The Indie/Zine RPG Guide Part II: Mork Borg

Mork Borg (published by Free League Publishing in the US)

Developed by Ockult Ortmastare Games and Stockholm Kartel

$40 MSRP in print (a very nice edition with gold and silver foil, ribbon markers) or $25 PDF on Drivethrurpg.com

Mork Borg Resource Page

Before reviewing Mork Borg (which is Swedish for Dark Fortress), I wanted to make some comments: the first is that this is possibly the first RPG of this style in the US (Sweden, maybe, too) and it, along with Mothership, codified the concept space of these sort of zine scene/arthouse rpgs. It is a decidedly old school product: this game bears little direct resemblance to the OSR from one view, but it is deeply rooted in the OSR concept space from another angle. Goodman Games' Dungeon Crawl Classics was designed to evoke that sense of surprise and mystery that D&Ders experienced in the seventies by adding weird dice, random magic charts, an emphasis on non-standard monsters and a higher risk of death and doom for PCs early on; Mork Borg accomplishes this right out of the gate: making the experience of fantasy gaming weird, new, interesting and entirely unpredictable. 

What it is: a fantasy RPG that uses exotic graphic art design reminiscent of apocalyptic Catholic and medieval imagery, Swedish death metal album cover art and stuff you might find doodled on the back of a high school notebook in the 80's and 90's (or maybe any generation for all I know) to inform and explore a minimalist game world on the brink of a nightmare apocalypse. The game also evokes a sense that too many From Soft games were played in the making of it (Dark Souls and Demon Souls specifically). 

The System: Mork Borg has a very simple mechanical design at its heart with four character stats, and a roll-high mechanic where you roll D20 plus modifiers against static difficulty checks. It randomizes almost the entire character creation process, and most monsters can be defined in two or three lines of text. The game's base magic system consists of scrolls, and anyone can cast them if they want to push their luck. The spell system, including the failure charts, is all of four pages but grants incredible power with high risks. The optional classes may also gain some unique magic talents.

Mork Borg does not require character classes, and human (or something akin to human) is the only racial option. The optional classes are evocative of the setting,wracked with madness and mystery. The Fanged Deserter is a warrior who honed his natural bite to perfection; the Gutterborne Scum is the rogue, but one born to the grim city and twisted by it; the Esoteric Hermit just emerged from a cave with dark powers; Wretched Royalty deal with the legacy of their noble family; Heretical Priests seek to escape the persecution of the official religion of the Two-Headed Basilisk; and the Occult Herbmaster brews strange and deadly concoctions. More optional classes appear in the official books Feretory and Heretic, as well as many third party sourcebooks.

The system includes rules for character advancement, which is awarded at GM whim, with a focus on improved abilities, a chance to boost hit points, and some loot you might find. The real advancement comes from emergent gameplay; you can find powerful scrolls, discover hellish artifacts, be transformed and transmogrified by horrible spell failures, and develop a fearsome reputation over time. If you can keep a character alive in Mork Borg for long enough, it can grow impressively in power. 

The Setting: Mork Borg spends the majority of its art and about half the book outlining the grim world at the center of which is the vast, warped city of Galgenbeck, surrounded by horrid realms such as the Forest of Sorkash, the Valley of the Unfortunate Undead and the coastal city of Grift. Every region reads like a worst-case scenario for a D&D Ravenloft campaign if the dark lords became unhinged, and if you've ever delved into the lore of Dark Souls you will sense that some interesting inspiration is afoot.

Although the setting, through short introductions and evocative art is quite inspiring, the core book does not linger for long, preferring to inform by example and through the use of many random tables and charts. The book includes 12 example monsters that set the frame for how different a monster can be in Mork Borg....goblins, for example, also known as the seth, are grim beasts which mark those they attack, and then flee. If you don't find and kill the goblin which marked you within 1D6 days your body shrivels and warps as your consciousness is consumed by the presence of your new mind, that of of a goblin, and you remain trapped, helpless as it carries on. Another example is the Aland Wickhead Knife Wielder, a grim humanoid with a lantern for a head which stalks victims, ignites its head as it attacks with a filthy knife, then escapes once more into the night.

Why does the goblin work like this? What made the Aland and what drives it? These are questions for your GM and group to decide or ignore as you see fit; the point is that the grim universe of Mork Borg is so close to the apocalyptic end that beasts like this are just everyday menaces for you to deal with.

