hey! was wondering if you have some ideas/tips for running a dark fantasy campaign? ive been running one for about a year now and while ive included horror elements im a naturally silly person and i feel like i go a couple sessions without including something strange and off-putting. i do wanna be distinct from grimdark, i want my story to have hope and moments of levity, but still feel scary and like the world is against the pcs.
hope ur day is well :]
Genretalk: Dark Fantasy
Maintaining a consistent tone at our d&d table is a notoriously hard thing to accomplish. Partially it's because it's a collaborative game and not all of our players might be as dictatorially inclined as we are, there's also the dice to contend with and those little polyhedral bastards don't care about dramatic consistency or the wrath of god.
So it falls to us as dungeon masters to do most of the work, but luckily I've found that evoking a specific genre can be pretty easily done through keeping a few ideas in mind while we're running scenes and building out our worlds.
First, a meditation on loss :.|:;
What makes dark fantasy dark? The surface level is aesthetics; dirt covered fauxmedivalism, horror imagery, gritty "realism", a lack of smiles and rainbows and happiness. These are all too common but they only reflect the feelings the genre exists to convey, specifically ones related to both the fear of loss and the suffering caused by it.
If people are going to lose something (whether they be players or npcs), you're going to need them and your audience to care about it, which means learning to build connections and evoke sympathy. Having those moments of levity is SO important because they're the point of attachment for your players, the thing that makes them care about this sometimes rotten world you've crated that they've taken on the responsibility of saving. If you skipped this step you'd be going into grimdark, which is one of the reasons I dislike the genre: death and suffering lose all meaning if there's no alternative.
Likewise, as easy as it is to lose hope, people are going to try to make the best of bad times. There's good food and the warmth of a fire and the company of friends and the chance of something better happening tomorrow. People are going to want these things no matter how turbulent circumstances get, so it's important to focus on them to give contrast to the darkness of your story.
Bad things happen to good people and there's (probably) nothing you can do about it
One of the central conceits of playing D&D is that the players are heroes, characters with a unique power and agency in the world and the ability to shape the outcome of events, specifically to beat the odds and save the day. However we can still lean into the dark side of dark fantasy by highlighting that while the players are privileged by their protagonist status, most other people aren't.
Most NPCS the party end up getting to know should have something tragic in their backstory; a war, a famine, a plague, a loved one's death. This will have affected them deeply and have coloured their outlook on the world and will set up their later dramatic arc. The town magistrate is going to have opinions about adventurers after her sister befriended a passing gang of sellswords and ended up dying in childbirth after being seduced by their charismatic leader. The townspeople are unlikely to rebel against their petty and sadistic baron since they remember his military acumen that saved them during the last border war. This also sets up the unexpected moments where the party can fight against the darkness of the world by getting people to see past the lifetime of cruelty they've been forced to endure.
A centeral part of the players having agency is making choices, but sometimes things go wrong, and sometimes there's no good options. Innocent people get hurt, there are costs that we end up having to pay that may or may not be worth the price. Keeping the young lovers apart and letting the unpleasant political marriage go through is the only way to avert war. There's a murder demon stalking town and the only way to banish it is for someone innocent to be ritually sacrificed, none of the heroes count, they've all got blood on their hands.
