How would you make demons really dark?

[Janx]

Actually, no, now I'm going to pick on you. First, because you are actually getting political but you just denied to yourself what is obvious, and secondly because your view of the world is not more dark. What you've actually done is clearly delineated the bad guys, making opposition to those things good and making the problem solvable and opening up at least the potential for victory. What you should be looking at is how easily this analogy came into your head, and how easily it might fit with how you already look at the world. You're actually creating a world view for yourself filled with hope.

That's the nicest thing anybody on EN World has ever said about me.

I'm OK with failing to define a perfectly horrible world view for my self. I agree with Kirk. I don't believe in no-win scenarios.

Dark would go much further. It would suggest that not only are all those things exactly as you say that they are, but that all the opposition to those things are also being run by the demonic conspiracy for their own demonic ends. It would suggest that the whole of political strife exists solely to trick people into doing first one thing then another to further the interests of the demons. So for example, you were motivated to repeat anti-corporatist memes, not because the corporations are actually the good guys, but that a world in which even all that you said was true, if the corporations won and created that world it would be less dark and better than is actually intended. The goal isn't to create a world nearly as bright as is suggested by your post, but the worst of all possible worlds, having all the evils you postulate but none of the redeeming features of that world. That is, all that, but also a world with no privileged status to hope to obtain to, no wealth or comforts resulting from industry for anyone to share in, everyone always desiring to being gluttonous but having no food to indulge in, everyone always in a state of heightened lust, but lacking any object for that lust, and so forth. In the world you postulate, there is at least room for the villains to enjoy themselves. But the truly demonic desires not even the villainous to find any joy, hope, or comfort because even those are shreds of surviving good shining like little lights in the darkness.

True evil has been portrayed a couple of times in literature. Tolkien does it at several points. The world where Sauron triumphs is a world of misery for its own sake. In the book 1984, Orwell pretty well captures the notion of evil triumphant - misery exists for its own sake. There is no big brother, no ruling caste, no anyone who is profiting from the horror. Everyone is captured in it. It's not perfectly horrific and dark, several features of the book at the end suggest a horrific sort of happiness is possible even in the darkness and that the social order described ultimately collapses, but it comes reasonably close.

I probably didn't read enough into Tolkien to get the hopleless sense of hopelessness that Sauron was pushing. Orwell was much more obvious and to the point as the hopelessness was the current state of affairs, rather than projected.

Anyway, in your view, the state of affairs in a GrimDark setting is that Evil has won, and it Sucks for Everyone. Even Evil.

Hypothetically, Walking Dead does OK at this. Everything sucks. When you die, you join the suck. Everybody you like is going to eventually join the suck. If you make too much noise being happy right now, suck will come and ruin it.

 

[megamania]

The greatest terror, horror and evil is in the mind. make them strike out slowly through possession and manipulation. Have them mess with player's heads.... turn them against friends, allies and finally themselves.

 

[Celebrim]

That's the nicest thing anybody on EN World has ever said about me.

Anyway, in your view, the state of affairs in a GrimDark setting is that Evil has won, and it Sucks for Everyone. Even Evil.

Joy, happiness, weal, health, pleasure, prosperity, and so forth are all good things. If even evil enjoys such things, it's an admission that weal, health, and the like are the objects which are desirable. Evil doesn't do evil so that joy and pleasure may abound all the more, as if team good was hoarding or withholding happiness and it was evil's job to spread it around. That's just how evil markets itself, because otherwise, no one who wasn't already wholly ruined would play for team evil.

Hypothetically, Walking Dead does OK at this. Everything sucks. When you die, you join the suck. Everybody you like is going to eventually join the suck. If you make too much noise being happy right now, suck will come and ruin it.

I wish I could agree with you, because a real zombie apocalypse would be analogous to the triumph of evil. But In reality, zombie apocalypse fiction is exactly like your initial attempt to escape the darkness by clearly delineating the sides and the means for winning - notably by kicking butt. Zombie apocalypse fiction is actually about giving yourself vicarious justification for enjoying killing the bad guys. It's ultimately about tickling the lizard brain with violence fantasies - "What would I do in the event of a zombie apocalypse?" And ultimately, in most zombie fiction we see the same moral arc being played out that I predicted and spoke about concerning slasher movies. The longer it plays out, the more functional and happy the zombies are portrayed, and the more empathy that we are expected as an audience to have for the zombies until ultimately the zombies become the good guys in the story and the living the monsters. Romeo who invented the genera basically does this with his story arcs. And something like "The Girl with All the Gifts" is actually the near the end state of zombie fetishization, in the same way that we end up with something like Twilight as the end state of vampire fetishization. Because ultimately real dark doesn't stop with you imagining the horror; it involves you forgetting the horror and then coming to lust after it as a thing to be desired. You start with fearing the zombies, but you end up worshiping them. You start with fearing the vampires, but you end up wanting to be one.

