Mork Borg: A Modern RPG

My mercifully succinct and somewhat crude description—though I will of course delve into agonizing detail—of Mork Borg: it is an overhyped, incomplete trash game, a fantasy heartbreaker without any heart, and I am of the firm belief that it was solely created by someone in order to mislead others into thinking they are some sort of game designer. 

Despite being at least three times longer than it has any right to be, Mork Borg offers little to nothing in terms of either innovation or interest, instead attempting to distract you through a combination of ill-conceived, shallow ideas, as well as inconsistent, atrocious, and at many times excessive art, font, and layout choices.

In other words it's the rpg equivalent of the worst of modern art, demanding considerably more discipline and effort to read than it did to create. It at best half-heartedly tries—but ultimately, cataclysmically fails—to emphasize a disjointed, amateur "style" over wannabe punk substance, which is not paved but sloppily smeared atop a weathered and barely recognizable Dungeons & Dragons foundation.

Unsurprisingly it bills itself as OSR, but I suppose there aren't many games that use a d20 and hit points that don't. Despite its failings, which are as numerous as they are pervasive, it does however achieve one goal, albeit inadvertently, and that is serving as the prime example of how different is not at all better.

The mechanics are what you'd expect: roll a d20, apply modifiers, and try to meet-or-beat a number. Mind you, there's nothing inherently wrong with this as a core mechanic, so long as what you wrap around it is at the very least engaging, something that makes you actually want to utilize the game more or less as-written, as opposed to perhaps mining it for an idea or two for another game that competently scratches those itches.

But that's not Mork Borg, no no no. Mork Borg is heavily diluted, foully re-flavored Dungeons & Dragons, with seemingly random changes to procedures and prose, all done in the vain hope that the sum of these minor and mediocre adjustments will, when immersed in a setting with all the depth of a puddle of piss on a hot Texas sidewalk, somehow come close to justifying even the pittance of participation.

And we might as well talk about the setting, not just because its streaked so thinly across seven pages (three would have been more than adequate), but because it's for some reason the first part. It vaguely reminds me of Dark Souls, or perhaps Bloodborne, but in the same way a chunk of spoiled, rotten beef might remind you of a steak. Basically, the world sucks.

But, why settle for a cheap imitation? Just go to their respective wiki pages, take some notes, stat out some monsters and magic items: you'll quickly walk away with something far more robust and useful.

Mork Borg starts you off with three pages of history, which could have possibly fit onto one page with a bit of squeezing, easily two, followed by what I suppose was once possibly intended to be a map, slapped together by a lazy, wannabe punk grunge-lord seemingly trying and definitely failing to imitate the works of Stephen Gammell, apparently and unsurprisingly not understanding the purpose of a map:


This isn't your "normal", "mainstream" fantasy RPG, where the map is legible. No, here the text is arbitrarily oriented, there's a billion different font choices, the land mass is just a black splotch with some white texturing (Terrain? What's that?), there's a block of X's, and a river that somehow flows in like four different directions.

Following the trend of this "game" in general, this map is also utterly useless, except for perhaps knowing the vague direction of something related to some other place, but without a sense of scale or terrain, there's no way or knowing how long it will take you to venture from A to B, nor what you'll have to contend with en route.

The following page briefly describes Galgenbeck, purportedly the greatest city that ever was...which obviously explains why it is allocated less than half of a digest page's worth of text:


Actually it's just a single sentence, after which it goes on about someone named Josilfa. She apparently rules the city. A city that is so important that you have no idea what it looks like, what the people are like, how big it is, what adventuring locales might be about or within, or anyone else of importance that the characters might actually interact with.

The other half of the page is dedicated to a forest called Sarkash. For some reason the font style changes halfway through the description. Basically it's a forest with a cemetery inside. You'd think the author would provide more details on both. I mean, the cemetery would be an opportunity for a random encounter table, noteworthy caretakers and dead, at least one good dungeon map, etc. 

Oh, wait, I guess there's also the Palace of the...Shadow King. Right. How evocative. Almost as evocative as this part of the description:

“None dare dream what might lie under the rubble covered catacombs and cellars.”

I'm sure to someone, likely a child (or child-brained adult), this was at least somewhat spooky and foreboding. I'm guessing that, were the author to bother mapping any of this out and describing it, it would just be bog-standard catacomb tunnels with skeletons and such. Not that it means much, it's not as stupid as the sons of the Shadow King, all of whom apparently hang out in the ruins in disguise, “engaging in games and tricking travelers, multiplying the miseries of their people”.

If that's what they do, imagine what the Shadow King gets up to. No, seriously, because even though “the slaves of the servants of the courtiers” come forth and do his will, it's never explained. I'm guessing he hides behind doors, and tries to jump scare anyone that bothers to show up. Not sure why you would, as with much alleged OSR stuff I've read there's no reason to go there in the first place.

