Many of us have moved away from the once universal fantasy of Middle Earth. In the 80s and 90s, Tolkien’s works defined fantasy in so many ways that we just accepted it as default fantasy. Now, and many will say thankfully, we have moved from that definition into a myriad of styles of fantasy. You have the grimdark of Game of Thrones, the dark fantasy of the Witcher, the D&D default of the Forgotten Realms, and the mystic romance of A Court of Thorns and Roses.
But when I am trying to describe my world, I have always hit walls. For a long while, I called the Dark Return, “A Gothic Dark Fantasy setting.” Which worked for me, but I got so many comments that they didn’t view the world in that way. Grimdark never fit because I have too much hope (though I would probably say cynical hope) in my heart to give in to the darker themes and hopelessness. It is not your current standard fantasy; magic is meant to be more of a secret, a skill, an art, and not just a fireball spell.
It is a setting where the characters are meant to be heroes, to want a better place for the world. Now that opens up the whole argument that most people think what they are doing is right, and see themselves as heroes. But the drive behind my stories is that injustice plagues Uteria, and the heroes are there to push back against it.
So, I can write an article like this, describing the world, I can put all the details in adventures and lore, and I can try to focus my art into this theme. But you still need to hook people. It is like the OSR issue from a couple of years ago. People described my world as retro and old school, but that carried the baggage of all the weird stuff happening with some of the OSR publishers. So I pushed back with VCR (Vintage and Contemporary Roleplaying), an easy to remember acronym that summed up the style of game I was making. It didn’t catch on in any way, but I am still happy listing my games under that banner.
So now I am trying to make an easy to pitch, couple of words, slogan that will help define the setting SagaBorn takes place in. It is a world with rare and dark magic, adventurers encounter mind bending creatures that make them gain Horror, of oppressive nobility, power systems, but it is also a heroic resistance against these things. So how do you describe that?
The descriptor I landed on was Against the Dark. In my mind, it sums up everything I want players to know before they play my game. What is it about? You are a hero, against the dark. There has been a long debate about settings like Dark Sun and can they be resurrected in our gaming world now. For me, I never thought we couldn’t. There are horrible things in Dark Sun, but I always thought they were meant to be the things that players struggle against. And the novels proved this theory. In the Prism Pentad series by Troy Denning (one of the co-creators of Dark Sun), the characters are struggling against an unfair system. We won’t go too deep into all the themes of Dark Sun, because those books are 34 years old and times have changed (in 1991 when the Dark Sun books were released, if they compared it to books written 34 years before that, it would have been books written in 1954).
Ok, back to my lands of Uteria and why I think Against the Dark works so well, and maybe not just for my setting. Now I know the game system Shadowdark is literally the player characters versus the dark, but this slogan could definitely go with it. I think if they rereleased Dark Sun, this adage would work, though I would hate to have Hasbro take more good ideas from the indie community. Other books could be described this way with varying results – The Witcher and Mistborn. Game settings like Dragon Age or Midnight are also built around the idea of a resistance against oppression.
So I think that is why I feel confident in using Against the Dark as a description for my game setting, it will set the tone from the beginning for players, readers, and game masters. And I don’t own it, so if you want to use it, go ahead!
