Naming The Faceless 2: Mӧrk Borg
If you’ve followed me on Twitter for more than five minutes then you’ll know that Mӧrk Borg is one of my favourite games. I run it a lot, but I’ve only had a chance to play it as a player rather than a GM a couple of times – and each time we used the fantastic Scvmbirther character generator to make characters. What this means is that I haven’t actually had an opportunity to create a character from scratch in one of my favourites games.
Today I’m going to fix that.
For those not in the know (I assume you’ve been sheltering in place under a rock or something), Mӧrk Borg is a very rules-light OSR game by Pelle Nilsson and Johan Nohr with the most visually stunning rulebook I’ve ever seen. Here’s how the game describes itself.
A doom metal album of a game. A spiked flail to the face. Light on rules, heavy everything else.
MÖRK BÖRG is a pitch-black apocalyptic fantasy RPG about lost souls and fools seeking redemption, forgiveness or the last remaining riches in a bleak and dying world. Who are you? The tomb-robber with silver glittering between cracked fingernails? The mystic who would bend the world’s heart away from it’s inevitable end? Confront power-draining necromancers, skulking skeletal warriors and backstabbing wickheads. Wander the Valley of the Unfortunate Undead, the catacombs beneath the Bergen Chrypt or the bedevilled Sarkash forest. But leave hope behind – the world’s cruel fate is sealed, and all your vain heroic efforts are destined to end in death and dismay. Or are they?
Mӧrk Bӧrg
There’s two ways to go about character creation in Mӧrk Borg – with a class, or without. I can’t remember at which point in the process you decide, so I’m just going to start at the beginning of the book and see what happens.
As with Spire (the game I played around with last week – and this may well be the first time Spire and Mӧrk Borg have ever been directly compared, so we’re making history here) Mӧrk Borg opens with setting information. Spoiler alert: that’s going to be true of most games I look at. Although it isn’t true of Traveller, which is what prompted this whole exercise. And what a setting it is. I could write a dissertation on my thoughts about the world of Mӧrk Bӧrg and how it’s presented, but that’s not what we’re here for. That’s getting perilously close to review territory, and that’s not a pool I’m about to wade into.
Actually that’s a lie because the book doesn’t open with setting information. The end papers contain random tables – names, occult treasures, traps and devilry, weather, and corpse plundering that tell us a huge amount about the game before we’ve even properly opened the book. But again, I’m getting diverted from my purpose.
Let’s roll a goddamn character.
Spire starts us out with what you used to do before you joined the resistance. Mӧrk Bӧrg doesn’t care who you used to be. Instead, “to begin with, you are what you own.”
Immediately I get to do my favourite thing – roll dice. And my first roll is fucking great. My character starts with 120 silver (2d6x10 – yes, I rolled double sixes), a waterskin, and 2 days worth of food. Presumably I’ll have to spend some of that silver if I want to eat, unless I get stabbed for it first. I don’t know where that silver came from but apparently I’m rich.
The game does warn me that “your soul and your silver are your own and equally easy to lose” though, so there’s that.
Then we roll some more dice to see what else we own. I start with a backpack for 7 normal sized items, a medicine chest with Presence +4 uses, stops bleeding and infection and heals d6 HP. I’ve played Mӧrk Bӧrg before so I know what Presence is for, and so I have no insight about whether this is one of those occasions where a rules overview might have been useful before character creation or not. I don’t remember being at all confused the first time I read the book, though. I also have exquisite perfume worth 25s.
The fact that I’m rich, carrying a medicine chest, and have some very fancy perfume tells me I’m probably playing someone who’s relatively upper class (whatever that means in Mӧrk Bӧrg). We’ll see what else comes out as I make the character.
After rolling the starting equipment, we now get the full rundown of how to create a character – and this is where we have a choice. We can either:
- Randomize the starting equipment (which we’ve already done)
- Randomize weapon and armor.
- Roll abilities.
- Roll Hit Points.
- Name the character. (The exact wording is “Name your character if you wish. It will not save you”)
Or we can use the optional rules:
- Start by choosing or randomizing a class (page 46 and on) and follow the class’ instructions on rolling for equipment, weapons and armor.
- Roll on the tables on pages 39–43.
- Roll a number of Omens (page 38).