Notice that pretty much any zombie apocalypse without survivors, always has the zombies themselves be the survivors? That's not yet dark. Real dark is what you started with - no one survives, they are eternally hungry to the point of physical pain but have nothing to feed on, eternally hateful but with nothing left to vent their hate on, eternally lusting but lacking even a decayed organ to satiate the lust with nor anyone beautiful left to desire, and they have not enough rationality left to even realize what they are much less do anything about it, locked into this existence without power or capacity to choose anything else even if they could want to.

 

[Janx]

Joy, happiness, weal, health, pleasure, prosperity, and so forth are all good things. If even evil enjoys such things, it's an admission that weal, health, and the like are the objects which are desirable. Evil doesn't do evil so that joy and pleasure may abound all the more, as if team good was hoarding or withholding happiness and it was evil's job to spread it around. That's just how evil markets itself, because otherwise, no one who wasn't already wholly ruined would play for team evil.

Just to explore this element further, you seem to be saying evil's goal is to inflict suffering. And that it recruits by enticing with power, health, wealth because those who pursue those end up inflicting suffering.

I suppose this would/could be true for an extra-dimensional critter we'd recognize as a demon.

outside of that actually existing, I assume regular evil people are just pursuing power and wealth with no regard for others. Thus, they don't mind hurting people. Some even enjoy it. Because they score high on the Psychopathy test.

But in the end, those people ARE happy, except when other forces thwart them.

I wish I could agree with you, because a real zombie apocalypse would be analogous to the triumph of evil.

I did say it was a "hypothetically OK" example, not a perfect one

How about Nazis?

Were they happy (when they weren't losing the war)?

Did torturing and killing 6 million or so people make their day?

Did Hitler have a pretty good time in office?

I sort of expect that a bunch of Nazis enjoyed their work and were happy with the fruits of their labor.

 

[Alzrius]

I've always thought that possession was an interesting theme, partially due to the lack of any particular method of verifying if someone is possessed or not.

Following on that is the idea that it's hard for a victim of possession to tell what thoughts and actions were caused by a possessing demon, and which were there own. Indeed, the horror there tends to be caused by the fact that the victim might wonder if they did something horrible of their own designs, rather than because they were forced to do it.

As an alternate take on that, the real victim might not be the individual that was possessed, but the people around them who were convinced to commit some sort of moral lapse because of the urging (or even "consent") of the possessed person.

 

[Celebrim]

Just to explore this element further, you seem to be saying evil's goal is to inflict suffering. And that it recruits by enticing with power, health, wealth because those who pursue those end up inflicting suffering.

I suppose this would/could be true for an extra-dimensional critter we'd recognize as a demon.

Yes. I'm addressing in a round about way some definitions like 'demon' and 'dark' before I'd even begin to answer the question. If I don't do that first, and if we can't agree to the definitions, there isn't much point in giving an answer.

outside of that actually existing, I assume regular evil people are just pursuing power and wealth with no regard for others. Thus, they don't mind hurting people. Some even enjoy it. Because they score high on the Psychopathy test.

But in the end, those people ARE happy, except when other forces thwart them.

I'm not going to quibble much, while I'd prefer a little more nuanced take, because I don't really need to for these purposes. Yes. They can be happy because they are not wholly ruined yet. Although again, on the level of nuance, if your description of sociopaths was in fact true, many of them would not want to be caught or would not commit suicide. Mass murders almost invariably commit suicide afterwards. Killing was their last chance at happiness, and it failed them. The happy serial killer has a certain level of romanticization of sociopathy to it and occurs in a far higher percentage of fictional representations of sociopathy than in reality. Or more simply put, the recognizably insane are usually not themselves very happy people. Most live lives of joyless terror haunted by irrational fears and anxiety. Many have severely damaged pleasure centers which render them virtually incapable of having happy feelings, so that the act of killing remains one of the few ways that they can still tickle the lizard brain enough to get a cocaine like jolt of pleasure. Typically, our stories about serial killers make it seem far cooler than it actually is.

How about Nazis?

