is probably the best of the wizards, being only MODERATELY a shitbag. But by the time you get to the high-level wizards of Rhialto the Marvelous, they are actively horrible people.
Add to that Poul Anderson's "Broken Sword" and "The Seven Geases" for its portrayal of blind, uncaring fate, and you've pretty much got all the dark grimness and grim darkness you need.
Yeah that's what I was going to say: Poul Anderson's writings have a darkness about them as well.
Quote from: Rincewind1;723862When it comes for portrayal of uncaring fate I usually go back to the original concepts of Nemesis, so old tragedies ;). But I second the Broken Sword and Seven Geases, excellent pieces. I admit a personal weakness - I always drop in a cursed weapon in such a vein, if there's a particularly bloodthirsty or dedicated PC in the party.
You would like Joe Ambercrombie. He's grim but with a touch of British gallows humour to lift the mood.