Building the Apocalypse: A Mörk Borg Solo Setup Guide

Laying the groundwork for glorious, inevitable failure...

Meester van Delft, Low Countries from the Rijksmuseum Collection. PublicDomain. Tweaked by me in Canva

I’ve been hurling myself headlong into the doom, the despair and the doom of Mörk Borg over the past week. This post will make more sense if you read my overview of the game and my character creation posts first!

So I have my short, sneaky and (frankly) slimy Gutterborn Scum, Vagal Grin rolled and ready. What we need now is a pocket of the world for him to explore, along with some quest sparks and (trying to use the correct terminology) an “inciting incident!”

The tools I have to work with are the beautiful Core Book, my walloping great 303-page ring-bound collection of supplements and a fistful of polyhedral dice. Inside my ring-bound book are Solitary Defilement (solo system), Solitary Depths (extra juice for Solitary Defilement, plus overland travel and more oracles), Feretory and Heretic (the two “official” zines), Alone in the Crowd (city and town supplement) and Apocrypha (more of everything!)

But I’m starting online—with the amazing DNGNGEN, the official online dungeon generator. This is the bleeding-edge app on the game’s website built for the Mörk Borg acolytes to create chaos and majesty alike.

With every tap, this app conjures evocative randomness: twisted dungeons, nameless horrors, cursed treasures, and twisted plot hooks, all drenched in doom-laden art and dripping atmosphere.

Not happy with what crawls out of the screen? One click randomises everything. Nearly happy? Click on separate categories to tweak only that box. When you're happy, one click makes a PDF or sends it to the printer! It’s genius!

Here’s what I settled on after a few little tweaks and clicks…

So, I’m going to explore a place called “The Festering Ditch of Grugl”—because “dungeon” doesn’t just mean underground tunnels and caverns, it can also be vaults, temples, pits, forts, catacombs, keeps, and loads of others!

You’ll see we have four main rooms at the bottom (sorry, the text is a little blurry, but that doesn’t matter right now). We’re looking for four unique rooms, along with other features such as caves, tunnels, and vaults. Once we deal with the last of the four special rooms, we will have completed the dungeon.

The overall size of the dungeon will determine the frequency with which we are likely to encounter these rooms. A small dungeon with, say, 7-10 rooms is going to “spawn” one around half the time—but a dungeon of 30 rooms means we’ll be doing a LOT more exploring to uncover the unique rooms we are searching for. Neat!

Anyway, before we even arrive at the gateway into the dungeon (which appears to be a lighthouse!), let’s focus on the inciting incident suggested by the larger text in the middle, with (blurry) heading “what brings you here?”

“Roadside Inn, Mysterious Stranger, Promise of Silver. It’s like you dreamt this, or read it somewhere?”

There is a lot to spark ideas in that “prompt”, eh?

How I put some (rancid) meat on the creaking bones

OK, let’s start “building out” from this prompt. And, firstly, I turn to the fabulous Solitary Defilement supplement…

Now, for those of us who came from having played Ironsworn, we’re gonna feel at home with the solo ruleset, since it relies on “moves” to progress the story, along with the “strong hit”, “weak hit” and “miss” mechanics from Shawn Tomkin’s classic.

The first move offered is “Begin an Adventure,” where we structure our adventure according to how many milestones we will (hopefully) meet on our journey. This is a starter quest, so I’m going for four, which breaks down thus:

1. Establish the quest and gather information

2. Journey to the Ditch

3. Survive the Ditch and locate the quest item

4. Journey back to the Inn and complete the quest

Each milestone offers us the opportunity to “Get Better,” the Mork Borg equivalent of levelling up. We’ll get to that when (or if) it applies!

But before any of that, we need to flesh out our inn…

“Welcome to The Crawling Parasite. Abandon Hope all who Enter…”

The official zine, Feretory, features a couple of pages of tables to roll on for creating a creepy and disturbing drinking establishment. Oddly enough, it doesn’t have a table for the name of the inn, so I flicked through the pages of my ring-bound monster and saw a denizen called “Crawling Parasite”—and decided it sounded horrific enough for my lonely inn.

But there is a table for the innkeeper. I roll a d4 and a d6, and learn that the barkeep, idly wiping a mug with a filthy, excretion-stained cloth, is called Drugel.

Now it starts getting typically Mörk Borg! We have a table for “Why is the innkeeper twitching?” 🤪 Yes, really! Only in Mörk Borg, eh? I see that one patron in the bar is a disguised necromancer! (Apparently, nearly all are, but one of them is especially hopeless at disguising himself, lol).

We need a “questgiver.” A d20 roll later, and we are looking for a dude with the (I assume, descriptive) name of “No Nose.” For flavour (if that’s the correct term), I roll on the cut-price menu oracle and find out that No Nose is scoffing a bowl of watery femur soup…

** channels Homer Simpson** “Mmm… Femur Soup”

We have a fair idea of where we are headed with this. I just need a rare or unique item to be the goal of a quest, and the first page of the Mörk Borg Core Book has the table I need…

I stepped into the Crawling Parasite. The air stank of mould, smoke, and old blood. Shadows hung heavy, swallowing what little light there was. A few curious travellers, looking like they had something to hide, are drinking at tables. In the corner, a bent, broken old man hunched over a bowl of grey water that passed for soup.

