Flagellants Part 2 // Mörk Borg

As I mentioned last post, I hadn’t done too much painting over the Christmas break, but I decided this week to break that negative streak and get back into it! The best way to do that was to pick an easy project and that meant finishing this next batch of Flagellants.

These will fight alongside the last batch, most likely in games of Midgard – hence the two sets of 8 models which make up a base each.

There’s not too much to discuss painting-wise, these are your bog standard doom saying, apocalypse preaching, world is ending types, in their usual accoutrements: brown and black rags! I tried to break up the mass of rags with some different shades of brown (I think I have 3 all up), as well as the aforementioned black sections. The fire was fun to paint, with some wet blended yellows and oranges over an off-white base coat.

If you remember my last post, I discussed creating a space in my posts to talk through books from my gaming bookshelf, partly to remind myself of old favourites, but mostly to motivate me to crack open those that have sat unread for many years. I’m a little bit undecided if these should be standalone posts or be part of “regular” posts (as I’ve done here; open to opinions if you have any!). Anyway, here’s my first shot at a segment I decided to call From the Shelves.

For the inaugural From the Shelves segment, I decided to pick out a book that has some nice thematic parallels to the flagellants above: Mörk Borg. Mörk Borg is a rules-light roleplaying game that sort of blurs the line between art project and game, with some pretty wild graphic design that looks like nothing else I’ve ever read.

I’ve had my eye on this book for quite a while (it was originally released in 2020), but I only picked it up in December last year, as my gaming group started talking about running short games instead of long campaigns as our default way to play RPGs. The book is pretty short (80 something pages, most of which are pretty light on text) and the rules are very simple (~8 pages of the book are the actual rules of the game). There’s a few pages on the setting (the world is about to end, and things are generally pretty grim; maybe the flagellants are right!), then character creation rules which are mostly dice driven (i.e. result in pretty random characters), this is followed by the main game rules, some optional classes, a bestiary, and an introductory adventure. All in all a pretty complete game given the small format.

The game itself is a simplified fantasy adventure system, in the OSR genre (i.e. tries to capture some of the nature of early RPGs), but has its own voice rather than being a classic Dungeons and Dragons reproduction. While the universe at first glance is extremely grim, there is a tongue in cheek feel to the whole book which reminds me of early Warhammer fantasy/40k publications. This in some ways is so over the top it’s impossible to take it too seriously and I’m sure this ridiculousness will lead to some great moments at the gaming table.

The crazy graphic design is pretty interesting, on the one hand it does a great job of communicating the feel of the game, but possibly more importantly it does a good job of making different sections easy to find. I read an article on this book that discussed that as each page looks different, you end up using the art/text as a landmark when flicking through the book, and I very much agree with that. The book also has the index on the rear inside cover which is a genius move that makes it very easy to consult at a moment’s notice.

Overall the book is a fun read and I really look forward to running games of it. It has a great amount of support out there from 3rd party publishers due to its permissive license model, so it’s hard to run out of pre-prepared content. It even has a in-universe 3rd-party miniature skirmish game called Forbidden Psalm which I’ll have to check out some day!

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this quick look into this book, I’ve definitely enjoyed reading it and now I’m going to go try to convince my friends to play the game.