Maybe so you can roll on the woefully understocked tables at the front of the book? The ones with a grand total of thirty-six unique results between them, which range from "pocket full of broken glass, take d2 damage" to "map to a place that cannot possibly exist" (okay, so throw that away), to a bird cage that kills and animates whatever is placed inside as an undead creature, twice as strong?

Note that that last one is on a table with only ten results. How many necromantic bird cages are there in this place? What about black pearls that roll toward the nearest exit? Rings that destroy whatever is placed through them? Not only are these tables largely useless if for some reason you plan on running more than a few sessions, but so are many of the items (which seems to be a common trope in OSR crap).

Anyway, back to the, ahem, setting. Next up is Kergus, a cold place ruled by someone named Anthelia, who is “as youthful as a drop of melting ice”, whatever that means. The writing here is especially awful:


Anthelia sounds like a vampire-by-another-name. She wants color and warmth so that she can drain it, which she can apparently do so with a glance. Her description is equally bad: she promises great rewards if you bring her vibrant life...yet “all fear to do so”. Which is of course bullshit, because anyone that bothers playing this trash game will do so at the earliest opportunity, if only to see what the GM will do.

But then, if they would do it, so would others, meaning that obviously not everyone is too afraid to do so. It's essentially a cringy, cliché rumor along the lines of “no one goes there” or “no one that goes there comes back”. You know full well the players are going to go there, and at least someone is going to come back. Unless of course you actually kill the players off which, if it meant you could play something else would be a kindness.

The western kingdom gets about half a page. The entire western kingdom. Unlike Galgenbeck you learn that it used to be a great place to live, now it sucks, and about half of the description is devoted to the ruler who also sucks. Seems to be yet another OSR theme: everything sucks. Or, rather, everything sucks and there's nothing you can do about it. Explains a lot about them, actually.

Mind you, I'm only saying OSR because it calls itself OSR. Frankly I feel like 99% of these so-called game designers just use the label for recognition. I don't think Mork Borg is OSR at all. Really the only similarities between this and actual D&D is the d20 mechanic, and that it has hit points.


"Few wish to speak of the Valley of the Unfortunate Undead", another unceremoniously eye-rolling name. It's mysterious because the author wished it to be so, and the air and soil might be lethal, might not. The ground might also swallow you up and take you to the land of the dead. Who knows...besides everyone that's already ventured there and returned to tell the tale.

There's some pink text blocked off for its own sake describing suicide cults, and that people are stupid for leaving offerings without explaining why. It then ends by stating, “Gloom grows, obscuring the world like an oil-stained image”. Seriously, who wrote this shit?

And that's it for the entire world. Now, if for some reason you want to bother rolling up a character, here's what you do: roll for random gear, roll stats. That's it. The list says that, while you can name your character, "it will not save you." Spooky, I'm sure. Of course, this is Mork Borg, so here's what the first two pages for character generation looks like:


Gotta put that arrow there to point you to the tables. Couldn't have thought of a better way to do that? No, of course you couldn't. This is how a child would layout a book, drawing lines and arrows to direct you here and there, instead of just writing things in an organized manner. 

And yeah, the character generation steps are on the right-hand side, in the lower-right hand corner. For some reason. Probably because you reasonably, rightfully expected it to be on the other page, in the upper left-hand corner. You know, where a normal person would put it so that you could conveniently see what you were supposed to do right from the start.

As you can see, the gear tables are about as underwhelming as the treasure and loot tables: too few options, with equal chances of getting a grappling hook, crowbar, a "life elixir", and the lol-so-random result of 1d4 monkeys that simultaneous love and ignore you. As bad as that is, weapons are even worse:


That's four pages. Four. Pages. For all of ten weapons. This would easily fit on a single page, even with illustrations and some description.

Just try to imagine the shit WotC or Paizo would get, if they plastered semi-adequate illustrations of three weapons, across two entire pages. People would be furious, and rightfully so, because they would have to eat that cost of excess with no payoff. It's not even visually engaging, but three flat, static weapons, with only names and damage dice attached.

If you're wondering where the weight or cost is, the former doesn't exist in Mork Borg, while the latter can be found two pages later, along with repeated damage dice. Which just begs the question (applicable to the entire book, really): why did they bother doing this?

Note that there's no club or mace, even though the creative commons graphic on the page with most of the weapons clearly indicates a club, along with some other strangely absent weapons such as an arming sword (swords just skip the d8 damage die) and spear. Apparently you can bonk someone with a bone, but not a stick (or a long stick with something pointy stuck to it).

Armor comes in both categories and tiers. For example, no armor is tier 0, light armor is tier 1, medium is tier 2, and heavy is tier 3. One of those is redundant, I'd say the tiers, because from what I could tell they weren't tied to any kind of modifier. There are shields, which oddly reduce damage, and have this really stupid rule that I've seen before, where you can avoid all damage from an attack by somehow declaring that your shield is utterly destroyed.