The core book does include a starting scenario, which is also a good introduction to what Mork Borg scenario design looks like. It's also design for brevity, and eschews excess expository text. If you ever tried to read any typical modern module with pages of backstory and lead-in that are ultimately useless to actual play, this module avoids those long blocks of "information on the backstory only the GM gets to know about" kind of stuff. It falls somewhere between "written for a large audience" and "my personal notes and outline of a game that only I can make sense of," turning instead into a decent but very to-the-point module that can be run after about fifteen minutes of reading for prep. In fact most of the Mork Borg modules work like this.

A key thing to understand about Mork Borg's setting is that it is meant to provide evocative inspiration, but practically everything is meant to be a spring-board and avoid burdening the GM with excessive details. Indeed, it is a game which a GM who likes to expound improvisationally from a starting point will greatly enjoy. It is not going to appeal to someone who would like to have the setting carefully outline and explain all of these details, though some 3rd party sourcebooks try to do this; it's actually really hard to restrain ones' self from over-writing in a game where brevity is a target goal, and a lot of the third party content fails on this mark.

Support: Mork Borg is disgustingly well supported with all sorts of weird stuff. Aside from the official books (Feretory, Heretic, the GM screen and the Ikhons boxed set prop) there's just a ton of inspiring weird content out there in both PDF and print. Stuff I have picked up for the game include:

From Free League:

Feretory  - an offical book, with new classes, scenarios, random table, a monster generator and artifacts. Indispensable sourcebook. 

Heretic - the second official book. Has a cult generator, unheroic feats (a system of granting new abilities to non-classed characters), more scenarios, a class, monsters, and Mork Borg's take on wishes. Also an indispensable resource.

Ikhons - Another Free League offering, this is a little black box filled with four pamphlets that can represent a tome captured in the game, which when held in possession grants random powers through the summoning of ancient and sacrilegious folk gods that can do terrible things if you sacrifice enough. A bit pricey for what you get but worth it if you fall in love with the game. 

The GM Screen - a five panel screen with two extra inserts you can clip in, filled with useful tables (some of which I think are only on the screen) and rules summaries. A very handy, sturdy screen with great foil-based art on the player-facing side.

From Exalted Funeral: 

Bestiary - if you are craving more monsters but are lacking the mental aberration necessary to visualize what such beasts would look like in the Mork Borg universe, then this is an excellent resource for you. 64 pages of weird monsters and lairs in Mork Morg appropriate art style.

The Valley of Forbidden Churches - lovely location book, a grim valley in which various increasingly hideous and depraved cults set up shop and then descend into chaos, followed by the Demonworm Tunnels and the twisted Silver City. The module and maps work out to make a great hexcrawl styled adventure for Mork Borg.

From Steve Jackson Games:

Calo's Book of Monsters - this oddly sized tome contains elaborate write-ups of the eponymous wizard Calo, 20 or so monsters and Castle Skullrot location. The book's most endearing and entirely inappropriate feature is that it provides copious details on its entries, with lavish Mork Borg-styled illustrations. The reason this is entirely inappropriate is that I am dead certain this book has a larger word count than the entirety of the Mork Borg rule book plus Feretory combined. As a result its a great book, lots of detail, but reads and feels more like a traditional RPG sourcebook, missing the ethos of brevity characteristic of Mork Borg by a slight bit. Still worth a buy! Phil Reed does a lot of generic supplements, but his content for Mork Borg is incredibly useful and evocative...most is under his own publishing label, but he did this one through Steve Jackson Games (where he also works) for some reason. Maybe to advertise all the cool dice and dice bags SJGames sells to Mork Borg players? 

There are other supplements out there I seek to acquire, but this is what I have so far.

Who is Mork Borg For? Well, my suggestion is the following people will find Mork Borg worth checking out:

1. You want a rules lite system with a grimdark aesthetic that has lots of dynamic emergent gameplay and effects/affects that change the PCs every game.

2. You want a game that gives you just enough to riff from, but makes painstaking efforts only to inspire you with the setting, rather than dictate it to you. You like the idea that one of the things you do at the start of a campaign is roll dice to find out how many years, months, weeks or days are left before the apocalypse happens.

3. You do not have difficulty parsing out text from exotic artistic layouts and weird fonts. This is critical; read the many, many comments from people on the drivethrurpg page for Mork Borg to see just how perplexing the layout was to some. Good news is: the Mork Borg site has a free no-art version of the entire text for people who need it. But...to be honest....the game kind of needs the art, it is incredibly important to establishing the game's tone and style. In this game, the art speaks volumes, and is critical to the experience.

4. You want fantasy, but you would like to see something that is in a new concept space previously unexplored or otherwise untouched by more traditional fantasy RPGs that have let D&D act as the benchmark for too many decades. 

So: I highly recommend Mork Borg if you want to see something genuinely different and weird. 

Next: The Grim Hack!