#RPGaDay2025 - 13 - Darkness

It's RPGaDay season again. Here's a link to the blog post with the current year's prompts.

Today's prompt is Darkness. 

Hello Darkness, my old friend...

I think that I get the most out of roleplaying games when the struggle to succeed is palpable and you're not sure if you're actually winning. The games I remember most as a player are those when all the way through, I wasn't certain that we could or would succeed. Eternal Lies, the Darkening of Mirkwood, Tales of the Lone Lands, the Dracula Dossier, the multitude of Esoterrorists campaigns I've played in, all of these had little victories along the way, and some setbacks. In all of these cases, I was never certain what was going on and - so many times - the opposition looked almost certain to succeed. And yet somehow, despite the darkness, we prevailed. Those victories all built towards victory, but right to the end of everyone of those campaigns, I had no confidence that we could win.

And sometimes the win was bittersweet. In the Dracula Dossier, my character had to kill another party member who had become a vampire to fight Dracula. In Eternal Lies, we won, but my character was lost, and the other character was permanently scarred by the events. But all the way through - from Mexico City at least - we'd thought that death was likely. 

The darkness makes the victory all the sweeter.

Looking at it from a GM's perspective, it can be a fine line to walk. I try to be a fan of the characters, but that doesn't mean that I won't push them or stretch them. There were a couple of moments in Curse of Strahd which came very close to being a TPK (Total Party Kill). Ironically, the encounters weren't aimed to be like that, but the tactics that the players chose made them do that. Throughout the campaign I struggled to judge whether I was making it feel dangerous enough for them. I knew that once they'd reached mid-levels, that even Strahd himself wasn't likely to be a major threat if they worked together, but the players didn't see it that way. I tried to make them see the darkness in the setting from their interactions, from the way that the townsfolk were cowed and had adjusted to their terrifying and horrific oppression by a feudal lord who would literally eat you alive if you opposed him. I tried to make the moments of success and sanctuary meaningful, light against the darkness.

Failure and adversity against the darkness make the victory all the sweeter.

13 August 2025

Edit - I was doing catch up mode with this and seem to have written a variant post to that in Overcome (which I actually wrote first). However, I think that the theme here is subtly different. The darkness is what you are overcoming, what the struggle is about, rather than the struggle itself. It is the threat, the oblivion, and the price of failure you need to overcome. You don't need darkness to overcome something (for example, a heist based scenario, or a trading based campaign both probably won't have much darkness) but I think that it makes the stakes so much higher.