After gear we finally get to ability scores (called abilities), and ability/skill checks (called tests):


Only four ability scores, most renamed. Does a similar thing to Dungeons & Delvers, where you roll but then only use the modifier once the game gets going. Oddly, 17-20 is a +3, and I'm not sure how you'd roll a 19 or 20 on 3d6.

It tries to be witty by describing a DR of 6 as “so simple people laugh at you for failing), even though the average person will fail at that about a fourth of the time. So will monsters, because monsters don't have ability scores, and so roll a straight d20 for everything. This means that a puny human with a Strength of +1 will have better odds of succeeding at Strength-based tasks than a big-ass troll. 

Conversely, a DR of 18 is a task described as something that “should not be possible”, even though the average person (or monster) will succeed at it 15% of the time. There is a reason that in adequately designed games, that legendary or nearly impossible things tend to both require a natural 20 as well as a considerable modifier. Something like, say, a 30, so that there's no chance of pulling it off without a +10 bonus.

Here if you have a Strength of +6, which is the max, you'll do things that “shouldn't be possible” nearly half the time! 

Nothing to write home about—it's just stats and a DC table—but plenty to mock. Too much, really.

There's a gimmicky encumbrance mechanic that I've seen before, where you just track items, because some people are too stupid and lazy to track other numbers (a trait that I'm noticing is consistent with a certain demographic of the "OSR" crowd). You might think that, given all the available space on the previous page, there was no need to slap carrying capacity in the middle of it's own page: wait until you see hit points...


Yes, this definitely needed its own page. I mean, where else would you put all of that? With carrying capacity? What, you think you could fit abilities, tests, carrying capacity, and hit points on all of one page? Come on, m—

Oh. 

Yeah, I even forgot about the "broken" table on the page following hit points and managed to drop that in, putting all of this related information in one place. This would have meant that they could have saved a page from the "violence" spread, but do you really think that would have stopped them from devoting yet another page to a tiny bit of text?


So, let's look at how combat works. You either roll a d6 to see which side goes first, or roll Agility + d6 if you want to have everyone roll their own initiative. Not sure how this works for enemies, as they don't have an Agility stat. Everything is against DR 12, except when it's not, as some enemies require a higher roll to hit them and/or evade attacks.

This is yet another lazy gimmick, as monsters have so much space they could have put in an attack and defend DR individually. It would have, at the least, made it almost seem like you're getting more content for your money. Not nearly enough to justify any price, mind you, but it would have felt slightly less insulting.

Another page of bad art later and we're at leveling up. 

DM decides when you level up, but only after an adventure, killing something, or finding loot. You roll 6d10 against your HP, and if the total is higher gain 1d6 HP. Far more elegant than just giving people 1d6 hit points every level, and then reducing or eliminating it at a certain point (as 2nd Edition AD&D does).

You also for some reason might gain money or a magic scroll. No explanation, you just do, randomly, in your pocket, or perhaps you literally pull it out of your ass. But perhaps that's the “point”: unlike other, actually competent, at least mostly complete games, where things happen for discernible reasons, this game does the opposite for its own sake.

Finally, you roll a d6 against all your stats to see if they go up or down, because in the world of Mork Borg characters are just in a constant state of flux like that, becoming suddenly, randomly stronger, smarter, weaker, stupider, etc. Honestly surprised that you don't roll to see if you randomly lose loot.

After leveling up we get to magic, which are called powers, but are only found on scrolls. "Scrolls are the twisted magic of Mork Borg." No, no they're not. These people love slapping these sorts of descriptors on things without backing them up with mechanics. There's nothing twisted about any of this. It's trite. It's boring. It's uninspired. It's not twisted. 

You can only use scrolls a random number of times each day, modified by Presence, which your character somehow knows in advance. "Hey guys, I can only use scrolls three times today." Curious if you need to have a scroll on hand before you make this roll, or do characters roll every day, no matter what.

There is no explanation provided for this, and like pseudo-Vancian magic it just feels like an arbitrary mechanic shoehorned in place for "game balance", if there is such a thing. You have to make a check, and if you fail become dizzy, which imposes no mechanical effects besides making all scroll uses auto-fail for an hour. It also states that they will fail in the “worst possible way”, but since they'll auto-fail, why would a player bother trying?

There's only twenty scrolls to find, and this is a section that could have greatly benefitted from all the space that's been thus far squandered on excessive font-sizes and terrible art. Instead all twenty spells are crammed onto a single page:


What does a confused creature do? Can you move while hovering? In what directions? How quickly? Good thing Death specifies a distance. Would have been nice to see that for the other spells. Or weapon ranges.

There's a page spread about the basilisks demand:


You probably forgot about it, but it's at the start. It gets a sentence or two in the "setting", but it's located deep underground, and there's no benefit to giving it whatever random crap it wants, so there's no reason to go out of your way to visit it. Worthless, like so much from the "punk" OSR camp.

There's something called Omens. You gain d2 every six hours and spend them for banal, purely mechanical buffs. There's no basis in-game as to how they are earned or used. They remind me of 3rd Edition D&D action points, and make about as much sense. 

