16 September

Guidance: Hope in Storytelling, Part 2

Written by Alex Augunas

GM Advice, Guidance, Storytelling 101 Articles, Guidance Leave a Comment

A blissful moment of silence falls upon the dilapidated office as the fox-man scrawls away at Deborah’s desk. Given the state that the old office is in, you doubt she’d mind very much. You’re not entirely sure why you stayed here, peering over the kitsune’s shoulder as he worked. Perhaps it was curious, perhaps a sense of foreboding dread that’s only natural when a shapeshifting entity suddenly manifests in your place of former employment from a massive, futuristic looking portal. Perhaps you just had nothing better to do then watch. Whatever the case may be, it turns out that while watching a painter paint or a sculptor sculpt might be fascinating, watching a writer write was anything but. It was a lot of whining, head-scratching, and time wasting both on cellular devices and computers. You had asked why the fox-man called Alex was browsing various art sites rather than research Tabletop RPG strategy guides or watch documentaries about the nature of hope in storytelling, but this only served to fluster your vulpine guest. More then once he tugged at his ears as his tail slapped against the ground and the fur around his muzzle bristled—after a few weeks you had gotten the impression that this was the kitsune equivalent of a ‘blush.’ However fascinating learning about other ancestries that shouldn’t exist in your reality is, however, that didn’t change the fact that the wait was long and arduous—

Welcome back to Guidance, Know Direction readers! I’m your Everyman Gamer, Alexander Augunas, and today we’ll be continuing our examination about the nature of hope in Tabletop RPGs and how we can use that hope to survive the horrible timeline that we currently find ourselves in!

Horrible timeline? What, this office building? This timeline’s not so bad, this place is just run down and abandoned.

Sounds nice, things are PRETTY BAD over in this timeline!

Is that why you’re here? Hiding away from a timeline that became more than you can handle?

Maybe! Let’s not think about it and talk about campaign settings instead!

A Brief Recap

Hope in Storytelling | Article 1 | Article 2 (You’re Here) | Article 3 (Coming 9/29) |

In our last installment in the Hope in Storytelling series, we talked at length about the nature of hope. What makes something hopeful and what makes it grim. We settled on two basic rules for our definitions:

Hope vs. Grim is about agency in the world, specifically in your ability to make the world a better place without making it worse for others.
This is a tone that is set by the GM and is experienced by the Players.

I want to touch base on that first point specifically. In the prior article, I mentioned about how a setting is only hopeful if most people can act in a way that makes the world a better place without making it worse for others. I specifically noted Warhammer 40k as an example, wherein the Space Marines of Warhammer 40,000 fight the good fight every day, trying to bring glory to their Imperium, but that didn’t make the Warhammer 40,000 universe a hopeful universe.

The reason that this is true is that nothing the Space Marines do matters in the grand scheme of improving the galaxy, and this is one of the major themes of Warhammer 40,000. I don’t want to assume that you know anything about Warhammer 40,000, dear reader—I know only the basics myself—but the “human” faction of Warhammer 40,000 is called the Imperium of Man. This is the federation that Space Marines are from, and if there’s one thing you probably know about Warhammer 40,000, it’s Space Marines right? Now, you might assume that the Space Marines are heroes, fighting the good fight to end the reign of chaos through the galaxy.

Literally no one is assuming that. Everyone knows that Warhammer 40,000 is a grimdark setting where nothing matters and people die in droves in a perpetual, endless war that spans the stars, Alex. You’re not relevant.

That … isn’t exactly the case. See, in Warhammer 40,000, the Imperium Man literally mass-produces its Space Marines. They’re all the result of horrific genetic manipulation; each Space Marine is a perfectly optimized lifeform that’s been genetically engineered to kill. Every single Space Marine soldier is born essentially fully grown, drafted into the military from the minute they open their eyes, given some rudimentary test runs because they’re basically born with the knowledge needed for war pre-etched into their skulls. They’re drafted into chapters, shipped out to the far ends of the galaxy, and immediately start killing. All day, every day. They’re human, but only in the most generous senses. And you might think, “Oh, these Space Marines must go out and do all this killing, all this dirty work defending the galaxy from evil so that everyone else can life safely, right?” Well, that’s not true either. Ordinary humans are drafted into the military too … just as cannon fodder.

