Pretty GRIMDARK.

GRIMDARKNDARKGRIM

AND THEN I PAINT IT BLACK

The one setting I thought up is fairly GRIMDARK, but I believe there should always be a "PRESS THIS BUTTON TO SAVE EVERYBODY" macguffin.

Good luck trying to find it.

So GRIMDARK DARKGRIM GRIMDARKGRIMNESS GRIMDARKNESS that I come back around to SUNSHINE LOLLIPOPS AND CUTE PUPPIES from the other side.

I generally prefer mine from the lower left, more often the corner extremes. Good stories need conflict to work, and the forther that way it goes the more you get. What the nature of the story will tell me whether to draw conflict from the world or from its people.

My most enjoyed settings are pretty stark, usually Neutralgrim because Dark settings are a little harder to make work without being silly. I drive them, but usually pull up short because you really do run the risk of pushing things past the point at which your world can no longer be taken seriously, and your attempts to make it more gritty have just made it farcical. I call it the 40K line because that's about as grimdark as you can be without being automatically ridiculous.

In GRIMDARKBROWN WORLD, which is not at all based on history, an ancient empire that conquered the entire world collapsed, and during in their last moments ushered in the magical apocalypse because they did. The entire world was horribly warped and corrupted, spawning multitudes of scary monsters that look cool and diseases and stuff. So humanity, naturally, survived the end of the world and rebuilt, this time a powerful association of mages filling in for the empire, and basically controlling the world since the only force that can deter the world's corruption and blight is magic. So, naturally, mages are corrupt. Also the Protestant reformation happens.

Is that grimdark enough?

How grim and dark is Detroit?

>>7043222

Well, they do have dead piling up on their streets, so pretty grim and dark.

Detroit is Neutralgrim. The universe at large bears no special enmity towards it and the place is much better than it could have been, albeit much worse that it could be. It is shit because people made it shit.

>>7043222

>>7043222
Not as GRIMNDARK as Camden. But then again, few things are.

Mine usually aren't too grimdark. The true evils are always underlying and in the background while focus is on indepedent characters.

This is only because I've yet to play a game based in the Hell of Barlowe's "Inferno" and "God's Demon" setting. I really want to but have no idea how to approach it or even what system to use.

NobleDark? How the hell does that work?

My problem is that in my head, I am trying to create a universe of Battletech that is all Oil&Dirt.

However, I'm unable to curb my making puns.

I have a feeling that I won't be able to make my PCs feel shitserious as I want them to, so long as I'm behind the reigns.

>>7043291

Nobledark would be a Lovecraftian universe where humanity is doomed, assailed by forces that it cannot defeat or comprehend, yet stands and fights every inch of the way.

"The War. The humans, I think, knew they were doomed. Where another race would surrender to despair, the humans fought back with greater strength. They made the Minbari fight for every inch of space. In my life, I have never seen anything like it; They would weep, they would pray, they would say goodbye to their loved ones, and then throw themselves without fear or hesitation at the very face of death itself, never surrendering. No one who saw them fighting against the inevitable could help but be moved to tears by their courage. Their stubborn nobility. When they ran out of ships, they used guns, when they ran out guns they used knives and sticks and bare hands. They were magnificent. I only hope that when it is my time, I may die with half as much dignity as I saw in their eyes in the end. They did this for two years they never ran out of courage but in the end, they ran out of time. "

Londo Mollari defining Nobledark for you.

>>7043291

The universe is a hellish place that seeks only to grind all its occupants into a screaming melange of misery and pain. There can be no lasting victory, and our gains are only losses yet to be had. And yet we fight on, with hope in our hearts and faith in our souls, for a glorious future must be out there, and if we have the will, we know we can take it.

One more charge, lads. One more charge and it shall be ours.

>>7043308
So what's grimbright, then?

I don't think Lovecraftian universes can be deemed Nobledark. I think one of the defining traits of Nobeldark is that there has to be some way, no matter how utterly impossible, to win.

Lovecraftian would be Neutraldark at best and Grimdark at worst. The tendency of humans to try and actively unleash this shit on each other in most of these settings precludes any other option.

>>7043320

Grimbright is where everything LOOKS bright and wonderful, but, if you look beneath the surface, shit sucks.

>>7043330
So a dystopia, then?

>>7043320

A Grimbright world is one in which everything is really nice, and people get along. And yet all it takes is one bad day to turn a peaceful community into a screaming hellhole of humanity lost.

