QVKE BORG (Exalted Funeral and Bird Silhouette Games)
$14.00 in print+PDF (Exalted Funeral)
$10.00 PDF only (DrivethruRPG) and also at itch.io
What it is: An expansion for use with Mork Borg! It's Quake, but in Mork Borg! It's also part of Exalted Funeral's summer of free games, though I have managed to get exactly zero free games out of the event. I did buy it, however, and have to say I'm not sorry...this is a rockin' little sourcebook/genre pack.
The System: It's Mork Borg powered, so you roll characters like you do in Mork Borg, and the QVKE BORG rules include a few worthy details to Quake-ify your Dark Fortress experience....a task easier done than said, I suspect. The rules add one new class, which can either be the only class if you're going for an exclusively Quake experience: the slipgate ranger, or you can add other standard Mork Borg characters; the game's backstory is that the dark realm of Shub-Niggurath...er, I mean Shub-Nechurath, the QVKEMother, has intruded upon the already eschatonically damned realm of Mork Borg, so some wayward explorers from the core rules could totally fall into this one. That said, the slipgate ranger might survive a tad longer.
The rules provide an array of eight totally-not-Quake appropriate weapons to choose from, including the usual shotguns, lightning rifles and rocket launchers. There are about 15 monsters in the book done in good traditional Mork Borg format with a grotesque illustration in which a slash of stat blocks are hidden away, In the back is a short treatise on what a slipgate is, a discussion of the four hellish realms of QVKE, some charts for things to find and what you encounter while traversing the QVKE realms.
It's not quite a module, as such....definitely a mini setting guide. But its exhuberant embrace of the Mork Borg minimalism makes it a fine little book to snag if you can get your hands on it.
Being that this is a supplement and not a rulebook in its own right, you need Mork Borg to play. It doesn't give you a structured scenario path to work with, but its random charts are more than enough for a night of crazy shotgun fun. You could totally throw this at a regular Mork Borg gang, as long as you're willing to accept they will take their freshly found boomsticks if they escape the QVKE Mother and rule all of Galgenbeck with them when they return!
Supplements: I think, although I would have to contemplate it a bit, that you could readily crib from this for a more heacy handed metal SF take on the Quake genre with CY_BORG or Vast Grimm without much or even any difficulty. Just keep in mind that those two systems more explicity support SF as a genre in its mechanics and style, while QVKE BORG here is designed to mesh with the scaling evident in Mork Borg. But....more on the other two SF Borg-likes later.
Who is this for? Well, first, it's for any Mork Borg fan who can't get enough. This book is a trip and a half, and its minimalist ecxpansion for Mork Borg is just enough to have some decent fun. It's undisguised effort to pay homage to the original Quake video game is appreciated, and it meshes fluidly with the Artpunk death metal genre of Mork Borg just fine. I don't know if you'll get a protracted campaign out of this, but I can see having a couple nights of real fun with it.
As a side note, this is one of many zine products which I am noticing have a non trivial level of video game influence. I feel like that influence does exist in bigger productions, but maybe the indie zine scene is more honest about it? Seriously though....it would be hard for a lot of big name RPGs to just spit out a Quake clone book...they'd have to get IP permissions (because anything off-brand might lead to a lawsuit), have to justify the book's existence with hundreds of pages of expository text....and with something like this, you don't have to worry about that, and you can have a couple fun 3-5 hour sessions of crazy shotgun madness, no questions asked.
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