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 . 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 . 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 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.