The Bad, The Worse, and the Vile: The Art of Being Evil
Yet, there are those of us with a slightly more sadistic bent. We don’t want to play characters in a world that welcomes heroes. We don’t want to play out someone living in an idealistic world that is better than ours in nearly every way imaginable. We play heroes and villains in a dark place where morals are ambiguous, the world looks unkindly on the good, and where martyr is a dirty word. We play in crapsack worlds and we love it.
…and I’m a crapsack girl!
Crapsack worlds have existed almost since the beginning of tabletop role-playing games. They are dark places ruled over by evil overlords where the common man is oppressed; good deeds must stay obscure, and light is a fleeting thing meant only to show a tiny shred of hope before dumping people back into the gaping pit of darkness. Some crapsack worlds are obvious; others are more subtle and require a deeper understanding to see them for what they are; an act that often leads to madness on the part of the character. Below is a short and brilliant list of the more popular crapsack worlds in RPG’s before I go on to show you what makes a good crapsack world for your own homebrew.
Dark Sun: Dark Sun was the first game setting for advanced dungeons and dragon that ever used the psionic rules as a part of the setting. The world was a charred wasteland where centuries long magical wars stripped the world of metal, water, and plant life leaving a desert world ruled by immortal dragon overlords and inhabited by blood thirsty savages. In Dark Sun a hero could never hope to triumph; only survive and somehow thrive in a world where water was worth more than gold and life.
Call of Cthulhu: Regardless of the time and place you play this game it is always a dark and secretive world with things waiting just beyond the shadows to tear and rend mankind to pieces with the casual disdain we afford common vermin. It is a world of hopeless futility where the characters can never hope to stop the coming doom of man but delay it for perhaps another day or so. To even have knowledge of the truth of the world is to drive honest men to madness.
Ravenloft: A mist covered plane of darkness and evil ruled by undead lords with cunning and power to match the most powerful of devils Ravenloft is a realm that can appear anywhere and suck anyone into its iron grip. Here being a hero is to invite death and being a villain is to never leave this realm of eternal darkness. This was one of the few campaign settings I know of with actual rules for rising as undead after death. You never really beat Ravenloft so much as survived it.
Paranoia: Take the worst parts of McCarthy era communist terror and combine with the best parts of Logan’s Run and B movie science fiction and you get a game rife with dark humor and satire that is still a favorite of tabletop gamers everywhere. Death was an inevitability of the characters. The goal was to die in the most hilarious manner possible and maybe, just maybe, succeed at your goals.
F.A.T.A.L.: The game which should not be named has a rape rate in which more than half of the men of the world take part in rape and the victim is usually blamed. This is hardly an example of a good crapsack world but a fine example of the kind of awkward stupidity and immature vulgarity one can get if they take the concept way too far.
Warhammer: Regardless of whether or not you play in the fantasy or sci-fi version of this grim and dark setting it’s always a gothic and dark place where life is cheap and dark humor is as easy to find as your nearest ork tribe. The setting has spawned several games from Fantasy, to Dark Heresy, to my personal favorite Rogue Trader. If I were to make a top ten list of crapsack worlds this one would be on the top of that list.
Exalted: The world is screwed by over one thousand dooms at any given time. Whether it is the return of demonic titans from their prison or the invasion of chaotic forces from outside the world to the rising of the living dead to drag the world into oblivion at any given time the world is doomed. Fortunately unlike most crapsack worlds the characters are empowered to halt the end and bring about a new golden age. That is if they don’t destroy it themselves.
Rifts: Wormwood: Rifts, by definition, is a crapsack world full of darkness and terror. The Wormwood setting book takes the whole concept a step further. Wormwood is a living world inhabited by Catholic Church equivalents that spend about as much time fighting one another as they do fighting the demons that have invaded their world and use the people as living batteries to power their engines of disease and death. The setting is icky and graphic with little room for pleasantness and good thoughts.
This place needs some atmosfear!
So what elements make a good crapsack world? Well for one it requires an appropriate feel to it. It’s not enough to have bad things happen to good people all the time. You have to give the sense that this is a universal truth. You have to imbed a feeling of foreboding and doom into every breath of air and smell of burning flesh. You have to give just enough of the feeling of dread as to let people understand that this is never a nice place to be.
How you do it is entirely up to you. Ravenloft has mists, crows and undead everywhere. Warhammer has its gothic everything and paranoia has the constant claustrophobic conditions in a constantly monitored city state where treason is a capital offense and nearly everything you do can be considered treason.
Going back to my ocean world as talked about in the making hell article let’s talk about how we would make this place feel like a crappy place to live. First, there is a sense of loneliness. People live very far away from one another on what few scraps of land still exist. These islands rarely welcome in any outsiders and constantly war with each other in a desperate fight for the resources needed in order to survive. The massive blue ocean surrounding the characters at all times simply adds to the isolation. They are alone in a world that sees them as just another mouth to feed. Magic makes things a tiny bit easier but it does nothing to staunch the feeling of loneliness. Add to the fact that there are creatures that live just beneath your feet that consider your ship to be a bite sized snack and you get the sense that not only are you alone, but your life is meaningless.
Giving a good general atmosphere is important to the setting. If it doesn’t feel like a crappy place to live then chances are it’s not going to translate to it in game.
