The first time I ran MÖRK BORG, I did something as a GM that I would not usually do. My players had been ambushed by a group of goblins who had stolen corpses from a previous room and rolled them down a set of stairs, dashing them against my players like bowling balls of stinking flesh. Our Esoteric Hermit hit the ground hardest, and the goblins set on him immediately. Pinned with nowhere to go, he had to make the gamble of calling a summon from his occult tome. Giant simian Berserker-slayers drenched in the blood of their own birth tore through the tear between worlds, each capable of killing a dozen goblins on their own but just as likely to maul the adventurers as to protect them. Naturally, our Hermit asked for their stat block.
The thing I did was that I screenshotted the entire page. I did the same thing when a player asked what they could do with their Omens, a luck currency that lets players improve their outcomes. I did it again to demonstrate Bounties, a part of each monster’s stat block that explains what kind of price you could expect for bringing in monsters dead or alive, or what part of the cadaver has value to a collector. Each time I wanted them to see the information exactly as it had been laid out in the book, splayed out in a macabre butterfly board of text.
MÖRK BORG is a visual treat, with fluorescent pinks and yellows being the primary accents among the grayscale text and art. It’s a simple look for a simple game, essentially a D20 dungeon bash for people who like quick setups and hearing the clack of their own dice a lot. Your first roll of the session will be to see if any apocalyptic omens are happening today, and if you get seven in a single campaign you are encouraged to torch your physical gamebook. At no point will the book admit that this is a comedic game, but layout touches like the basic weapons “table” being a near-naked man riddled with the tools of war you can choose from are illustrations that the grim excesses of MÖRK BORG’s doomed setting aren’t to be taken too seriously.
In an interview with Mottokrosh, MÖRK BORG’s Pelle Nilsson mentions that much of his most recent work has been poetry, and you can see how it carries through to his work in the ttrpg sphere. The book is filled with evocative turns of phrase, from the Fanged Deserter class’s bite weapon being described as “a parliament of teeth” to the faux-biblical predictions of the Calendar of Nechrubel declaring that “mothers flesh shall be the cloak of demons” and “the sky shall weep fire and a great stone shall plummet as a city fallen from heaven”. The level of polish on MÖRK BORG’s poetic presentation goes far beyond the text though, with meaning being created through the form given to lines on the page.
MÖRK BORG owes a lot of its visual language to zine culture, which Swedish artist Öyvind Fahlström draws on for inspiration in the earliest manifesto for concrete poetry. Concrete poetry emphasises the poem’s presentation on the page — for instance, Fahlström lists “Mirroring, diagonal reading,” “Free emphasis and free word order”, and all kinds of unusual, eye grabbing arrangements of the strophes (segments of a poem). The goal of presenting verse like this is that ”every attack aimed at valid language form will be an enrichment of the worn-out paths of thought”. Being challenged by creativite form kickstarts the reader’s creativity, which is the perfect mindset to encourage in a GM flipping through a new book while they imagine the kinds of sessions they could run.
Paragraphs in MÖRK BORG (or strophes, as it seems more accurate to call them) have a strong visual distinctness from one to the next. Each new chunk of information is done in a different font or text colour, lilting diagonally or varying between short compact columns and sprawled out long sentences. The Origins for the Heretical Priest class tip over 90 degrees between the third and fourth options, encouraging you to rotate your book to keep reading. On a number of occasions, titles are so large and vivid and in such incomprehensible fonts that you have to shift your focal point back just to read them. “YOU READ IT WRONG, YOU ILLITERATE FOOL!” is scribbled over the top of one in a tacit admission that the creators aren’t going to let something like legibility get in the way of their fun.
The book knows when to be silly and when to play things straight, with the monster stat blocks and scripted starting adventure being two of the most sensibly formatted sections of the book. Official online resources such as the character generator SCVMBIRTHER and the dungeon generator DNGNGEN are straightforward tools that my players loved. When MÖRK BORG does choose to play optical games with its reader it is not to antagonise them, but instead incorporate the act of play into that very first reading. The land of Tveland’s basilisk-prophesied apocalypse is meant to be evoked rather than described in detail, and borrowing from the visual language of concrete poetry acts to that end.
Thinking about MÖRK BORG makes me want to play more MÖRK BORG, and one of the benefits of creating a game that asks the reader to meet it halfway in terms of creativity is that people will step up to that challenge. The adventure that I ran for my friends was from the Dissident Whispers RPG anthology created in support of the Black Lives Matter movement with proceeds going to the National Bail Fund Network (disclosure: my friend Chris Di Donna worked on this), with layout from MÖRK BORG’s Johan Nohr and six adventures explicitly written for the MÖRK BORG system. The MÖRK BORG website has all kinds of fan created adventures and resources, with more continually being added. It’s a game built to be built upon, and I look forward to seeing how far the affectionately titled MÖRK BORG CULT will take the game.
