Running and Playing Dark Fantasy Campaigns

[Satinavian]

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]

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

[Anonymouswizard]

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

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]

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. 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]

I found this link on writing Dark Fantasy, and I think pretty much all of it can be applied to running games as well.

[RazorChain]

I found this link 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]

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]

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]

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]

I've come across a couple of interesting settings the last weeks, which also did remind me of others I've seen before.

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 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 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]

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]

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]

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_...ducts_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]

@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]

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.