Everything You Know Is A Lie
Reimagining the grimdark lore of Mörk Borg
I don’t keep it a secret that this ugly little yellow book is what brought me back to the TTRPG table after many years away from the hobby.
The same thing happened to me as happened to many: I “grew up.” Job, family, friends moving away or growing apart - the usual.
My books went into boxes or were given away bit by bit over time, and, in Puff the Magic Dragon fashion, I imagine all my old PCs moldered away in cardboard boxes wondering if they’d ever return again to lands of mist-covered mountains and high adventures.
Enter Mörk Borg.
A friend gave me this sometimes around 2021, and I was hooked by the simplicity, and the DIY vibe of the whole thing.
I know I’ll lose “old school” cred for this with some, but I actually believe, unlike many, that what’s there under the hood of the game is a terrific little system.
Player facing rolls, armor as damage reduction, ultra simple monster stat blocks, low powered “mudcore” characters (that actually can quite swiftly become crushers)…all combined to pique my interest and an in-person game kicked off shortly thereafter with some of my old gaming pals eager to get back to hack and slash.
Right at the beginning, though, I knew the “so grim it’s funny” feel that most of the third party stuff had wasn’t for my table. There’s plenty of laughs at my table, but we generally shy away from comedic *material*, knowing the comedy will be there regardless.
My initial game didn’t even use the world roughly sketched out in a few paragraphs of the core rulebook, and we (as veteran gamers) bolted on a few things right from the start. You can see the HOUSE RULES we used here.
The first full adventure and campaign we did in the Dying World was my own Company of the Fading Star. (It’s a 100+ page adventure you can get totally for free!)
In that, it is implied that the world is still some way off from the fully apocalyptic visions of the core book, and it took on a tone of gritty chivalry and medievalism with a low magic feel that was more akin to a low fantasy horror version of Pendragon than anything.
My ideas kept developing, even though the group eventually went back to B/X, and then OD&D, but I know that my next campaign will return to the blackened framework of MB for a few reasons:
It’s excellent for episodic games where players have a hard time making every game.
Advancement by my own re-worked system allows PCs to make improvements determined by how many of these episodes their characters take part in, rather than counting coins or monster XP.
The rules are simple, the house rules are brutal, and my players love rolling for defense, stacking up armor and the penalties that come with it, and selecting different feats to differentiate between PCs expertise and so on.
Simply put, it’s simple, it’s fast, and it works well for us - my players almost always wind up as mercenaries, and I find the chassis of MB is great for a Black Company/Berserk style game.
The common complaints/remarks of most people about MB is the advancement system feeling too “mother may I?” or not interesting enough, and its deadliness, which, as someone who has played this game extensively, I find is wildly overstated.
For the first, I stole/hacked/borrowed a sort of Frankenstein version of improvement from Shadowdark and Black Sword Hack. You get points for showing up and playing the adventure - you also earn bonus points for specific stuff, so there is no “mother may I?”
Did you show up? Did you accomplish any of the cool things on this list?
Ok, this is how many points you earned.
I’ve also been heavily experimenting in solo play with things like Lore mechanics - discovering “true” world lore having one-time scroll-like benefits, or lower powered lasting effects, something I began developing in my Tarvannion project as a way to make lore cooler for players.
After a foray into solo Pendragon, I developed a bolt-on Traits system, and worked up a basic character lifepath/background system with its own mechanical effects as well as in-game adventure seeds to start the game with, but ultimately, some of these things slow down a game more than they add to it, so it’s all a work in progress until I get a new game going to test it all more.
What I *did* start working on, however, is a very simple concept to make the game truly “my own.”
I re-read the core book and the “Cult” zines, Heretic and Feretory, through a lens I’d considered a good while back:
The books lore and information is written by a totally unreliable narrator who lies, exaggerates, misrepresents and conceals all true information behind a web of half-truths and paranoid fanaticism.
”Basilisk” is a perversion of “Basilica.”
The presented lore about the basilisks is really a sort of parable about a religious war between two powerful churches, or religious sects.
The Creton Order are seen as insane heretics by the actual church, and its apocalyptic doomsday cult with their “Miseries” and prophecies are actively suppressed and persecuted.
All the stories about immortal nobles and bargains with evil spirits and death cults are regarded as conspiracy theories and nonsense from bored peasants with too much time in the tavern.
The countries and locations listed in the core book, also, are not “real,” save the cities mentioned.
Sarkash is indeed a vast taiga, but stories of a moving cemetery or a “Shadow King” who conspires with the rulers of the southern kingdoms are old wives tales.
Kergüs is an inhospitable land of harsh peoples and frozen coastline, and so on, but there are other kingdoms, cities, and lands that connect to those in the main book.
My own playing region is called Avreaux, and takes elements of a France that never was, combined with a dash of Clark Ashton Smith’s Averoigne (ok, much more than a dash), and makes for a campaign of dark medieval horror.
What have you done with your own Dying Lands? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!
PS - sorry for lack of writing, between work and being super sick, it’s been all I can manage to just get through a day!
Keep Your Blades Sharp!
CG
> Right at the beginning, though, I knew the “so grim it’s funny” feel that most of the third party stuff had wasn’t for my table. There’s plenty of laughs at my table, but we generally shy away from comedic *material*, knowing the comedy will be there regardless.
I think intrinsically most people know this, but I’m so glad you repeated it. Humor *will* happen -- regardless of how you try to push it away, so you have two choices: fully dive into a slapstick gonzo game where humor is sort of the point, or use humor as a fine tool to break up larger chunks of drama, melancholy, terror, etc.
> The common complaints/remarks of most people about MB is the advancement system feeling too “mother may I?” or not interesting enough, and its deadliness, which, as someone who has played this game extensively, I find is wildly overstated.
I find these complaints far too commonplace among *many* games. It’s almost like the Dark Souls effect, where because the game is advertised as or visually gives the impression of brutality and deadliness, people just regurgitate that at face value. I think this ends up making the game sound *unfair*, which is hardly true. Really good points here.
> I’ve also been heavily experimenting in solo play with things like Lore mechanics - discovering “true” world lore having one-time scroll-like benefits, or lower powered lasting effects, something I began developing in my Tarvannion project as a way to make lore cooler for players.
This is fascinating for a number of reasons that I’ve been working on in my own projects. Do you have further readings or articles on Lore mechanics or how you’ve implemented them in other games?
> The presented lore about the basilisks is really a sort of parable about a religious war between two powerful churches, or religious sects.
Ooooo, I love this along with your other edits as well. Really enjoy the take that the core book is almost like this heretical piece of literature spread through cults and anticanon religious sects that make all the traditional histories and traditions into pseudo-gnostic esotericism.
Eager to read more on all this! I’ll admit my own forays into MB have been pretty traditional and, literally, by the book. Maybe I ought to take another look through and see what inspirations I glean.
I love the game but you are right (in part) about the setting as it tends to wear thin and players start to ask what is the point if the world is going to end.
I've toyed internally with remodelling it to resemble the old FF books I read as a teenager and maybe even set it on Titan. Switch out the Swedish names for Old English and swap out the scratchy metal art of Johan Nohr and replace it with the muddy art of Russ Nicholson.