Pelle Nilsson

Pronounced "Murk Borg" it translates to "Dark Fortress" in English. There are three things happening here, some amazingly cool layout/art, some great original, atmospheric writing/ideas, and a bare skeleton of a system.

Let's start with the bad. I've seen more effort put into adding rules to the Dungeon! board game than went into creating the actual game rules for this system. Seriously this could have been created in 30 minutes (an hour tops) by anyone who's tried their hand at rpg game show more design in the past. The minimalist style of writing here just doesn't leave any room for details.

On to why I'm still glad I bought this book. It's beautiful. I love the punk rock zine/flyer look of the design, especially in an age of super smooth, elegant design and art that's become the standard lately (which I also love btw). The small format also makes it stick out as something more "indie". It's a sexy package all around.

The creativity here is morbid and boundless. Magic items that constantly berate you with insults about how disappointed your ancestors are in you, bad habits like "addicted to eating bugs", classes like "Wretched Royalty" and "Gutterborn Scum" create a wonderful doomy landscape and get my mind racing to create ideas this outré to add to my own games.

So overall, if you don't mind making up rules as your playing, if you love Metal (especially doom or black), and/or you like having cool looking books on your shelf I suggest this. Just know there's nothing groundbreaking about the system itself, it's all about the mood and the over-the-top strangeness of the setting. show less

Okay so maybe not everything Mork Borg is amazing, or maybe the novelty is wearing off. This wasn't bad, but it didn't blow me away. It has 2 short adventures, a bunch of new monsters and new magic items, some random charts and a couple more classes (is that what they call them in Mork Borg? I can't remember). It was cool seeing what the original "Dark Fort" was like before it was fleshed out into Mork Borg. It really was more like an 80's video game that you played with one player using show more dice and paper.

The 2 adventures were written in the kind of shorthand I use when I'm brainstorming an adventure. At first I thought maybe the writer (and editor if there was one) both spoke English as a second language, but then I realized it was just trying to be minimalist. Paragraphs like - "Demon Spawn. Clad in a dazzling black robe embroidered with gold crimson. Five eyes symmetrically placed around the head, crowned with cylindrical antlers. A huge, rotting vertical mouth covers the chest and abdomen. Mostly found in the ziggurat."

I'm torn about this because on one side it seems lazy and unprofessional to publish your notes and call it an adventure. But on the other side only having what is needed and having it in short sentences might make it easier to run than a module with paragraph after paragraph of information. show less

Optional rules additions and 3 or 4 short adventures. Graphic design and art were awesome as usual. I have to admit that I don't like adventures where you have to read a book for each encounter, but this level of brevity is too short for me. 3 clipped sentences is often not really enough. I know we're supposed to make up the rest and answer all the questions, but that's kind of why I buy pre-made adventures - so I don't have do a bunch of work.

There's a big map "adventure" that's mostly show more just pictures, I don't really understand how it works, but it looks cool. show less