Let's create the most grimdark setting possible /tg/ I'll start
>there is no heaven but there is hell, the best thing a human can hope for is to cease to exist completly once he bites the dust or become undead
>to become undead he must sacrifice the person he loves the most
>every concpiracy theory is true
>>48168415
Real life
>>48168436
Shiiieeet
>>48168436
The world is inhabited by assholes like this guy.
>>48168415
Sounds like you're going more Grimderp than Grimdark.
Besides, those kinds of setting don't have a lot to do in them. Everything's fucked anyway and there's no hope of unfucking it. Why bother?
the main character is the soul of an ancient demon trapped inside the rotting corpse of a murdered warlord who ruled over a kingdom of cannibals inside the caldera of an inactive volcano in the center of a graveyard for an extinct race of godlike giants who were composed primarily of crystals of frozen blood.
the sun is made of crying babies and the nights sky is ravens picking at their blistering flesh.
buteverything changed when the fire nation attacked.
>>48168623
Sounds like a Metalocalypse episode.
>>48168415
That's easy - 1e Kult's setting. Next question!
>>48168415
Check out the manga Dorohedoro. It would be dark as hell if the characters weren't so inured to all the hellish bullshit going on.
The most grimdark setting would have a dying world theme of course, crops grow a little less every year, infant mortality continues to rise ,etc.
Humans and can no longer die, and the land can no longer properly decompose dead material of any kind.
Your soul lingers in your body permanently no matter what disease or injury afflicts you
People eke out a wretched, miserable existence in deserts of ash or in what were once forests, now turned to noxious swampland by the permanently rotted plantlife. Bandits and scavengers attack people for functioning body parts to graft to themselves when their own break down.
Afterlives do not exist. When you die, you remain inertly conscious in your corpse as your brain rots away, consciousness becoming more and more nightmarish, incoherent and fragmented until there is nothing more than numb impressions in the remains of a brain and nervous system, then, nothing. Imagine being cremated. Imagine being frozen. Imagine the embalming.
With this terrible knowledge, humans seek to annihilate the brains of the dead upon decease to they will be saved from this deteriorating madness. It also led to an arms race for immortality, rich lords and monarchs across the land experimenting wildly on their populaces to create an everlasting life. Primitive sciences and poor understanding of the mysteries of the human body has led to vast legions of malformed mutants and nightmarish undead being sent into the wastes to be forgotten, but sometimes they wander back into civilization carrying plagues or madness. Outlying villages fear hordes of ravenous corpse things descending on them and cities fear creeping horrors from crumbling vaults under their homes.
To make a setting truly grim-dark, we need to built it around a concept that is revolting and painful in and of itself.
The best I can come up with is something like the Sysiphian punishment, but with a twist. The backstory can come later, but what's important is that this is a world where reality disintegrates as soon as it is consciously recognized but fades back into being once it stop being acknowledged by a consciousness. The scope and speed of disintegration correlates with how much and how far the acknowledgement extend.
In practice, it will be mostly normal until higher intelligence evolve. There would probably have been flickers here and there, as it's not inconceivable that other animals have brief flashes of awareness, but nothing major will happen. Once consciousness and self awareness comes into play however, wew boy, we're going to see the start of a wonderful shitshow. The first human to sit beside a stream and let its eyes wander from the berries in its hands to the reflection in the water will immediately, but probably gently be pulled from where and when it is at the moment. Sounds will fade, sights will blur and as the heat from his body fade ever so slightly, he will notice for the first time that his body's warmth. That because he is alive, his body IS warm.
Maybe it will be too small and limited of an effect at this point to cause any damage. Maybe he will be distracted once again by the sweet juicy berries he happened to be eating let the whole experience fade peacefully into the past.
But maybe he won't. Maybe the experience could have been so alien and so uncanny to him that he couldn't help but stare once again into the water. Maybe when he let his eyes linger on the distorted reflection in the water, he will realize for the first time that he as a being, is there, does exist and continues to do so. At this point, the reflection in the water, the water itself begins to fade, but little does he know that he too is fading.
cont'd
>>48171254
He is too absorbed in the sudden realization of his own being and by extension that of the world around him. Other people at this point are fine, as he is alone by himself and hasn't cast this new light of consciousness on others yet. This however will change with time as he and countless others experience the same irreversible change.
In the beginning, populations are small and any fading will only extend to territory surrounding a village and maybe their neighbouring village at most. To carry out a productive life and survive, everyone in the village must try their best to just "get on with what they need to do" and try their best to not think so much. Exiles mental or physical will become a necessary custom of almost all villages as execution of those who are overly aware will ironically cause more damage as it's not easy to just forget about someone you live every day of your life with. At some point this effect may be weaponized as the ability to erase your enemy from existence even for a brief second with a short but concentrated burst of recognition would be helpful. The mental strain would be enormous and one slip could cause you or even your comrades to be faded as well, but all's fair in love and war, I guess.
As civilization develop however, this would cause more and more problem as both the degree and scope of conscious awareness grow exponentially at first and eventually quadratically. What's worse is that even though those who are hyper aware are a huge source of problems for societies, they're also a huge asset for reasons that should be easy to imagine. Just to make things clear, a fade may be temporary, but it doesn't end with things back to how they were before it began. The physical world literally start disintegrating, but time doesn't stop.
Effectively, what you have is a world that's fundamentally unstable and full of societies that must be intrinsically hypocritical just to function.
