#grimdark fantasy

[mortighaar]

Mordheim Ogre Bodyguard

When I started painting this mini, I hadn't realized the journey it would take me on. The only thing I had decided at that point was that I wanted it to be grimdark, but I was still thinking what to use it for.

It then dawned on me that it would make a great Ogre Bodyguard hired sword for Mordheim. And because inspiration works in mysterious ways, I then started wondering what type of warband would hire him. Thus, the next project, which is still WIP, was born: Marienburg Mercenary Pirates, once rich and opulent privateers, now turned into corrupted mad scavengers from greed and the debilitating effects of wyrdstone exposure.

So, plenty to thank him for. He was the unintentional origin of a whole Modrheim warband. Soon, once that project is complete, he will find his home :)

[stridingvalkrie]

READ NOW: The Empire of Maharlika, a Trench Crusade story, inspired by Facebook video posted by Grimdark Fantasy, asking "What's happening in Asia in Trench Crusade?"

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Summary:

The Gate of Hell opened in 1099 and the world burned. Every coastal nation from the Persian Gulf to the eastern shores of Asia fell to the Heretic advance, one by one, until the map of the faithful was a shrinking thing. No one thought to look east of the Golden Khanate. No one knew that a seven-thousand-island archipelago called Maharlika had been fighting its own war since the beginning, and winning.

When a wrecked Faithful naval vessel drifts onto the shores of the Visayas in 1912, its surviving Captain carries something the islands have never had: gunpowder. What Datu Lapu Lapu XVI carries in return is eight hundred years of knowing exactly how to fight the dark.

A Trench Crusade fanfiction exploring an uncolonized Philippines in the grimdark alternate history of the Great War. Structured as a lore document and chronicle, following the unification of three kingdoms under the Empire of Maharlika and their campaign to reclaim the West Maharlika Sea from Heretic control. Inspired by the Shogun TV series and the canonical blank space of Asia in the Trench Crusade setting.

Author's Note:

Trench Crusade's world map has a fascinating gap: everything east of the Golden Khanate is uncharted, and the official lore acknowledges that the Heretic Legions pushed into eastern Asia but says nothing more. This felt like an open door.

The Philippines has never gotten to imagine itself without colonization in a serious speculative fiction context, at least not often enough. Maharlika, the old word for the warrior-noble class of pre-colonial Filipino society, was the name that felt right for that version of the archipelago. The three-kingdom structure - Anito-faith Luzon, the Visayas, and Islamic Mindanao - reflects the real religious and cultural geography of the islands, just as Trench Crusade uses real-world faith traditions as the bones of its world-building.

The Babaylan are real: the shamanic spiritual leaders of pre-colonial Philippine society, many of them women, who served as healers, ritualists, and community anchors. Putting them at the center of Maharlika's demon-fighting doctrine felt both historically grounded and thematically right for the Trench Crusade setting.

Datu Lapu Lapu XVI's lineage traces back to the real Lapu Lapu, the chieftain of Mactan who killed Ferdinand Magellan at the Battle of Mactan in 1521 in our timeline. In Maharlika's timeline, with no Magellan and no colonization, the name became a dynasty.

Captain Voss is drawn from the Free State of Prussia, a canonical Trench Crusade faction, which felt like the right home for a naval officer of his profile. The dynamic between Voss and the Datu is deliberately Shogun-coded: two competent men from irreconcilable backgrounds, learning each other slowly, arriving at something neither of them expected.

All weapons, vessels, and creatures referenced are drawn from documented pre-colonial Philippine and Southeast Asian sources. Any errors are my own.

[gribozavrfagnusrakta]

Just a little shitpost fanart for @musteilss

[siidequests]

EMPIRE OF THE DAWN

85/50 2025

"It helps to hate the things you fight. But it’s far better to love the things you defend."

[andreai04]

You carry on. That's what he’d always done. That's the task that comes with surviving, whether you deserve to live or not. You remember the dead as best you can. You say some words for them. Then you carry on, and you hope for better.

