Grok Mörk Borg
This is not a review of Mörk Borg; it’s a little story about it. Mörk Borg is the new hotness: a rules-lite doom-metal OSR retro-clone with a bright chaotic design sensibility, an exaggerated grimdark setting, and high production values.1 But when I first picked it up, I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I could open up any two-page spread and immediately comprehend its purpose, but I couldn’t imagine what the game was like when you put it all together. There was so much of it and everyone loved it, imitated it, played it, but I couldn’t figure out from the book alone why.
So this is a stealth-review of a different product: The Smiling Mountain Annals by Monty D. Monteleagre. It’s available on itch.io as a 42-page PDF for $5, but you might have it already from the “TTRPGs for Trans Rights in Florida” bundle. If you buy it on itch, it also comes with a one-page bonus item and an 11-page plain-text PDF with author’s commentary. The commentary is inessential, but interesting. Most of the pages were also shared on Twitter as they were written.
The Chained Moon
I want to look at the example that made Mörk Borg click for me, the page I turned to and “got it.”
The Chained Moon (Monty D. Monteleagre)
Aesthetically, this is not Johan Nohr, which immediately lets me know that although this is “Mörk Borg,” the author is bringing something of themselves to the table. This is Mörk Borg the game, not Mörk Borg the brand (nothing against that). Something about digital painting with grunge brushes makes it approachable, and sticking to one item/page keeps it digestible. The text is legible, but it’s not going out of its way to be.
It tells a story. Someone stole the moon through unholy means. They reduced an unequaled marvel of the cosmos to a trophy with worldly ends. The second paragraph shifts to second-person as we assume that you, the player, have come into possession of this thing, and now it is your responsibility. We learn that it’s still the moon, and still does all the things the moon does. Finally we learn that wielding this weapon has wider implications, the night sky itself marking you as an enemy and the moon disgusted and vengeful toward a world that would so mortify it.
The art tells a story too: of attention, perhaps unwanted. You cannot wield the moon in secret.
But above all of that, this is obviously wild as fuck, right? I love this. This is over-the-top anime power-levels coupled with bizarre doom-metal2 imagery and a touch of black humor. The world is ending because it’s too edgy and there are too many dangers in it, not because it’s too crappy and everything sucks. We are here to make our own bad decisions. This apocalypse is all war and death, no famine and pestilence. (We get a little famine and pestilence elsewhere, to be fair.)
It won’t be a universal experience, but this is the moment I grokked Mörk Borg. I can’t say that every page in the book delivers like this one, but it’s worth checking out.
This description invites comparisons to Lamentations of the Flame Princess, but I don’t want to deal with that in detail here. Suffice to say that I think it’s much more interesting and more likely to be fun, to say nothing of the people making it.↩︎
I’m not a metal person, apologies if this is inaccurate.↩︎