Like I mentioned, I’m not an expert in Warhammer 40,000 lore. You’re better off talking to Paizo’s Thurston Hillman or watching a video series on the horrors of Space Marine life to get the juicy specifics, I’m only telling you about this to paint the broadest of strokes from which we can continue talking about hope in tabletop RPGs. Because this? This world of Warhammer 40,000 is not hopeful, nor was it ever supposed to be. This is the opposite of hope, this is a genre that we call grimdark.

I can’t wait for people to eviscerate you in the comments for how much Warhammer 40,000 lore you got wrong, foxboy.

On the Topic of Grimdark

Grimdark, as a genre, embodies a tone, style, or settling that’s dystopian, amoral, and violent. To really understand what grimdark is, let’s dissect those three adjectives that characterize the genre.

Dystopian, literally translated as “bad place” from Latin, refers to a world or society in which every aspect of the average person’s daily life is unpleasant or bad. It often has elements of totalitarian rule, characterized specifically by fear and distress. People living in dystopias are usually dehumanized and lacking many of what we would consider the necessities of life. Modern dystopic fiction often includes themes of propaganda and police state tactics, censorship or denial of free thought, worship of an unobtainable goal, the obliteration of individuality in favor of enforced conformity, and in more recent years, environmental and/or economic disaster.
Amoralism refers to the absence or disregard of morality. It can also refer to indifference or incapacity for morality, but that’s usually when people are talking about common objects and the like, so it doesn’t really fit for a narrative tone. It’s important to note that amorality is not the same as immorality; immorality refers specifically to doing something that one believes or knows is wrong. To put another way, immorality is, “This is wrong, but I have to do this,” while amorality is, “There is no good, no evil. Only power.”
Violence is simply the use of physical force to cause harm.

So, when we take these definitions and massage them together, we get something like this as our actual definition:

Grimdark is a genre where every aspect of an individual’s life is defined by unpleasantness or badness stemming from an overall disregard for morality and use of physical force to dehumanize, censor, and control most of the people who live in that world or society.

Shades of Grim

As mentioned, Warhammer 40,000 is essentially the genre definer when it comes to grimness. After all, the term, “grim dark” comes from the following quote from the Warhammer 40,000 setting books:

“In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war.”

That tagline sums up the dystopia, amorality, and violence aspects of the genre nicely, doesn’t it? But what if I told you that grimness isn’t black or white? What if I told you that it comes in shades, and many settings that you know and love likely have more grimness in them than you’ve ever really stopped to think about?

I don’t know if you’ve heard, man, but grimness is really all there is. Hope was for the 1950s, hope doesn’t sell merch.

Grimness in the Age of Lost Omens

Hey look, I finally circled around to talking directly about Pathfinder and Starfinder! It only took me like 5,000 words or so! Now, you might be wondering why I bring up the Age of Lost Omens here, in a discussion about grimness. The Age of Lost Omens isn’t grim, is it? The answer to that question is very “shades of gray,” in my opinion. After you read my points, join our Discord and let me know if YOU think the Age of Lost Omens is grim, based on the definition I gave and some of my points listed below!

