Bleak World is a Tabletop RPG created on Microsoft Word and distributed through Wix. The game consists of playing as many different types of monsters as well as humans and magical princesses.
It can be found legally and free here: Bleak World
, Enemy List.
Each race of monster has five different classifications, each based on a snippet from popular culture. In addition there are five organizations that each player must decide on at the start of the game when designing their character. Each character has six stats that are determined by the monster's class and organization.
The races of monster include: Humans, Vampires, Werebeasts, Witches, Aliens, Experiments gone horribly wrong, Ghosts, Mummies, Magical Princesses, Jotun, Children, Zombies, Killer Animals, Half Beasts, Elementals, Mad Scientists, Demons, Heroes, Angels, and Things That Go Bump In The Night.
Examples of tropes within the work include:
- Above Good and Evil: The Powers That Be claim to be this, but they might be the Darkness or even The Caretaker.
- Action Girl: Most Princesses. A high blades skill is a must for these kinds. The Gem Princesses and the court of Shadows emphasize it the most.
- A.K.A.-47: All the guns in the game are just named pistol or shotgun.
- Aliens Are Bastards: You're basically encouraged to play this way, gaining points for making the U.S. Government inefficient and spreading plagues through children.
- Always Chaotic Evil: The Darkness and all its children.
- Ambiguous Innocence: The princesses are fighting the darkness that threatens to consume the universe... but might also be the elves who destroyed Jotun society and kidnap children
- The Jotun themselves are presented as freedom fighters, but might routinely engage in cannibalism to get home
- Basically all of the races are presented as being good by the gamebook, despite all doing terrible things to further their "altruistic goals"
- Amoral Attorney: The Board of Executives is this mixed with Corrupt Corporate Executive.
- Artificial Zombie: All of the Experiment classes aside from the Super-Soldier.
- Patchwork are either a Body of Bodies or Frankenstein's Monster.
- Legion are corpses that were implanted with 108 demons and ghosts.
- Androids are cyborgs made from the corpses of teenagers and implanted with code to make them better humans.
- Radio Zombies are zombies brought back to life (and repeatedly killed by) nuclear radiation.
- Authority Equals Asskicking: Every
Nightmare ranked enemy is in charge of the lower difficulty versions, even the ones that don't rightly make sense such as Consigliere. - Bald of Evil: The Primal Vampires are completely hairless and described as savage animals.
- Benevolent Alien Invasion: Zigzagged with the Aliens PC race. Their real objective is to kill the venusians, but they also cite protecting the weak and foolish humans as reason to invade. They can also launch a full scale genocide to protect us.
- Black Speech: Princesses of Darkness can only speak in this, but are perceived as mute by all others.
- Body of Bodies: Patchwork can be this or a standard issue Frankenstein's Monster.
- Bomb Throwing Anarchist: The Bridge Burners and Host of Fire can be seen as this.
- Cannibalism Superpower: Vampires, certain witches, and some Jotun all get powers from eating people
- Cast from Lifespan: This is how Mummies curse people and do magic.
- The Chessmaster: Princesses of Chess, natch.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive / Honest Corporate Executive: The Blackwood Company aligned players can easily be either. The Dark Skies Corporation is always evil though.
- Cosmic Horror Story: The Darkness is apparently unstoppable and already destroyed the magical princess homeworld
- Crapsack World: Despite the name of the game, it's really not. It's really more campy than anything, with the addition of Magical princesses and werefish, in general it has a huge edge of hope and optimism to it, even robots can become human with enough hope and goodwill.
- Cute Mute: Despite the corruption and muteness, Court of Darkness princesses are still adorable.
- Dark Is Evil: The Darkness is this in its purest form, being a massive shadow that consumes and mind rapes everything it comes across.
- Deal with the Devil: The Demon Host Witches.
- Don't Fear the Reaper: Averted, The Reapers will send ghosts to the Death Beyond Death if they stay a ghost for more than a week.
- Eldritch Abomination: The Hosts, the Darkness, The Powers that Be, and the Caretaker
- Eldritch Location: Wherever it is that Ghosts go when they die.
- Evil Lawyer Joke: The Board of Executives are a group of Lawyers who sold their souls for immortality and all of the legal knowledge in the world.
- Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: The Breeding team of the Aliens in a nutshell, they usually stick around to bring the kid up with good martian values though, and female Martians can be part of this squad too.
- Fate Worse than Death: A good deal of things in the setting. Amongst them is the Second Death, and the Radio Zombies constantly being killed and brought back to life.
- Frankenstein's Monster: What the Patchwork were modeled after.
- Fusion Dance: An ability of the Gem princesses. It's tough to do though.
- God in Human Form: A mummy class enemy, many player characters would probably qualify as well.
- Goldfish Poop Gang: The Prism are too busy fighting each other to do anything really.
- Gone Horribly Right:
- The Super Soldiers actually obeyed their orders for the most part, the flavor of the game usually starts with the PC gaining enough sentience to NOT obey orders
- Same for the Dog Soldiers in the Werebeast Race
- Gone Horribly Wrong: The actual name of one of the PC races is "Experiment Gone Horribly Wrong", it consists of Frankenstein's Monster under a new name, thousands of ghosts and demons inside of a single entity, rogue androids, radioactive zombies, and super soldiers.