You can also roll on a "terrible trait" table, in case you lack the creativity to concoct a bland personality trait of your own. It follows the trend of all the tables by being marvelously underwhelming. Of course a normal-brained game designer would have done a table with two columns of 10, so here they have to be wonky and uneven, with two traits on the same line. Even though despite the space wasted by an unnecessarily large paragraph of text, there was still plenty of space leftover.

The only way you'd know that you were in the optional classes section, is if you happened to notice the very tiny heading in the upper left-hand corner. I'm surprised it's even here, given so many sections don't have any sort of indicator. Not for lack of space, of course, but because...different?

Each optional class is fairly bland and feels rushed. Some of their "abilities" aren't due to natural skill or capability, but centered wholly around gear or an animal. Sometimes this gear is magic or likely unique, but others are commonplace. This would cause an actually intelligent, creative player to ask, for example, if they could make their own "crumpled monster mask", like the one the fanged deserter can start with. Or wizard teeth.

Many of these benefits don't make sense, but that's to be expected. For example, the occult herbmaster, which is really just an alchemist or apothecary, always somehow acquires the materials to make random potions each day. Kind of like spontaneously finding cash and scrolls after a level up. But either the materials or potions become useless after 24 hours. Doesn't specify.

The wretched royalty class can give you access to a guy who carries a sword, that you might not be able to use at all, and if you do there's a good chance you will kill the guy who carts the sword around (why?), which for some reason causes the sword to vanish (again, why?). You can only do so "once per combat" (whyyy?).

There's a 1 in 6 chance of having this ability, so if you bother playing this game for any length of time, expect to see more of these guys scrambling about, possibly at the same time, with the same, named sword. There's also a 1-in-6 chance to get a dagger that instantly auto-kills anything you stab 25% of the time. I get that getting things perfectly balanced is impossible, and not even desirable, but one of these is cleary superior to the other.

I don't see any reason why you wouldn't take an optional class: while they might modify your stats for the worse, these are easily increased via leveling up, and you gain random abilities to boot. This of course assumes I would bother playing this game in the first place, however.

The book transitions abruptly from optional classes to monsters. Each is generally a description, usually sparse if present at all, poorly written, with barebones statistics consisting primarily of hit points, Morale, and damage. Some monsters seemingly have two names. For example, the page on goblin also says Seth, and the entry for scum says bent. This isn't consistent, which isn't surprising, and neither is the wasted page space:



They tried to be clever by associating values for bringing back monsters dead or alive (no idea who is buying them, or why), but the values are absolutely bizarre, with no correlation between anything. For example, goblins/Seth is worth 150, while a lich is only worth 200, and a berserker/Zukuma is valued at a measly 55, despite having are twice as many HP an being far more dangerous. Their blood is also worth 3 per liter, but no idea how many liters each one has.

Otherwise the monsters aren't anything to write home about: goblins/Seth have 6 HP, and deal 1d4 damage whether using a knife or bow. Wraiths/Wrat have 15 HP, no real immunities or resistances, and their touch drains some stats, but only until the fight is over, then you're completely back to normal. The blood-drenched skeleton/Belze differs from a normal skeleton, I suppose, in that it is "impossibly soundless" and can mimic voices. That's really it.

There are only a dozen monsters, but given that the so-called lich—a normally powerful, nigh-unkillable, undead wizard that players have grown to fear over the past decades—has been reduced to 15 HP, a pitifully paralyzing touch, and only able to use magic that it steals from scrolls you bother bringing to it? Yeah, you're better off just making and using monsters you come up with on the fly. Also probably better off just making up and playing an entire RPG that you come up with on the fly.

Now, there's an adventure in the back, and I was waffling on whether to even mention it because, well, it's trash. Content-wise. It's boring and nonsensical, and most anyone that's not a lazy indie hipster slapping OSR on everything they crank out could do so, so much better. But the reason I wanted to bring it up is that it's uncharacteristically consistent and clean.

Bad art, yes, but no incomprehensible font choices. Blocks of text are well organized. The same sort of lines are used to divide information. Relatively it's unremarkable, but compared to the rest of this book it's a welcome, glorious sight to behold:


 

Again, the actual content is trash. The whole point is to find some kid named Aldon, who is in an "infamous underground locale, a place no free man would willingly go" called, wait for it, the Accursed Den. What's in here? Remember earlier when I said that, were the author to map out the catacombs in the Shadow King's lair, that it would probably just be some tunnels with skeletons? Well, I was wrong.

Technically.

It's somehow worse.

One room has a guy that won't do anything, period, unless you all sit at a table with him, after which he'll tell unspecified stories and then quiet down again. You can kill him, but he won't defend himself and nothing happens. He serves no meaningful purpose. He's just there for the lol-so-random factor.

The very next room has an invulnerable demon and some skeletons. The demon can escape by draining text from a scroll, but there's a scroll in the room. So the demon is just there for no reason. How the books are handled is how the worst, laziest GMs handle lots of books: none of the contents of any of the books are described (in fact, there's a 1-in-4 chance that the text is incomprehensible).

