Mörk Borg
| Publishers | Free League Publishing |
|---|---|
| Publication | February 2020 |
| Genres | tabletop role-playing game, heavy metal music |
| Chance | High |
| Age range | 12+ |
| Skills | role-playing and imagining |
Mörk Borg is a tabletop role-playing game inspired by heavy metal music, created by Swedish game designers Pelle Nilsson and Johan Nohr and published by Free League Publishing in February 2020. The game features dark themes, frequent character death, and a doom metal playlist. The title means "dark fort" in Swedish.[1][2]
The game grew out of the old-school revival scene, and became popular as a response to the controversial history. As a result the fan community grew large and created many variations on the game.[3]
Gameplay
[edit]Mörk Borg uses 20-sided-dice rolls with character stat modifiers. It is rules-light.[2]
Design
[edit]Visual Design
[edit]A major part of what makes the game special is the way the book is laid out. It dramatically departs from the historical formats of rule books, becoming something where the art is as much a part of the game as the rules themselves. In a traditional rulebook, scores of information is stored in simplified tables for the sake of readability.[4]
Mork Borg has some of these, yes, but many of the important ones are interwoven into a piece of art. For example, one of the tables that tracks weapon damage is a piece of art in the style of the medieval era[3] that shows a man with weapons piercing throughout his body. Labels on the weapons give the information that is required.[4]
Likewise, the choices of what to focus on serve the aesthetic, but not may fit what is expected. The page before the mentioned table has but one thing: a picture of a bone, labelled "femur", and the statistics that it requires. This is a weapon that players can use, but rather than being grouped with the rest, it is given its own complete page while having nothing special about its function.[3]
One standing issue with the aesthetic design is that it is not accessible.[4] It has a large number of fonts and, as hinted to from the description of the weapons table, a setup not consistent between each section. The palette likewise is not common, with a combination of grays, yellows, and pinks.[3]
Game Design
[edit]With the design of the game itself, everything about the character (other than its name) is randomly generated via rolling on a table. Almost all pre-existing games do have some form of random generation, but a majority of those also gives the player more control over the final creation.
The rules themselves are simple in comparison to many other rule systems. They take up 16 pages total, as opposed to Hunter the Vigil's 30 pages of basic rules and 75 pages of character creation or Dungeons & Dragon Fifth Edition's 35 pages of rules and 150 pages of character creation.
Awards
[edit]Mörk Borg won four ENNIE Awards in 2020: three Gold ENNIES for "Product of the Year," "Best Writing," and "Best Layout and Design," and one Silver ENNIE for "Best Game."[5] In 2021, Mörk Borg Cult: Feretory won the Gold ENNIE for "Best Supplement."[6] In 2022, the Mörk Borg Digital Monster Generator won the Gold ENNIE for "Best Aid/Accessory - Digital." The same year, the Mörk Borg online tool DNGNGEN won the Gold ENNIES for "Best Online Content" and the Silver ENNIE for "Best Aid/Accessory - Digital."[7]
Reception
[edit]Alex Meehan for Dicebreaker named Mörk Borg one of the best tabletop role-playing games to play in 2024.[8]
References
[edit]- ^ Anderson, Pearse (2020-08-11). "Unleash the minstrels of pain! Mörk Borg, the metal role-playing game rocking lockdown". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2023-04-14.
- ^ a b Elsam, Sara (2020-02-05). "Ultra grimdark tabletop RPG Mörk Borg comes with its own doom metal playlist". Dicebreaker. Retrieved 2023-04-14.
- ^ a b c d Berge, P. S. (2022-01-01). ""LET ALL PARTAKE IN THE SUFFERING": MÖRK BORG as a Visual-Material Toolkit for Fan Remix". Proceedings of DiGRA 2022 Conference: Bringing Worlds Together.
- ^ a b c Christensen, Kasen (2022-10-06). "Cool and Useful: Tabletop Roleplaying Games as Aesthetic Technical Communication". Proceedings of the 40th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication. SIGDOC '22. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery: 149–151. doi:10.1145/3513130.3558994. ISBN 978-1-4503-9246-4.
- ^ Jarvis, Matt (2020-08-03). "Swedish doom metal RPG Mörk Borg triumphs at 2020 ENNIE Awards as Alien RPG named Best Game". Dicebreaker. Retrieved 2023-04-14.
- ^ "2021 Nominees and Winners – ENNIE Awards". Retrieved 2023-04-14.
- ^ "2021 Nominees and Winners – ENNIE Awards". Retrieved 2023-04-14.
- ^ Meehan, Alex (2022-02-21). "Best tabletop RPGs 2024 (that aren't Dungeons & Dragons 5E)". Dicebreaker. Retrieved 2024-09-26.
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