What's Money Eyes, Welcome back to Dragon's Greed Gaming. It is I your
host and forever GM, the Great Unclean One, welcoming you to another episode
today, kicking off the start of our merk Bore campaign in actual play series.
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We thank you all, and well, if you're new here, welcome.
This is Dragons Greed Gaming. We are a channel about all things gaming.
We've been doing things now for about two years, primarily focusing on our
podcast, actual play episodes of various role playing games. We've done some Warhammer
Fantasy fourth Edition roleplay, We've done some Alien and Blade Runner. We've just
recently finished a Warhammer forty thousand Wrath and Glory campaign and now you aren't joining
us for our next endeavor. We've also done some tail four gamers playing,
our building some armies for old school Warhammer Fantasy sixth Edition, and preparation for
the Old World. So if you want to follow our hobby journey there,
be sure to check us out over on YouTube for that and well as we
continue to grow and build the channel. We've got plenty more in the works,
plenty more coming out, and I've already planned some stuff for Halloween this
year too. So anyway, I guess before we delve in, if you're
new here, really quick, Who am I? I'm the great unclean one,
your host, and I've been the GM for pretty much all of our
games so far. Hopefully that's going to be changing soon, but more on
that later. Anyway, I've been playing games for a long time, as
long as I can remember, as we lad video games, board games,
RPG's, miniature games at one point or another. I've delved into it.
And the only thing I really haven't really touched our collectible card games. Not
really my style, but done. Tons of stuff started off, man,
what I start off with a blood Bull and Hero request or some of the
first intros to the miniature gaming world and Battlemasters that eventually got me into Warhammer
and ended up working for Games Workshop for about eight years in the two thousands,
right after high school. And ninety percent of my friends current are all
people that I met through Games Workshop customers and staff, old co workers of
mine, and yeah, I just I've delved into everything, man, I've
been gaming for a long time, and I started to get into RPGs around
high school. First played D and D and played a lot of D and
D over the years, and recently the last couple of years, really started
getting into other types of RPGs, which I regret did not happen sooner and
ever since COVID started, we started recording for the channel. So here we
are suffice to say I am I'm a gamer through and through. Even made
our own board game called Etherium that we brought to market a couple of years
ago. So if you see that float around that was that was from mine
and some other friends crazy minds. Anyway, that's enough about me. Let's
delve into our subject today. We're doing a very short introduction episode, as
we usually do when we hop to a new system. We like to try
to bring new systems to you guys, because there's so much more out there
than D and D and Pathfinder. And having played D and D for so
long and just really gotten kind of bored with it, I've just I've played
too much of it, you know, I've gotten worn out from it,
and I've realized there's so many other cool games out there that I enjoy.
And I've learned that I really like brutal fatal games that have a much more
high morality rate or for other players. So D and D can't quite scratch
that itch. But today we are delving into a game that you may or
may not have heard of. If you're into RPGs, I'm sure you have.
