mork borg – PopCult Reviews

31 Days of Character Creation #19 – Death in Space

So I had a different ttrpg in mind for this day, but when I sat down and started working through it I found the character creation rules to be very poorly laid out and communicated. I think being a primary school teacher for over ten years has left me always looking for streamlined, visual, easy to comprehend tabletop systems. There are a lot of people who play and ttrpgs in the sciences or other technical fields and they often make their games in a way that makes sense to them, but not to someone new. As a teacher, my brain is always thinking about how that new person can be caught up easily.

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – CY_Borg Part Four

CY_Borg (Free League Publishing)
Written and designed by Christian Sahlén and Johan Nohr

You can purchase CY_Borg here

You can download the CY_litary De.file_ment solo rules here

Read how Zalec’s adventure began here

Before Zalec heads to The Fickle Fig, she doubles back to Blink the Tinkerer, tossing them the packet of Vurt. Blink grins from ear to ear and gestures that Zalec can take any item she likes. Among the shelves, the gearhead discovers a SmartMine. This object is just like a typical mine – triggered by pressure – but it has cloaking tech, so it blends into any surface you place it on. That could come in handy. The only problem is that Zalec can’t tell what the mine will do when set off.

(Because I double-backed, I’m making myself have to get through one more street before my destination.)

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – CY_Borg Part Three

CY_Borg (Free League Publishing)
Written and designed by Christian Sahlén and Johan Nohr

You can purchase CY_Borg here

You can download the CY_litary De.file_ment solo rules here

Read how our last CY_Borg adventure ended here

For this playthrough of CY_Borg, I decided to go with one of the six classes in the core book. A d6 roll had me as an Orphaned Gearhead. Things are named very specifically in all the Borg games, but the text doesn’t define them. This evocative design makes it so that each player or group’s experience with CY_Borg will be very different while still following basic genre tropes. I interpreted “Orphaned” as someone who had been under the guardianship of a corporation and then dropped when that corp dissolved or was taken over.

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – CY_Borg Part Two

CY_Borg (Free League Publishing)
Written and designed by Christian Sahlén and Johan Nohr

You can purchase CY_Borg here

You can download the CY_litary De.file_ment solo rules here

Read Part One of Bell’s journey here

Bell descends the rickety metal stairs hidden inside the holobox and emerges into quite an impressive lair. The space has been fine-tuned to suit the needs of its single inhabitant. A chair swivels around, and there she sits, Wick. “Saw you on the CCTV,” she says. “You look like a desperate one. What is it you need?”

Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – CY_Borg Part One

CY_Borg (Free League Publishing)
Written and designed by Christian Sahlén and Johan Nohr

You can purchase CY_Borg here

You can download the CY_litary De.file_ment solo rules here

Cyberpunk is a broader genre than I typically give it credit for. In literature, you can see cyberpunk’s roots form with authors like Phillip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard, and it came to fruition in the early 1990s with Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Within film, some of the earliest examples are movies like Escape From New York, Tron, and Blade Runner – all wildly different takes on the idea of humanity, technology, and dystopian futures. This would eventually lead to movies like Robocop, Hackers, The Matrix, and more – again, such diverse takes on the same base genre. Cyberpunk has a strong presence in anime and manga. Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and Battle Angel Alita are prominent examples. While cyberpunk is considered a subgenre of science fiction, it is even blended with other diverse subgenres. From my perspective, and I think this is the consensus, the cyberpunk element that puts it over the edge is a dystopian future world where capitalism has become an immensely oppressive force, where debt is used to make people into a new kind of slave.

Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Mork Borg: Solitary Defilement Part One

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

You can get this set of solo rules here.

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

OSR stands for the Old School Renaissance, which is a revival of a style of “classical” tabletop RPGs. This type of game is marked by four core ideas: 1) the GM is a referee of sorts and makes rulings and has the final say on the events in the game; 2) players have to be explicit in what they want their characters to do to avoid traps & hazards set up in advance by the GM, 3) characters are heroic but not invincible as death comes often, and 4) the events are not balanced, and players can wander into areas they are not prepared for. There is, of course, more unpacking of these ideas and additional concepts that come into play, but these are the base foundation of OSR. From my limited knowledge, OSR was a response to a period of more experimental story-centered games like Powered by the Apocalypse or changes made to stalwarts like Dungeons & Dragons that fans didn’t care for.