From career to grave - the birth of grimdark fantasy

It is 1986 and you are rolling up your first character for a brand-new fantasy game. You roll on the career table, and the dice are unambiguous: ratcatcher. Not a paladin, not a wizard, not a chosen one. A ratcatcher. Your starting gear includes a lantern, some traps and, in the book's own words, a "small but vicious dog".

Here is the strange part: at that table, this is one of the best results you can roll. A ratcatcher has grown immune to most of what the city's filth can do. In the world you have just been born into, that is worth more than a sword.

A grim world of perilous adventure

That game was Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, published by Britain's Games Workshop and designed by Richard Halliwell, Rick Priestley, Graeme Davis, Jim Bambra and Phil Gallagher. The subtitle on the cover was a manifesto: a grim world of perilous adventure. The Old World looked like Renaissance Europe with the serial numbers filed off, complete with imperial court intrigue, trading towns and marshes, but everything rotted beneath the varnish. Chaos seeped through the cracks, cults gathered in cellars, and most problems were caused not by monsters but by people.

The system matched the world. Where Dungeons & Dragons offered classes and levels, Warhammer gave you a career: herdsman, beggar, pharmacist, exciseman, ratcatcher. Advancement did not mean rising toward heroism; it meant clawing your way out of the gutter, one career to the next, scars as proof of progress. The percentile system made every roll readable and every failure felt. And The Enemy Within, the campaign that began appearing shortly after the rulebook, is still regarded by many players as the best the hobby has produced: not a world-saving quest, but a conspiracy slowly closing around the players.

What it turned upside down

To see how radical that was, stand it next to its moment. In the mid-eighties Dungeons & Dragons was under fire in a moral panic, the story we told in our chapter on the satanic panic, and defended itself by stressing how heroic and wholesome it really was. Warhammer did the opposite. It said: our world is filthy, our characters are nobodies, and that is exactly why what they do matters. Courage only counts when the world offers no reward for it.

There was also a joke buried inside, and the joke was load-bearing. The ratcatcher with his vicious little dog is not despair but gallows humour, and that has remained the genre's secret ever since: grimdark without a grin is merely grim. The word itself, by the way, comes from Warhammer's sibling in space; the Warhammer 40,000 tagline, "in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war", was compressed by fans into a genre name that long ago stopped being about Warhammer alone.

The messy parts

In fairness, the game's own history is at least as bumpy as its world. Games Workshop's attention drifted back to the miniatures game, and the roleplaying game wandered between publishers and licences for decades, with new editions in 2005, 2009 and 2018, each with its own idea of what was sacred. And the genre it set in motion has a well-known trap: mistake grimness for cruelty and you end up with a table nobody wants to sit at. Grimdark at its best is an agreement between players, not a licence.

From the Old World to now

Walk through our shelves today and you can see how alive that inheritance is. The Old School Renaissance, which we covered in our chapter on the Old School Renaissance, gave the genre a second wind, and Zweihänder proved the homesickness for the Old World was big enough to carry a game of its own. MÖRK BORG by Pelle Nilsson and Johan Nohr boiled the genre down to an apocalyptic scream of a book in 2020, Cy_Borg drove the same current through neon-lit streets and Pirate Borg hoisted its sails with it. And with Blunderbuss, the genre winds the clock back to 1597 and a free city full of sin: proof that forty years after that first ratcatcher, there are still designers who believe fantasy only becomes real once it gets dirty. If you want a way in, our Mörk Borg starter guide is the shortest route, and our comparison of Pirate Borg and Cy_Borg maps where the current flows today.

Because that is what the 1986 dice roll changed for good. Somewhere tonight, someone is making a character, rolling on a table, and getting not a hero but a ratcatcher with a small, vicious dog. And smiling.