How about we don't? I dislike using Nazis as short hand for non-subjective and consensus evil between members of different cultural subgroups, not because I don't find Nazism vile but because I find it impoverishing of the vocabulary and imagination to do so. In particular, in discussing something as broad as 'Nazis', we probably ought to ask a question like, "Which one? There were 10's of millions of Nazis." From those, we could find examples of evil working in every sort of way, and among all sorts of different types of people with different experiences. But again, I don't have to object to your claim that the Nazis were pursuing good ends and that many of them enjoyed what they did, even in some cases the most abominable sorts of things that they did. However, nothing good I think can come from exploring this question through Nazism. Ironically, we are far more likely to find people turning off their brain at the mention of Nazi than they are the word demon.

The point is, with something like a person, you'll never quite get a perfect representation of evil. Truly terrible and horrible evil, yes - I'd argue more horrible than any of the suggestions of this thread - but not quite absolute unadulterated evil. So far most suggestions regarding demons amount to, "Make them cool, powerful, smiling, happy, joking sorts of human villains." Not to put to blunt a point on it, but most suggestions are really answers to the question, "How would you make demons really sexy?" I grant you that is dark, but it requires backing out to the meta-scene. For example, a slasher movie isn't scary or disturbing. The audience watching the slasher movie is scary and disturbing. Our imaginations are capable of taking us to even darker lands. But the slasher movie itself isn't the vehicle that can take us there, which is why Morrus isn't actually putting his head around how to make his monsters darker.

 

[Deuce Traveler]

Whatever you do, don't give them stats. At least not in the beginning of your arc. Maybe the party can only stop them if they know the 'rules' like with Dream of the Endless or Constantine in the comics.

Build NPC relationships with the characters, but make it so that the characters cannot save everyone. Don't overuse this or they'll reject the game entirely, but for every person they save there is another one that they cannot. For every win the PCs achieve, they have to suffer somewhat and come out permanently scarred. Look for towards anything written by Neil Gaiman for some ideas.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Make them anathema to something, and some things anathema to them.

By that, I mean that their presence causes something to go wrong, causes odd reactions in certain kinds of flora/fauna. And, on the flip side, they cannot stand to be in the presence of _________, and react in a certain way.

I did this in a semi-successful campaign. A kind of homebrewed stat-draining demon I used would snuff out light sources because light damaged them. The more powerful ones would also use mental control effects to make their foes extinguish their own light sources, or avoid using light-producing (like fire or lightning) attacks. They would have been much scarier, but I made a design flaw when I created them: instead of draining stats that would make it easier for those mental control effects to work, they drained physical stats. Which meant that as the PCs increased in power, the demons decreased in scariness- even a weak, nearly immobile PC can light a torch, after all.

 

[pemerton]

I think there is a structural feature of RPGing that can make genuine "darkness" difficult to achieve.

Darkness and horror are linked to despair. And despair is linked to hopelessness - a perceived lack of ability to achieve desired goals.

The last notably dark film I remember seeing was "Wake in Fright", an excellent Australian film from the early 1970s that was re-released around 5 years ago. It is not a horror film in the conventional genre sense (no zombies, ghosts, etc), but I think it does evoke horror and hopelessness, and the audience's sympathetic experience of the main character's lack of control over his situation is part of that.

Another film that I think is quite dark is Tod Browning's "The Freaks", although its relationship to loss of control is different (and probably more disturbing).

In an RPG, it is hard to give the players a sense that they have no control over their fate without removing control. Which can easily come into conflict with the goals of RPGing, where players tend to at least feel that their choices make a difference to what is happening in the story - even if those choices are simply choices about how to roleplay their PC.

 

[KirayaTiDrekan]

Demons are rooted in human fears and desires. They are often portrayed as both something to be terrified of and something to lust for, otherwise succubi wouldn't be categorized as demons so very often.

So, while Celebrim brings up some good points, I think that you shouldn't shy away from the lust/desire aspect. Make them frightening but compelling, grotesque but beautiful. They are the holders of the forbidden fruit - the question is, why is it forbidden and who forbade it?

I happen to be a Clive Barker fan but you mentioned Hellraiser as not to your liking so I'll use Candyman for my example instead. He is a non-sexual seducer, extending an invitation to "Be my victim." Why would anyone give in to that? What compels someone to look into the mirror and say his name five times, when the possible result is a painful death?

Ultimately, the demon represents a fascination and fear of the unknown and death. We both seek to understand it and fear its inevitability.