Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Mork Borg: Solitary Confinement Part 4

Mork Borg: Solitary Defilement (10d+5)
Written & Designed by…? (no specific names on the document)

Read Part One, where I explain the rules/tone of Mork Borg and this solo supplement.

You can get this set of solo rules here.

This playthrough also uses the Mork Borg Core Rules as well as the Feretory supplement.

Instead of using the core book & its included classes, I used a third-party class I’d found on itch.io. Let me introduce you to the Murderous Marionette. 

I rolled through some of the Mork Borg core book tables to flesh out my character and his adventure. His name is Träpojke, a puppet made by a disturbed hermit in the mountains of a distant land. The hermit had initially intended to use Träpojke to lure children into his lair, where he would feast on them. However, the spirits of the children who had already been killed by this monster prayed, and these prayers were heard by the Fae who lived in the misty mountains. They woke the wood sprite that slept within the wood Träpojke was made of, and he went on a murderous rampage, bludgeoning his creator to death with the very mallet used in his creation. 

Träpojke wandered through those mountains until he came to the shore. Curious about what lay on the other side of the vast ocean, he climbed aboard a fishing boat. A storm destroyed the ship, and the puppet sat floating in the water on a piece of driftwood. A whale swallowed up him and some of the wreckage. Träpojke became furious at this leviathan and went about murdering him from the inside and spent an unknown amount of time dwelling inside the carcass of a dead whale. The body washed up on the shores of the Dying Lands, where Träpojke carved his way out (explaining the 5 rations worth of lard I randomly rolled).

As a puppet, Träpojke does not need to eat or sleep. He explored the dense forests of Sarkash in the northeastern corner of The Dying Lands for months before he came upon a badly burned priest. Graft is a badly burnt priest of the Creton order. He wants the Devoted of the Slumbering Behemoth proven wrong. He was trying to knock over the coffin and show the fetid corpse inside, showing we are not the giant’s dream. Trapokje is happy to do this because he has a chance to murder. The Devoted are passing through Galgenbeck soon and heading towards Sarkash. If you remember, the Devoted was the cult encountered in the very first adventure of this series by Wemut the Gutterborn Scum.

This would be a Depressing ranked journey, meaning four milestones: 9 days of travel from Sarkash to Galgenbeck, locating the Devoted, opening the giant’s coffin, and killing as many Devoted as Träpojke can get his puppet hands on. 

Day one starts with rolling thunder in the distance as Träpojke makes his way down one of the well-used main roads to Galgenbeck. He comes to a crossroads, but the written word means nothing to this wooden boy. He randomly picks a direction only to be ambushed by the infamous Adnah the Troll, the same beast who squashed Wemut. Träpojke chooses to flee this fight, rolling 16 & 18 against a DR12. 

Day two reveals the promise of the thunder with hammering rain. Träpojke cannot get wet, so he goes off-road, using the canopy of trees as a makeshift umbrella. He stumbles across an ancient battlefield littered with skeletons and armor. Träpojke wonders if he might find a nice sharp blade, better than the bluntness of the wooden mallet. A search for objects falls, and three undead soldiers rise after having their final resting places disturbed. 

As a player, I remembered to use my Omens this time and avoided two devastating Defensive roll fails. Using some of the lard in his satchel, Träpojke greases up the ground before him. However, the zombies avoid the trap and attempt to grapple Träpojke. At one point, the puppet puts his little wooden fist straight through a zombie skull, causing it to topple to the ground. After a back and forth, Träpojke is eventually snatched up by the undead and torn apart, ending his journey almost as soon as it began.

Yes, I could have been resurrected because he is a puppet, but I decided to end it there. My reflections on Mork Borg and this solo player variation are that I had a lot of silly fun. I’ve seen some comments on social media from people frustrated with how quickly characters die in this game, but that’s just part of the OSR experience to a certain degree. When playing something built on the Apocalypse World engine, I have a greater expectation that my character can persist, as those games are about building narratives. Mork Borg was more about using evocative artwork and tables to create a strange & fascinating world. The characters were just part of the flavor of this dark world. I would be interested in a longer form story within the world of the Dying Lands, so maybe in the future, I’ll try to come up with a framework that helps us live a bit longer. There is a fan-made Ironsworn/Mork Borg mash-up called Morksworn that might be worth looking into.

This will not be the end of our time with the Mork Borg system. I will play Lonesome Drifter in November, the solo player variation on the Mork Borg- American Western hack Frontier Scum. Keep your eyes out for that.