Mörk Borg Alternatives: Grim, Rules-Light RPGs (and Which Work Solo)
Mörk Borg, by Pelle Nilsson and Johan Nohr, published by Free League in 2020, made a whole corner of the hobby look different. It’s an apocalyptic fantasy game with a page-thin ruleset, loud art, characters who die constantly and a world that is ending anyway. If you loved it and want more of that — or you want the grimness without the heavy-metal styling, or something that works when you’re playing on your own — this is a short list of where to go next. One of them is ours, and it’s marked.
A note before the list: Mörk Borg itself is a group game with a GM, and so are most games like it. If you want to play any of these alone, pair them with an oracle (see solo RPG oracles). Where a game works solo with little effort, the entry says so.
CY_BORG
The cyberpunk sibling, from the same stable and compatible with Mörk Borg’s rules: corporate dystopia, punks with nothing to lose, the same lethal rules-light core, with the black metal swapped for noise and industrial. If what you loved was the attitude and the speed, this is the obvious next step.
Solo? Group-first. Works with an oracle.
Pirate Borg
Limithron’s Pirate Borg, published by Free League, takes the Mörk Borg engine to sea: ship combat, undead crews, cursed treasure, rum and horror. It’s a fuller book than the original, with more tables and more to do between disasters.
Solo? Group-first. Its many random tables make it easier to run alone than most.
Into the Odd
Chris McDowall’s Into the Odd is industrial horror and cosmic strangeness in a few pages of rules, and it’s one of the games the whole rules-light movement grew out of. The remastered edition is distributed by Free League, with graphic design by Johan Nohr, who also co-created Mörk Borg, so it shares some of the look. Death is a few bad rolls away, but the game is as much about wonder as dread.
Solo? Group-first, but its simplicity makes it one of the easiest to bolt an oracle onto.
Cairn
Yochai Gal’s Cairn is an adventure game about exploring a dark, mysterious Wood full of strange folk, hidden treasure and things you shouldn’t have woken. It’s folk horror rather than heavy metal, and it’s free: the whole text is released under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Solo? Group-first; its light rules and wilderness focus suit solo play with an oracle well.
Knave
Ben Milton’s Knave is less a game than a toolkit for running old-school fantasy without classes: every character is a tomb-robbing ne’er-do-well who can wield a spellbook as easily as a blade, and you are expected to add, cut and change rules to suit you. If what you liked about Mörk Borg was how little rules there were, this is that, unbranded.
Solo? Group-first, but it’s compatible with a huge range of old-school adventures, and plenty of solo players use it.
Mausritter
Isaac Williams’s Mausritter is the oddity on the list: brave mice in a dangerous world, in the line of Redwall and Mouse Guard. It’s gentler in tone, but the rules are just as lean and the world just as deadly to something the size of a mouse. Its rules are available free as a Creative Commons SRD.
Solo? Group-first, but popular with solo players.
Foked (ours)
We make Foked, so take this entry with that in mind. If what you want is Mörk Borg’s lethality but you’re playing alone, Foked was built for exactly that: solo-first, with groups of two or three as the variant. It’s set in Hellsborough, a parallel Sheffield under a living fog, with a motto of “no magic, only violence”: grim folk horror rather than heavy-metal apocalypse. Everything runs on two six-sided dice and three stats, Grit, Wit and Murk, and the stats are your health, so every wound makes the next roll harder. The oracle is built in, and a Murk Clock punishes you for resting or dawdling.
Solo? Yes, by design. The core rules and first scenario are free. Short, free one-evening scenarios are at the Postcard Adventures.
How to choose
- You want more Mörk Borg: CY_BORG or Pirate Borg.
- You want weird and industrial: Into the Odd.
- You want folk horror and it has to be free: Cairn.
- You want to build your own: Knave.
- You want something kinder, or to play with younger players: Mausritter.
- You’re playing alone: Foked, or any of the above with an oracle.
For what “grimdark” really means at the table, see grimdark RPG settings; for the folk-horror side, folk-horror tabletop RPGs; and for playing alone in general, the overview of solo tabletop RPGs.
Books