Think of most utopia to dystopia stories.

The chart is easy. Grim-Noble are the people. Grim means people are generally shit. Noble means people are generally good. Neutral means people can go either way, and tend not to go too far. Dark-Bright is the world. Dark is a world that should never have seen life. Bright is a utopian wonder. Neutral is a place that's pretty good, but could really use some work.

>>7043189
>I PAINT IT BLACK

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oifhg-La088

>>7043291

Teddy Roosevelt rides a black cyborg stallion into battle against amorphous horrors driving semi-sentient flesh golems.

>>7043337
>And yet all it takes is one bad day to turn a peaceful community into a screaming hellhole of humanity lost.

Not quite.

Bright/dark refers to aesthetic, whereas Noble/Grim refers to how things actually are.

Grimbright would be a setting where everything is neat and clean, with beautiful landscapes and exquisite art. But it'd also be a setting where everything is going to hell - barbarians are at the gates, the nobility are hopelessly corrupt, and the poor are being sacrificed inside marble temples to unspeakable creatures to maintain the safety of the city.

>>7043333

Possibly, but not necessarily.

1984 wouldn't be grimbright.

Neutral Dark.

Ravenloft up in this bitch.

I like worlds that are simply apathetic to the heroes. My players frequently slip into nihilism because, I quote verbatim from the ex-paladin, "what would be the point of it anyway?" When presented with a raped woman begging out to them as they passed alongside the road. Their characters are frequently warped to the point where they all turn out true neutral, as the paladins lose their righteous fury and fall, and the psychopaths are deadened by the sheer ineffectiveness of their actions. They're also capable of some incredibly awesome deeds, mostly because they attempt to gain some sort of notice, and it turns out awesome.

That being said, I also run campaigns that are any kind of dark, where the heroes frequently run into moral dilemmas and tragedy. I gave the knightly sorcerer character a beautiful elven princess that adored him and wanted to be with him forever, then had her corrupted by a demon and tried to murder the paladin. Paladin smote evil like there was no tomorrow on a level 1 aristocrat, and the sorcerer went berserk and tried to kill him. From then on, sorcerer was a haunted character who hated love and would sleep with any whore he could get his hands on. IIRC, he ended up achieving lichdom and found the paladin and slaughtered him and his family.

That's a little grimdark, though.

I use ValiantDark. Everything is dark, but there is a core of nobility and sacrifice if only you can somehow tap into it and inspire those around you to do the same. Not that it won't get them killed at the same time, but nobility implies self-sacrifice to begin with.

>>7043337
So our world by that definition is Grimneutral, with the neutral shaded pretty heavily towards Dark.

>>7043354

You can set up your own divisions however you like. I made that chart and these definitions because I felt the aesthetics/goodbad division was not useful.

I tend to stick to more the left or bottom edge. Noblebright is too boring, and grimdark seems to fall into paraody WAY too easy.

>>7043380

That sounds like the start of a game if I ever heard one.

The object of the game is to survive and help others survive. It's best accomplished by not just physically helping them to live but bestowing upon them the willpower to live.

Well, my current setting involves a city-plane that hosts the supporting pillar of the multiverse. My PCs found a flier in their hometown that said this place was a great vacation spot and got in line to visit the place. They are given a house with neighbors consisting of a Mimic house and a family of friendly Ilithids that are always inviting them over for dinner. They get around the city by means of either super powered scooters that travel at 1500ft per round, but can't turn and inevitably crash into a building before they get anywhere, or transporcatapults; catapults that launch it's passengers to different districts of the city. As a sidequest they have competed in the PWF (Planar Wrestling Federation) and managed to work their way to the top to challenge the champion, Rasslor, and get their collective asses handed to them. They recently found out that (big surprise) that they can't leave the city, and need to face the city's administrator to find a way home. Currently, they were caught by the city guard (Glazberu in rainbow armor) and thrown into the pits of Happyland (of the Dead) where they are being forced into a eternal rave with a bunch of zombies by the ruling vampire who wants nothing more than to literally party all the time.

So yeah, I would consider my setting to be pretty far in the GRIMDARK territory. (Pic related, it's the final boss these guys face)

>>7043374
>>That's a little grimdark, though.

More like, that's very, very awesome. I'm saving that story.

