Game Preview: Mörk Borg
Mörk Borg (2020) is a rules-light, art-heavy, doom-metal-album role-playing game, constructed by Pelle Nilsson (Ockult Örtmästare Games) and Johan Nohr (Stockholm Kartell), and published by Free League Publishing.
Have you ever looked at a black metal or death metal album cover and thought: “Boy, it would sure be swell to go wandering around there for a night with my friends while we all skip merrily into oblivion”?
Well, go to therapy. But also, you should pick up a copy of Mörk Borg, an apocalyptic black metal album cover mixed with dark fantasy. A game that is a love letter to the awful truths that seep into the minds and souls of people who are just trying to bide their time to face the inevitable. A certain and unalienable feeling of dread mixed with a very real threat from a two-headed basilisk demanding adventure but threatening to end time. All in all, just a fun time for families of all ages. Actually, to be totally transparent, the creators openly suggest being 16 years or older to play the game.
First Impressions
They say, “you can’t judge a book by its cover,” but if I am being honest, that is exactly what I did.
Look at this thing! Can you blame me? The artwork is incredible: the use of negative space, the sketchy album art look, and the use of color are amazing. I was initially worried on my first quick flip through the book, but I have to say that once you get started, it reads really easy and the busy design helps guide you around the pages like a comic book. It’s truly handled really well, and there are these small moments where fonts are used creatively to help organize the page. It’s hard to explain, but the take-home is that you should not let the layout turn you off.
Gameplay
As a tabletop RPG, this game is set up to get you playing quickly. The official Mörk Borg website has both a random character generator and a random dungeon generator. It offers a rules-light system that utilizes a standard polyhedral die set with the standard notation for dice (e.g., 3d6 means roll three 6-sided dice), and they use different tables to determine the items players find or the effects of spells. Some things to keep an eye out for:
Unlike some rules-light RPGs, monsters do roll dice to fight you as well.
They use a notation for difficulty noted as DR[number] or “difficulty range.” It means that players need to roll whatever number comes after DR or higher (after bonuses) to complete the challenge. There are specific rules for critical successes and failures that you will see in the book.
Otherwise, play works as you’d expect. A DM acts as the keeper of the maps and rolls for the creatures and rolls to talk players through their experience. This can be light on the roleplay and quickly becomes very hack-and-slash which is good for a one-off, but there is plenty of lore to build off of. Just keep it dark and vicious.
In addition to setting up the game and dungeon, the speed of the world falling apart is also the fate of a dice roll on the Calendar of Nechrubel. There are several different locations and powerful NPCs (such as The Blood-Countess Anthelia) with great lore in the book, but they can be ignored if you choose. Monsters are equally weird and the book starts with 12, but expansions are coming out soon (both official and unofficial). They also have several monsters on their website that you can download and work with.
Character Creation
It is very easy to build a character in this game. There is a character generator on the official website, and on top of that, the characters can have a lot of their story and customization rolled randomly to help fill in blanks. This is especially nice for new players as it gets them into the muck quickly; however, there are a few quirks to be aware of:
When rolling for ability scores, you roll 3d6 and add or subtract any class rules (though classes in this game are totally optional). You then select a number between -3 and 3 based on those rolls. This can take some getting used to, but the tables are easily accessible.
Characters also start with food and water in addition to their silver (typically 2d6 x 10, though that can vary) but no other equipment. You can roll for all of these things, but it does require some more conversation with the DM.
Rules-light games differ here, but this is a hard game in which to create “min/max” characters—which can be both good and bad, depending on your group.
Some characters get NPC help, which is also written out in the book, but homebrewing minions might be helpful to soak up damage. It might even be good to have an extra character in the wings.
Anything else?
There is a lot of free content for this game available on their website (https://morkborg.com/) as PDFs. Everything from new classes to new creatures and even new dungeons. And if you are really feeling the creative itch, there are ways to submit official content to the company (which they encourage) and homebrew is a snap.
They also really invite using their system to create unofficial content under a third-party license system. This is REALLY awesome because they even allow for sale of the content you create as long as you follow some simple rules outlined on their site.
As a total aside, they also have a reminder that, while this world should be dark and awful and tortuous: please refrain from sexist, racist, homophobic, or transphobic content related to Mörk Borg, especially using this license. It means a lot to see companies trying to head that off at the pass—for lots of reasons, not the least of which is the problematic image that many metal bands and fans have cultivated in these areas. But that is a conversation for “Keegan talks about the history of black metal,” which is not for this preview.
Conclusion
I love this game and I am waiting patiently for their next game to come out (re: kicking myself for missing the Kickstarter). Not much else to say other than I think it’s worth picking up for your TTRPG group. The core book comes with a starting dungeon to get you off to the races and contains information for both the DM and the players. So, all you’ll need is a standard polyhedral dice set, this book, some graph paper, and a pencil or pen. You can download additional characters, monsters, and character sheets in PDF form from their website for free. In addition, there are some simple rule reminders available for download.
I have created a character (“Fjord ‘Hunden’ Logrrinn”) that you can use or look at for inspiration. This was done without the character sheet, just to show how easy it is.
