How the MÖRK BORG Community Grew by Pelle Nilsson

MÖRK BORG started out as a continued collaboration between me and Johan Nohr, after the folklore horror RPGBarkhäxan (as of now only released in Swedish), when we discovered that we work very well together. We have fun, work fast but without stress, and … yeah, never stop until a project is done.

MÖRK BORG was not much more than a wish to print a cool zine for ourselves, with a promise to break rules and do exactly what we wanted. I had a couple of pages with some basic rules, classes, etc for a fantasy game, and we developed that in an agile art and text process, spread by spread. We thought it would be cool if some other gaming groups could enjoy and play the gameThat was the initial ambition. Inspiration was more from DIY old-school punk zines with a “get to the point” kind of feel, than other RPGs. And of course, we took inspiration from various kinds of metal genres, mostly sludge, doom and black.

The book became more suitable as a hardcover book in the end, and when we signed with a publisher, we thought it would be cool to test the potential via a Kickstarter. I don’t mean to underestimate ourselves – the art grabbed people’s attention – but I think the book was released at the right time, as kind of a liberating second wave of the rather popular but also infected Old School Revival/Renaissance genre.

Apart from the art, the sparse setting with open-ended questions and the light rules was a good inspirational ground for players interested in the game. It’s easy to create a new class, some more item tables, adventures, etc. And very important: get the game to the table and actually play! It was really mind-boggling to see all the creativity from the community that was there already from the start; from backers of the kickstarter before the book was even released. We both felt very humble when fantastic stuff was sent to our email, and we curated and published the two zines Feratory and Heretic, combined with some official material.

After a while, we didn’t want to be that kind of bottleneck anymore and released the third party license. Things really took off from that day, and none of us can keep up with all the released material anymore. MÖRK BORG has become an uncontrollable beast itself, and we are very happy and thankful for that!