Mork Borg, Mothership, HoL, and Corp Borg

I haven't played Mork Borg, but I have heard of Mork Borg.

What Is OSR?

Mork Borg is part of the OSR: Old School Revival, which is - in short - people playing games that feel like D&D 1st edition and 2nd edition, where stats were rolled randomly and nobody made it past level 2 before getting eaten by a grue.

Rules, light, randomness high, fatality near-assured. You can roll a wizard with 4 INT, and the best way to deal with that is simply to bumble headfirst into traps on behalf of your party until you can roll up a new Wizard, who is now named "Thad Stormbringer the 8th".

This is a very large contrast to D&D 3e, 4e, and 5e, where your players are comic book heroes - they have so much Main Character Energy that killing them feels very difficult.

The one D&D 2e game I've ever played was run by a not-terribly-good DM in a room full of disinterested players and - I'm afraid to report - suuuuucked, so I'm not sure how I feel about the format. I feel like the right DM could really make it shine, but I'm too avuncular a DM to really pull it off.

The shortened lifespans really change the game's vibe, too: deep skill trees don't make sense when your characters are only intended to last a session or two at best. OSR games tend to be more rules light than longer campaigns.

The lethality and lightweight nature of the OSR style is also very good for horror content.

The rules-light and random nature of the OSR style leads itself well to vibes-over-balance, which means publishing new content into the ecosystem is very easy.

And, because a lot of the OSR style was forged in the fires of disgust with Hasbro, OSR-style RPGs tend towards very open licensing and a kind of "zine-friendly amateur-print style" .

Mork Borg

That brings us to Mork Borg, award winning RPG that I don't currently own, because the pitch of "OSR" + "Death Metal" + "Horror" + "Fantasy" wasn't really up my alley.

Leaning extra heavily into "lethality", "rules light", and "vibes" you get to Mork Borg, a game designed like a metal poster and shouted at you.

⚠️ DIGRESSION: To be honest, lately this style of TTRPG has really taken over the amateur end of the industry: rules light, vibes heavy, bold magazine-style design, more setting than crunch. As fun as it is in concept, I've _never played one of these_ that I've enjoyed as much as good ol' reliable Dungeons & Dragons and its more epic peers like the absolutely excellent 13th Age (which now has a relatively fresh SECOND EDITION out the door, nice!).

I'm told I might enjoy the dense, tactics-heavy Lancer.

Anyways: Mork Borg - lethal, grimdark, shouty, death-metal, rules-light, zine, aesthetically wild. Very popular. Very influential. Not designed to be played for more than a handful of sessions before the story comes to an end.

The Peer: Mothership

Honestly, the (in my opinion) more compelling alternative to Mork Borg is a game that was borne out of the near-exact-same inputs, at pretty much the same time - but took it in a different direction:

It's still fast and lethal and grim, but Mothership is Sci-Fi bay-bee: less Berserk and more Event Horizon or Alien.

Mork Borg's art and design are fabulous but they aren't up my aesthetic alley, while Mothership's absolutely is

An Opportunity To Talk about HoL

HoL: Human Occupied Landfill was printed in 1995, it was Canadian indie artists making fun of TTRPGs, and it was also a lethal, rules-light, scribbly, zine-like RPG that shouted its rules at you. So... also Mork Borg-like, just many years in advance and significantly less polished and professional.

HoL doesn't bother with "typesetting": it's a long and detailed book that looks like it was penned, top to bottom, by Jhonen Vasquez. It is very 90's.

I've read this whole thing. I think I attempted to run it out of a copy I'd pirated when I was a teenager or young twenty-something? Memory from that era is spotty.

HoL is available in its entirety on the Internet.

What HoL is not is "rules-light" - while its rules have stupid too-edgy 90s names, there are a lot of them, packed tightly in dense and borderline unreadable handwriting:

HoL is not really designed to be played: it's hard-to-read, self-contradictory, and frequently very weird, a satirical art project made by people who clearly enjoyed RPGs and wanted to make art about them. Even when I tried to run it, what I was running wasn't really HoL, it was a hyper-abridged version that I could compress into a few pages of notes.

gosh I'm just happy to remember HoL. What a fucking beautiful mess of a game.

Corp Borg

Mork Borg's very open licensing and very influential nature has bred a litany of copycats, one of which I actually bought because the setting is just right.

"Occult Corporate Comedy-Horror" is a great and, in my opinion, under-utilized setting.

When I last did an Inktober I mocked up some content in an Occult Corporate Comedy-Horror setting:

This is the setting of the very fun Laundry Files book series, an old favorite of mine I haven't revisited in a while (like many long-running series, the quality drops off as the author runs out of ideas):

basically, "the world as it is right now, but with supernatural horror, but because it's the world as it is right now we mostly just have to coexist with and manage the supernatural horror in a very matter-of-fact way.

Corp Borg takes the extra-grim position that the company that you work for is actively evil and working hard to end the world, which they will always manage to do inside of a handful of sessions. Your job is simply to survive the bureaucracy.

It's... well, it's no Mork Borg. I might need to buy Mork Borg and Cy Borg at some point: just to own them, they're beautiful. (Also: Mothership and its many zines.)

I can't buy HoL. Nobody owns a copy. I saw one online for over $400.