Pelle Nilsson. Art by Johan Nohr. Free League Publishing and the Stockholm Kartell, 2021.
1–5 players plus a Game Master | Variable | Adult
Mörk Borg is a Swedish horror tabletop roleplaying game set in a dying world whose end is prophesied with absolute certainty by two-headed Basilisks whose utterances are peddled among the desperate for political power. Players take on the roles of misfits, scum, and revenants, the unloved and unlovable, scrambling for riches they will never enjoy or redemption that will never come, as plague after plague descends in the countdown to apocalypse. Each session begins with a roll on the ‘Calendar of Nechrubel’, a table of pseudo-sacred psalms that determines which disaster characterises the current game. The game is ‘rules light and heavy on everything else’, adopting an Old School Revival (OSR) style that minimises predefined story arcs and maximises spontaneity, failure, and randomised encounters. Released under a Creative Commons licence, Mörk Borg has generated a substantial ecosystem of licensed and fan-made spin-offs, including Corp Borg, Cy_Borg, Orc Borg, and Pirate Borg, and establishing a distinctive aesthetic across the indie TTRPG community. This analysis also draws on Rotblack Sludge, a three-episode actual play produced by Red Moon Roleplaying (2020), GMed by the game’s artist Johan Nohr.
Despite its eschatological framing, Mörk Borg is a productive site for ecological thinking precisely because of, rather than despite, its embrace of extinction aesthetics. The game enacts what Donna Haraway (2016) calls ‘ongoingness’: a commitment to living and dying well in precarious worlds that refuses both elegiac mourning and salvific heroism. Where mainstream extinction narratives present ecological collapse through elegiac finality and apocalyptic closure, foreclosing alternative futures, Mörk Borg stages extinction as provisional, contestable, and subject to collective reimagining.
Content written by Chloé Wake. Adapted from a forthcoming paper, “Extinction Rebellion: Death and Worlds’ Ending in Tabletop Roleplaying Games.”
References
Haraway, D. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulhucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.