GM: John Jones
Players: Dan Frederick, Chad Rey, Thomas Tancre, Basil Benitz, Brady Golden, Sean Nittner
System: The Molt (Mörk Borg)
Mörk Borg in the evening, Mörk Borg in the morning, Mörk Borg all day long!
I may have been a little enamored with Mörk Borg during sign ups, or maybe it was the convenient 4-hour slot, or knowing that John is a fun GM. Anywho, more Mörk, more Borg was my motto for the con.
Game description:
What Is Known: Rhalla, the eldest Dattsoff crystal gazer, has been struck with a seismic vision. She caught a glimpse of an ancient scroll written with Fatuma’s true hand. The parchment, long lost to the lava, is enchanted with powerful magicks. Rhalla saw a location through the shards of crystals wedged into her eye sockets. She believes this Trophy to be somewhere in the Ruins of the Fatumite Colony. You and your Marauders are just beyond the ruins now. Will you claim the Trophy before someone else? Will you become a Champion of SHE?
Here, beneath the surface of the planet, an intense heat has been boiling and bubbling, waiting to erupt. For centuries, the denizens of Kör have awaited the widening of a crack large enough for the Molt to commence. And now, in Grift, one such rupture has torn a gash through the human realm. How long will it take for the transformation of the Molt to complete? Will you stand by and watch as the earth sheds its outer crust, making way for the Kör and its inhabitants to overcome humanity? Or will you rise up, ripping off the scabs that are Galgenbeck, Kergüs, and the like?
The Molt is a self-contained, rules-light RPG based on and compatible with Mörk Borg. It is written, sculpted, and laid out by Brian Colin, co-creator of Vast Grimm.
Gameplay Experience:
Once again John introduced the setting and the characters and the dove right in. Within five or ten minutes we were playing, which seems to me like a modern miracle.
The vibe at the table was generally a good one. We were sent to explore the Ruins of the Fatumite… which looked very much like a crashed spaceship (nice cross-over action there!) and soon found that there were some cultists working to destroy and effigy of SHE that we made it our mission to put a stop to!
What rocked:
- Again, the characters were just fire. I was playing Learn, a Greyskull Urn Slinger who could convert things into Ichor Leech, which I then used as a weapon. Possibly more important (for me) was that I had a vision of my own death…and it was to be glorious! That was a major driver for me.
- The crashed spaceship made a great set of “temple ruins” to explore. Full of strange technology as well as signs of other (successful and unsuccessful) attempts at inhabitation.
- The game ended on time and we hade a satisfying finish. A fight with a group of cultists and and the giant Frankenstein machine they unleased on us.
- Our flame obsessed warrior was so excited to set things on fire, but just wanted to watch the flames, so at the end when his might weapon burst into divine flames…he planted it in the ground and watched it burn. What a delight. Most of the other characters were similarly bizarre and the game really held space for them to explore their eccentricities.
- Learn died at the end from a critical hit from a cultist but I was in the process of converting the giant machine into a leech machine and his consciousness was transferred to the writhing susurrus leech monster that lifted the giant statue of SHE and crushed the final cultist with it, thereby revealing the trophy beneath it that we sought…GLORIOUS!
- I love that John just jumps into games. Most of the time when I run games we spend 30-60 minute character and world building and while I do think that generates some real attachment to the characters and situation, as well as budling relationships between them, I hate that it eats up so much of the limited time we have. In John’s games you go right to the action!
What could have improved:
- We didn’t all share the same play agenda at the table. I was definitely there to charge ahead and see what happened (excited to “find out”) and another player had a much more cautious, tactical approach that meant spending a lot time scouting, searching bodies, trying to turn every encounter into something that could be harvested for resources. I think think in a long term game where the characters were outmatched, I would have been amenable to that style of play, but in a 4-hour slot I just wanted to see more of the world and the interiority of the other characters.
- Mechanically there were a few more questions that came up due to some inconsistencies between Mörk Borg variants (what generates Favors, Power, etc). I think standardizing things like that is the way to go, but I don’t have enough deep knowledge of the system to know for sure. We also had some questions about uses of Favors to ameliorate critical failures. I think my take away is that you can spend a Favor to reroll a die unless it’s a critical failure, then you can only spend the Favor to prevent the critical, but not to reroll.
- The idea of “one weird thing” is definitely not followed in any Mörk Borg game that I’ve seen. We’re all weird, all the time. While our motley crew was a delight, there were a few weird things that seemed like they got overplayed. For instance three of us had some version of an extra head (either growing from our bodies or that we caried with us) that talked or muttered. It was a fun gag, but I think that when you have too much weirdness it can really take over a game. Thanks to the players at the table, I felt like we still had some great character relationships and story, but I could imagine the game really going off the rails and being hard to connect with on an emotional level.
So I still haven’t played Mörk Borg itself, but now having tried out The Molt and Vast Grimm, I can say that it lives up to my expectations. It’s a messy, sometimes gory, OSR game full of oddballs without any particular connection or motivation beyond the immediate threat or opportunity (or both) in front of them. I don’t think it’s my game, but I had a good time trying it out. Notably I think it’s very well suited to a convention slot because in 4-hours we had a self contained and very satisfying adventure!