I went to the bar. The barkeep, a hollow man with cracked lips, wiped a filthy mug with a cloth stained by things I didn’t care to name. He didn’t look up when I spoke.

“Drugel,” he said, voice flat. He twitched his chin toward the hunched figure.

“No Nose. He’s your man.”

I forced down the bile in my throat and walked over. As I neared, I saw the truth of the name—his face was a ruin, with nothing but a dark pit where his nose should be.

I dragged a chair close. “I hear there’s silver for the bold.” No Nose shoved his bowl away. The watery slop rippled like something still alive. His red, wet eyes locked on mine.

“What would you say,” he whispered, his breath sour, “if I told you of a torch that, once lit, makes you untouchable? Nothing—no blade, no curse, no beast—can kill you.”

“Sounds like a tale for drunks.”

His hand shot out, clammy and shaking, gripping my sleeve. “It’s real. Think of what men would pay—merchants, priests, kings—for a flame that laughs at death…”

Solitary Defilement in action….with my custom Move cards

OK, I’ve got my inciting incident and quest, together with milestones to hit along the way. All I need now is some sense of scale—how big is “my” world? This time, I flick through my book to find Solitary Depths, the expansion to Solitary Defilement (which in itself is an expansion to the Core Book…. please keep up 😝)

There are eight named regions in Mörk Borg, which is convenient for a d8 roll—and I find myself in The Valley of Unfortunate Undead.

Further rolls on the Solitary Depths tables give me more flavour:

• (Descriptor) “Poisoned Air, Desolate Plains”

• (Trait) Dead Quiet

• (Feature) Ditch

• (Discovery) Tracks

• (Monsters) Prowler (from Core Book)

• (NPC I might meet) Pilgrim/Hermit/Prophet

I want to understand more about the scale of my world: How far will I need to travel to get where I’m going? I turn to Feretory again, where it suggests that the distance from the Valley of the Unfortunate Dead to Bergen Crypt is d8+2 days. Now, of course, this isn’t “canon”—it’s one envisioning of a world that has no canonical distances.

Still, this seems like it’s a helpful way to understand the distances involved. I roll my d8 and get a four, add the +2 and “decide” it would be a six-day walk. I’m going to say, in the absence of a better option, that my destination (The Festering Ditch of Grugl) is roughly halfway between the two locations. It will take me three days to walk to the Festering Ditch, and I’ll use the tables in Solitary Depths and Feretory to bring that journey to life!

“I’m Getting Better All the Time”

Just one more thing before I sign off for this instalment: I’ve quietly hit my first milestone by locating my mark and gaining my quest.

Now, you could argue that I’ve “cheesed” that by doing little more than show up, envisage some narrative, and be repulsed by revolting soup. That’s a fair point!

BUT remember: I’m a solo character in a (lethal) world built for groups.

I saw a Reddit user argue that solo players should give themselves a couple of early “wins” to compensate for being alone. And I’m going to do that to avoid my character(s) getting squished within seconds of arriving in the world. Fair?

The rules for “Getting Better” are in the Core Book and involve a few options, such as increasing hit points, finding treasure and modifying attributes. In the Spirit of Mörk Borg, you can actually “Get Worse” from this supposed levelling up, should the dice fall in such a way as to reduce an attribute!

I’m opting for the “finding random crap in the debris” option, hoping for a scroll—and, voila, I roll a five which affords me an unclean scroll. I roll a six with a d10 on the oracle and gain something with the snappy title of “Nine Voilet Signs Unknot the Storm”

It’s a scroll I can use four times a day to unleash lightning bolts that blast foes (or friends, I imagine) for six damage each. Sweet…

And with that, I’m ready to depart. Join me in a few days for “what happens next”

Just as I’m about to leave, a clammy hand clamps onto my sleeve, the grip is cold as grave-water. If he’s trying NOT to look like a necromancer, he’s doing a piss-poor job.

“Friend,” he croaks, “best take a shit in the privvy before ye go. Fortune favours the bold.” I’ve no idea what he means. But the soup—if you can call that grey sludge soup—sits wrong in my gut, so I figure I might as well.

The privvy door hangs off its hinges, swollen with rot. Inside: a heap of filth that looks less like waste and more like an offering. Piss, skin shavings, vomit, and human detritus all mashed into one festering shrine. But there, jutting from the muck, I see it—a scroll. The papyrus is half-rotted, the ink smeared, but the Frubilic words still crawl across it: “Nine Villet Signs Unknot the Storm.” Even I know what that means. Lightning.

I snatch it from the pile, gagging at the stench, and hurry back to the bar to thank the corpse-wizard. But his chair is empty…