If you are at all immersed in the more-than-DnD tabletop roleplaying community –and if you are reading this, you probably are– there is a good chance you’ve heard of Mörk Bork. It describes itself as “A doom metal album of a game. A spiked flail to the face. Rules light, heavy everything else.” It’s a description that’s surprisingly accurate given the amount of hyperbole there.
The game, with its avowed light rules and art-forward graphic design, took the indie gaming world by storm. In the course of just a few years, it was everywhere. Not just the original game, either. Dozens of third party sourcebooks and adventures, along with total reskins into other genres like sci-fi and pirates. There are even more that were simply inspired by the graphic design. I even debated writing a comedy/sci-fi/fantasy version I’d call Borg Borg, full of metal soldier golems. (Someone can steal that, but I want a concept credit.) All that, but I made the decision that TheRatHole.ca was too busy to dig into a system with so much material coming out. We just didn’t have the time. That is, until I was convinced to review Pirate Borg.
I really liked Pirate Borg. The graphic design and the content were fun. I was convinced to try Mörk Borg. (Pronounced Murk Borg, by the way) While it’s taken longer than planned to get to it, I figure Halloween is a good time to review this. At its heart, Mörk Borg is a horror RPG more than it is a dark fantasy RPG. Unfortunately for me, I was expecting the latter. You see, I’m not a big fan of the horror genre. Honestly, I’m not a big fan of the doom metal genre of music either. So I don’t really know what I expected here. Something closer to Pirate Borg, I guess.
That’s ok. To be clear, this is a good game using a good game system. There are good reasons it’s become so ubiquitous. So, let’s look at some of the game elements.
Let’s start at the start, with Character Creation.
- Optionally choose a Character Class
- Roll some starting stuff. You are, after all, what you own.
- Roll your raw ability scores and hit points.
- Name your Character if you want. A name won’t save you from your inevitable doom.
- Play the game.
If you want to flesh out your fleshy creation more, there are tables for all sorts of extras. Trauma, bad habits, physical traits, and troubling tales of your backstory are all options. (The troubling tales is even more troubling as it suggests throwing a knife at the page to choose.)
You don’t need to put any of that on a fancy Character Sheet. In fact, the book doesn’t even have a character sheet included in it. But for traditionalists, morkborg.com has character sheets available to print. That’s not all; it has a character creator, a four-room dungeon creator, a nameless monster generator, adventures, and more. There’s even a section for being followed by rabid monkeys. In fact, the online content has won almost as many awards as the game itself. That’s really all that players need.
For GMs, there are tables of plundering, treasure, adventure sparks, and dungeon generation. There are only 12 specific monsters to kill your players with, however, and I wish there were more. That being said, the stats for monsters are simple, and you could likely pluck your favourite creepy crawler from nearly any game.
The book ends with an Old School style dungeon crawl titled “Rotblack Sludge, or The Shadow King’s Heir.” It’s a straightforward adventure that I won’t spoil here. One unique aspect of the book design is that they printed the adventure on different paper. Most of the book is glossy, whereas the adventure is matte. It’s a unique, and likely not cheap, embellishment.
The whole book is an experience in itself. The art is dark and evocative. Colour is used for specific enhancements, not as a default, giving the game its signature look. Every page has its own look and feel, but somehow this visual cacophony, this veritable assault on your visual cortex, works. It’s everything graphic design students are told not to do, but dammit, it works. There are specific instances that are a bit hard to read. I fully acknowledge that. But that’s part of its charm (question mark?). It’s inspirational. It’s aspirational. It’s insane. But it has surpassed itself. Other games have come out with Mörk Bork mashups. Be Like a Crow took the look and style and made Korvus, a BLAC scenario that feels like Mörk Borg. Kobolds Ate My Baby took the rules (and look and style) and made Mörk Borg feel like Kobolds Ate My Baby in De Smörkås Borg. It’s everywhere.
So, while I can’t claim to like Mörk Borg on its own. I can and will admit it’s a quality horror game like no other. It’s dark and intentionally a little depressing, which is somewhere I’m trying not to be in my life right now. While I appreciate the game, at another point in my life, I think I could have loved it.
You can find Mörk Borg online at morkborg.com or on Facebook at facebook.com/MORKBORGRPG.
Free League Publishing can be found online at freeleaguepublishing.com or on Facebook at facebook.com/FreeLeaguePublishing.
