Doom has come
MÖRK BORG
Designers: Pelle Nilsson & Johan Nohr
From its name to its tone to the design of its rulebook, everything about MÖRK BORG is pushed far beyond what common sense tells you the limits of conventional RPGs could – and possibly should – be. The result is a pile of punkish occult weirdness splattered in ink-black and neon yellow, beautiful to look at and hilariously bleak to play.
On a very fundamental level, the game is an incredibly lightweight take on old-school, Dungeons & Dragons-esque fantasy roleplaying, but with the grim and gritty dial turned all the way up. And then twisted a bit more. And then bashed off with a bit of broken femur.
The result is a world so monstrously dark and brutal that it wouldn’t look out of place on a death metal album cover.
Everything from the trees to the player characters, who can’t really be described as anything even approaching ‘heroes’, are decayed, corrupted and limping towards a miserable death.
However, rather than being a depressing slogfest, a read through the MÖRK BORG rulebook is utterly captivating, simply because it’s a work of art. More Hieronymus Bosch than Picasso, to be sure, but art nonetheless.
Every single page in the book is a uniquely designed labour of love intended to provoke a reaction beyond simply explaining rules or background settings. Medieval woodcuts mix with ink-spattered sketches, while silvery inlays pick out warped and decayed titles.
There’s no attempt to keep fonts, sizes and layouts even vaguely consistent – indeed, it wouldn’t come as a surprise to find that the designers had deliberately ripped out anything that threatened to make a pattern.
This gleeful dismissal of conventional design practise makes a book that’s damnably tricky to use at the table or as a teaching tool, but honestly that doesn’t seem to be the point. Mörk Borg describes itself as “rules-light, heavy everything else” and it isn’t wrong about that.
The core of the gameplay will be familiar to anybody who’s ever touched a variation of D&D, with most tasks being conquered with a 20-sided dice and a sprinkling of addition, but in the same way that a fire-gutted house is familiar. Every rule and sub-system that wasn’t needed to keep things standing has been ripped out, and what little that’s left is scorched black.
There are no magical races to play as, no tangled tables of saves and bonuses and no levels. Characters might get an advancement when the GM wills it, but to be honest it seems tough for any of them to survive long enough for this to come up too often.
The biggest question that springs to mind as you read the rulebook and parse pages of weird prophecies and rules about spitting phlegm in your enemies’ eyes, is that of quite how serious the writers are being.
You could easily read the entire thing as one big joke – a setting so grim and depressing that it passes out the other end and becomes weirdly funny. However, you could very easily treat the either thing as completely sincere; as a world and a game filled with genuine horrors and soul-sapping tragedy.
This is perhaps MÖRK BORG’s greatest strength. If it was obviously a pastiche of grittier-than-thou fantasy settings the endless nastiness and hopelessness would quickly become depressing.
Likewise, the game wouldn’t be anywhere near as fun to squelch through if there weren’t so many entirely serious attempts at its dank medieval horror squatting on game store shelves across the world.
Indeed, as both a setting and as a game it only really makes sense within the wider context of roleplaying in general, and old-school D&D clones in particular. There aren’t any real guidelines for what the players are doing in this world or even an explanation of what being a game master entails. Instead, MÖRK BORG makes the rather reasonable assumption that everybody picking up an art-punk RPG decorated in shades of angry wasp already have the basics buried in their brains.
On a logical, reasoned level this makes it rather a mixed bag. The layout is tough to navigate, the rules are functional but nothing you can’t bodge together from a dozen other old-school D&D clones, and the world is hopeless to the point of being nonsensical.
MÖRK BORG isn’t much into logic or reason, though. It’s about style and energy; grim humour and gritty imagery.
And no, it doesn’t really tick all the boxes of a well-built modern RPG, but it absolutely nails everything to do with being one hell of an experience.
RICHARD JANSEN-PARKES
WE SAY
If it was any darker it'd be a black hole, but there's a sackful of twisted charm and disturbing style in this slim little book.
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED… ZWEIHÄNDER
Same grim, gritty tone, love of old-school ideas and ever-present umlaut, but with more stripped-down rules and prettier design