Sanctuary! Sanctuary! Sanctuarrrrgggh!
As important as it is for the world to feel like a crappy place to live it’s just as important for the world to have a nice place to stay temporarily. Just like a perfectly nice fantasy world has its dark foreboding castles and horrible black dungeons a dark world needs to have places a bad place needs to have its sanctuaries of light and security. These places have to be the last bastions of hope in a world where its existence is like a boil on the world. At the same time these places have to have a sense of uneasiness. The idea that at any given moment at any given time the black world outside the gates can focus its strength and snuff out the sanctuary with the effort one would take in squashing an ant. It’s a fragile peace and one that’s cherished by the inhabitants. The people, especially the authorities, need to act with a sense of paranoia and absolute caution. Yes, they welcome outsiders. Yes, they are genuinely hospitable. However they come down harshly and quickly upon anyone trying to stir up that tranquility.
To go back to our example where would we place our sanctuaries in this world covered in water? The answer lies not below the sea, where it’s established that hostile creatures live and exist, but far above it hovering on the tops of massive storm clouds. These massive floating islands soar on the winds of hurricanes that spell doom for those below except for those hardy enough to survive them or cunning enough to get above them to the safe havens below. The inhabitants view those below as unfortunate barbarians who live just on the edge of a pit of madness. This does not mean they are unkind as anyone who is clever enough to find a way to their cloud cities are certainly worth their hospitality. But they are highly guarded and paranoid of the world below as the slightest disruption of the magic that holds them aloft on the clouds could send them hurtling into the cold waters below.
Another thing about these sanctuaries is that they exist probably because the leaders have made some dark bargains in order to ensure the peace and prosperity of their people. If the characters cross some of these dark powers that the bargains have been made with then it’s not unheard of for these sanctuaries to turn against the characters and abandon them for the sake of their security.
An Exercise in Pointlessness
The one thing that might chafe at some players is the fact that in most crapsack worlds no matter what the characters do they aren’t making any really significant impacts on the world proper. All they’re really doing is keeping a bad world from getting worse. One could argue that it is the point of a crapsack world that things never get better. However, many players don’t like the idea of investing time and effort into a character that won’t have any kind of impact on the world. This isn’t an easy problem to solve; if you allow the characters to change the setting in large and significant ways than you lose the whole point of playing a crapsack world at the same time if you simply spit in the eye of all the characters changes you run the risk of alienating your players which is significantly worse.
Ultimately it requires dialogue between you and the players. They have to understand that significant change on a setting scale is unachievable by any character that can be played. While you have to understand that some kind of change or at least resolution is necessary for the satisfaction of the experience. Try to find a middle ground where both parties can get what they’re looking for. If you can’t then you should probably look into another kind of setting.
Don’t blame me, I voted for Azathoth.
In a crapsack world there are no such creatures as good leaders. At least not leaders unstained by treachery, double dealings, and brutality in order to rule as needed. This of course doesn’t stretch all the way down to the leaders of small groups, say, villages or small towns. It’s just that the bigger a place is the more bodies that need to be climbed to get to the top and stay there.
With this in mind the more powerful the ruler the greater their corruption and depravity. Ravenloft's vampire lords are classic evil overlords while Warhammer 40k’s human leader is a psychic corpse strapped to a throne powered by the souls of innocent psychics. Let’s not even get into “Friend Computer” from paranoia.
While they have to be bad they don’t necessarily have to be out of the reach for characters to deal with. Theoretically anyone could take the long trip to terra and kick the emperor of man off his throne. Theoretically any troubleshooter could hack Friend Computer and fix the flaws that turned it from a benign overseer to a paranoid psychopath. These kinds of games go against the idea of a crapsack world but the point is these kinds of goals should not be out of reach just nearly impossible to attain. They should be ever present but not invasive into the characters stories all the time. Instead, have them as an all looming threat, a reminder that despite their actions there are things in the world far greater and much more terrible than whatever they may be facing. Instead it’s best to occasionally remind them of such an entity either through a servant of that entity or having the characters feels the repercussions of that characters major actions.
A Cowardly Old World.
Another aspect of a crapsack world is that it tends to be very old. That is because they are always given a sense of decay and deterioration that the characters are partly responsible for stemming as long as possible. As a rule of thumb it’s generally best to have the golden age as relatively good to your world as the current state is bad. In other words, the worse the status quo is the better it used to be.
This does a couple of things. For one it shows just how bad things really are helping to deepen the sense of darkness and madness that’s consuming the world. It also gives characters a nigh impossible goal to shoot for if they do decide to try and make the world a better place. Hints of this past should lie around, preferably in ruins to help heighten the atmosphere of decay.
In the grim darkness of the really nearby present everyone can hear you scream but don’t particularly care.
Crapsack worlds can be complex and entertaining worlds to play in. The thing to remember is that it’s the game master’s responsibility to keep the atmosphere of the world together and to keep a dialogue between themselves and the players to ensure that both parties get what they want from the game. Don’t be too shackled to the idea of a crapsack world and don’t let the players go unchallenged. Don’t be afraid to let players accomplish exactly the goals they want. Let the heroes win the day. Because on a crapsack world night always falls and evil will always rise again to rule.
