The world is a vamp
What kind of worlds make us want to get into them?
Mork Borg, Symbaroum, and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay
In the world of tabletop roleplaying games, there are some settings that grab you as soon as you open up the books they are in. You just want to inhabit that world through the medium of a game.
What makes a world like that?
The answer is that I have no expertise in the matter and shouldn’t be opining in general on the matter. I’m a newbie in regard to TTRPGs and in any case don’t really know what settings have drawn other people into them.
But I can talk about the settings that have drawn me into them. And I think that some of what makes those settings compelling to me just might be helpful for spaces outside the TTRPG world, such as fiction or even non-fiction books.
Just a spoonful of sugar
Ask people with knowledge of the TTRPG space which game has made the largest splash relative to its size and expectations, and many of them are likely to mention Mork Borg. The game, produced by Stockholm Kartell and published by Free League, has provoked an outsized reaction, in regard to its reputation in the wider gaming world but more importantly in regard to the effect that it had on its fans.
Mork Borg (along with related games from Stockholm Kartell, such as the cyberpunk game Cy Borg) has a huge fanbase that has created a huge base of content for the game. The website Ex Libris lists 1,527 different projects made for Mork Borg, which is a large amount for any game not named Dungeons & Dragons, especially considering it is just about three years old.
The game clearly has drawn in fans, and some of the obvious qualities of the game may be reasons. The game is a death-metal-inspired tongue-in-cheek rules-lite RPG with an incredible art style in the original book. (Its graphic designer, Johan Nohr, has done incredible work in RPG design in recent years, in general.) Some of its critics deride it for being more of an artbook than a game (though this often indicates they haven’t tried running it). The visual style certainly is a cause of its popularity.
But I think there are some special draws of the world-building that the book does that lend themselves to pulling people in. The world of Mork Borg is dire and dying, but the flavor that its authors gave it makes people want to explore it. At least, that’s what the flavor did for me.
(Mork Borg was written by Pelle Nilsson, in Swedish, translated by Johan Nohr, and added to in some manner by Patrick Stuart, along with a host of editors.)
And that flavor is imparted in very few words. The primary setting material in the book is less than 2,000 words, and much of that discusses prophecies about the end of the world. (It’s more fun than it sounds, really.) The discussion of the actual physical layout of the world clocks in at less than 1,200 words. But it has lots of flavor in those words.
For example, here is the description of the forest Sarkash and the massive graveyard that lies inside it:
In Tveland also lies Sarkash.
The forest seems, lately, to spread unnaturally fast. Paths tangle and wind in the overgrown gloom, leading wanderers astray. Far in the depths of Sarkash, always where one least expects to find it, in a halo of dying trees, is Graven-Tosk. A truly ancient cemetery filled with mausoleums, blank-eyed cherubs, stagnant fountains, plague pits and ordinary graves.
But hasn’t it grown warmer in this usually cold place? Do you hear the frantic scratching? The air feels heavy, stale and hard to breathe.
Or here is the description of one of the kingdoms of the world:
The Western Kingdom
The western kingdom, called Wästland in the songs of the simple and rhymes of the poor, once home to peace and wealth when Lake Onda gifted fish and the river-trade thrived.
Now, terror and despotism stalk. In the secret citadel of the sad-but-gaudy city of Schleswig King Fathmu IX schemes. Paranoid, fat and increasingly mad, he is consumed with psychosis and invisible fears.
Obsessed with the prophecies of Verhu, the King raids and invades houses and villages, barns and temples. Nowhere and no one is safe, especially the poor. Taxed into starvation, the contents of their larders and storehouses are carted off by Fathmu’s men.
The original full-art version contains a map that is about as minimalistic as it can get about geographical detail but which manages to make it feel compelling:
The world of Mork Borg is certainly not to everyone’s taste. It’s doomed and dark. But the writing does three things that I think have made people want to dive in and find the details that weren’t expressed in the book.
One is that it makes the minimum that it does express interesting and eye-catching. Most of it is outré and disturbing. But none of it is simply boring. Even the cemetery in the forest, which could be a cliché of horror writing, has some elements that set it apart. The halo of dying trees. The fountains. The change in the temperature.
There aren’t any sane and simple kings or queens in Mork Borg. Each one is creepy in some way, but in an interesting way.
The second point is what makes some of those elements interesting: mystery. Most of the descriptions of places and people leave some sort of question lingering in the mind.
In Graven-Tosk, that cemetery in the woods, there is that change of temperature. What does that mean? The text doesn’t say. That’s up to the game master and the players to discover.
There is a character called the Shadow King, in a dark, gothic castle, described as “a being obscured by ritual.” The text tells us that “The slaves of the servants of the courtiers of the King come forth and do his will” and that he always has sons, who may wander amid regular people. There isn’t a lot of detail here, but the parts that there are make you wonder what you could find out if you traveled to his castle and poked around.
