Creating a Dark Fantasy Campaign (Read 1st post)

As it appears that my current Kalamar campaign is drawing to a close, I’ve been prepping for the next campaign to be set in Pathfinder’s Golarion. As I’m putting the framework together, I’ve been thinking I want to plant the game squarely in the dark fantasy camp. To use video game vernacular, it’s going to be “M”-rated. To use movie vernacular, it’ll be straddling the “PG-13” & “R” fence but will lean more towards the “R” side.

The closest source of inspiration I can cite is Dragon Age: Origins . I want to take a standard Golarion campaign & use it for a dark fantasy campaign much like DA:O takes conventional FRPG elements but puts a dark fantasy lens over it. Taking cues from DA: O, the mechanics aren’t what makes the game a dark fantasy, it’s the story & content. I’ve got the mechanics I need. Instead, I’m looking for theme, mood, NPC, & adventure creation suggestions to help achieve my goal.

What this campaign WILL NOT be:

• A Ravenloft-style horror campaign
• A Midnight-style oppressive lost-cause campaign
• A no-heroes campaign

So to my fellow GMs, how would you go about achieving my goal of a dark fantasy Golarion campaign?

My initial thoughts:

• Tough choices. There should be few choices that lead to better/easier outcomes than others. This isn’t to say all choices must be negative, but the PCs should have to really work to determine the optimal path and the optimal path should never be the easiest one to take.
  
• Moral ambiguity. Even though PF uses alignment, generally speaking, things are more morally gray.
  
• Ruthless bad guys. The PCs aren’t facing four-color comic hero villains from the Silver Age of comics, bad guys to bad things – and they often times are being done to good people/innocents.
  
• Corrupting influences. Things like the 7 Deadly Sins (already in canon per the Runelords) are NPC/villain motivations just as often (or moreso) than Evil as Sauron-style influence. When Outsider-style/otherworldly evil is in around, it’s reeeeaally bad.
  
• Violence isn’t pretty. It’s bloody, destructive, and not always the best solution.
  
• Competing factions. Many people find security in group affiliations and many groups are at cross purposes with each other.
  
• Prejudices. Many people have them & they can be based on just about anything. Those that have them often aren’t shy about displaying them.
  
• The PC’s actions have lasting consequences. Whether it’s the death of a NPC that might have been saved, the destruction of a village or town, there should be demonstrable consequences of the impact to the setting caused by the PCs actions. Many times, making things better for person/group A means severely impacting person/group B in a detrimental way.

Interesting idea. IMO those ideas dont' make it very "dark", more like "mature". Dragon age (which I like and have played), is more of a mature and semi-realistic compared to many other games of similar genre.

Then again IMO there hasn't been "dark" computer game since Harvester.


What comes to Golarion example of Runelords module, I am a player now as part 5. Little darkish, mature and twisted humor elements.


You have already defined some basic elements how things will work in your world. However, what you are missing is overall plot.

Do you want to go similar direction as Dragon age with it's war/politics/darkspawn?
Some return of elder evil story?
Some story of rogues/fallen nobles in way to glory and riches from dirt and poverty, personal story maybe how far you are willing to go and how much to pay for that price


Or no bigger plots, just different events pc:s can interact.


Or are you still at phase of fishing ideas.


As to add to that list:

Magic corrupts (if you want to go to Dragon Age direction, think blood magic)
Trusted groups arent' what they seem (hidden agendas, not with every one but some)
Curses
No color coded good/evil (dragon example but goes wtih everything, dont' overuse though)
Ruthless good/neutral guys (in world such as this why should only evil be ruthless)
Innocent get hurt (children, animals, your good average harworking family)
Uprising masses (there are strikes, rebellions, witch hunts)
Corrupted nature (don't forget polluting infulence of evil gods like Lammasu)
Fear (show how npc:s fear monster, undead and many bad things, affects player mood)

Runelords adventure part 2 with ghouls was dark and creepy. It's not good idea to do too much of this kinda scanarios though, unless you want to run horror fantasy, which I love, but many people don't.

DA:O takes conventional FRPG elements but puts a dark fantasy lens over it

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Woah, DAO is "dark fantasy"? You're kidding right? This game is about as dark as a sunny field of flowers. Okay, maybe dark-ish, maybe a few parts are kinda dark, but not even close by most dark fantasy standards I'd say. That said, I'll comment on what you said you want to do.

Tough Choices

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Are always good in any game. It's good for the game, it's good for the players, and generally, it's fun when you actually have to think about what you want to do, instead of just go with the "save all the bunnies" route.

Moral ambiguity

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Like tought choices, always good, so long as there's at least enough clarity to understand where your moral choices are going to place you in the given context. Killing kids is bad...but what if they're theives? That sort of thing.

ruthless bad guys

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Depends on what you do. The "bad guys" weigh the decisions just like the rest of us, few of them are so psychotic as to think the rules don't exist/apply. Your standard theif is not going to suddenly bump up to rapist/murderer just because the wife was home when he broke in. And you have to be careful with some of that stuff, if the afore-mentioned thief does make that move up, those sorts of things, rape and murder, can upset players, even if they thought they were OK with it.

And of course, if you do include those things, you have to be careful about having them happen to the player. What happens if the female mage is overpowered by the criminal? That's not somewhere I'd go with a PC.

corrupting influences

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Are good when they are subtle. Temptation, trickery, lies and deceit. You have to balance how overt they are with how effective they are.

violence

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Again, even players who claim to be tolerant to it may find they are not so if you are overly descriptive.

lasting consequences

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Are great, but once again, saving X farmer shouldn't be the make or break on if the dark lord is going to regain his ring of power and destroy the tower of bable. Maybe saying 100 farmers might mean a little more deforestation and the town makes more food, but it's a matter of scale. Killing Kobolds won't tip the balance of power in the universe in a matter that well, matters.

