I spent last weekend at PAX Unplugged in Philadelphia. It had been a long time since I’d last attended a tabletop gaming conference of any kind with my game-loving partner, and I pushed to have us attend this, both because-of and despite how it slotted perfectly between two other interstate trips that filled out most of November for us. We traded away a chance to catch our breath at home for several days of exhausting overstimulation that reminded me why I love non-digital games at least as much as video games, and caught me up on recent trends and innovations I’d been missing. It was a terrible idea, and I regret nothing.

One thing I learned about was Mörk Borg, a loud but minimalist tabletop role-playing game system by Pelle Nilsson and Johan Nohr of Sweden. Its design and aesthetic—of the game’s rules, and of its slim, hardbound, bright yellow rulebook—draw heavily from the native music of the designers’ home country, by which I mean black metal. While certainly not the first marriage of fantasy TTRPGs and metal I’ve encountered, it is the first example of the so-called New School Renaissance that has spoken to me.

Here’s me trying to explain my interest to someone in a group chat the other day:

Eyes go glassy Mörk Borg—technically pronounced something like “Murk Bory” but I understand the Swedish designers to recognize an “official compromise” of “Murk Borg”—is an example of the so-called “New School Renaissance (NSR)”, an extension of the earlier “Old School Renaissance” led by grognards who missed the pace and flavor of decades-past D&D and other ancient TTRPGs. NSR games try to remix the attitude of older games with newer philosophies and innovations in game design.

Mörk Borg, in particular, emphasizes a fast-play, rules-light stance with a broadly sketched but highly evocative apocalyptic setting inspired by doom metal. The designers have opted to hold its IP loosely, resulting in a flourishing of third-party content for it in just the last few years. At PAX Unplugged there were so many vendors selling Mörk Borg supplements that one of them set up a scavenger hunt just to visit them all. Complete-system offshoots designed by other entities include CY_BORG and Pirate Borg.

It is my dream to run at least one Mörk Borg adventure before the final Misery is rolled, the prophecy of Psalm VII is fulfilled, and the face of the black disk Yetsabu-Nech covers the sun, and a darkness swallows the darkness forever. Collapses into a pile of mouldering bones

So, yes, all of that. The rulebook—a riotously laid-out affair that reminds me of nothing so much as The Book of the Sub-Genius or The Principia Discordia—includes a starter adventure called “Rotblack Sludge”, and I am practicing by playing it solo with generative-AI assistance, treating the chatbot as a group of players at my table. The bot’s constant forgetfulness and bad dice-math interspersed with moments of surprising insight makes for a suitable GM training dummy, I find.