For completion I’m going to do both. We’ve already rolled starting equipment, so I’ll carry on with that method first and then make a new character using the optional rules.
So. We have our starting equipment. On to weapons and armour, which involves rolling a d10 and consulting the illustration of Wound Man. I roll a 6, which gives me a Sword (d6). Fitting for someone of higher class, I suppose. Armour is a d4 roll, and I come away with heavy armour which has some mechanical concerns. The full entry reads “heavy armor (splint, plate, etc, -d6 damage, tier 3) 200s. DR +4 on Agility tests, defence is DR+2”.
Again, if I hadn’t played the game I wouldn’t know what all this meant and that might be confusing. But the good thing is that because this is randomised, there’s no option paralysis here. I don’t have to wonder about whether I’m choosing the “right” things or not, because the dice choose for me.
The bottom of this page also tells me that scrolls will never work when wielding medium/heavy armor. So I’m not a spellcaster, unless I want to take my armour off.
The next step is to roll Abilities. Mӧrk Bӧrg has four of them – Agility, Presence, Strength, and Toughness – and they all use a modifier of between -3 to +3. It’s generated by rolling dice and consulting a table. Initially the rules tell you to roll 3d6, but then it goes on to say that if you’re not using the optional character classes you should instead roll 4d6 and drop the lowest for two abilities.
It’s implied here that you roll in order, but the fact that you can choose to roll 4d6 for two abilities tell me we get to make some decisions about who our character will be. I’ve already established that this character is quite wealthy, and I suspect that means they’re probably relatively well educated. That says to me that my Presence should be quite high (although with my armour I’m not going to be able to use Scrolls, but whatever). The massive armour and the sword also tells me that I’m probably quite strong, but the medicine chest has got me wondering if maybe I’m some kind of apothecary (in which case maybe I’m trained in poisons, and should think about Toughness).
In the end I decide that I’ll roll 4d6 for Presence and Toughness and 3d6 for Agility and Strength, and I get the following scores:
Agility – 10 (which becomes +0)
Presence – 14 (which becomes +1)
Strength – 8 (-1)
Toughness – 13 (+1)
They’re not bad scores really. A +1 makes a lot of difference in Mӧrk Bӧrg. It’s also interesting to note that the range to get +0 is 9-12 – a span of 3 numbers right in the average roll range, with results of -2 to +2 having tighter ranges of 2 numbers each. The game expects you to be average.
The final step is to roll hit points and pick a name. You begin with Toughness + d8 hit points, with a minimum of 1. I have 5 hit points, which is pretty good for a Mӧrk Bӧrg character. As for my name? The problem I had with naming my character in Spire doesn’t exist here, because there’s a d68 table of names on the inside front cover. My character is called Grin.
In theory I’m now done, but I know that there’s something missing because I’ve played the game before – Omens. The optional rules tell you to roll your Omens (which are a currency in the game you can use for rerolls, neutralising crits and fumbles, etc) but the standard rules don’t. Every character I’ve generated with Scvmbirther has had Omens as standard, even when I haven’t used the classes, so I turned to that page (pg 38) just to check. It turns out that every class gains a number of Omens specific to that class, and if you don’t use classes you start with d2 Omens. GrinI starts with 1.
This actually marks the first criticism I’ve found of Mӧrk Bӧrg in all the times I’ve read it and played it. This part of character creation isn’t clear. It’s not game breaking, it’s not a large issue, but I’d like it to be mentioned earlier in the book.
Right now I have a vague sense of my character and their place in the world. I have stuff that I’m not entirely sure how I came by, and my character doesn’t have much purpose, but that will come up in play. If I hadn’t been writing this post while rolling this character the process would have taken less than 5 minutes – which is great for Mӧrk Bӧrg, because lethality is high. (Last time I played the game I had two TPKs, and we just kept introducing new characters. Aside from the one who got cursed with immortality and therefore couldn’t die. It was a blast.) This process gave me a good sense of the tone of the game and the way it views characters, but not a huge impetus for my character to actually venture out into the world and explore it.
Let’s see if that changes when we use the classes.
As a reminder, here’s how we make a character with the optional classes.
- Start by choosing or randomizing a class (page 46 and on) and follow the class’ instructions on rolling for equipment, weapons and armor.