You just roll a d4, and get a random scroll (that, again, the demon could have used to escape whenever he wanted to), or don't know what's in the book, but might gain some arbitrary, unexplained purely mechanical benefit, or scream "you dead, arise", making the skeletons attack.

The next room has 1d4 guards, which means there could just be one guy. But, question is, why haven't the guards dealt with the skeletons? Or the demon that shouldn't be there in the first place? They are blindly obedient to Fletcher, the main bad guy of this scenario, but don't know why, but stick around anyway. Even though they could all just walk away and Fletcher would never know, because he's all the way on the other side of the dungeon.

What's stupider is that they're also trying to find Aldon. Well, they know where he is, but can't open the door. The obvious solution is to smash through the door. Tunnel through. Whatever. Should be easy. But given that this is a poorly written adventure that people will gladly use as an example of why you need to "fail forward", you have to perform a specific action to open the door.

You have to, because if there's an alternative, then the other guys logically would have discovered it already. 

And what's the incredibly specific method? Place an eye in the empty socket of a statue, because that's "gross" or "edgy". Because when someone makes a secret door, the obvious method to make it work is to gouge out an eye. Buttons, levers, even secret phrases? Pffft. That's "normal" and "mainstream". But Aldon still has both eyes, so how did he get in? Who knows? More importantly, who cares?

I'm actually kind of disappointed in how tame it is. They should have gone all out. Like, instead of a statue it's a giant stone head with massive, jagged teeth, and the only way to get through is to use intestines and floss the teeth in a certain order. Popping an eye in? Child's play.

Which is still retarded, because if the players could figure this out, why couldn't Fletcher? After all, he was "hurled into here to die" a long time ago, and this place is allegedly "ruled purely by his will". Fletcher must feel really accomplished, "ruling" a series of rooms filled with random, unrelated contents, like crazy old people, invincible demons hanging around of their own volition, and skeletons playing violins for no reason.

I could go on, I could pick apart every individual page, but it would be redundant at this point. Just more of the same: bad design, bad ideas, bad execution.

But I get it. I get why people like Mork Borg, or at least pretend to: they are drawn to the mediocrity. Like attracts like. It emboldens the hacks, justifies—in their mind, anyway—their laziness and ineptitude. They can emulate it, and use it in an attempt to rationalize their own terrible ideas and art as something good. Something deserving of money and attention.

And if you don't like it? Well that's just, like, your opinion, man (that they will despise you for, secretly or otherwise). You just don't get it. You're just a hater. You're just jealous. The same flippant responses I'd expect from someone pretending that random squares and scribbles are quality art. No real defense. No real justification. Just sneers, excuses, and shunning, all because you challenged their flimsy narrative.

Mork Borg is awful. This is why I describe it as a "modern" RPG: as with modern, so-called art it is equally devoid of passion, substance, and I'd even argue vision. There is absolutely nothing about it to recommend: everything, from the mechanics to the setting to the monsters is either standard, uninspired, or somehow made worse. Things are changed or renamed just for the sake of changing or renaming them.

While I don't expect every game to have wholly unique parts to be enjoyable, I at least expect enough to make me want to play the game, on its own, as-written. You can achieve superior results using any official edition of Dungeons & Dragons (though, for something more inline I'd say go with 2nd Edition or earlier), and combining it with homebrewed content pulled from any Dark Souls wiki.

17 comments:

  1. I find it hilarious how much you despise the game after seeing Adam Koebel's gushing review of it XD

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    1. He helped create Dungeon World, and given its contents I am not surprised. However, I believe some degree of cronyism (or something similar) would account for that.

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  2. At least I'm not the only one who thinks its trash.

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    1. I'm sure many (most?) do, though they might be hesitant to voice their dissent due to fear of backlash. Which is a shame, as I'm terrible at Dark Souls but enjoy the look and feel. I think a setting would be enjoyable, done right. Or at least one or more books describing the monsters and items.

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  3. @Unknown,

    Sorry, with very few exceptions no comments from anonymous or effectively anonymous profiles.

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  4. Wow. That seems like a lot of unbridled hatred, not just for this particular game but for all of OSR and the people who like, play and produce OSR content. I do agree that this book is very disjointed and the art and layout is definitely not everyone's cup of tea. As you suggested, someone could easily take their own stab at things and produce something similar with earlier D&D editions, but this is definitely meant to be a "fill in the blanks" system and setting. I would also point out that third party content from people like Philip Reed (a.k.a. CEO of Steve Jackson Games) has been very good, managing to have a fair amount of style AND substance. So if anything, this garish piece of OSR ephemera has managed to spark quite a few imaginations, similar to the way in which the very talented people George Lucas hired took his creation to newer heights, which he and Disney then crapped all over. But that's a different rant.

