Dark Fantasy Discussion

[Rob]

Cultivate!

[Omen]

I love the idea of flying magical ships so MUCH that I want a campaign world of NOTHING but flying magical ships.

Imagine waterworld, but replace the world with something along the lines of a gas giant planet ( unfeasible, but this is fantasy ).  Include that dark survival aspect, now play!

Possibilities: ( do not need them all, just mix and match )

1. A boiling storm lies beneath the 'survivable' plain of existence and occasionally churns up islands of floating rock that provide resources for the people who live in this bizarre realm.
2. Giant poles stretch from the storms underneath into the endless skies above, representing ancient artifacts that contained a once vast civilization that used these gargantuan artifacts for the basis of their cities.  The poles can have some mechanism for raining water and other resources down upon 'discs' that orbit the poles themselves, providing a stable ground for plants.
3. Plants grow in giant floating air 'matts' that provide the food and resources to build the ships/maintain civilization.
4. Giant floating animals serve as both 'land masses' and 'flying ships' for the society that lives in this bizarre world.

[Rob]

I love the idea of flying magical ships so MUCH that I want a campaign world of NOTHING but flying magical ships.

Already done, just for you : http://www.studio2publishing.com/shop/product_info.php?products_id=2423

Hahaha

[Omen]

I wouldn't mind a rpg campaign based on a series of books called,"The Death Gate Cycle" By Weiss and Hickman.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_Gate_Cycle

The Death Gate Cycle is a seven-part series of fantasy novels written by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. The main conflict is between two powerful races, the Sartan and the Patryns, which branched off from humans following a nuclear holocaust. Centuries prior to the events of the series, the Sartan attempted to end the conflict by sundering the earth into four elemental realms, and imprisoning the Patryns in a fifth prison world, the Labyrinth. The Sartan took up stewardship of the elemental realms, but soon mysteriously lost contact with each other and disappeared. Centuries later, a Patryn known as Xar escaped the Labyrinth, and started returning to the Labyrinth to rescue others. He learned how to access the other worlds and dreamt of freeing all his people from the Labyrinth;and conquering the other worlds. The books follow the fiercely independent Haplo, a Patryn agent sent to scout the elemental worlds and throw them into chaos in preparation for his Lord's conquest of them. Weis and Hickman created five distinct fantasy worlds during the course of the series, along with developing the cultures of five major races—their unique Patryns and Sartan, and the common fantasy races of dwarves, elves, and humans.

Haplo is the real star of the book, being a dark and moody character that has to struggle with himself as much as he does with the plot.

The story covers several elemental themed 'worlds'.

Water: Chelestra was to be the primary world where the mensch and Sartan would live. A great orb of liquid, the world was populated by great drifting beasts used as habitats for the mensch, with its own "Seasun" at the center.

Air: On Arianus, intended as an industrial and manufacturing world of floating continents, the Sartan had other problems.

Fire: Pryan was created as a great inverted globe with four small suns at its center.

Earth: Finally, and most desperately, Abarrach was a huge volcanic asteroid-like world. The Sartan and mensch lived inside its honeycombed tunnels—designed to provide minerals and metals to the Kicksey-winsey—but they turned out to be loaded with poisonous volcanic fumes.

It is a 'simple' fantasy series that can be alittle predictable, but for some reason I still hold onto this series as my absolute favorite set of fantasy books.  I think a roleplaying campaign based upon the same would be interesting.

[Angry_Face]

Victorian England-esk setting the golden age of "European" Imperialism, In distant ports and the back alleys of the homeland alike depraved magics are practiced like a black ever-burning fire... (it feels like half a thought)     

[Artemis]

Mages.... filthy fucking mages! They torched the sky, with their twisted majicks, the air became poisionous, plants wilted and died, water became fouled. And that son is why we now live underground, and that's also why we're about to burn this man at the stake. You see, we found a strange book on him that we don't understand, and he speaks in strange tounges. He must be a mage, and mages are the cause of all our problems.

It's dark fantasy with the BBG being the strange and often hostile enviornment. You aviod the pitfalls of having to take on the BBG to be heroic, but it's still dark and gritty with survival being the main goal. The other plus side is it's easy to pull in any races you want, and just as easy to limit them. Yhea we had elves, but when the skys burned all their forest cities went up in flames, if there are any left they're staying hidden.

[Mike]

Mages.... filthy fucking mages! They torched the sky, with their twisted majicks, the air became poisionous, plants wilted and died, water became fouled. And that son is why we now live underground, and that's also why we're about to burn this man at the stake. You see, we found a strange book on him that we don't understand, and he speaks in strange tounges. He must be a mage, and mages are the cause of all our problems.