If you're new to RPGs or if really only been like in the D
and D camp, you may not have heard of it. But it's a
game called Merkborg or Mirkbior. It's a Swedish game currently being published by our
good friends over at Free League Publishing, and it is one of the craziest,
cool, bizarre things you will ever see. It's best described as a
Swedish doom metal RPG. Was created by two guys named Johann Norr and Pela
Nielsen. The two of them came up with this game that they brought to
Kickstarter back in May of twenty seventeen, was funding about an hour with almost
twelve hundred backers. By the end of it, they raised about as like
forty five or fifty grand US dollars. And well, this game took the
industry by storm. I was not aware of it at the time. I
wasn't really as diverse an RPGs then as I m now. But if you're
into like I said, if you're into RPGs now, it's all over the
place because this game has blown up. It has taken the gaming world by
storm. And when it first came out, it absolutely blew up at the
Any Awards. The Any Awards are I guess the best way I scribe is
kind of like the Grammys or the Emmys of RPGs. Basically, if you
win an Any Award, it means you've got a top tier game that you
know people should be looking at and checking out. And in I don't remember
what year it was, but the year of the Ennis that merk Boor came
out, it won eight Any just sweeping categories left and right. Six of
those were gold and two of those were silver, and it's just the most
out of left field thing. They won gold for Best Writing, Best Layout
in Design, Product of the Year, Best Supplement for their one of their
expansion books called Cultiferatory, Best Digital Aid and Accessory with their Monster Approaches table
kind of like a random generation for when a monster encounters the party, and
Gold for Best Online Content with their Dungeon Basically it's an online tool they have
to generate a dungeon for you to have your party go through. And then
they won silver for Best Game and Silver for Best Digital Aid Accessory also for
their dungeon thing that they have online. So it's a crazy game if you
haven't seen it, it's this little book with this bright yellow cover, crazy
black writing of the title across half of it, and this awesome looking skeleton
with a shield and a bloody sword and a weird like beast man pig head
thing. And when you open this thing up, it is unlike any ARTPG
you've ever seen. If you've have a chance, check out some of the
interviews with the two creators and they talk about how one of them I believe
it's Johan. He's the artist, the graphic designer, and he did graphic
design or he does graphic design for a living, and when they made this
game, they decided, let's throw every rule about graphic design out the window
and see what happens. So every single page has different layouts, different colors,
and most crazily different fonts. I think the book has over a hundred
different fonts in it, and it's just bizarre. And while some people think
it's a little hard to maneuver get through, the cool thing is is that
there's so much good art and stuff that sticks out. You don't necessarily need
to have good organization. You know, for example, if you need to
know how to generate the health, the starting health for your character, there's
a page with a big, nasty looking human heart on it, and it
tells you your HP right there. The whole book is filled with stuff like
that, lots of clashing colors, yellows and pinks, blacks and whites,
and it's just so cool and the game itself is very simple and straightforward.
They talk about how it kind of hearkens back to the old school days of
D and D, which some of us or you'll probably hear the term OSR
old school revival, old school renaissance. Basically this kind of new wave of
gaming and making games and playing games for RPGs that focuses more on how things
used to be back in the day when D and D first came out with
first edition and a D and D. Basically, the idea being it's more
about the journey. Rules are simple. The GM is encouraged to come up
with stuff on the fly because the rule systems don't get super in depth with
you know, things like drowning or falling damage or fire things like that.
The GM is encouraged to come up with that stuff as they play. And
rather than just oh, I make a search check to search the area,
or I make an observation test. You know, it's encouraged for the players
to really get into the mindset of the game and explain exactly what they're doing,
how are they searching this room, what are they searching in this area?
And it also kind of throws out the whole idea of quote unquote balance,
So rather than worrying about, Okay, everything you encounter is going to
be a balanced fight for the party, it takes a much more what some
people would argue realistic approach, in that you might stumble into an area that
you are just not capable of dealing with violence and fights and combat should not
be your first go to, should not be how you try to solve every
issue, and in many cases, combat should be avoided at all costs because
in these older games, characters are not these invincible superheroes. They can die
and they will die. And Merk Boor really takes this to the next level.
We've already recorded our first session for this game, and I can tell
you that it is an absolute blast and it's a breath of fresh air to
see how this all comes together. So let's talk a little bit just about
the game itself and kind of how it works. This game is all about
random charts and dice rolling for procedural generation, which, if you're new to
that might seem a little weird or off putting, but it's cool. It's
exciting. Everything in this book Trips of Flavor. Basically, merk Bore takes
place in a medieval fantasy Gothic world and it's described as a dying world.
Basically, the premise is that this world it has an impending apocalypse that's about
to happen, and the game itself is seeing what your players do with the
time they have left. Do they go dungeon delving to get treasure and get
rich. Are they a bunch of evil bastards off doing whatever they want because
they know the world's about to end anyway, or are they actually maybe trying
to find a way to avert this impending apocalypse. This game is burgling in
your face. It's meant to be dark and bloody and gritty and violent and
has some very awesome influences from a lot of heavy metal and black metal.