>>7043149

I try to make my campaign settings as much like Silent Hill as possible. Not in the sense of burned or waterlogged environments (although they show up too), but in tailoring enemies to the PCs' shortcomings or insecurities, making BBEGs either have Lovecraftian goals or be misguided heroes, equipment which is incredibly useful for a morally compromising price, making players roleplay through hallucinations, that sort of shit. Grimdark isn't necessarily what I aim for, but I always want some small part of the player to be reluctant to sit down for simple fear of what will happen next in-game.

Im running a campaign right now that is basically a ripoff of Golden Sun: The Lost Age

If anyone actually knows about that game, more power too ya, also makes great grimdark lowmagic setting (just make 4 custom classes for four elements and your squared away, you get to keep all the gooy 3.5 goodness w/o breaking your teeth on a chunk of arcane casting)

Not very GRIMDARK, really. While I love grittiness and bad shit to be in my settings, I like there to be hope and some actual chance of progress or goodness in the settings, if you look for it. I like heroes to be able to change the way the world works, or to improve thier lot in life or whatever. I'm basically a happy ending guy.

That said, a happy ending isn't as powerful if you dont earn it. I like my settings to be able to really put the PCs through the meatgrinder. not just in the death sense, but in the sense that they'll suffer, but in the end the rewards are enough.

Probably the darkest setting I enjoy regularly is a homebrew a friend and I developed. It's set in a modern-day alternate reality style setting. It's basically about how magic and sorcerous powers exist, but are entirely controlled by the government, big businesses and organised crime families.

It's kinda grim in that the world the PCs live in is a lot more restrictive, run down and violent than real life. We mostly play in either New York or LA, which is much larger and the moderate areas make the worst areas of the real life cities look tame. All sorts of social problems like gangs, the cops wear riot gear as standard uniform that kinda stuff. To give you an idea, the prohibition in the 20s was never lifted and things just kept getting worse. The police force are kinda like Gotham PD in that there ARE good guys, but a lot of the force is corrupted. We usually play as either a small band of the Special Investigations squad or as Enforcers for one of the Families in the local Mafia scene who keep order between the factions in the organised crime scene.

>>7043438

So while the characters are exposed to the shit state of affairs, they are the "main characters" so they can be above or separate as the plot demands. And we've considered trying a plot set somewhere else. After all the US is still fairly okay compared to some other places. China or the UK in the setting have a very hands-on government control force, all Europe is much more violent and we still haven't figured out how to run an African campaign and have a survival rate the players would be happy with (maybe with a different group).

Anyways, there is still hope in the setting, like I mentioned. In higher-level plots we usually deal with WHY magic and stuff is kept secret,(Being one of the top priorities for all governments) as the players start to have enough influence to point out the flaws in the explanations they've been given and have people listen. There are ways to overcome the "conspiracies" and to affect change. One of the players in a previous campaign killed one of the group of mages who ran the US and took his place, while another two leap through time to investigate the whole thing further.

>>7043424

I don't know if I think that's horribly retarded or majorly awesome...

My setting is pretty solidly noble-neutral.
The world itself has been shattered, and millions of sentient beings perished in the sundering, but they strive to rebuild.
This is the age of rediscovery, the age of adventure.

Right now I'm playing a DC Comics RPG, and it's pretty damn up beat. Our enemies are all monsters or energy beings that fade into nothing when killed, everything's easy, and if we somehow get in over our heads Batman or a Green Lantern saves the day.

New DM, new players, so that's fine.

One or two more stories and this thread is going to need archiving. Between the great stories so far and the more than decent discussion, this is a thread to return to.

CORGIS. EVERYWHERE.

I will let you decide just how grim a setting can be with that much DAWWWW.

>>7043149
So GRIMDARK it shits muhreens.

I'm fluffing up that 8-bit dystopia....its truely grimdark so take it as you will.

Grimdark isn't always the worst. The X-COM setting is pretty much Neutralgrim and yet is more brutal than most Grimdark settings.

It is impossible to put me into a grimdark setting.

GM starts up what was supposed to be a physiological horror game. I somehow turned it into a pseudo-super-hero game. He just ran with it and it turned out pretty well.

Another game, space opera. The GM tried to give us the "All is lost, time to retreat" feeling. I said FUCK THAT, CHAAAARGE! and ended up blowing a hole in the enemy main ship before getting forcibly pulled back to our own by the other players.