[gr4v3sgr4v3s]

Daemon was born wrong. A repugnant abomination

[littlecakeclub]

[halogenwarrior]

Perhaps an unpopular opinion about all the discourse on "cozy" and "grimdark" fiction and whether either one is unrealistic or inherently politically regressive; I actually admire both genres on a craft level for trying to do something oddly similar; avoiding a typical limitation used in storytelling on the presumption that without it stories will be less interesting/no one will be invested, even though no such limitation exists in real life events, and trying to tell a story that is still meaningful and compelling without those things, in the process making the story more realistic on a certain level. In the case of grimdark fiction, the limitation is rejecting that hope and meaning has to be affirmed by every story, that people can't be too flawed without a convenient good guy to root for who prospers, that some people can't just die or fail without there being a redeeming victory in it somehow, that things can't get too bad, even though life has no such limitations. With cozy fiction, the limitation is that there needs to be a formulaic expression of conflict, drama and rising tension to make a narrative, that things can't be peaceful for too long even if the break in that peace has to be contrived, when again real life has no such limitations. Breaking this limitation gives the sense of painting with a subtler brush, not relying on eye-catching explosions and cheapconflict formulas to get attention but showing meaning and beauty in life as it is. That not everything has to be painted in life-or-death choices, tragedy and catharsis, but the minor struggles and victories and times of peace can be ineresting as well.

I also feel like the criticism of both of these things as unrealistic in spite of this aforementioned potential for greater realism in both is often based on the tropes they can fall into if done poorly rather than being an inevitable facet of the genre. For grimdark fiction, that the pessimistic view is unrealistic, humans aren't bad all the time and the world isn't bad all the time, and in doing so is ruining people's hopes of making the world better by lying about human nature being always bad which is politically conservative. This, I think, comes from badly done versions often not have a good enough understanding of humanity to ground the bad things in realistic psychology, but show the bad things happening because they have a vague knowledge of those bad things happening in history without an understanding of why. You see this in a lot of depictions of the negative aspects of religion or of revolutions that don't meet their goals and turn to persecuting people - the author understands these things can lead to humans doing horrible things but they don't understand why those things happened, so they portray a cartoonish view of the perspectives of those people that seems like an unrealistically cynical view of humanity because they get far too quickly and simplistically from A to the horrible B compared to their real life counterparts. Or post-apocalyptic fiction where most humans turn to selfish violence against each other immediately and only because there is no punitive authority to stop them, because the author doesn't have a good understanding of the many things that can cause humans to actually turn on each other cruelly as societies are upended, and the specific scenarios in which they don't. It's not that humans can't be that bad, it's that they wouldn't be in that way with those motivations. Or in general, the replacement of human psychology (which already has plenty of material for grimness!) with edgy tropes.

And for cozy fiction, the criticism is that it is unrealistic because life isn't really that happy/peaceful, you have to live in a separate utopian bubble for that to be the case, and presenting such a world is thus, again, inherently politically conservative. I think this is also getting at badly executed versions that completely separate out any bad things in the world from even coming into contact with the story and "polluting it" in ways that can have connotations of the wealthy living in gated communities with their peace of mind at the price of others. But it's also true that plenty of lived experience isn't dramatic and painful on a huge scale, even for many people who aren't the most privileged, and I think a good version of this type of fiction acknowledges that dramatic, bad things happen and cannot be hidden away from entirely, they happen in the background (and when they do appear are perhaps more impactful for the subtlety of not throwing them at the audience constantly), but this story is not about them because a very large portion of real life isn't about them and they get disproportionately focused on enough in narratives.

But really, I feel a lot of the criticism of both comes from some individual people really needing the ideas, respectively of "meaning/hope" and "conflict" that they mostly if not entirely eschew to care about a story, to the point of being uninterested din something without it even if it executes the concept well. Which is fine, there is a reason these things are so often considered a must in storytelling, minimizing them isn't going to work for everyone. But instead of accepting individual preference against a particularly narratively risky (if arguably more honest to reality) genre, people tend to politicize and moralize to justify their dislike, which is a tendency that I think people should always try to be self aware about.