- Good Witch Versus Bad Witch: They're all against each other, but some are better than others.
- Granola Girl: Gaia, of the "Destroy all industrialists" variety.
- Great White Hunter: The standard enemy for Werewolves. The Guardians of Earth gain bonuses to their Inner Beast for killing them.
- Hard-Drinking Party Girl: The Court of Wine is this, they only travel to Earth to get drunk, party, sleep with some humans, and take their favorite humans back to Uranus with them for more sleeping and drinking.
- Humans Are Special: Most races have six skills. Humans have seven.
- Intrepid Reporter: The Name of a human class. It gets bonuses for Persona, Technology, and Funding. It is best to play this class as The Face or The Team Benefactor.
- Kill It with Fire: Just about everything is weak to fire.
- Lesbian Vampire: All female Dracul, as well as the Society of Lesbian Vampires, who assassinate outed vampires to keep up the illusion that vampires don't exist.
- Lightning Gun: The Lightning Gun.
- Looks Like Orlok: Nusferatu and Goblins, among others.
- Lovecraft Lite: The darkness is as Lovecraft as they come, but they are continuously opposed and defeated by the Princesses, and can even be fought by baseline humans.
- Magical Girl Warrior: The Princesses
- Magical Native American: Averted, Wendigo have no magic skill.
- MegaCorp: The Blackwood Company and Dark Skies Corporation.
- Nintendo Hard: Any enemy with the Nightmare tag, which to date includes: The Chosen One, The North Wind, The Hosts, Double 0 Agents, The Robot made by Satan, The Board of Executives, The Caretaker, and The Grim Reaper
- Nuclear Mutant: The Radio Zombie Class. They have only 1 voice in their head, making them more sane, but their charred away skin and glowing innards makes it harder for them to blend in.
- Our Giants Are Bigger: The giant is the first Jotun Classification, and also the biggest.
- Our Goblins Are Different: Despite being as smart as any other class, the goblin of Bleak World is more prone to the Rape, Pillage, and Burn approach of getting to the Homestead than any other Jotun.
- Our Ogres Are Hungrier: The Ogre is a classification of the Jotun race and is actually a tortured and mutated human with the intelligence of a dog, they have great strength, but no real way to get to the homestead.
- Our Vampires Are Different: Like all races, there are five different kinds
- Dracul are the classic style of vampire, they feast on blood, live in castles and all the women are lesbians
- Mods are the Twilight version, they are (sometimes) immune to the sun, and have an unnatural attraction to teenage girls
- Primals are little more than savage beasts, with 30 Days of Night being cited as example
- Nosferatu are the classic hammer horror style vampire that are nightmare incarnate.
- Wendigo are more of a super powered cannibal, but are included as a vampire anyway.
- Our Werebeasts Are Different: In addition to the standard werewolf there are also
- Cat People who are permanantly locked in half beast form
- Were Roaches who can turn into 6 foot tall roach monsters
- Were Fish, who have all the worst qualities of a frog and none of the advantages
- Princess Classic: Princesses of Nature are usually this.
- Puny Humans: The view that most monsters have of the humans, sometimes they're right, sometimes they are dead wrong.
- "Second Law" My Ass!: The Android class of Experiment can kill humans all day if you want to.
- She Is the King: Gender Flipped example you can play as a male witch or princess.
- Split-Personality Merge: The goal of the Multiple Men, they can do so with a high magic skill, but even then it will cost them most of their humanity, which could lead to...
- Split-Personality Takeover: Can happen to Experiments if they sink to low in their humanity or if they lose certain checks to their voices, if they lose the checks, they usually revert to their Prime Consciousness.
- Spotlight-Stealing Squad: The Princesses, the number of times they or one of their enemies appears in another race's backstory is ridiculous, to date they are responsible for: The Jotun losing their home (probably), the Alien occupation of Earth (probably), Ghosts being absorbed by the darkness, the Experiments learning how to become human, Witches splitting into 5 different cults, and bringing on the apocalypse.
- Stealth Pun: The most sexually active Court of Princesses is stationed inside Uranus.
- Token Good Teammate: Of the Hosts available, the Host of the Moon is the most moral, asking that you have consensual sex as an offering to her. The other Hosts ask you to eat the corpses of the noble fallen, kill a helpless sacrifice with an 11 inch blade, destroy all the Republicans and anyone else who would threaten nature, and set things on fire at random. All in all casual sex is pretty tame.
- Tomboy Princess: Most Princesses are a lead from the front type commander.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: All races have shades of this, but the Jotun and Aliens have it the most.
- The Jotun only want to get back home, they believe in creating spaceships or magical bridges and marching an army up there to destroy the elven occupation, however the magic to create this is formed via cannibalism and the ritual slaughter of humans.
- The Aliens are trying to wipe out the Venusians who have taken over Earth's government at the highest level and are draining our sense of wonder and hope. To combat the Venusians, the Martians are doing the exact same thing.
- Wendigo: A class of vampire.