>>7043635
You once wrote up a description of X-Com that I've repeated several times to friends, but didn't have the foresight to save then. Any chance that you saved it?

...is Exalted's setting GRIMDARK as fuck to anyone else?

I mean, even Ancient Reborn God-Kings have only a slim change of saving the world from N number of factions (where N is equal to one more than the heroes can possibly handle).

My fantasy worlds are pretty fun and fancy free, even my evil campaign. It was more... campy than evil. Like a saturday morning cartoon show where there's cannibalistic faries and shit, but everyone is so casual about it.

The only futuristic campaign i've run is a survival DH game. Despite my best efforts and the bleakness of the scenario, I just can't make it as grimdark as I want it to be. You'd think it would be easy to make a nightmare machine where the players are trying to escape a planet about to be exterminatus'd while being chased by chaos, orks, and sodomizing space elves.

Seriously, somebody better archive this.

I'm planning a game based on Alan Moore's Twilight of the Superheroes.

The initial proposal is super GRIMDARK, Plastic Man is a prostitute, for God's sake.

Me and some buddies are working on the story, toning it down some. Right now it's looking like a cross between Kingdom Come and Hunter: the Reckoning/Vigil.

I think it would be considered NeutralDark.

>>7043149
Hey look its the chapel from act 1 in diablo 2

only with less blood and mutilated bodies

>>7043675

The players are the scum of the military, people who were too useless, dangerous or incompetent to keep around, but not worth the hassle of discharging. The entire leadership of the organisation consists of those who were too zealous, too fanatical to do their jobs, but not so incompetent it was grounds for discharge. They've been rammed into this organisation, created as an administrative black hole in a desperate attempt to clean out the scum of the armed forces of the world, given the most insane paranoid goal the world could think of to guarantee these men would never be allowed into combat, and given only those resources that are cheaper to hand over than throw away, the obsolete relics of long-past acquisitions and failed research programs.

Except then the one thing nobody ever believed could happen, did. We are attacked by aliens, and suddenly this tiny shitfunded organisation full of incompetent psychopaths and retarded psychotically-nationalistic armchair generals are the only thing standing between a military superior in every way to our own and the loss of earth and the enslavement of the human species.

The governments, now panicking, throw money at you, and you throw bodies at the aliens, spending hundreds of lives in insane and incompetent strategies to buy time that could only ever have been thought up by the zeal-over-intelligence fools in charge.

Your technology slowly improves, almost as fast as the death rates, the psychological traumas, and the horrific collateral damage, and through retrograde technological adaptation and sheer Darwinism you've turned billions of dollars and thousands of lives into a few dozen soldiers who actually stand a chance, every last one of them insane, running the gamut from acquired sociopathy to outright psychosis.

They start fighting back, and winning. With more money and troops into the meat grinder, you succeed in driving away each wave, but each time all you do is draw the attention of higher-authority foes and more powerful foes. It is near the end, and you've lost entire nations to horrific attacks, millions of soldiers from standard militaries, and X-Com has an honour roll longer than that of every war fought in the last fifty years and is now full of a few dozen of the most dangerous men ever to live armed with equipment powerful enough to make them individually a match for entire armoured companies. They are a knife in the dark, fast, deadly, and all but unstoppable. And yet, they are now all-but irrelevant. Your every loss is more than your forces can bear, and your every victory only causes the foe to escalate, until at last a mission goes catastrophically wrong and the fragile control you have managed to exert over an impossible situation is torn away. The aliens press their advantage and attack with such force that even if you found a hundred such troopers for every one you have now they would still be outmatched a thousand to one.

We have lost.

And yet, facing certain defeat, we can see for the first time a chance at victory. We have lost earth, but with it goes the need to defend. The time has come to strike. A final apocalyptic attack order is issued, and your forces fly to Cydonia as Earth burns behind them.

They succeed, despite all odds, with scarcely a handful of survivors flying back, to see a world utterly ravaged, half its population dead, the environment permanently altered, famine due to claim billions in the next thirty years, and reconstruction work to consume the combined productivity of the world for the next two hundred years . Even now, as the one man who lived through the entire conflict, a chump who never had a choice and at every stage of the war just wanted to go home, steps into the burning ruins of his homeland, only for the few survivors of his nation to beg him to turn around and leave. He is, quite simply, too great a threat to be allowed to live in the savaged carcass of human civilisation.