A Void of Heroes. This might be less true with some of the later Pathfinder 2E adventures, but every 1E adventure and every 2E adventure I’ve read (which goes up to around Season of Ghosts) assumes that the PCs are the only heroes in the story. One thing I want to make very clear is that a hero isn’t always the same thing as a protagonist. Calling someone a hero has a certain subtext of valor and self-sacrifice that the more neutral term ‘protagonist’ doesn’t have. I mentioned that I’m currently in a PF1 conversion of Paizo’s Savage Tide adventure path, from Dungeon magazine. In Savage Tide, the PCs gain a benefactor early on named Lavinnia Vanderborn. She’s objectively a good person; as the story goes on, she helps people and becomes a leader that encourages the PCs to do good things. She’s an NPC Protagonist, since the story is largely about her efforts to secure her late parents’ legacy. But she’s not a hero of the story; she doesn’t go out and do things selflessly, she doesn’t make sacrifices for others, and the action of the story isn’t really driven by her or her actions beyond coincidence. Now, Savage Tides is written for one of D&D’s settings, I believe it’s the Forgotten Realms (ours is imported into Golarion), so maybe this ‘void of heroes’ thing is restricted to D&D, but I’d argue it isn’t. I’d argue that the lack of active NPC heroes is more of a Paizo thing than a Wizards of the Coast Wizards of the Coast is totally fine with creating NPC heroes for your PCs to aspire to; Drizzt Do’Urden is probably the most famous of such characters, but you can hardly toss a stone in Neverwinter without hitting SOME NPC who is a good person that does good things for their town and community. You can’t really say the same thing about the Age of Lost Omens, where the hero is you specifically. My argument is that if the PCs are the only heroes in the world, doesn’t that show an overall disregard for morality, one of our qualifiers for grimdark? You could even argue that Pharasma herself embodies this idea; she’s the most powerful deity in the multiverse, and she doesn’t take sides. She doesn’t care about goodness or badness, only that people get sorted into the afterlife that she believes they should go to. You might call her an impartial arbiter, I’d say she has an overall disregard for morality, but I also don’t like Pharasma.
A Dehumanizing Afterlife. Have you ever noticed that D&D and Pathfinder’s afterlife is a capitalist hellscape where the capital is souls instead of coin? Because I sure have! Pathfinder RPG: Planar Adventures gave us one of the most comprehensive looks at the Pathfinder afterlife that we’ve ever received, and here’s essentially how it works based on what we’ve read. Step 1) You’re born a mortal, live a mortal life, and die. Step 2) Your soul travels along the River of Souls until it reaches the Boneyard. Step 3) You wander the Boneyard for an inordinate amount of time. You basically just hang out there until you’re brought before Pharasma, judged, and are sentenced to an existence on one of the other planes of existence. Step 4) Upon arrival at your new eternity, you’re transformed into something called a petitioner. In PF1, we’d call it an outsider, a being whose body and soul are a single unit. Prior to this point you’re essentially a shade, a soul with no body. Once you become a petitioner, there’s things that happen to you. For one, your form might change. Petitioners vary in appearance based on the plane you were sent to; for example on Elysium you basically look like an idealized version of yourself, but on Nirvanna you turn into a feral furry and in the Abyss you turn into a grotesque larvae with your face on it. You might worry about the body dysmorphia since you’re an average Joe from Golarion who doesn’t know what happens to them when they die, but don’t worry, Pharasma’s got you covered. The act of being transformed into a petitioner erases your memory in most cases. Not all cases, of course. Petitioners vary by plane regarding how much they remember of their mortal lives, but doesn’t this … invalidate the notion of an afterlife? For example, if you get turned into one of those horrible Abyssal larva petitioners and your memory vanishes in the process, you kinda don’t remember what you did to get banished to the Abyss. Do you? You just appeared there, writhing in torment and at the mercy of more powerful demons. It’s not really a punishment, because the person who committed the atrocities that landed you in the Abyss is gone. Similarly, going to Heaven’s not really a reward in the Pathfinder multiverse, because the person who strove to be righteous in life that earned the privilege of Heaven is gone. And this is before we talk about Step 5) You essentially just … go about your normal life living on the plane. Like, people in Heaven must toil for the gods forever. People in Hell get mortared into the walls of Disparter and are literal bricks forever. Such is afterlife? I’ve felt for a while that when you look at the afterlife from this angle, the afterlife in Pathfinder is extremely dehumanizing, which again is part of our criterion for grimdark.
Why Do People Live in Absalom? Adventures have to happen, it’s true, but since everything that gets printed in Pathfinder is canon to the entire setting’s history, let’s stop and take a small look at the history of Absalom. We could talk about how Aroden’s death caused earthquakes that split open one of the city districts (this is why the Puddles exists and why the Precipice Quarter is mostly destroyed) or how Cheliax attempted to siege Absalom about 600 years before the start of the adventure, but I’m not going to start there. Let’s start in 4716 AR, where the Aspis Consortium attacks the Pathfinder Society’s Grand Lodge. They explode buildings, blast a tower off the central building and make it hover in mid-air, and are ultimately stopped. This canonically does damage to the neighboring regions of the Foreign Quarter where the Grand Lodge is located. Now you might be thinking, “Well, a little bit of property damage is no big deal, I can still live here in Absalom.” Well, how about 1 year later, in 4717, where Pathfinder Society Season 9 kicks off with the Fiendflesh Siege; the entire city of Absalom is attacked by hordes of undead and demons united by a common enemy—the Pathfinder Society. This is the famed event where all the slaves in Absalom were freed (which leads to the Age of Ashes adventure path in PF2), but having your home overrun by horrors seems pretty bad, yeah? Well, what if I told you that 2 years later in 4719 Absalom was besieged again, this time by the Whispering Tyrant? And then about a year later the entire Isle of Kortos nearly became devoid of all life during the events of the Extinction Curse adventure path? (Granted the average person probably doesn’t know about this.) Life in Absalom is kind of terrible, a running theme in Dustin’s Where There’s Smoke adventure, which could certainly fit the mold of, life is defined by unpleasantness or badness due to people who seek to use physical force to control most of the people in the city.

