Grim Omens

The world doesn’t need to be saved. It needs someone to notice it’s already failing.

Grim Omens is a system-agnostic tool for fantasy roleplaying. It treats dark fantasy not as edginess, but as clarity in the face of collapse. This is a genre where the monsters wear crowns, where magic has consequences, and where hope, if it exists, is a debt no one expects to repay. The goal isn’t to fix the world. It’s to navigate its ruins with honesty, caution, and a blade that may not stay clean.

This book equips you to treat dark fantasy as narrative reckoning. Use it in any setting where trust is rare, survival has a cost, and every action risks becoming a mistake. The focus is on tension, corrosion, and the stories that emerge when belief runs out.

This Book Contains

Each section gives you modular tools to shape dark fantasy into something more than cruelty. Together, they offer a storytelling approach grounded in consequence, moral pressure, and choices made without guarantee of reward. These aren’t redemption arcs. They’re warnings.

Narrative Framing: A suite of tools to help you define what dark fantasy means in your story. It explores what’s broken, what’s inevitable, and what characters are willing to risk knowing they might fail.

Scene Tools: Practical methods for portraying dread, pressure, and loss without resorting to spectacle. These tools help you describe rot that spreads slowly, power that demands compromise, and how nothing clean stays clean for long.

Character Archetypes: Ten character ideas built around desperation, reckoning, and control. They include cursed wanderers, failed prophets, and survivors who learned too late that hope has sharp edges.

Story Complications: A collection of narrative injuries that persist. Each one introduces decay, betrayal, or uncertainty. They do not resolve. They spread.

Worldbuilding Prompts: Define how your setting fears, denies, or serves what cannot be undone. These prompts help build worlds where survival is personal, power is painful, and stories end whether you’re ready or not.

Adventure Hooks: Ten story seeds that begin in the aftermath. Each one leads into confrontation, refusal, or a descent someone thought they could avoid. They don’t start clean and they don’t end kind.

The world doesn’t ask who will save it. It asks who still chooses to act when nothing is left worth saving.