One of the things I like in any story is the absurd, and not

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>A paladin helps an orphan living on the street and finds out later that their purse was stolen.

>Saving a princess from a dragon and then she kills herself because she doesn't like her arranged marriage.

I think you mean "I like the grimdark," you edgelordy chuunibyou.

/thread

>>49404344
Reality doesn't care for light or dark. It just is.

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>>49404392
>Reality doesn't care for light or dark. It just is.
~ Yami Darkshadow Deathblade Muramasa, Blade of True Darkness

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>>49404392

>>49404433
>Sonichu

>>49404392
>Reality: Psssh, nuthin personnel kiddos. I don't care for light or dark.

>>49404323
If I was really paladining I'd be basically showering relatively worthless loot like gold on ever peasant I encountered, not much of an issue

I hope you are claiming the princess kills herself AFTER delivery, and are not impugning my honor as an adventurer in thinking I would be so shoddy as to let the package die.
Once I've been paid they can do whatever they want, its their life.

There's nothing preventing an orc warrior from also being the warband's cook

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>>49404433

>>49404416
>>49404433
.>Real life is too edgy for you
Why don't you just kill yourself then, since you exist in what you hate so much.

Or is -not- killing yourself edgy in an edgy and grimdark universe?

>>49404323
>A paladin helps an orphan living on the street and finds out later that their purse was stolen.
>Saving a princess from a dragon and then she kills herself because she doesn't like her arranged marriage.
>Going into a dungeon and killing a group of orcs. One of them is wearing a stained apron. Sessions later, you find a cauldron filled with gravy.

Wait... are you saying... the orphan stole your gold to pay the dragon to rescue the princess, but the orcs faked her suicide so they could abduct her body to EAT?

Jesus.
Fucking.
Christ.

How deep does this rabbit hole go?

>>49404323
This kind of stuff is almost impossible to pull off well. The problem is, most people aren't literate enough to recognize effective modern/post-modern critique.

There are three things you need to keep in mind when you attempt to write something like that:
>the plausibility of the scenario
>the arbitrary nature of reality
>the character's lack of affect interacting with it

The reason most modernist literature was successful is because it juxtaposes the absurdity of reality with the false predictability nurtured by society, and the character is more concerned about their routine than the ridiculous things happening to them.

In my opinion, the two most straight forward pieces of literature that capture this are Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Metamorphosis by Kafka. Hitchhikers nails the arbitrary nature of reality, and the absurdity of modernity, and Kafka has a really in depth understanding of the modern human's lack of affect towards anything bizarre.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkPR4Rcf4ww

>>49404582
please ma'am no meat touching

>>49404323
An old campaign of mine wall full of this shit, sometimes just because I allowed the players to make big stupid decisions and built the world around the likely aftermath.

>There's an urn that can divine who has or lacks legitimate royal blood. It also seals the restless dead from an old curse beneath the earth.
>It gets stolen and the PCs have to retrieve it for the kingdom or whatever. It's good money, and an okay hook for the first adventure.
>I'm also thinking political machinations against the throne could be a big deal, or the party might find out a member has royal blood.
>They get back to town and unknown conspirators send a message via aforementioned restless dead that they've kidnapped a member of the cleric's flock and want the thing.
>The party fucking goes along with it instead of trying any bullshit solution. I didn't have something in particular in mind, but wanted to give them a chance at what would feel like a clever victory.
>Instead they hand over the urn. Dude smashes the thing and now the kingdom's crawling with ghouls every night for the remainder of the campaign.

Every step of the way my party did weird shit. They burned fields to fend off the undead for one night and started a famine. They meet a horrifying villain (there were assholes aplenty, but they really only got to know one well) and with little more than a spooky description they were too afraid to do more than... well they ended up borrowing a book from him.

The climax of the campaign was a direct assault on a soup kitchen that was feeding the people of the town tainted food hoping to turn them into more ghouls. The party made no real attempt to deal with the situation quietly or not look like psychotic monsters.

Basically, just letting the party have the run of your campaign is often more than enough to get something crazy out of it. Not complaining though. It was a blast the whole way through.

>>49404632
This guy does it right. Have bad events happen if your PCs do something bad/don't deal with something bad/deal with something in a questionable way.

>>49404983
I think it's more than that, the PCs are trying to get a grip on things but reality doesn't care.

>>49404983
>>49405035
Truthfully, bad things would have happened regardless and some of their odd actions won them windfalls. That book they borrowed from the off-his rocker dead guy turned out to be pretty helpful.

My larger point is that it is actually kind of hard not to have something like the absurd just fall out of the gaps between your expectations and theirs. It takes work to make sense of these stories after the fact, and it's easy enough (and surprisingly fun) to just stop doing that work.