It's dark fantasy with the BBG being the strange and often hostile enviornment. You aviod the pitfalls of having to take on the BBG to be heroic, but it's still dark and gritty with survival being the main goal. The other plus side is it's easy to pull in any races you want, and just as easy to limit them. Yhea we had elves, but when the skys burned all their forest cities went up in flames, if there are any left they're staying hidden.

... Huh.

That is actually very, very cool.  A different take on Dark Fantasy, to be sure.  No big overlord, just a shitty and dangerous and almost carnivorous world.

[Artemis]

Went out for a smoke and had a few more thoughts on the subject.

The refugees from the surface are delving down trying to escape from the poisionous world above. The dwarves had a functioning society built mostly underground but that fell apart when massive amounts of creatures fled down, their society crumbled, their cities became cut off from each other. Sometimes it was war with the immigrants other times it was natural disasters, earthquakes and volcanos.

The refugees must be careful when delving though, the deeper you go, the stranger things get. Maybe it's radiation from the worlds core maybe it's some strange magical effect, whatever it is though go to deep and things begin to get twisted. Pale sightless things inhabit the deep and sometimes they bubble upwards.

[Rob]

Sounds like a Fantasy Fallout, Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy... interesting. I might be able to get into that.... somewhat better then High Fantasy.

[Artemis]

Here's another good reason for this setting. You don't need a whole lot of history, most of that has been lost in the devastation. What is left is passed by word of mouth and is most likely very bigoted/contradictory. Heck you could even use the tool box approach and have different versions, what really happened??? Depends on what you need to have happened for your game.

[Omen]

Not sure how dark this is, but it is a fantasy setting I dreamed up years ago.

Imagine a planet covered in a sheet of ice dozens of miles high, covering the entirety of the planet it is only broken by round depressions that are filled with the greenery of life.  Each depression is approximately 200-300 miles in diameter centered around a towering crystal that burns with a brilliant light.

Where the crystal penetrates the surface lakes of lava bubble and burst like a sore, with the gleeming crystal standing a mile above the torrent.  Spreading out from this geologically active center is a wasteland of baked and dried earth, the ground is cracked and readily crumbles underneath the lightest step.  The wastelands end in various mountain ranges that form a ring around this inner wasteland of desert and lava fields, forming a natural barrier protecting verdant forests and waving plains of grass that spread out from the growing circle.  The plains and forest usually end in a large body of water that forms a ring around the entire surface feature all the way up to the wall of ice that forms the ice sheet covering the entire surface of the planet.

The crystal is a magical construct that is fueled by the energy of an 'inner star' at the core of the planet.  The star resides inside of a crystal core, the heat and pressure causing the surrounding crystal to magically grow pillars to the surface of the planet to bleed excess heat.  The planet has a mantle like other planets, but the crystal is virtually impervious to the heat of the mantle itself.  It penetrates the mantle as easily as it does the thick crust of the planet as it slowly grows.

The planet has a distant star that provides approximately half of the light the earth recieves and far less actual energy.  The difference is made up by the crystals themselves which pulse with their own rythmns of light ( glow much brighter every 2 days compared to a standard day of the planets spin ) and always shed heat.  Time is marked by a combination of the moving star and the cycle of the crystal's light.

Your typical fantasy races live and thrive in the domains of life surrounding the crystals, struggling with needs and wants of your typical fictional fantasy plot line.  However, occasionally these oasis of life are threatened when geological movements cause the crystal to break beneath the earth severing the light and heat they provide.  The crystals slowly wane and the lava fields retreat into bubbling pits of mud.  As the surface temperature plummets, the winds from the ice sheet began taking their toil on the now unprotected oasis.  Blizzards and storms of any magnitude sweep the land as the races fight to survive.  This process is meant to take many many years, rather then the seemingly sudden description I just provided.

1. The ice sheet on the planet could be cracked, melting where underground rivers of lava come near the surface.  Those cracks could form enormeous rivers and networks between the pockets of life on the icey surface.  When one of those pockets loses its life giving crystal, the races en masse attempt to escape through the treacherous network of rivers in the ice sheet.
2. Millions upon millions of civilizations could have risen and fallen, leaving the world marked with their magical detritus even after their oasis had long perished.  Entire cities could be frozen in ice or even nightmares that are beyond reason.
3. The world could be alive, crafted to be a god by a god.
4. The mantle could contain a magical city left over by this creator god, various magical portals on the planets surface lead to the city.
5. The world could be alive, but from a science fiction perspective ( just ignore the science that doesn't work :x  ).  Aliens could visit

[appollyon]

What I did read about Midnight was very interesting.  That world evil had won, and only pockets of civilization lived (kinda 4th ed esque). 

