Darker and Edgier/Tabletop Games

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Warhammer 40,000 is this trope to Warhammer Fantasy Battle Fantasy, though not by the margins of some other works on this page, as the source material was already parodying "Darker and Edgier" works by playing this trope to the extreme.
  • Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition has gone both this route and the opposite (Lighter and Softer) simultaneously. The wacky gnomes and lust-for-life half-orcs are replaced as player races with dragon-men and demon-children. For the most part, dragonborn and half-orcs fill the same niches; they aren't any more given to brooding than half-orcs, the race most likely to be spawned by rape, already would be. The gnome and tiefling switch is better apples and oranges. Replace the angst-free fun loving inherently magical race with... demon children, who all but gain dark powers by slashing their wrists. Not to mention that they did include a new kind of elves that are shinier, happier, and more mystical, like an entire race made of Galadriel.
    • Of course, this is somewhat rendered moot by the fact that the Half Orcs and Gnomes were put back in Players Handbook 2. And they actually made the Half Orcs Lighter and Softer via removing the implications of rape from their backstory, implying that they more appeared due to orcs and humans teaming up and eventually intertbreeding after the fall of the empire of Nerath.
    • Forgotten Realms definitely went darker, with glorious cathedrals crumbling and different gods and longtime power characters being slain or depowered left and right. Though one must remember that Forgotten Realms wasn't the only campaign setting, just the most popular; other settings, particularly Ravenloft and Dark Sun, were noticeably darker than FR was anyway -- this more brought FR "down" to Greyhawk's level. Players still have Eberron, with its pulp-adventure-y feel, for less depressing fare.
    • On the third hand, the system is much Lighter and Softer, in that every adverse condition that happens to the players can be removed almost instantly. Several of the nastier conditions from earlier editions (e.g. attribute drain) simply don't exist anymore, and all of the others either automatically wear off in five minutes, or can be removed by a low-level spell. Hungry? Oh, here are some infinite rations. Room is dark? Plenty of infinite light sources around. The world may be dark and edgy, but harsh, long-lasting hardship for the player characters is non-existent.
  • The Pathfinder Adventure Paths and campaign setting have also gotten noticeably Darker and Edgier. The half-orcs' origins as the product are made more explicit, ogres are reimagined as inbred monsters right out of Deliverance, and most monsters explicitly like to eat people. Even the gnomes get in on the act. In Pathfinder, they are fey creatures who have been separated from their original world. If they do not constantly seek out new and ever more sensational experiences, their features begin to 'bleach', the banality of existence aging them to death.
  • Bliss Stage is essentially "Bokurano: The Roleplaying Game".
  • The Old World of Darkness was initially marketed along these lines, as an "adult role-playing game" for "mature gamers." Both it and the Spiritual Successor New World of Darkness can be described as modern day Earth... only, you guessed it, darker and edgier. And within the overall series, Changeling is an example. The original game, Changeling: The Dreaming had its darker moments, but was widely considered "kiddy" as it was a game about the power of imagination and resisting crushing banality. Then came Changeling: The Lost, which hewed much closer to the original myths of The Fair Folk by having the main characters be humans who fought their way back to Earth after being abducted and hideously abused by mad alien gods.
    • The New World of Darkness actually plays with this. True, the world is, in general, more miserable and suspicious, but there aren't any looming apocalypses or sense that things are getting worse beyond the perspectives of individual people, and the moral fabric has been lightened a bit (even the Card-Carrying Villain groups have explicit Evil Virtues and actual reasons for what they do-however arcane those reasons are). Thus, it's only the prerogative of the Storyteller that decides if it's a World Half Full or not. And you know Lost? "World Half Full" is one of the basic premises of the game. You know what happens to the Lost if they avoid behavior they know is dangerous like maxing out Wyrd and not decreasing it after you start being hit with Clarity rolls? Absolutely nothing. This is in contrast to the old game, where it was either death or going Dauntain.
  • The sixth edition of Gamma World used the D20 Modern ruleset and was the grimmest, darkest edition of the game, period. While the first edition of Gamma World had basically been a parody of post-nuclear apocalypse, a Black Comedy rich game of wackiness, where one could see things like a laser rifle-toting yeti/cockroach hybrid, Gamma World D20 took everything seriously, making the backstory realistic (genetic engineering and nanotech vs. nuclear war) and portraying all of the horror inherent in such a ruined, freakish world. Gamma World 1e would point out the hilarious side of fighting a garbage grinding robot whose programming had gone mad: Gamma World 6e would emphatically point out what it would like to be on the wrong end of those grinding, snapping, mashing jaws and relentless, implacable hunger...
  • Midnight setting is sometimes summarized as "Sauron won".
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