Do you read Grimdark? I really like gritting fantasy, like Glen Cook's "Black Company" series. The main characters are not lily white "good" guys, are willing to do very bad things to win, but they were fun characters. I've read some stuff listed as "grimdark" but haven't thought they were that grim or dark. What are your favorite grimdark books/series?
I'm not really sure what exactly grimdark is. Is George R. R. Martin grimdark? Song of Ice and Fire is pretty grim and dark. What about Joe Abercrombie's First Law books? Read those and liked them a lot. Haven't heard of Black Company. Will add it to my to-read list.
I'm not 100% sure about GRRM, but I think his series is grimdark. Abercrombie's First Law books ARE grimdark.
Ah okay. Well I guess I like Grimdark then Those two series are both great. The Lies of Locke Lamora is also really good (and might fall into this category), though I haven't gotten around to reading the sequels yet.
Check out the Black Library catalogue of Warhammer 40k books. It's the game that defines the term "grimdark". If you haven't heard of 40k, it's a fictional universe set in the 41st millennium where there is nothing but brutal war. Here are the factions: Space Marines, genetically modified immortal superhumans who follow a rigid code: burn the witch, purge the unclean, kill the xenos. They're religious fanatics worshipping the god-emperor of mankind who sits in his golden throne and is kept alive by the ritual sacrifice of 100,000 psykers per day. Chaos Space Marines are space Marines who were corrupted by the warp gods of chaos. Khorne, the god of blood; Slaanesh, the god of hedonism; Nurgle, the god of pestilence; and Tzeentch, the god of change (mutations basically). They worship the chaos gods and summon daemons from the warp to spread their corrupt influence over as many planets as they can. They regularly lead black crusades to destroy entire worlds. Imperial Guard, the uncounted and innumerable legions of mankind's conscripts. They're normal people with weak weapons and armor who are expected to face the aliens and warp-spawned horrors as they garrison entire planets. Nobody knows how many of them there actually are, but they're led by commissars whose primary form of motivation is execution and their generals are famous for willingly sacrificing thousands or millions of them during campaigns, goading them into charging head on into meat grinders. The Eldar. Space elves, basically. They're a psychic race that literally screwed a chaos god into existence by way of a species-wide orgy. That's how Slaanesh became a god. They're reduced to a few artificial worlds now and travel the universe trying to undo some of the horrors they wrought and guide the younger races before they pass into oblivion. They're also cold, calculating, and manipulative as well as backstabbing. Their primary goal is to fight their main nemesis, the Necron. Dark Eldar, raiding bands of evil space elves who get their jollies from torturing their enemies (basically everyone, including other dark Eldar) and are constantly raiding the other factions for slaves so they can torture them to death and feed on their souls. The Necron. Ancient machines built and given sentience by the elder gods, so ancient that they predate even the Eldar themselves. They're relentless, unstoppable, and even when you kill them they just don't stay dead. They extinguish suns to build and fuel their war fleets and lie dormant underneath many populated worlds. Think The Terminator, except multiplied by who knows how many. Orks. The comic relief race. They are spawned from spores and use their own teeth as currency for trades. The entire race is comprised of background level psykers and their technology won't work for anyone else, simply because it never worked to begin with ... except when in the hands of an ork who believes it should work. They love good fights and infest worlds by crashing space hulks onto them; giant constructions made of hundreds or thousands of ships poorly welded together that the orks fling onto ballistic trajectories knowing that eventually they'll land somewhere and there'll be things there for them to kill. The Tau, the youngest race. They were born on a planet that was hidden by a massive warp storm for a couple thousand years. When the storm abated, there was an entire civilization where none was before. They fight to subjugate the other factions for the "greater good" - space communists, basically. They're highly advanced and make use of battle suits and insanely powerful rail guns, but instead of wiping planets out wholesale, they take control of them and reeducate the population to join their growing empire. And the Tyranid, the all-consuming swarm. They devour worlds, stopping only long enough to convert every last bit of the biomass on a planet into food and breeding pools to breed more of the monstrous bugs. Then they launch themselves back into space and hibernate until they find another planet to devour. Currently they've eaten about, I think a third of the entire galaxy and it's believed that they were originally running from something even worse wherever they came from. So yeah, 40k is about as dark as it gets.
I have some of Warhammer 40K game books that I would raid for ideas for some of my gaming sessions. The Cyberpunk 2020 I would use was a house rules version, with magic and psionics. Liked the system better than Shadowrun. The really nasty part of the human empire was, most of what they did was somewhat justified. Especially considering they were techno-barbarians who used technology but pretty much had no idea how the stuff worked.
Oh man, I haven't heard mention of Cyberpunk 2020 in forever. Edit to add: yeah, Shadowrun has always been plagued by that issue. Their setting is hands down the best dystopian cyberpunk setting since Blade Runner, but the rules have been a miserable pile of unintuitive crap that nobody really understands or knows how to make work. I did the same, but I ported the setting into GURPS. I think Steve Jackson even wrote a conversion guide for Shadowrun to GURPS if I'm not misremembering. But to think, all of that came about (along with Palladium Games and White Wolf) because TSR copyrighted the D20 system and protected it like a hawk.
