How to Create the Perfect Dark Fantasy World

Dark fantasy isn’t just a fantasy world with a bit of extra shadows and monsters. World building for dark fantasy is also not just about taking a medieval setting and upping the angst. Dark fantasy is about weaving a world that feels immersive in its bleakness and haunting in a way that’s almost reminiscent of horror. It’s about creating a place where hope is fragile, morals are bent, and danger is pretty much a constant in every town and region. So, for today’s post, I’ll be helping you figure out how to create the perfect dark fantasy world for your next project. 

When you want to think about what dark fantasy is, I think there are some great examples that really showcase what it’s like. Berserk is one of the best examples of dark fantasy and is often cited as being a blueprint for inspiration into the dark fantasy genre. There are other great dark fantasy pieces of media out there like Dark Souls or Elden Ring, but there are also plenty of books that fall under dark fantasy. Sometimes, dark fantasy is mixed up with grimdark fantasy, but there’s some differences which I discussed in a separate blog post before. 

Either way, let’s dive right into this topic! 

Speaking of world building though, I’ve actually created an awesome system designed for world building that you can easily get started using. It’s called The Ultimate Guide to World Building, and it’s a 340+ page workbook that breaks everything down that you need to know about building worlds. But if you need a little freebie to help you start world building first, sign up below to grab yourself some prompts!

How to Create a Dark Fantasy World

1. Define Your Core Atmosphere

Dark fantasy is pretty much defined by the fact that it’s got a dark atmosphere, but you can dig even deeper than just the idea of a dark atmosphere. You can choose to make your world Gothic and brooding with decaying castles, vampires, and lots of storms. You can also choose to make your world barren and desolate with occasional spirits that roam the vast expanse. 

Taking a bit of a look at something like Elden Ring, which is a popular video game that I really recommend writers play because of just how much unique lore it has, the world is decaying. The atmosphere is one of a haunting feeling with that desolate, hopeless isolation about it while still being somewhat full of life. However, that life is corrupted and tainted and there are powerful beasts lurking in every corner. It’s a perfect example of building the atmosphere of a dark fantasy world. 

You want to think about your world from both a visual perspective and an internal perspective. Basically, what does it look like when you wake up in this world and how does it make you feel? 

2. Anchor Your World in Belief Systems

In dark fantasy, there is a heavy emphasis placed on myth, religion, lore, superstition, and similar concepts. In fact, one of the things that really works well for dark fantasy is its ability to showcase the corruption of an entire society through the use of systems like these. People living in a dark fantasy world might fear ancient gods and cursed bloodlines and there might be dark prophecies that keep everyone in a chokehold basically. 

In addition to this, the belief systems that exist in your world help to shape politics, social hierarchies, and how the common people interpret the things that exist around them. For instance, maybe there are entire cult factions that sprouted out from fringe groups because of an ancient prophecy. 

For instance, in Berserk, the God Hand manipulates the ideas of faith and prophecy and the entire world is just full of awful corruption. This is an example of how your belief systems help to anchor your dark fantasy world in itself. 

Check out The Ultimate Guide to World Building to learn more about creating these types of systems!

3. Create Magic That Actually Has Costs

Magic in dark fantasy is pretty much a must-have. But beyond needing to exist in a dark fantasy story, magic is not supposed to be a source of hope and happiness in a dark fantasy world. In fact, magic is meant to be dangerous, unpredictable, and has plenty of costs and consequences. Oftentimes, you’ll see magic systems in dark fantasy that involve blood, necromancy/death, ghosts, and similar sort of macabre and dark ideas. 

The costs that also come along with the magic systems that exist in dark fantasy are more often than not very dark as well. For instance, spells might cause curses or corruptions on entire nations. 

To build a sort of terrifying magic system, you need to think beyond what your magic system does and focus more on what it does to the person casting it. Of course, you do need to think about what it does, but build it primarily with some hefty consequences in mind. 

If you want to learn more about how to build an entire unique magic system, then check out this post here 👉 How to Create a Unique Magic System: An Author Explains

If you want to build up a magic system easily, I’ve got a Magic System Builder Worksheet that helps you design rules, limitations, and costs easily. It’s also a Canva template that works for the free and Pro versions of Canva so you can customize everything and copy and fill it out as many times as you need to. 

