Episode Details

How to play Mork Borg.

Hi everyone, this is a special how to play episode of Firebreathing Kittens podcast. I’m the game master for an upcoming session using the rules for Mork Borg. This episode is a summary of what I learned after reading the rule book. Hopefully this will be a handy guide for how to play for my players, will help me organize myself, and will be useful for you listeners, too, who are looking to play your own Mork Borg game.

I’ll organize this how to play guide into sections.

1. Game category

2. Combat rules

3. Zero hit points

4. Abilities

5. Magic

6. Omens

7. Building an example character

8. How to level up

Game category. Mork Borg describes itself as a doom metal album of a game. A spiked flail to the face. Rules light, heavy everything else. It’s set in a world driven insane by accurate prophecies foretelling the end of days. You’ll face goblins, trolls, and blood drenched skeletons. How will you react to the certain impending death of the world? By robbing graves for soil-stained wealth, or facing down the apocalypse, hoping it can be fought? You can play as character classes, such as the esoteric hermit, occult herbmaster, or gutterborn scum. Your character might be a nihilist, someone who stutters when lying, an inveterate bug eater, or maybe you’ll tap into the magic all around you and call down some arcane calamities of your own.

This is Mork Borg. A tabletop roleplaying game famous for its artistic rule book. Bright yellow, darkest black, blood red. I encourage you all to check out the rule book even if only from an art perspective. You’ve got nothing to lose because if you don’t like the art style, the creators offer a free bare bones edition that has all unusual layouts removed. It’s just black font on a white background. But that would be a bit sad. I first heard about Mork Borg from a conversation about which tabletop roleplaying game had the most beautiful rule book. Mork Borg and the spinoffs it has inspired are really something special. So if you haven’t browsed this rule book, give it a try. Maybe hearing this explanation of the rules will help smooth your experience. I dunno, let’s get into it.

Combat rules in Mork Borg. All the dice rolls in Mork Borg are made by the players. That includes combat turn order, players attacking an enemy, and when players are def