Now, do I think that the Age of Lost Omens is as grim as Warhamemr 40,000? Of course not. But that doesn’t change that many of the core elements of the Age of Lost Omens are extremely grim. With a very liberal interpretation of the story, one could say that it’s a post-apocalyptic story since it takes place after Earthfall and the subsequent Age of Darkness. Also, the entire setting is defined by a promised prophecy that didn’t happen. Not having heroes and being in desperate need of them is quite grim, indeed.

Grimness is in the Eye of the Beholder

One of the core ideas I mentioned in Part 1 of this series is that a story is only as grim as the audience perceives it to be. If our focal point is a character of whimsy and wonder in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, much like Finn and Jake in the TV series Adventure Time, then the story doesn’t feel grim despite having grim elements to it. Similarly, my kitsune cleric in Savage Tides exists in this world where Pharasma gets to decide where you’re going when you die and wipes your memories of why you deserve it upon arriving there, but he’s still hopeful that he can find a way to save his father, who appears to have been transformed into a demon against his will. How the characters view their world and react to it is an important element in deciding whether something is grimdark or not. Warhammer 40,000 is grim because the protagonists of that world’s story accept and indulge in the grimness of their worlds, Adventure Time isn’t grim because the protagonists of that world’s story refuses to indulge in the grimness that they are constantly bombarded with. So to that in, the deciding factor in whether a story is grim or not is you, the Players and GM sitting around the table. Do you want a world of grimness, or do you want a world of ho—

Spare me your idealistic nonsense. No one cares, no one is reading this.

Look, I’ve been trying to be polite to you, letting you say your schtick. Commit to the bit and all that, but I’m getting tired of your negative interjections.

Well, I’m getting tired of you, Alex. Do you think you can just disappear for years and people are going to care about you? That they’re going to look at this blog column and think to themselves, “Gee, I really care about what this cut-rate furry wannabe has to say about a game he’s not even actively playing?”

Hey, that’s not fair. My PF2 games are on hiatus right now. People need to rest when they need rest.

People want actual information on how to do things, dumbass. They don’t want you sitting here, telling stories about the good ‘ole days. I bet you don’t know enough about the Three-Action System to even write character designs for any system anymore or know enough about the game to do any of that anymore! Because let’s face it, the Know Direction Network is dead. It’s been dead for years. First you and James stopped writing blogs. Vanessa and Luis broke into the business full-time. Ryan and Perram stopped Know Direction Prime. You want to talk about grim? Talk about the state of the Know Direction Network. You used to be the Pathfinder news and reviews site. You’d have all the latest scoops; you’d travel out to all the conventions. People would share your articles and episodes constantly; you had to see KDN to be in the know about anything. Now Paizo does all their own shows, all the people who made the Network great have moved on to other games, other jobs, other lives. And now you come back here, to this blog that used to be one of Know Direction’s cornerstones, and decide to just … write again? Out of nowhere? Like nothing had happened? This corpse has been picked clean, my guy. You should just go back to Know Direction: Beyond and leave the bones of this place to rest.

Your breath hangs heavy in your chest. The words hurt, but at the same time they feel … good. Something about all this pain, all this anger. It feels good to just release it. To pull the daggers out of your chest and to throw them into someone else’s. That’s what life is, right? It’s about minimizing your pain, other people be damned. You’re panting, when did you start panting? Where you always this escalated? Does it even matter?