I think if you want something truly 'dark', you need look no further for inspiration than our own history. In this sense, 'Dark' is also realistic: but it can make for a rather depressing game experience. As soon as you place any objective 'Good' in the world - with regard to the moral behavior of a society - it, in fact, becomes fantastical.

Occasionally, exceptional individuals can buck this trend with regard to their own behavior. It tends to be harder to convince large populations to behave in what we might today consider ethically responsible ways. Both historically and contemporaneously in many cases (I shirk from saying 'all'; I'm not quite that pessimistic), I think it's reasonable to say:

1. Greed, corruption and the desire for more power are the norm amongst the ruling elite
2. Torture, slavery, oppression and persecution is commonplace
3. Armies routinely rape, murder and plunder, and enormous populations of noncombatants suffer in wartime

The fact that these days we feel some kind of indignation when 'our' people are found guilty of certain of these acts is actually an enormous leap forward in my mind. For the last five thousand years, nobody batted an eyelid.

The other side to my favored campaign settings for 3.x is Diomin, which is decidedly dark fantasy. Decisions matter. The bad guys are right bastards and enjoy what they do.

I've wondered if I should house rule in the triple 20 instant kill optional rule?

Shades of gray might be a better description than dark. Never-the-less, here are some ideas.

Drop alignment altogether. Substitute other things for alignment spells an abilities. This keeps the players from deciding who to said with based on who's evil, neutral, or good. It also keeps you from having to create all neutral characters and effectively making detect alignment worthless.

Minimize monsters. Focus on creating threats that come from the same races and the PC's. A monster is inherently something the PC's are going to put down, a halfling? It will give them pause.

Give everyone a redeeming quality or a vice. Bad guys maybe misguided and good people will follow them. When a couple paladins stand up in support of someone like Loghain, will the PC's just chop them down? Or if the generous and charismatic lord feeds mistreats gnomes, what then?

Instead of getting rid of alignment altogther, make it so that it only works based on perceptions. The cleric of Bane can drop a holy smite on the PCs because he thinks they're evil, and so on. Only things that truly perceive themselves as evil can take blackguard, assassin, etc.

Overdose on reading Fritz Leiber, Clark Ashton Smith and Glen Cook's Black Company series. Hell, look a little deeper into The Hobbit and you will see some weird/dark elements. The Silmarillion itself is a great way of introducing dark-strange elements into your campaign world. People who say Tolkien is sunshine and happiness have never really read his work.

Read some of these, if you haven't, and you will have a lot of inspiration to inject darkness into your fantasy. I begin with a "standard" fantasy world and slowly layer the strange, weird and dark as the players explore around. Why do those strange dwarfs on the hill have wings and fangs? Do they follow a dark god of some sort?

Here's an outline of an adventure I did for Eberron in Sharn: Prostitute found dead from asphyxiation related to burning 'drug' stuffed into windpipe. After, a disoriented halfling found in a crate full of copper coins, left to die possibly from suffocation, maybe thirst. (Didn't really work that out.) They found him in time. Then, (and did,) a noble being suspended on Big Ben (large clock tower that I think Sharn should have had, so it does now,) to be killed by the clock mechanism when it strikes midnight. The prostitute did drugs, the halfling was greedy, and the Noble wouldn't even stop to give someone the time of day. A (fallen?) paladin of Good (Silver Flame in this case) noticed these evils, was tired of the corruption, and took matters into his own hands. Party stopped him, then lied and published that he was insane. More insane? (One of the characters worked for the newspaper.) Sprinkle clues throughout, like the halfing had a pocketwatch with blood smeared on the '12,' and done.

I thought it was really fun. I think that sort of situation might be what you're looking for.

I am currently buidling a dark fantasy setting inspired by feudal Japan, called Kaidan: a Japanese Ghost Story setting, being an imprint under Rite Publishing, and should be available early 2011.

Things I did to make it a dark setting...

1. The setting is founded based on a curse uttered during a tragic event.
2. All provincial rulers, the imperial court and shogunate including the 5 year old boy emperor are ghosts - tied to the curse mentioned above.
3. Raise Dead and Resurrection magic does not work.
4. Reincarnation is tied to the setting, one's place in society depends on your actions in a previous ife, as your actions today determine your place in the next life (through a mechanic called Karma) - one can multiclass across multiple lifetimes.
5. When one reincarnates, they may or may not remember everything in their past life (they might lose levels in the crossing.)
6. Becoming a ghost is all too easy, many requirements at the moment of death are demanded, even at PC death, not doing so appropriately leads to undead (NPC) status.
7. Despite the presence of non-human races hiding in wilderness enclaves or in shape-changed form in the setting, the setting is very much humanocentric, so non-humans seem out of place.
8. Oni demons on dark agendas can be found in shape-changed form stalking and seducing those they can.
9. A social caste system is hard-wired to the reincarnation mechanic, and the universe exists in its own alternate cosmology, a cursed one.
10. Many historical and mythical instances from Japan used in the setting that never had been included before in previously published setting, so while dark and spooky, its also more authentically Japanese - this enhances the suspension of disbelief for players and GMs.

These are the elements I've included in Kaidan to make it dark, to an otherwise very Japanese feudal fantasy setting.

GP