That is X-COM.

Speaking of Exalted, just read the Abyssal book.

Name another game where, if a PC wanders through a burned-out husk of a village and finds a single child barely hanging on to life through scavenging scraps and helps said child, it's entirely within the established rules (CoP rulefags) that when the child is turned over to a loving family for a future of happiness and joy, the kid is actually a plague dog and everyone involved dies of a horrible plague and the kid commits suicide, leaving a note blaming the PC which is found when said PC comes to check on the kid's progress.

tl;dr Exalted Abyssal = Grimdark.

Pic 85% unrelated

We were playing a group of edgerunners. Hardasses so gritty that they shit brick houses. Three veteran players, and one new guy. It happened that the new guy decided to be LOLevil and DEEP. He was going all angsty and how he hates the world - ok. He tries to play the alpha male in our group [IC, i mean] - we don't give a fuck, it's not a dog sled. And then he just did it.

We were at a bar, negotiating a contract that we badly needed - on our last run i had my arm blasted to pieces, and an EMP blast wrecked all of the Runners gear. And then i see that dumbass stand up and head to the exit after some bitch. I excuse our contact, and head to the exit. I hear screams from a back alley nearby. That dumbass is raping the girl for no fucking reason.

I slowly approach them, only the woman notices me and i see hope in her eyes. I take out my .357 magnum revolver and shoot her in the face twice. The guy panics, i silence him and make him fuck the corpse until he comes. After that i just turn around and head back into the bar.
From then on he behaved like a diligent choirboy.

^
a typical story from my games. That is still fairly light, the aftermath of a gang war ws GRIM.

The gods are dead. All of them. The astral plane lies empty devils and angels are bound to one layer of the Abyss unable to pass beyond and the souls of the dead have all but vanished from reality. Death and destruction lies across the land as the seasons fade to bleak winter, as crops die and water dries up. Fish rotting on the surface of the water for nothing can live in them. The world is ending, this reality is failing and my players have to choose if they would flee, fight to protect it, or just give up as the Apocalypse draws nigh.

>>7043876
Respek, yo.

That's some badass shit right there.

>>7043876

I find myself completely unable to imagine how anyone could roleplay this.

Grimdark = Sex Slave Simulator with photorealistic graphics
NobleBright = Magical Fairy Princess Adventures Anime filled with rainbows and laughs
GrimBright = Sex Slave Anime filled with rainbows and laughs
NobleDark = Magical Fairy Princess Adventures Simulator with photorealistic graphics

reasoning, or mechanics-wise?

mechanics: awareness->shadow/track->stealth->pistol->intimidate

reasoning: she was a witness of a crime and could put one of ours into the can. He was starting to act stupid and was endangering the group both indirectly [by his rape thang - police don't like that, and could jump his ass] and directly [he was getting cocky - the last thing you want is a cocky dumbass during a firefight]. I could have had a polite conversation with him instead, but then again, my char wasn't a psychotherapist.

And as for the gang war thing - we were hired for a simple demo job, a drug storehouse/factory was to be whacked. No thinking, just pulling the trigger, change mag, pull trigger some more. So, well, we cleared it out with some pretty excessive firepower [a van with a .50cal, a thermobaric warhead, white phosphorous and HE grenades, and some usual firepower in large amounts]. The next day it hit front page - thermobarics severly wounded over a dozen people in surrounding buildings, the .50cal was basically shooting through houses and i think 3 innocent people ended up dead, and so on. We basically killed a huge amount of innocent people, injured even more, and caused damages going in millions [there was fire spreading through the block thanks to us]. Felt bad, man.

>>7043876
For a "typical story", you sure tell that one an awful lot. Probably the twelfth time I've seen it this week.

>>7043922
With a lot of snickering and wiping Cheeto dust on Metallica t-shirts, I would assume.

>>7043990
No, as in what you actually said, out loud.

>>7043992
i'm terribly sorry for using a copypasta rather than writing it again. And, well, we neither eat cheetos nor listen to metallica.

>>7043997
all to the point of shooting the gal in the face was on your handy notes-to-gm, after that it was just a conversation between me and the other player, with GM adding the mechanics. It was something like that:

-continue
-[a nice string of profanity that could be summarized to 'what the fuck, man']
-no, you were in the middle of something, continue [ask the GM for some Intimidate rolls]

i really don't see your problem with it.