They've even released a couple like a song playlists and soundtracks. There's bands that
have put music together for it to inspire it, and it really gives this
game a really crazy cool feel, and after having played our first session,
I can tell you if you just go into this game and just enjoy it
for the joy of this crazy, goofy dungeon delving ROMP, rather than worrying
about some crazy meta plot or intricate plot threads or things like that, it's
a blast. Obviously, there's still a little bit of story there, and
you can take that as far as you want, but we're not sweating it
too much. We're just having a fun, cool game that so far everyone
has really enjoyed. We're are we looking forward to our session for tonight's session
too. Anyway, So the world's ending. There's actually a mechanic in the
game to support this. Basically, every day that passes in game the start
of the campaign, you decide how long you want your campaign to go to
be, and that will determine the size of dice that you roll. This
game does use D twent, another multi sided dice like D and D.
That's kind of where these similarities end, though. So you decide how long
you want your campaign to run, and you pick one of these dice sizes.
The game suggests either a D one hundred. All the way down to
a D two and basically every time you roll one of those dice, if
you roll a one, a misery occurs. And there's a chart of these
prophecies you roll on, which are all these terrible things that start to happen
as the world comes to an end. You know, the birds fall out
of the sky, plants wither up and die, flooding, things like that,
and you're encouraged to implement that into your campaign as the world gets worse
and worse, and once seven miseries occur, the final apocalypse happens and the
world ends. It's up to the GM and the players to decide exactly what
that looks like or how that comes to be. But the idea is the
game is then over, the world is destroyed, and as the book says,
you then burn the book. So yeah, that's what we're doing in
our campaign. We're going to play until the world ends. We're speeding it
up with just starting with a D six for our misery die, and as
the miseries get more and more, the Misery Die is going to get smaller
and smaller, down to a D four and a D two. So as
the world ends, it's going to speed up, so we'll see what our
players decide to do with time they have remaining in this dying, dying world.
Now, the rules for the game, being an OSR style game,
are super simple, and if you use any of the online resources or the
fan made stuff for foundry, it is even faster and easier. Most of
the game revolves around D twenty. Character creation is pretty much super straightforward.
You can randomly generate everything. You can also use optional class, which it
seems most people do. The classes give you all sorts of weird cool abilities,
and they are unlike anything you've ever seen. This isn't like D and
D or you have a wizard and a paladin and a thief. No,
this is you have a fanged deserter, or a forlorn philosopher, or a
wretched royalty or a gutter born scum. And when you pick one of these
classes, or if you roll with one of them, it'll tell you how
you know, how many hit points you start with your starting gear, and
then some cool background stuff like you know what kind of poisons can you make?
What kind of unique piece of family heirloom do you carry with you?
Or how did you end up? You know on the streets as this scum
that wanders around, or what kind of deal did you make with some other
world entity to get your powers? Things like that, And not only do
they give you some background when you make those rolls, but they usually dictate
some of your starting powers, abilities, and gear as well. You roll
for some other starting gear as well, basic stuff like your weapons and equipment,
which could be anything from nothing to heavy armor to a femur s your
main weapon. Of course, there's a small vicious dog in there as well
that you can get, and then some other goofy shit as well. Magic
in this game is done through scrolls, unclean scrolls and tablets of obscurity.
I think there's another type of scroll as well, But basically you roll a
D twenty to try to cast your spell. You can cast so many a
day, you know, usually between like three to seven spells a day or
powers. And I mean these powers are not just like you cast fireball is
It is much more insane than that, you know. It's things like oh,
your your tongue rots out and your your skeleton lead us your body and
begins to walk around like weird, weird shit like that. And of course
the GM is always encouraged to push that envelope further. You also have your
four abilities, which are like your attribute scores, Agility, presence, strength,
and toughness. Agility is for your dexterity based things, including ranged attacks.
