You can no longer bathe in the old rivers waste and sewer infrastructure haven’t yet taken hold, or broke down. More muck piles than magpies, more refuse heaps than robins. Maybe the PCs live in the Dung Ages, where people subsist on gruel and dump the bedpans out the window til the filth fills the street. Tip : monsters from the 5e Monster Manual bear no superscript, while those from Volo’s Guide to Monsters bear a “2”, and those from Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes bear a “3”. Our gritty gaming should not succumb to misanthropic shock value with no hope and no contrast, no struggle and no tension. Yes, for the most part, we want more Michael Moorcock or Joss Wheden or George R.R. Instead, Terrible Writing Advice reminds us to shoot for moral ambiguity, not moral handwaving. Where the Perfectly Innocent Victim exists simply for the Perfectly Evil Villain to destroy, and that villain only exists for the hero to kill, a hero who has no redeeming qualities either! No, that sounds worthless. Where a Straw Dystopia goes out of its way to stomp on puppies for no reason, and runs on pure coercion and repression, with no plausible stability or logistics for its unending war. In particular, he reminds us to avoid the edgelord excesses, where the setting never rises above brooding and bleakness, where everyone exists solely with vices and flaws. Life proves messy, but not meaningless.Īs a note on that, I highly suggest Terrible Writing Advice’s tips on Grimdark, a comical explanation on some of the common narrative pitfalls of gritty worlds. 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.
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