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    1. “Wow. That seems like a lot of unbridled hatred not just for this particular game…”

      Really? I think my disdain is quite restrained. :-)

      “...but for all of OSR…”

      I’m curious where you get this idea, as I just don’t like incomplete, postmodern vapidware trash games.

      RPG Pundit’s faults aside, something like Lion & Dragon is alright. It’s a more or less complete game (I recall it’s missing rules for holding your breath and starvation, at the least). It wasn’t particularly innovative, but if you want a more “medieval authentic” feel I think it would do the job, without really needing to reference other RPGs to, as you say later, fill in the blanks.

      Venger’s stuff doesn’t really appeal to me (mostly the setting), but at least he explains things, organizes content in a logical manner (and makes it easy to read), and puts in enough effort to show that he actually cares about what he’s doing. Even his free stuff is better.

      Maybe most OSR, or at least people claiming to be OSR (I think there’s a bunch of stuff that isn’t really OSR), but certainly no tall.

      “...and the people who like, play and produce OSR content.”

      I really don’t care what people like or play. The ones that produce incomplete postmodern vapidware trash games bug me, though.

      “I do agree that this book is very disjointed and the art and layout is definitely not everyone's cup of tea.”

      No need to sugarcoat: it’s bad. It’s badly organized and laid out, and there’s a huge amount of wasted space. Worse, none of the rules are innovative or interesting.

      “As you suggested, someone could easily take their own stab at things and produce something similar with earlier D&D editions…”

      With any D&D edition, really. You can even just skim one of the Dark Souls/Bloodborne (maybe even Elden Ring) wikis for ideas and you’re good to go. Better visuals, better ideas, and some actual lore to play with.

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    2. “...but this is definitely meant to be a "fill in the blanks" system and setting.”

      A “fill in the blanks” system is an incomplete system.

      I was surprised that it mentions starving at all, but it’s so abstract and retarded—no HP if you don’t eat or drink, and it takes two entire days before you start losing HP each day—it would be a trivial effort to create something that actually makes some sense, and because of that I consider it to be a missing rule.

      Same for Morale: it only mentions three criteria, there are no modifiers, and only two randomized outcomes should the creature fail. It fails to hit even the half-assed mark. Why bother at all if you aren’t going to even try, especially given that there ARE more detailed morale rules out there!

      Toughness is said to be used to survive falling: so what happens if you fail? How much damage do you suffer? Every D&D edition starting with at the least 2nd tells you, and given that this is a cheap D&D rip off they could have easily done the same, allowing an ability check to reduce it or something along those lines.

      Agility is oddly used for swimming, but again there are no rules. Ditto for grappling, and whatever the fuck crushing was intended to mean/be used for.

      On that note, how come a DR 6 is said to be “so simple people laugh at you for failing”, even though without modifiers you’ll fail at it a fourth of a time. Is something that you’d fail 25% of the time really so simple?

      DR 10 is “pretty simple” even though, without modifiers you’ll fail it nearly half the time. DR 18 “should not be possible” even though you’ll succeed 15% of the time without any modifiers. In a normal game this sort of thing would be like DC 30 or so, so you’d need to have a pretty hefty bonus in order to have any chance at all.

      Despite its faults, Eberron was intended to be a “fill in the blanks” setting, but it still gave you something to work with (each region gets half a dozen or more full-sized pages, not broken up by trash art and layout choices intended to waste space and pad the page count).

      There’s also a section on what you’re supposed to do with the setting, 10 things about the world, organizations, monsters that are more than renamed goblins and utterly pathetic liches, and more. Was everything filled in or fully explained? No. There was plenty for a DM to flesh out, especially three entire other continents.

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    3. “I would also point out that third party content from people like Philip Reed (a.k.a. CEO of Steve Jackson Games) has been very good, managing to have a fair amount of style AND substance.”

      I don’t know who Philip is, and only barely know that Steve Jackson Games is a company, but so what? The CEO of a company, even if I knew who they were (or what the company even does), making third party content for a game doesn’t make it a good game (it also doesn’t mean he makes good content).

      The third party stuff I’ve seen–nothing by Philip–is also postmodern vapidware trash, and the impression I get is that people only bothered to push it out because Mork Borg doesn’t really have any standards or measure of quality, so anyone can publish whatever for it, and no matter how pitiful the results are still pat themselves on the back and feel special.

      “So if anything, this garish piece of OSR ephemera has managed to spark quite a few imaginations…”

      Again, so what? I don’t care if Mork Borg somehow cures cancer: that doesn’t make the game itself good. 5th Edition has…gotten people to write stuff and put the 5E logo on it, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a good game, either.

      “…similar to the way in which the very talented people George Lucas hired took his creation to newer heights, which he and Disney then crapped all over. But that's a different rant.”

      Really Mork Borg feels like Disney-grade D&D, and given what I’ve seen of third party content those guys aren’t doing any better. Just more of the same postmodern vapidware trash.

      Also, even at his worst I don’t think the Mork Borg creator(s) are anywhere near as talented as George Lucas (not that I think he’s particularly talented, given what I’ve heard about his original vision for Star Wars, as well as the prequels).

