Quote from: Silverlion;341388What I want: A blasphemous empire of twisted things, dead and living, mechanical monstrosities of dead and living flesh melded together for abominable acts. Blood drinking corpses who are not pretty glittery boys, but true monsters who will rip someone's throat out to satiate their thirst. Black ships that are almost hell warped cathedrals to sin and corruption. Earth as a toxic, blood spattered, orb, remembered for the heroes it spawned, and homeworld lost to evil--for heroes to one day reclaim. Weapons that rend and tear and howl. Chain pikes, burning swords, lasers dim lights burning across a black battlefield and, human threshers with chain-saw katars who give into madness to fight, knowing they will die if they stop. Whispering psychics who wake up screaming because the voices and images of what seems hell itself won't let them sleep.

How do I get the latter, and keep science AND faith? How do I create something worth playing yet dark. I'm heavily inspired by Mutant Chronicles, which I don't feel was dark enough, and the imagery of Warhammer 40K but not their fluff otherwise.

How do I take our terrible folklore, and fashion something that would still be scary 800 years from now?

Your goal reminded me of two things: the Hellraiser series of films (especially Bloodlines which had a future segment), and something I'd seen at a Gen Con crafts area, a Lemarchand Box version of a Star Destroyer.

Posit that the supernatural Armageddon comes a five hundred years or so from now. Pour in a liberal dose of Kult. Hell opens. Demons are spawned. The dead rise. Heaven loses. The star empire of mankind is torn in two... with Earth as the blackened, hellish cancer at its heart, while the outer colonies are all that is left of free humanity.

Rather than a WH40K Imperium where humanity (ironically) holds Earth as its bright center, Earth is now the source of humanity's bane, a never-ceasing fountain of sorcerous awfulness and hell-touched mayhem.

Quote from: jdurall;341732Rather than a WH40K Imperium where humanity (ironically) holds Earth as its bright center, Earth is now the source of humanity's bane, a never-ceasing fountain of sorcerous awfulness and hell-touched mayhem.

Pretty much this is how I saw it--with the evil sources wanting to take more worlds to spread their seed, and grow more evil across the galaxy.

Here's a thought...

Good horror movie monsters are effective because they tell us something about ourselves, because they symbolize the darker aspects of our own nature. The zombie horde that'll eat your brain is the dark mirror image of our own mob mentality which robs us of our individuality. Similarly, the werewolf symbolizes our own susceptibility to shedding the veneer of civilization in times of duress.

So if you want to have a bunch of horrible, terrible things in your game, ask yourself what darker aspect of human nature you want them to depict, and build from there.


One idea that occurs to me and which ties into the whole faith/science issue is this: our desire to survive no matter the cost.

Say, at some point some people in your setting found themselves in an untenable situation. Doesn't matter what it was: maybe an ecological catastrophe, an invasive monster species, social collapse, whatever. The point is that the only way to survive was to become monsters themselves. Maybe they used advanced genetics to make themselves immune to the deadly radiation or toxins, or to give themselves the strength and reflexes to fight off the monsters, or whatever; but at any rate, the price for this change was the loss of civilisation. Maybe the protection was only partial, and the radiation still managed to destroy higher cognitive functions while leaving the body alone; or, for a more chilling version, maybe violent rage (or vampirism or whatever) was a known and accepted side effect, because it was either this or oblivion.
So a few centuries pass, and you have your nice, normal sci-fi society where the PCs come from, and they meet these creatures. The horror stems from the realization that despite their monstrosity, these things are still humans, who just did what they had to do to surive. As for faith... Maybe there is (or isn't) faith that these creatures are still redeemable humans. Or at least that they're still humans and should be considered as such, whether redeemable or not. Or as seen from the other side, the faith that becoming monsters is/was  an acceptable price to pay for survival.


Unrelated, another idea is the "monstrous economy of scale". You know Stalin's infamous quote, "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic". Take the concept and apply it to a spacefaring civilisation, and see where it takes you. Maybe it's necessary to have monsters kill billions of people, because it forces mankind to pull together and fight the menace; while otherwise they'd descend into incomparable costlier internal strife.

Or the Mongol strategy: torch and massacre one city, and the others will submit without a fight. A perfectly rational choice, but take it to a galactic level and it's horrible...  while still the rational choice.

Quote from: Premier;341779Here's a thought...

Good horror movie monsters are effective because they tell us something about ourselves, because they symbolize the darker aspects of our own nature. The zombie horde that'll eat your brain is the dark mirror image of our own mob mentality which robs us of our individuality. Similarly, the werewolf symbolizes our own susceptibility to shedding the veneer of civilization in times of duress.

So if you want to have a bunch of horrible, terrible things in your game, ask yourself what darker aspect of human nature you want them to depict, and build from there.


One idea that occurs to me and which ties into the whole faith/science issue is this: our desire to survive no matter the cost.

Nice. Another very good idea, I'll need to examine at length.

I want old fears and new fears to blend a bit. I can see collaberaters with the monsters, simply because it is better to be well regarded pet than a slave fit only for feeding upon.

Other ideas I've been bandying about have related to our desire to keep the body alive, the mind alive with no consideration for the essential human spark--what faith calls a soul.  

Souls trapped in computer networks, warped by their prison. Glitches in information that used to be recording of human thought.

Bodies kept alive by machinery, dim echoes of what humankind is supposed to be--cyberzombies essentially.