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Games Workshop's worlds of Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40'000 have long since had a reputation for sheer utter cruelty, mind-boggling malice and harshness built into the worlds themselves. Small wonder, given how both are based on real human history, and how they are both inspired by heavy metal rock album covers, Dune and so on, refined by various learned minds and talented hands, not least John Blanche with his distinctive style. Age of Sigmar started out with a hopeful note in the background story, yet grim darkness seems to be on the rise there as well at the moment.

A harsh world of conflicts and unforgiving hatred makes for a great backdrop scene for stories to play out on, allbeit when taken overboard it also limits the stories that can be told by shutting out subtleties with barriers of bottomless animosity (e.g. the watertight barriers between uncorrupted Dwarfs and Chaos Dwarfs in WHFB which makes any interaction other than violence most unlikely).

Loved and loathed, whether hailed as exquisite narrative settings or exaggerated to the point of "grimderp", the grimdark is a strong feature of Warhammer settings' backstories.

Do you have any favourite concepts of grimdark? It could be moments of stories or bizarre artwork or models, and they certainly need not be from Games Workshop settings. If pictures are involved, then please share!

What made me post this was my brother coming up with a 40k-ish RPG character idea yesterday, of a cyborg who had died in his robotic harness, yet whose exoskeleton steams on with dead weight strapped inside it. That jokingly-intended zomborg must come close to the top of most grimdark concepts I've ever stumbled across. In official background, the Daemonforged Hellcannon with ammunition of mortal souls ranks in the very top, and that concept continues to inspire many Chaos Dwarf stories to this very day (it's got fantastic and inspiring narrative reverberations).



And likewise for 40k with its Golden Age of Technology human civilization's most advanced and psyker-tolerating worlds being the most ripe targets for Daemonic forces through Psykers, while only superstitiously backward and witch-hunting colonies survived: The grim darkness is written into the very structure of that universe.

As to artwork, these two pieces spring to mind, among a host of others:





And a random Blanche artwork, because mention of grimdark wouldn't be complete without his lifework of art:



And outside GW, an honourable mention goes to Disciples of Lughar in the Ninth Age, i.e. Daemonically possessed Infernal Dwarf berzerkers on fire, here illustrated as a K'daai Cultist with glowing runes carved into his flesh, by Helblindi. Lovely over-the-top grimdark idea and visual:



Cheers!

I was always partial to the idea that Dark Eldar siphoned off the souls of slaves to Slasnesh in order to survive and prolong their own lives, the more tormented the soul the more the DE gained from it.

Also DE related, the idea that they used slaves bound into machinery as living wombs to create clones to fill the ranks of DE warriors.

I have no idea if either of these were official but they captured the feel of the Dark Eldar nicely,

Re-reading the Night Lords series. Live aboard the Covenant as a human slave sounded preeeeeety damn grimdark to me :(

There's lots of things; it's quite scary that the human mind can conceive of such wretched things, and in such magnitude and quantities. The Dark Eldar and Slaanesh are particularly vile in my books.

But, the following paragraph of "Fulgrim" as part of the Horus Heresy series stuck in my mind...

This image for me. It makes me think what has this guy gone through to end up like this. He was once a normal human, then a genetically modified Astartes. That must be bad enough going through that process. But to end up like this, what horrors has he seen? I mean I assume it's a space marine, but it's getting difficult to tell.




Automatically Appended Next Post:
Another part that gets me in the novels are when guardsmen are killed in a such a manner that their soul is tainted or captured by a chaos god. All a guardsmen wants if he is killed is to go to the Emperor's light, not killed horribly THEN suffer an eternity in a cesspit of Nurgle.

 Karak Norn Clansman wrote:

What made me post this was my brother coming up with a 40k-ish RPG character idea yesterday, of a cyborg who had died in his robotic harness, yet whose exoskeleton steams on with dead weight strapped inside it. That jokingly-intended zomborg must come close to the top of most grimdark concepts I've ever stumbled across.

Dreadnoughts say hi

Crispy78 wrote:

 Karak Norn Clansman wrote:

What made me post this was my brother coming up with a 40k-ish RPG character idea yesterday, of a cyborg who had died in his robotic harness, yet whose exoskeleton steams on with dead weight strapped inside it. That jokingly-intended zomborg must come close to the top of most grimdark concepts I've ever stumbled across.

