Mörk Borg

In September 2021 read an interesting thread on rpg.net, The Last Five Years: What are the best new games since 2016. It mentions many games I’m familiar with and consider good (e.g., Blades in the Dark). Mörk Borg is mentioned a few times. I would say it’s the most enthusiastically discussed game on that thread that I’m not familiar with. So, in late 2021, I took the plunge and bought the book.

Mörk Borg really is a rather remarkable piece of graphic design, (self-consciously?) over the top but still effective. It brought back the experience of reading the Warhammer 40k rulebook as a teenager. (Just like the recent port of Spiro the Dragon that “looks like you remember it”, because of rose-tinted glasses this is no mean feat and requires significantly more than mere fidelity to the original.) But the game design appeals, too: I think it strikes the right balance, being very minimalist but not too sparse. I’m reminded a bit of World of Dungeons; both games feature a list of random names, something non-obvious but in practice very helpful when playing. In general, there’s a good number of evocative random tables, and the classes have strong narrative content, too.

While I think it’s a great game for someone, I’m not sure if it’s the right one for me. For one thing, “A doom metal album of a game. A spiked flail to the face” is not the mood I usually seek in my RPG experiences. I would say Mouse Guard best captures the feeling I most enjoy: gritty, but hopeful and even heroic. Mörk Borg may just be too dark a place for my mind to enjoy visiting.

The other way the game doesn’t quite click for me is the mechanical layer: it’s OSR. I’d characterize my history as an RPG hobbyist as a gradual journey away from the trad games of my youth (Earthdawn, Vampire: the Masquerade) via “semi-trad” games like Burning Wheel and Mouse Guard, to more “narrative” ones like Lady Blackbird, Blades in the Dark, The Night Witches, Agon, or Microscope. OSR and “narrative” games take very different approach to resolving the difficulties of traditional games. The “narrative” game take is, broadly speaking, to add mechanics that better align players’ incentives with what makes for a good story (Lady Blackbird’s Keys are an excellent example of this), while removing mechanics elsewhere to prevent the game from becoming unwieldy. The OSR games instead pare down the rules to the “good old” core of earliest D&D. I’m suspicious of that strategy: it seems motivated by sentimentalism for designers’ youth rather than a convincing analysis of traditional games’ shortcomings. This can still work, of course, if the players themselves are possessed by a similar sentimentalism. But since my own youth did not involve any early D&D (I started with Earthdawn), it doesn’t really work for me.