Recently I took time to pack up a lot of my books in anticipation of future moving, and in the process shuffled some of my collection to a stack of "must go" product. In the course of this, I reallocated precious shelf space to the myriad zinerpgs, chapbooks and other weird micro-indie-rpg products I have been slowly accruing, and among those lies Mork Borg.
I don't think it was specifically just Mork Borg which got me in to its strange blend of Dark Souls, Swedish Death Metal design and grim horror thematics. That stuff is cool, but not the reason. No, I think I have to blame some other artsy and weird RPGs for this moment of revelation in which the beauty of Mork Borg finally made sense to me: Mothership, certainly, but also Death in Space and Into the Odd, Screams Amongst the Stars, Into the Zone and Liminal Horror.* All great games, all with their own interesting design quirks and a desire to aim for minimalist mechanical design in hopes of exploiting inherent creativity and storytelling in the process. They are all spiritually OSR in the sense that the games want to exploit the players' inherent desire for challenge and need for unanticipated emergent gameplay as core to the experience, while also aiming for simple but modern rule structures that eschew procedural elements as much as possible. For these games, the intent Dungeon Crawl Classics aimed for, to capture that feel of being weird and different and surprising in the way D&D felt in 1974, is simply the starting state.
Mork Borg owes my sudden interest to the newish playrole.com VTT site, which appears to cater to theater of the mind and nonstandard RPGs extremely well, mixed with a moment, when I got some of my players into a room there with the ultra lite RPG Dead Malls, where rolling three main stats is one half of character generation, an the other half is picking three items of equipment. I realized that the liberating effect of having the minimalist, essential rules structure in place allowed me to do whatever I wanted with the rest of the game, which is about exploring urban decay in abandoned malls, and the hint of danger that comes from an era where the world online regularly invents monsters like slender man and siren head.
It was then that I realized: Mork Borg is doing the same thing. The story of its world is all meant to inspire and evoke the genre it is depicting, sure, but the point is to have rules that inform the story, rather than the story being informed by the rules. If I am tired --and boy, am I tired!-- of D&D or Pathfinder with the hundreds of pages of exception based rules on every thing, then is Mork Borg, a shining blacklight in a sea of deep ones swimming ashore, with an entire magic system defined on a couple pages, and a setting where character growth of necessity is defined by how marvelously you manage to suffer and mutate due to the stress and pressure of a dying fantasy world over time, if you don't just die outright.
It's not for everyone, but it is definitely for me at this moment....as are its many cousins, such as the inimitable Mothership, Cy-Borg and so many more. I think, at last, I am going to start taking these games not just more seriously, but as maybe the zone I should start focusing on for a while, give the big fat-book RPGs a break for a bit, see if this is what my waning interest has needed to spark some interest in the hobby again.
*I need to write more about and on all of these games. Liminal Horror is fascinating in and of itself.
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