I'm sorry, no, it's not for range attacks, but things like
your defense, balance, swimming, fleeing. Your presence is usually for things
like any sort of manipulation, charming, ranged attacks, and perceiving things around
you, like your observation. Strength obviously how hard you hit, how much
you can lift, how much you can carry, and toughness you know how
much you can resist, and also influences your starting hit points. Usually,
if you're using classes, you roll three D six. You add those together
and that'll tell you what your stat is. So it's not like in D
and D RE add those together and your strength is a fifteen. It's okay,
I rolled to fifteen. My strength is plus two, and so you
all of your abilities. Your attributes will be from a negative three up to
or positive three anywhere in between. And when you roll, you simply make
a test. You'll have a DR, which is a difficulty rating that either
is a signed by the GM or the game, usually twelve is the average.
If the DR is higher than that, the task is more difficult.
If it's lower than that, it's easier. And you have to roll equal
to or higher than the DR on a D twenty to pass the test,
and if you have any modifiers from your abilities or any gear things like that,
you add those accordingly. So if your strength is plus two and you're
going for a DR twelve test, if you rolled an eleven, you'll add
plus two for your plus two to strength. That'll make it a thirteen.
Thirteen's higher than twelve you passed. Now the really cool thing. It's very
different to get your head around, but as a GM and having played this,
I can tell you it's freaking awesome. This game is pretty much all
player facing with the dice rolls, which means all the roles are done out
in front of everybody, and the players pretty much make all the roles.
When a monster attacks you, as the GM tell them what the DR is,
usually twelve, but sometimes it's different and they roll to defend themselves rather
than you're rolling to make the attack for the monster. And so even though
it's a little thing from a GM perspective, it feels less like you're targeting
the players or maybe coming at them, and it feels more like the fate
of the characters in the players hands. So if you failed your defensive role,
that's on you, not me, because my monster rolled a D twenty
and crushed you. So action economy is really simple. You get an action
to turn in a move. They describe the move as being able to move
across a regular sized room, average sized room, whatever that means. So
again, it's not like other games like D and D which has this huge
action list, or or Alien or Blade Runner, which has a very specific
types of actions. It's very just if the GM says you can do it,
if it makes sense, if it seems feasible or plausible, let it
happen. Initiative is also a little bit different than what you might expect.
You roll a D six, there's just one person rolls one D six,
and if you roll a one, two or three, the bad guys go
first. If you roll four or five or six, the good guys,
well, the players go first. They all go. They change their order,
so if the players get to go, they can choose who in the
group acts first. But yeah, it's so it's a kind of an all
or nothing. System. Combat in this game is fairly brutal. Most characters,
you know, they're going to have like a D eight for their hit
dice, you know, plus or minus whatever their toughness may be, so
you can have a minimum of one. You might have a lower hit die
if you're using some of the class options D four, D six, So
most of our guys had between three and like eight hit points, and you
know, most weapons do like D six or D eight or even D ten
damage. If you roll a N at twenty on an attack, you do
double damage, and if you roll an at twenty on defense, you get
to make a free attack, so those are critical hits. If you roll
a one, it's a critical fumble. Your weapon can break, your armor
can get damaged, you can take extra damage from monsters things like that,
and armor just does damage reduction, so you'll have armor that's either light,
medium or heavy and reduced damage by D two I think D three or D
four, so between like one and four points of damage can be absorbed,
which doesn't sound like a lot, but when someone's only swinging for D or
a D six damage, it can actually be a big deal. But we
only have six hit points. Pretty scary character death. You're gonna it's gonna
happen. You're gonna see it. If you hit zero hit points, you're
broken. You roll on a D four table to see what happens. One
of those results is dead anyway, So there's still twenty five percent chance you're
dead either way. The other ones may meet and things like that, losing
body parts and you know, bleeding out, things like that. If you
roll a if you get into negative hit points, you're dead. That's a
game over. Make a new character, and well tune into our first episode
to see how that works out, because it's fucking crazy. Now. As
I mentioned, with some of the ennis and some of the awesomeness of this
game, this game has an epically huge and active community. The creators actively
encourage people to take this game hold apart, make it your own, come
out with content, and there was even lots of fan made content at the
beginning that they made official with some of their expansions, adding in some new
classes and some dungeons and things like that, some adventures, and there's tons
out there that while it's not official, it might as well be because the
community has really grasped onto the art style and feel of this game, and
even if it's not officially endorsed by the mark Borg team, a lot of
the stuff out there is really really cool. There's even some other games that
have come out. There's Cyborg, which is the cyberpunk version. There's Pirate
Borg where you get to be pirates on the high seas, and orc Borg,
all sorts of other stuff in between. So you may not have seen
it everywhere, but in the depths of the internet and in the RTPG world,
it's really it's really become a big thing, and there's just all much
stuff to get your hands on, and if you go to their website,
be prepared to have your mind blown for just what a weird website it is.
