Yosmonkol

Everything Black

At first there was Gallagher, then R lee Ermey, and now muscle mommies and zaddies are a scourge wrought onto the innocent fruit.

That made me realise that there is a parallel between fea and mortal and a lord and bond. If a mortal eats fae food they can never return to the mortal realm, much like a peasant is tied to their lords land in exchange for keeping some of the crop to eat.

Wouldn’t that change the probabilty curve? I guess it could be nice if you wanted to limit critical success and failure but it might reduce the sense of randomness.

You just reinvented the midwestern “uff da”. It sounds almost the same and can be used the same way.

To your second point you might find some explanations in film studies. The rise of viscerally violent zombie/horror movies of the 2000s has been widely discussed. Its typically attributed to: political instability (911/war on terror); fear of diseases (2002 SARS/1999 west nile virus); natural disasters (Huricane Katrina 2005/climate change); and economic crisis (dotcom bubble 2000/2007 economic recession). Essentially widespread fears and anxieties shape our media and I think (some) video games being darker, grittier, and more violent in that time period reflect this.