Mörk Borg by Pelle Nilsson is a role playing game supplement published by Free League Publishing. This is the core book for a game that is stated to be OSR.
The supplement is available as a 96-page PDF from DriveThruRPG for $11.99 and is also available in printed form from sites such as Amazon. The PDF is the version reviewed though it was purchased at a reduced price during a sale. Two pages are the front and rear covers and two pages are the front matter.
There are front and endpapers to the supplement, with, by the looks of it, two pages at the front and three at the rear. Each has a selection of random tables.
The Dying World is the first section and is a description of the Mörk Borg setting, complete with a map.
The Game is the second part and starts with how to create a player character. This includes weapons, armour, equipment, tests (how to succeed at tasks), carrying capacity, hit points, violence, rest, reaction, morale and how to improve a character, which happens when the GM decides. There are unclean and sacred scrolls, which have different powers, a number of optional rules then several optional classes.
Creatures is essentially the bestiary; each creature is described, given stats and has values for various things, such as their dead body or parts of it.
Outcasts is similar, but would appear to be essentially NPCs. Possibly.
Rotblack Sludge, or The Shadow King’s Lost Heir is a sample adventure, a small dungeon.
Finally, before the endpapers are a couple more tables.
Mörk Borg in Review
The PDF is decently bookmarked with major and minor sections linked. Navigation is decent. The text appeared to be free of errors, but the overall presentation and layout of the book needs to be gone into in detail.
The text follows no rhyme, logic or reason in its layout. The only part that maintains a consistent layout is the adventure. The rest sees text boxes at random angles, text written around the page edge, random alterations of font size and type within the same piece of text or table and sometimes almost no words on a page. There are a lot of illustration, with the text written over them, of a pretty distinctive style. Though it might be different for the printed book, this is an absolutely awful, headache inducing book to read as a PDF. Mörk Borg has been described as being more of an art book than a game, and that is probably true.
The game itself is pretty light-weight, dark and table heavy. There is rather less to the game than might be thought of by the page count; the size has been bloated by the, to politely put it, unique layout choices. It’s difficult to tell, but if the book had used a standard, and more rational, layout, it might only have had a third of the page count at most.
This is not a game for everyone. Some will probably have trouble actually reading it; it doesn’t appear to have been designed for reading, instead looking at. The art is distinctive, but it is also probably not to everyone’s tastes. Mörk Borg is definitely a stand out game in many respects, but it’s also an extremely difficult one to read. Mörk Borg is a game that some will love, some will hate and probably very little in-between, and it can be found by clicking here.
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