Gothic and Grimdark tales usually stay a cut below the utter helplessness and hopelessness of Lovecraft’s Cosmic Horror. They survive, they fight, they find purpose. Worlds that keep you on your toes, keep you up at night, and offer the slimmest of hope.īut characters persevere nonetheless. Maybe your players find their characters born into a world like Fallout, or BioShock, or Mad Max, with no guarantee of survival. Where the forests want to eat you, and the dungeons may take more than just your corpse. Or, perhaps, they live in a Gothic Age, where monsters roam and phantoms haunt. Maybe they live in the Wretched Hive of City Noir. Or a Polluted Wasteland, or a Soiled City on a Hill. Maybe they live in the filthy feudalism of the Dung Ages. Maybe your players’ characters live in a Crapsack World, where everything went from bad to worse, and stayed that way. So you want to play a gritty game for your D&D campaign. You might also want to check out TV Tropes’ Sliding Scale of Shiny Versus Gritty I’d like to briefly mention a big inspiration for this piece: Giffyglyph’s free Darker Dungeons homebrew ruleset, which I highly recommend, and reference in several places.
