r/DarkWorldbuilding

452 archived posts · May 2018 – Jun 2026

The darker side of your world

r/DarkWorldbuilding

The darker side of worldbuilding: terrible diseases, cosmic horrors, brutal cultures, creative experiments, and the banality of evil.

Created May 4, 2018

5.1KMembers (last snapshot)

452Archived posts

Most created worlds aren't all sunshine and rainbows - they can include terrible diseases, cosmic horrors, brutal cultures, creative experiments, and the banality of evil. Here is a home for worldbuilding details that might alarm, offend, trigger, or unsettle people. If it's gross, disturbing, violent, depressing, gory, horrifying, or just something that you feel weird about putting in r/worldbuilding but isn't sexy enough for r/NSFWworldbuilding, put it here.

Rules:

No advertisement or promotion.
No requests for program/app suggestions, mapmaking tutorials, or other basic worldbuilding help.
No memes, shitposting, or low-effort comment posts. Go to r/worldjerking.
All posts should have worldbuilding context. Images without context will be removed. All outside links (world anvil, google docs, articles, etc) should be summarized. Instead of linking to Reddit threads, consider crossposting. All posts should be more about about the world than the craft (writing, drawing, etc) or story.
All posts should fit the "dark" part of the title. It's not a hard line, just use your best judgment; there should be something potentially disturbing or uncomfortable.
Be civil. You know where you are; don't be offended. If you don't like something, don't read it.
Flipside: Be considerate of the audience. Flair themes people may not want to read, such as rape and cannibalism.
Gore, especially visual, should be marked NSFW. No photorealistic depiction of NSFL content.
Sexual content is allowed, but if it's the entire point of the post (or it is blatantly pornographic), consider if r/NSFWworldbuilding would be a more suitable home for it.
Lore and prompt ("what is the ___ of your world?") posts are especially encouraged, and on-topic discussion and requests for help, suggestions, and inspiration are also welcome.
Comment as you would have others comment unto you. This doesn't mean there is a rule that you have to comment on other people's posts, but it does mean that if you don't engage with people you can't be surprised when they don't engage with you. If you don't care if people respond to your work, carry on.

for general worldbuilding: r/worldbuilding
for sexy worldbuilding: r/NSFWworldbuilding
for fantasy worldbuilding: r/FantasyWorldbuilding
for military worldbuilding: r/MilitaryWorldbuilding
for making religions: r/conreligions for making languages: r/conlangs
for making maps: r/mapmaking
for characters: r/characterbuilding and r/characterforge

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