Dreadnoughts say hi

Huron Blackheart says hi. Have a read of what he does to one unlucky fether in this short story (or just skip to page 13 for the TL;DR).

https://www.blacklibrary.com/downloads/product/pdf/m/maelstrom.pdf

The sacrifice of a thousand psychic souls a day to power the Golden Throne that sustains the Emperor and in turn the Astronomican.

Whether you like his bizarre art style, Blanche really is the most definitive aesthetic behind 40K in my opinion. The entire ethos kind of broiled up from a lot of his early artwork. It's mostly garish splatter-art, but it delivers the feel better than any of the artists I've seen come and go with 40K.

There are loads of grimdark concepts but I can't think of one which epitomises it personally. There are plenty at the top though.

 DV8 wrote:
The sacrifice of a thousand psychic souls a day to power the Golden Throne that sustains the Emperor and in turn the Astronomican.

Was going to say the Golden Throne. Pretty much everything about it.
The individual strapped in has given up everything they are for this one purpose, which they will do forever. Thousands of people every day are sacrificed to keep it running. It is a war memorial and a shrine that people worship at. It is protected by a host of the most highly trained warriors and two of the greatest fighting machines conceived, almost all of whom will live out their lives having never used their training.
It contains the most respected and loved individual to have lived, but is a symbol exploited for political gains and to enforce subservience by billions.
And the husk sat on it all is either dead or lives every day in perpetual torment.

Crispy78 wrote:

 Karak Norn Clansman wrote:

What made me post this was my brother coming up with a 40k-ish RPG character idea yesterday, of a cyborg who had died in his robotic harness, yet whose exoskeleton steams on with dead weight strapped inside it. That jokingly-intended zomborg must come close to the top of most grimdark concepts I've ever stumbled across.

Dreadnoughts say hi

Also there is a creature on XCOM 2 which, after you kill it's occupant it then goes on and continues to mindlessly fight with the corpse dangling out.

I remember a short story about a huge building full of adepts slaving away at they terminals doing basically bureaucratic busywork, punching in number and doing calculations and stuff. And one guy makes a tiny error in his calculation, which ends up sending a war fleet to the wrong system or something and getting billions of people killed. I wish I could remember where that story was. But yeah, that always kind of epitomized what the Imperium is to me.

 Albino Squirrel wrote:
I remember a short story about a huge building full of adepts slaving away at they terminals doing basically bureaucratic busywork, punching in number and doing calculations and stuff. And one guy makes a tiny error in his calculation, which ends up sending a war fleet to the wrong system or something and getting billions of people killed. I wish I could remember where that story was. But yeah, that always kind of epitomized what the Imperium is to me.

I think that's the BL story "Fifteen Hours".

I'd suggest, prior to reading the rest of this post, that you read the introduction to this anthology, which discusses the role of moral relativism (it is free to read, as the preview). I think that part and parcel of what gets labeled "GrimDark" is the moral relativism of "evil" or "good" but too often it just gets reduced down to "dark," "brutal," or "horrible." I think that is when it gets reduced to what you label "GrimDerp" which would seem to be what happens when one attempts to write the former, but without subtlety and so it simply gets reduced to the latter. It falls right into the trap of something like "it's fun to do bad things" or "whatever, whatever, I do what I want."

I think the Games workshop fluff (which I honestly can't really bring myself to read, due to perceived quality issues (yes, I am a snob)) seems to aspire to the ideal, morally relativistic "GrimDark" perspective, but I think too often falls to the low-brow, hand-wringingly evil pastiche that makes it much less interesting, at least from a literary standpoint. As in, the story of the Horus Heresy could be a fantastic exploration of moral relativism, but from everything I read about the actual books, just seems like people doing dumb things for bizarre or nonsensical reasons. Chaos seems to simply be the default "bad" and everyone who courts it, or is courted by it does so for some illogical meglomaniacal reason.

There could be so much more to explore with just the simple "truth" that Chaos is a necessary and generative force/concept. But the fiction seems to me to be increasing polar, which isn't a shock given the general political climate now-a-days.