I like the idea of an overarching villain more than a terrain, though it doesn't have to be just one guy.

Something like this: 

So the acts of man, all of their sins finally broke the backs of the people who are supposed to help them to the next plane of existance.  Thus did the day of Angels happen.  Flying down from the sky, they first took over government, then began a systematic approach to purging all sin from the son of Adam (or whatever).

However, the only way to truly purge sin, is to destroy free choice, thus the newly purged populace lives a very robotic, zombie like existance, with the angels looking on approvingly.

There exists some who live outside of this "New Eden", the "Choicers" who are working to find a way to banish the angels back to heaven and restore the best (and worst) parts of humanity.

[Jeremy]

A Dark Fantasy that i had toyed around with some time ago.

Creatures symbolizing the four horsemen (war, death, plague, famine) Rise to power, over throwing the Goodly Races. The creatures could serve an elder evil god, or something that doesn't serve good or evil, but seeks to create nothing. This war forces the races and gods of the good races (both good and evil, so Lolth + Corellian) fight for mutual survival (almost like the Dragonlance novel Dragons of Summer Flame) So it is not uncommon to find a paladin working alongside a blackguard because mutual survival requires it.

Another bend to this idea would be that the creatures of chaos have always existed, and every so often in cosmic time they arise like a tide and seek to devour the world forcing it to change. once again elements in the world that are normally opposed are forced to fight for survival. When i tried this one out the characters would have flashbacks to other forms of existence (one was similar to modern day, one was Roman, Greek, futuristic) in which the characters would get hints as to what to do next. I would have ruins for the previous world littering the background, things that the PC's might recognize (ruins of skyscrapers, Twinkies, ect)

The idea is to create a foe that is neither good nor evil, but is more like a force a nature that cannot be reasoned with and must be fought.

[kraken]

I'm building a gritty, low-fantasy world for my gaming group; the major influence in this would be Conan, of course, along with the Lankhmar stories.  I don't have years of experience running dark fantasy, but I've been working on it a lot recently, so episode 20 provides me with an easy opportunity to vent.

In the settings I see in this thread I see a lot of worlds that are under some macroscopic threat, ruled by an evil overlord or simply in an environment that is hostile to any kind of permanent development.  I wanted to avoid that kind of thing in the service of keeping my setting lower on the fantastic elements and somewhat familiar to my players.

I dodged it by replacing apocalyptic scenarios and sorcerous, omnipresent evil  tyrants with a dim and misanthropic view of civilization (which I owe Robert E. Howard a nickel for, I suppose).  When everyone in power is inept, complacent, shortsighted or corrupt, if not all of the above, it's easy for a dark tone to prevail.

A side effect of this is that it's harder to change the whole world.  It's been pointed out that players will see a defined Bad Guy as an invitation to kick ass and be heroic.  If a GM is going for dark fantasy I see that ending in either a TPK or in the campaign changing from Dark Fantasy into Tolkeinian Epic.  While my players might think they can or are supposed to take down a Sauron-type villain, I doubt they'll try to cure poverty and promote world peace, and their actions won't have such far-reaching consequences.

[runester]

Imagine a planet covered in a sheet of ice dozens of miles high, covering the entirety of the planet it is only broken by round depressions that are filled with the greenery of life.  Each depression is approximately 200-300 miles in diameter centered around a towering crystal that burns with a brilliant light.

I like this idea. There's something about the isolated pockets of life in an ocean of ice. Then, when the crystal stops giving heat, the sentients try to navigate miles of under-ice rivers to find another pocket. Depending on how often that happens, you could get a strange mixing of races and cultures.

Personally, while people have been describing worlds and settings, there have been some assumptions about races. I'm more interested in how player (and other) races are developed. I mean, there is no actual law that says you HAVE to have elves, dwarfs, gnomes, and hobbits (oops, I mean halflings). Though, to be fair, the efforts to create truly unique fantasy races is usually weak. I tend to see a lot of anthropomorphic's. Now, while that doesn't bother me (I don't have an anti-furry phobia or whatever) but the races are usually just "humans with a twist" and pretty generic at that.

It occurs to me that coming up with interesting fantasy races would imply a setting and generate a back story (history) instead of trying to do it the other way round.