- Roll on the tables on pages 39–43.
- Roll a number of Omens (page 38).
There’s no list of the classes, but right at the top of page 46 is the header OPTIONAL CLASSES (D6). So let’s roll a d6.
I roll a 4, which gives me Wretched Royalty – weirdly, that’s quite fitting for Grin. Maybe I’m about to make the same character twice by accident. The flavour text tells me I’m “Bowed down only by the memories of your own lost glory, you could never submit to anyone else. Not you, of noble blood! (Not that you expect any of these peons to understand the depth of your sorrow.”
I start with 4d6x10 silver (140) and d2 Omens (2, this time).
I’m “painfully average”, so I adjust no abilities. (I assume that this is when I’m meant to roll my abilities, though the book doesn’t tell me to. I end up with Agility +2, Presence +1, Strength +0, and Toughness +0 after rolling 3d6 in order. Decent scores.)
I roll a d8 on the weapons table to end up with a Knife (interesting that Wretched Royalty are unable to access the crossbow or the zweihander, which are results 9 and 10 on the weapons table respectively). I’m also told to roll a d4 on the armour table, rerolling if I receive heavy armour (why not make it a d3 roll, Mӧrk Bӧrg?). I guess Grin wasn’t royalty after all, since they have heavy armour. Anyway, this character ends up with light armour (fur, padded, cloth, etc) after having to reroll twice.
Then we’re given a list and told that we begin with two items from it. It’s not explicit that we should roll, but each entry is numbered from 1-6 and it seems in keeping with the way the rest of character creation works to randomise it. I end up with “Poltroon” the Court Jester, who accompanies me on my adventures and distracts enemies in combat, and the Horn of Schleswig Lords, which I can blow in to bolster my companions and make them succeed at tasks they might otherwise fail. That’s pretty good.
There’s also a roll table scrawled down the side of the page titled, “Things were going so well, until…”. Rolling on it I find that my caravan kingdom of Tveland fell into penury. This is what I was missing from the classless character creation – something to tie me to the world in a concrete way.
The next step is to roll on the tables on pages 39-43. These are tables of traits, traumas, and history – things to flesh out your character and give them some life. There’s nothing telling us we can’t use them when we generate characters without the optional classes, but similarly there’s nothing saying that we should and that’s why I didn’t touch them when we were making Grin.
On the first table, Terrible Traits, we roll 2d20. My character has a loud mouth and is prone to substance abuse. The Broken Bodies table tells me that I’m corpulent, ravenous, and drooling – which ties in nicely to the substance abuse, and the overall theme of Wretched Royalty. I’ve lost myself to excess in response to losing my ancestral seat. The Bad Habits table tells me that I’m a pyromaniac. And, after throwing a knife at page 43, I learn that my flesh heals twice as fast, but my companions twice as slow, and that I see a many-eyed “guardian angel”.
This is not a nice person to be around.
I also realise that I need a name, so I turn to the front cover again and learn that this disgusting, fallen monarch is called Arvent. And that’s my second character done.
All told, it took less than hour to create both of these characters while writing this post. Grin would have taken 5 minutes on their own. Arvent would have taken a little longer – maybe 10 minutes, since there was a bit of flicking back and forth in the book and finding the right pages for things.
It’s interesting that the classes have very little mechanical effect in the game. They’re a collection of thematic trinkets and hooks to the world, and they change the way you generate your abilities and equipment to make things slightly more fitting to your role. One of the potential things the Wretched Royal can start with is a talking horse, which is ludicrous and incredible.
Whereas my Spire character felt anachronistic to my expectations of the world, both Grin and Arvent definitely met my expectations for what a Mӧrk Bӧrg character looks like. I’m a little disappointed that my random rolls generated two such similar characters thematically, but that’s not a problem with the game. In fact, the theme of fallen nobility was something I attached to Grin myself as a result of my interpretation of the equipment they started with.
Of the two systems I’ve played around with so far, Mӧrk Bӧrg’s character creation definitely suits my preferences as a gamer more than Spire (even though Spire is a game I thoroughly enjoyed playing and shares a lot in common with Blades in the Dark, which is one of my favourite games).
Next week I’m going to play with a system I know nothing about as I roll up a character in Burning Wheel.