      I won’t say Disney ruined Star Wars, the prequels pretty much turned me off well before they got their Mickey Mouse mitts on the property, but they certainly made it worse. Haven’t watched anything Star Wars since Revenge of the Sith, and don’t plan to.

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    4. I think your review misses some things that only become apparent through play. For instance, attributes can increase past the 18 mod range through advances, even though you technically throw away that attribute number after character creation. I think showing 20 was not based on initial creation, just to give a range that's helpful, especially when converting other D&D/OSR products.
      The percentage of failing or even dying is greatly offset by the Omens rules. Acting as luck in some games or like bennies in Savage Worlds, those points add a whole other level and I would argue that not using that rule makes the game too lethal.

      There is lore to the game, which is expanded in other titles. The fact that they didn't spend hundreds of pages on things the players will likely never read about or encounter such as detailing royal lineage and the economic system means the GM will create what's needed.

      Do you really need explicit rules for swimming/drowning, grappling or anything else? The usual conceit with any type of OSR game is that A) you've done this before and can make rulings on the fly and B) the rules can be streamlined enough to allow for quick play and even bring those unfamiliar into it without bogging them down with too many mechanics. When I ran it for the first time, I made some quick rulings and house rules based on how these games traditionally work and had zero issues. It wss a relief not to have to thumb through the book or a pdf to find and adhere to something.

      Some rules differences I found odd, but then realized the reasoning behind them. Ranged weapons go off Presence, not Agility. Well, that balanced out the four attributes and helped ensure that there is no "dump stat." Although if someone wanted to revert missile weapons bacj to Dexterity in keeping with other products, it's certainly doable.

      Monsters weren't simply renamed (or given odd sample names, like "Seth.") The goblins here are cursed creatures and merely encountering them means the PCs may become like them. Again, the assumption with a lot of these games is that you'll beg, borrow and steal from everything that came before. You're also more likely to encounter humans in some instances, so char gen alone gives you a way to populate this world. Bit you could literally pull thousands of monsters out of previous products and part of the beauty is, you don't have to convert most of their stat blocks.


      P.S. I'm also a fan of Venger's work which is definitely gonzo, to borrow his descriptor, and a bit disjointed at times, but shows the same level of appreciation for old school style gaming with a twist.
      If you like your OSR with a bit more meat and potatoes, I would suggest trying Dungeon Crawl Classics if you haven't already. That also shares some DNA of D&D while being a very different sort of experience. And if you like elaborate campaign settings, there's certainly a lot of cool stuff out there, whether it's OSR or got a 5E logo slapped on it. The Dolmenwood setting for Old School Essentials and the 5E version of Symbaroum from Free League are very detailed and thought out.

      Oh and you're not missing anything with the Star Wars sequels. Other than maybe watching the Mandalorian or Rogue One, there's nothing to see there. If you want to talk about hot garbage.. there were many dumpster fires there.

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    5. As for the aesthetic of the game, one of the creators stated that he designed it to purposely break the rules he had been taught about layout and design. Yes, it does make for a hot mess to read. They've actually released the "Bare Bones Edition" for free on itch.io. It still jumps around in content but is far easier to read as it's in simple black and white, condensed and with no art.

      You "barely know" what Steve Jackson Games is? Granted, I was never a fan of GURPS, Car Wars or the Munchkin games, but Fantasy Trip alone is a huge part of fantasy RPG history, and a many in-depth analyses of systems will often mention GURPS in comparison.
      Take the time to look at Philip Reed's content. Some of it is system agnostic and lumping a huge swath into a "vapidware" category without admittedly having seen it is like saying all post Renaissance fine art is trash.

      Is this an odd game? Sure. But like a lot of these games, it's less concerned with "character builds," expansive rules and pages of setting specific details and gets the group down to the nitty gritty of having a good time with interesting characters and jumping right into some skanky adventuring.

      My first outing with this was a blast and the players love their characters, even the ones who thought they might be utterly hopeless compared to their older D&D or 5E characters. Again, it's not everyone's cup of tea as I said, but it's far from broken. The things that are missing from this I can gladly do without, like players worrying about "character builds" or overly complex character creation that can fill a whole session. At my age now, sometimes the ability to dive in without too much fuss is worth the price of admission.

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    6. Going through both comments I noticed you made a few disingenuous and/or well-poisoning statements, which I want to address before responding to anything else:

      “The fact that they didn't spend hundreds of pages on things the players will likely never read about or encounter such as detailing royal lineage and the economic system means the GM will create what's needed.”

      Who said or even implied wanting or needing “hundreds of pages” of setting information? Again, going with Eberron, it only used 70 pages for an entire continent. I don’t even expect that many, especially from an indie publisher.

      Written well, I’d be satisfied with even one region mapped out (with an actual map), with a half-dozen or so adventuring sites (not fully fleshed out dungeons, but simply named places with suggestions as to what might be there). It doesn’t even have to be fully explained: just enough detail so players know what 5the culture is generally like, what dangers are typically found there, brief overview of some villages, etc.