Alex’s expression is difficult to read, probably because he’s a fox. There’s silence in the space between you. A few computer screens flicker out, a couple lights gone, the ruined workspace a little dimmer than it was a moment before. You don’t care; the darkness suits you. It suits how you feel. In the darkness, you don’t have to hide the pained expression on your face, the anger, the longing—the shadows mercifully do that for you.

“That’s a lot to take in,” Alex replies finally. He steps a paw towards you and you step backwards out of instinct, bumping into a desk. As he moves closer, he blocks the light from the flickering portal he had suddenly appeared afrom. It gives him a bluish corona, like an alien invader stepping towards a hapless victim, awash in an otherworldly glow. He reaches a paw towards you, and you flinch, expecting retaliation for the things you had just said. You meant every venomous word, but there’s also a small, flicking part of your mind that thinks, “Go on, I deserve it.”

He clasps your shoulder instead. “Change … isn’t easy. And we can’t always control it because it needs to happen, even when we’d prefer that everything stay the same.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” You shift in place. Comfort wasn’t what you were expecting. “You got to decide that the change was happening. People like me? I felt powerless. Something I enjoyed was gone, and I was left with nothing to replace it.”

“That’s hard,” Alex agreed. He turned towards one of the walls of the office; it used to have a large, glass window that overlooked the city streets. That window was shattered now, the glass fragments long gone. It looked out into nothing but ruins. “The sun will be rising soon. You were up late. Care to join me in watching?”

You weren’t sure, but you found yourself following the kitsune anyway. It was weird, like your legs had a hunger that your brain didn’t register yet. Alex sat down on the ledge, legs tangling. He motioned for you to sit beside him. Again, those damn legs. They folded. You felt Alex’s shoulder next to yours, the fur bristled against your skin.

“I’m … sorry. For what I said,” You stammer. There was an ache in your heart and buzzing in your brain. Maybe this would make it go away.

“Thank you,” Alex replied simply, watching out towards the horizon. It was a ways away, and more than a few buildings blocked its view. “It’s okay to feel upset that something you loved isn’t around anymore. But it’s important to not allow that darkness to consume you, or the people around you. That’s sort of the tricky part about grimdark, though.”

He was still going on about this? “What about it?”

Alex was silent for a moment. “I think grimness is something that doesn’t work if it has a single source. One villain doesn’t make a setting grim, once force, one evil. True grimness, like in Warhammer 40,000, must be all-encompassing, right? Every aspect of your life, defined by unpleasantness and badness, right?”

“I guess,” You weren’t sure.

“Well, for every aspect of your life to be unpleasant, that means that all the people in your life must also be unpleasant. You must have everyone disregard morality, everyone use force to dehumanize and control you. True grimness must be something that most of the world over propagates. That’s why fascism always wants to invade private life. It must if it’s going to exert the control it craves.”

“I didn’t realize this was going to be a social commentary,” you replied wryly.

“Art always is,” he replied simply. “So, things are bad now. You’re feeling scared, frightened about what’s happening. What’s next. You’re afraid, and you push that fear onto others. You see people disregard morality, so you ignore your own too. Grimdark isn’t a blanket that smothers us, it’s more like when people do the wave at a sporting event. It only works if everyone joins in. That’s scary, because if things are grim then that means a lot of people aren’t doing what’s right. But it’s also empowering, because at the end of the day you get to choose. You can choose whether you’re a part of that wave or not. And when you refuse, the people around you feel empowered to do the same.

“You’re sounding awfully idealistic right now,” you laugh through a grimace.

“Maybe,” Alex replies as the first golden rays of dawn shimmer across the city. “But idealism is the hope that burns away the grimdark.”

Race to the Finish!

That’s the second installment of my series on hope in Tabletop RPGs in the bag. We’ve come up with good definitions for grimdark, talked a bit about what it looks like and why, and now for our final installment my plan is to take a look at its polar opposite, then talk about the two storytelling styles and maybe try to convince you to replace some of the grimness with a bit of hope. Will you like it? No idea! But there’s only one way to find out, and that’s return next time for the last installment.

Until next time I’m Alexander Augunas, Know Direction’s Everyman Gamer, and I implore you to fight the good fight and keep the hope strong in your heart.