But pretty much everything for this game you can get online for free.
There's stripped down version of the rules. There's a bare bone edition of the
rule book if you just want to have the text without all the crazy formatting.
It's the one complaint I would have. There are some thoughts that are
a little hard to read in some places, especially when you're getting to like
some of the the lore in the game. There's not a lot, but
there's some to kind of give you a feel for what's going on. There's
a cool map of the continent that the game takes place on. Some of
the font can be a little hard to read in places, you know,
especially when you get some of that fancy gothic lettering. Am I looking at
an A or an O? But other than that, if that's too much
for you, then get the Bare Bones edition. It's free to download on
their website. There's tons of adventure. As I said, they have a
random dungeon generator which will generate kind of some small plot hooks, some rooms
for your characters to explore, and you can generate it with monsters. There's
stuff in the book to procedurally generate creatures and rather than like, oh,
it's D six orcs or you know, you're fighting a bear. You roll
on this crazy monster approaches table and you get stuff like the the monster drags
itself towards you and it wants to feast on flash, or it's got this
weird buzzing noise and it's black, staticky creature. Rather than rather than really
concrete descriptions, it's much more nebulous and leaves the horror up to the mind.
And again there's tons of community stuff as well that you can use if
you want to expand that or just come up with your own crazy shit.
When you start to read some of the rules in this game and things that
people have put out, you'll realize that just you know, as an OSR
game is supposed to be, you are encouraged to take the bull by the
horns and go crazy. So get creative, get goofy with it, and
you will not stray too far from the mark. Other than that, man,
I don't know what else to say about this game. It's m oh.
There's also a character generator on their website. Click of a button,
you've got it done. Not that character creation takes long as a matter of
fact, and you're done listening to this episode right now at this very moment.
You can also listen to our session zero, which in total only lasts
about an hour, and that includes doing character creation for three of our four
players. The Frog wasn't able to make it, but he's joins us next
week, and we also do like a test combat to see how it works.
We get all that done in like under an hour, which is pretty
cool, and if you're playing in Foundry, the awesome thing. And we
actually ended up using this spoiler. We ended up using this in our first
session. If your character gets killed, there's a button on your character sheet
and foundry. One click of the button will completely randomly generate in a brand
new character for you, completely done, including art for your character and a
name. Awesome. Even though you can do character generation once you've done it
once or twice, you probably literally get it done in about five minutes,
it does it in like two seconds. So these guys deserve some mad applause
because they've made the game nearly as accessible as humanly possible. You can basically
get the game for free and go check it out. And if you buy
the book, they tell you to burn it when you're done playing, so
you know they don't they don't mind how you do things. So check it
out where Like I said, you can listen to our session zero after this
and then the week af we will start our campaign and yeah, check it
out. See what if you dig it? I promise you after playing through
our first session, you're going to really have a blast. And as I
always say, embrace the chaos and embrace character death. It is a breath
of fresh air and you will not be sorry for trying it out. So
we're gonna keep it short today. I probably rambled down a little bit too
long. Thank you so much for stopping by to check it out. Just
wanted to give you guys a little taste of what you're in store for.
Again. That's Mark or Murk is how it's pronounced mlrk with the umlauts mark
bore borg bor. I don't know that that second part. I haven't figured
out how to pronounce. Everybody says it differently, even the creators. It
seems so Mark Bore. That's Dark Fort or Dark Castle and Swedish. Check
it out to the Doom Metal RPG. Thank you so much for stopping by.
We will see you hopefully in a few minutes at session zero, and
then we will see you next week when we start off. So, same
time, same place, ninety nights,