      And then the book just hints at what lies further away, which could be described later in other books. Or left up to individual GMs to figure it out.

      But, why do you specifically use boring examples such as royal lineage and economics, as opposed to, say, information that GMs and players would actually find useful? You know, organizations, factions, rumors, adventure sites, stuff like that.

      Do you think that GMs cannot “create what’s needed” in a published campaign setting? Do you think that campaign settings have all of the information a GM would ever need? That they won’t develop any original content, or flesh out or change existing content?

      “Is this an odd game? Sure. But like a lot of these games, it's less concerned with "character builds," expansive rules and pages of setting specific details and gets the group down to the nitty gritty of having a good time with interesting characters and jumping right into some skanky adventuring.”

      Why bring up character builds, and why put it in quotes?

      Do you think that adding in rules for swimming, falling, climbing, grappling, etc would suddenly make it “expansive”? Do you think 2nd Edition D&D has “expansive” rules? In my RPG, all of the rules for adventuring (which includes jumping, sneaking, climbing, falling, dealing with doors and walls, excavation, exhausting, swimming, starvation, foraging, etc) only takes up seven pages.

      I want to know how “expansive” rules and a setting that has sufficient detail so that the GM and players get an adequate sense of what it’s all about and what to do with it, but isn’t “hundreds of pages” (which no one except you even suggested was necessary) prevents you from “having a good time with interesting characters”?

      This is just an excuse. You even say that “you'll beg, borrow and steal from everything that came before”. The authors could have easily done this, looked to an actually complete game and went, okay, make sure we cover all the bases (that’s what I did, though the rules are different based on my own research). After all, they did it with other mechanics and concepts.

      "The things that are missing from this I can gladly do without, like players worrying about "character builds" or overly complex character creation that can fill a whole session."

      Here you again put character builds in quotes, as if that is something anyone said, and now you tack on session-long character creation. Why? Who the fuck said any of that was desirable?

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  5. @Roger,

    When I click on your name it says Profile Not Available. If you make it public, more than happy to approve your comment and respond.

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  6. I feel like the theme of Mork Borg is almost a parody of death metal and the satanic panic of RPGs, I read somewhere that it was the writers intent to be "the game your parents warned you about."

    I also read that people were going from 5e to Mork Borg because it has some flavor. Which is sad because there are competent dark fantasy games that you can play, or just any game that had a team with a brain behind it. All you need is read a rule book with hard words in it.

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    Replies
    1. @JPG:

      “I feel like the theme of Mork Borg is almost a parody of death metal and the satanic panic of RPGs, I read somewhere that it was the writers intent to be "the game your parents warned you about."”

      Hilarious if true, because there’s really nothing...provocative about it (it felt more like what a 13 year old would consider innovative/edgy), but that level of hyperbole wouldn’t surprise me.

      “I also read that people were going from 5e to Mork Borg because it has some flavor.”

      Knowing what I know about people that at least talk about 5E and Mork Borg, I believe this.

      “Which is sad because there are competent dark fantasy games that you can play, or just any game that had a team with a brain behind it.”

      This is where I again say that if you want something that I think Mork Borg was trying for and failed miserably to execute, read the Dark Souls wiki, play a Dark Souls game, and/or watch Dark Souls videos for ideas and lore and just do it yourself.

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    2. @Roger,

      Apologies. I initially published your comment but decided that I don't want to be a vector for additional vapidware trash, which is what the game you linked looks to be. I will however respond to the rest of your comment:

      “My friends and I have a good time with it, but with any of these games, it's really what you put into it.

      Perhaps, but that doesn’t insulate a game from having an incredibly shallow setting and content, to the point of being incomplete.

      “The setting just gives a bit of inspiration.”

      To say that it misses the mark as to what constitutes something resembling an even partially complete setting is an understatement.

      “Again, anyone can take barebones rules and make it a gritty grimdark. MB has some interesting rules.”

      Such as?

      “If you can get past the avantegarde design and layout, you can have fun with it.”

      I could also take, say, 2nd Edition AD&D and drop it into a Dark Souls-esque setting. It would be a complete game with a more fleshed out setting.

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  7. Reading this and your troika review has opened my eyes. I see how art and an evocative idea can draw people in. I wonder if games like these have a place for getting people into the hobby etc. having to keep track of an inventory and gold and encumbrance was a turn off for me at the start. Being able to just start playing and doing stuff was helpful for me. I was a baby and needed to be spoon fed. I'm now understanding the meat and spices of ttrpgs.

    I'm wondering what makes a good ttrpg?
    how do you design one?
    what is the minimum to start with?
    Do you have a review of a great ttrpg to review to help understand these things?
    What makes ttrpgs fun for you?
    How much "world" do you need vs system/mechanics to made it special?
    How do you design a value system for items and rewards? That seems overwhelming to me!

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