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.

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.