4. Populate the World With Monsters That Reflect Its Darkness

Pretty much every dark fantasy story, game, movie, etc… that I’ve interacted with has had monsters and creatures that exist uniquely to that respective world. Instead of relying only on classic things like vampires and werewolves, many dark fantasy writers who’ve succeeded actually created entire monsters and creatures of their own. Of course, you can easily base your creatures off of ones that exist in mythology and folklore, but you can also make your own. It depends on what you find yourself comfortable working with. 

For instance, in my series, The Fallen Age Saga, I designed plenty of alien species and creatures. It’s a grimdark sci-fantasy, but I’ll talk about it anyway because I do take elements from dark fantasy as well. In the series, there are lots of aliens like the Ones Above/Varkavans who are human-like but there are also Orcanas which are giant blue monsters from an ice-based planet. 

If you want an easy template to create your own dark fantasy monsters and creatures, I actually created another Canva template just for this based on how I do this process. It’s the Monster Creator Worksheet and it’s also customizable and guides you through everything from the appearance to the behavior and stats and more. 

5. Weave Items and Artifacts Into the Fabric of Story

Throughout your campaign or story or game’s dark fantasy adventure, you’ll probably have your main characters come across tons of different artifacts and items that will play a big role in the overall progression of the plot. These items include things like cursed swords, heirlooms, magical potions, relics from wars past, and so much more. Think of the weapons you find as you’re traversing in Elden Ring or the cursed Behelit in Berserk. These sorts of items play a big role in the formulation of your dark fantasy world and make it significantly more immersive to your readers. 

When you’re designing these sorts of elements and items, you want to think beyond just what the item is and what it does. You need to think more along the lines of what it costed the inventor, what it does to the user, and why it’s so important to the fabric of your dark fantasy world. 

You can build these types of items with the Magic Item Creation Workbook. I designed it with game masters and writers in mind and there’s even a fun section where you can come up with the crafting recipe. Sorta like Minecraft! 

6. Show How Ordinary Life Survives the Darkness

One of the most chilling parts about creating a dark fantasy world is trying to understand how the inhabitants are affected by all this darkness. In so many dark fantasy stories, we tend to focus on the main characters, but I think examples of the best dark fantasy worlds I’ve seen have been really good at weaving things together. 

For instance, as you traverse the world of Elden Ring, you can see that a lot of villages are abandoned and dilapidated. Those that still have people in them are basically decayed and withered. The main cities are overtaken by soldiers for whatever rules over the area and there are aggressive and insane farmers that attack you randomly sometimes. It’s a good way of showing the world in a visual sense, but you can easily describe this in a written piece as well. 

Something I think helps with this is my Haunted Region Workbook. It’s a quick workbook that just walks you through creating a haunted region including why it became haunted, how people react to it, and it also comes with some encounter tables to help prompt you to think a bit deeper about what’s happening in the world and the region. 

7. Tie It All Together With a Theme

At the core of a dark fantasy world, there is typically some sort of theme that you’re trying to show the reader/player/viewer. Whether that theme is morality, freedom, hope, faith, or something else, you want to think about what your world is really about beyond just the surface level stuff that’s happening. You don’t need to give it a positive message, you can easily make your theme about the corruption of greed or something like that. The idea is that when you identify what you’re trying to display and convey in your world, you’ll have a much easier time coming up with the details that help to round out the rest of your world. 

I think that dark fantasy should ultimately have a message beyond the decay that exists in the world and you need to try and show that message without enforcing it too hard to the point where it doesn’t feel subtle anymore. 

Conclusion

Forging the perfect dark fantasy world requires a lot of thought beyond just the aesthetics and visuals of the world. You want to think about the underlying message, the interactions, the people, and the systems that ultimately exist in this dark fantasy world. In addition to this, it’s really important to remember that you need to work on grounding your world in its own logic so that you don’t have inconsistencies that could cost your world the grounds required for believability. 

Something I recommend you check out for world building is The Ultimate Guide to World Building. It’s a 340+ page workbook that I based off real systems that work for world building no matter what project you’re working on. I’ve included tons of instruction, practical examples, application questions, and active learning worksheets to help you actually create and learn all at the same time. Check it out here → The Ultimate Guide to World Building

Here are also the other tools I mentioned throughout this post:

• Magic System Builder Worksheet 
• Monster Creator Worksheet 
• Magic Item Creation Workbook 
• Haunted Region Workbook

If you’re working on a dark fantasy world, I recommend that you look into Elden Ring and Dark Souls because those are great video games that literally encapsulate what dark fantasy means and looks like. You can also check out another blog post of mine where I talk about some of the best video games for world builders → 15 Games With Amazing World Building

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