MÖRK BORG: Goblin Grinder
It's hard to look away from MÖRK BORG once your eyes get hold of it. Winner of four Ennies (three Gold, one Silver), MÖRK BORG exploded onto the tabletop scene in 2019 with their Kickstarter toting itself as a "Doom Metal album of game. Light on rules, heavy everything else." Creators Pelle Nilsson and Johan Nohr were right about that. If you've ever found yourself enjoying extreme metal (death, black, doom, or otherwise), you will find yourself quite at home thumbing through the beautiful pages of artwork presented in MÖRK BORG. The art, along with the incredibly grim and hopeless world building, set the tone for your game, and if that's not enough they even have a playlist on Spotify to listen to while you play the game.
Having a long and storied history with metal, I was instantly pulled to this grim and dark role-playing game rooted deeply in Swedish black & doom metal, as well as the OSR movement within tabletop role-playing games. Thankfully, several of my friends were also interested in the game, which has lead to several one-shots and some of the most outrageous events in my personal gaming history. This week I was lucky enough to play in one such game, where my friend and Game Master ran us through The Goblin Grinder, an adventure written by Ripley Caldwell which you can find for free here.
The game started out with our intrepid adventurers (not heroes), awakening after a haze inside the walls of a grand cathedral. Although the cathedral isn't part of the adventure, it served as a great introduction to the area and gave us a taste of the basilisk-centric religion of the world. Soon we were lead to the hook of the story: a child had turned into a goblin and the cure the mother had purchased, for a steep 45 silver, did not save the child, resulting in the child having to be put down. In the world of MÖRK BORG merely being in the presence of a goblin will turn you into one (in d6 days), so a goblin pandemic, or "gobdemic" if you prefer, can be a real threat to any population, and a real money maker to anyone purporting to sell a cure.
Over the course of next few hours we presented a chained goblin to the congregation of the church (and smashed it's head with a war hammer) to advertise ourselves as goblin-killers, caused severe hallucinations to the town's alchemist (who was selling the bunk "cure"), and hid in a pile of corpses to avoid the guard. MÖRK BORG has a way of bringing out the grimdark of a character, especially when you're using the SCVMBIRTHER character generator, which of course we all were. It is worth noting, however, that our game was full of laughs and the randomly generated characters usually have some sort of silly trait or item on them which can help break up the darkness if a table is getting too serious.
I won't be going into detail about the actual adventure, just in case you want to play it. I will note, however, that there was a bit of sleuthing involved, some clues here and there, a bit of a mystery, and an excellent hook that definitely gets the players invested in solving the case. All and all, the adventure probably took us about three or four hours (not including little breaks here and there), and we had an absolute blast. There were just as many moments of horror and disgust as there were laughing out loud and genuine excitement. As someone playing in a TTRPG, I couldn't have asked for more.
Overall I really enjoyed the Goblin Grinder. Although I had played MÖRK BORG before, this adventure served as a great introduction to the hellish setting of the game, and if you're looking to dip your toes into the world of MÖRK BORG, this is a great place to start. Find yourself a good group who likes to dig into the blood and grime, put on some THOU, and if you can stop headbanging long enough to describe how you kill and die, you'll have a great time.