The third element is the fact that each of the places in the world has something to interact with. The vivid descriptions and the mysteries seem like things a GM could build a scenario around. They aren't just flavor.
The Shadow King's sons might be knocking around the castle if your players show up. They'll have to deal with them.
If you go to Schleswig, you'll end up running into Fathmu's soldiers, as they plunger the countryside.
There's clearly something to do in all these places, even before you get to the random tables in the book that help make a scenario.
(One interesting point is that Cy Borg, the cyberpunk game made by the same team, though not the same writer, as Mork Borg, uses the first and third of these elements, but not the mysteries.)
Faction friction
Symbaroum is another Swedish RPG with a setting I find compelling. There are some interesting contrasts to be made with Mork Borg.
Symbaroum 's basic story is like this: Escaping devastation caused by a war with sorcerers, a kingdom of people called the Ambrians moved northward of a steep mountain range and killed, displaced and subordinated a collection of tribal groups. All of this took place south of a massive, mysterious forest where an ancient kingdom once existed. Why that kingdom and a different kingdom south of the forest disappeared is a mystery, but the evil forces that treasure hunters from Ambria find when they enter the forest may have something to do with it.
Symbaroum has a lot of something that Mork Borg also has: mystery. What exactly happened during the fight with the sorcerer kings? Ever since the queen of Ambria, the supreme leader of the kingdom, was captured during the wars and then rescued, she has worn a mask. What's under the mask? Is it even really her? What are the secrets of the elves, the strange guardians of the forest? What are the secrets of the goblins and ogres and trolls? What killed out the old kingdoms? Every little section of the setting, as laid out in the core rulebook, has some mystery.
But Symbaroum also has something that Mork Borg eschews: complicated politics and interacting factions. Every section of the rulebook’s setting information shows how the people in that area are intertwined with those elsewhere and sets up conflicts.
For example, in one of the first paragraphs about the houses of Ambrian nobility, the book sets up fractious relations between the queen and the dukes of the realm, between the queen and her new father-in-law and half-sister, and between the queen and her uncle, while also suggesting that outsiders would like to unseat the dukes in question. The detailed descriptions of each of the duchies and their masters drop in further details that show the interplay between the Ambrians, the barbarian clans, and the denizens of the woods.
Symbaroum is a game about colonial conquest and rebellion and dark undercurrents everywhere, and the factions are where so much of that happens—and the book makes that possible.
Setting up so many opportunities for factions to interact means that there are opportunities for the full setting to change. If the GM can manage all of the factions, or at least those that impinge on the player characters, the game won’t just be about scary things amid the trees. Instead, it will be a political thriller, one that can leverage all of the mysteries that the book presents to further increase the thrills. You can put the players in the middle of the fights and alliances and conspiracies and make their actions count for the wider world.
Managing factions in RPGs isn’t easy. There are some mechanical systems for doing so, such as those in the games Stars Without Number/Worlds Without Number and Mausritter. But the kind of pregnant relations between factions like those in the Symbaroum corebook are tempting for a GM. It’s not clear to me whether the Symbaroum campaign books take advantage of those opportunities, but a GM with imagination could take the corebook and run with original ideas.
The mud on your shoes
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay also has factions. For those who know about the wargame, that should be clear. There are lots of people and not-people that want to fight with one another.
But the draw of WFRP isn’t really the factions, per se. There is plenty of politics in the most famous WFRP campaign, The Enemy Within, with player characters getting involved in all sorts of court intrigue. But what sells the setting of WFRP is the sense of realism that it suggests.
There is magic in WFRP, and elves and orcs and so forth. But it is the mud and the squelching of your boots in it that really sells the setting.
Warhammer Fantasy’s Old World is a fantastical version of our world, with much of it resembling the Renaissance period. The player characters wander around the setting by coach and boat, stopping in at coaching inns and ports. This isn’t the vague fantasy medieval setting of D&D. It’s a much more rooted place, with lots of detail about what you can expect.
The choices of professions for the player characters sell the realism, too. You can be a fighter of some sort, or a magician. But you can also be a lawyer or a boatsman (or woman) or a ratcatcher or peddler or merchant. Your progression in your profession brings you greater skills and abilities, and there are few RPGs where that is as true of a lawyer as it is of a warrior.
Obviously, GMs and players aren’t necessarily running to a game to experience full-blown realism. (Some are, but they seem to be in the minority.) But giving a sense of some realism sells the setting as a place you can imagine. After all, your boots are caked with mud.
Back to the books
Do any of these ideas transfer over to other media? I think it’s clear that they do.
Flavor and mystery sell a setting. So does a sense of the interplay of people—and factions—within it. And so does realism. Giving readers a sense of all these things early on can help hook them.
These are all true in non-fiction, as well. Discussing a place and showing its flavor, the mysteries that surround it, how its people interact, and the sense of the actual real place are all great ways to bring readers in. And whether you’re a game writer or a journalist, capturing attention is something you should want to do.