#morktober

MÖRKTOBER day 1: FROG

:// A little over a month & 14,000 edited & well-considered words later, SAVE VS DESPAIR is complete to read in its entirety.

If you have any interest in TTRPGs or ever wondered what Mörk Borg's whole deal is – this is for you.

I approached it as a writing exercise & design analysis to understand what's so special about this game and art object, and I'm really proud of both this piece and what I learned for my own practice.

If you're invested in the TTRPG scene I'd appreciate it if you shared this with anyone who might enjoy it.

Our artform deserves as much high-quality analysis as we can cultivate, and the fact that I stumbled into writing what is currently the most thorough analysis I could find (which still has huge gaps in its perspective & approach) of one of the most successful games to emerge from the scene in recent years indicates that there is a need to encourage more writing like this.

In a perpetually collapsing digital infrastructure where so much of our design writing is ephemeral and lost to time (I've heard ancient tales of The Forge & Google+ eras, Discord is an unreferencable void & I really hope someone wiser than me is archiving all these podcasts) I hope that longer form writing might represent an opportunity for the ideas we have now to still be accessible (in one form or another) in years to come.

—

Too much patting myself on the back? Maybe.

But it's good writing and I think you'll get something out of it.

Personally I learned that cross posting on multiple platforms is exactly as fun as it sounds (I thought the whole point of starting a newsletter was to avoid this crap in the first place) and by the end of the month I just wasn't posting the illustrations I was making or sharing the last 2 (?) individual parts here as they went up after burning myself out on instagram.

So for the sake of my poor microwaved brain, if any of this interests you:

“Is the camera crew nearby?”

“No, they’re still picking through the brush.  You have a few minutes.”

Ka’shek seemed to shrink as he visibly relaxed.  It always impressed Mitsako how he was able to flex his muscles for so long, making him more physically imposing than he normally was.  Even when relaxed, Kash was still an impressive individual, but when he wasn’t maintaining his ring persona he looked noticeably smaller.

Kash lifted his sunglasses and scowled at the golf ball half-buried in thick grass and fallen leaves.  Next to the ball was a large, bored-looking toad.  “Now that’s a shitty lie, Mits.  How are you going to handle this one?”

Mitsako glanced at him out of the corner of her eye.  “Isn’t that your job?”

“C’mon, Mits, the cameras aren’t here.  You and your silent shadow here are better at this.”

“Yeah, but you won’t learn.  Give me your recommendation.”

Kash growled in frustration.  “How about a stick to shove that frog out of the way first?”

Mitsako was quiet for a brief second that Kash knew she disagreed with him.  “It would help, but animals are unpredictable.  If it bumps the ball, that’ll cost me a stroke.”

“You mean if a stupid frog touches it, that–”  Kash immediately shut up when Mitsako turned to glare at him.

“Right, then…”  He fumbled around with some of the clubs, careful to be quiet so the camera crew didn’t immediately make a beeline for them.  He started sliding out one of the lower-numbered irons, but caught Sumi tilting their head slightly.  He grabbed an iron one number higher, and Sumi straightened their head and blepped.

“4-iron?”

Mitsako held out her hand, which Kash placed the club into.  She stepped forward slowly, taking up position carefully so her swing would miss the toad.  The toad turned, the ball right in front of it as it looked at her.

“Either back away or stay still…” she muttered as she positioned her club.  After a few moments, she swung it back to launch the ball out of the woods.

In a blink of an eye, the toad swallowed the ball and hopped away deeper into the underbrush.

All three of them stood in stunned silence before Mitsako started running after it.  “You son of a–get back here!”  Sumi practically threw themselves after her, stumbling and tumbling through the brush.  After a moment, Kash came to his senses and hurried behind, cursing as he seemed to hit every branch in the woods.

Mitsako suddenly stopped, forcing him to skid to a halt to avoid running her over.  “Whoa!  What’s the–”  He quickly fell silent, his eyes fixed on what looked like a shimmering pool of dark water, its surface hanging vertically between two trees.  Kash tried to think of what he was looking at, but it defied explanation.  He glanced at Mitsako and Sumi out of a vague hope that they might know, and was surprised to see a look of resigned recognition on their faces.

“What the hell is that?” he asked.

“A demon gate,” Mitsako replied with a confidence that startled him.  “Makes sense, this is the northeastern corner of the course.”

A demon gate.  Kash had heard of such things, enough to know that this was something he didn’t want to get involved with.  “Let me guess, the frog jumped into that thing.”

“Sure looks like it.”

“Yanno, Mits, I think you should take the stroke.”

“Yeah, I think you’re right.  We should head back before anyone else follows us here.”

Motion caught their eyes, and they turned to see Sumi pull a broken golf club out of the nearby brush and lift it up.  Its custom finish was immediately recognizable.

“Wait, isn’t that…?”

“Woodrow’s 6-iron, yes,” Mitsako replied.

“That…doesn’t look good.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

They were all silent for a moment, staring at the baleful portal before them.  Finally, Mitsako signed and walked over to Kash, pulling her 9-iron and sand wedge out of the bag.

“Hold on, what are you doing?” Kash asked.

“Going after him.  He’s an ass, but nobody deserves to be trapped in there.”

“And you know what you’re doing?!”

“Won’t be my first time there.”  She handed the iron to Sumi, whose constant trembling seemed to take on an air of excitement.  “You stay here, we’ll handle this.”

Mitsako and Sumi stepped into the watery surface of the portal, looking like they were walking a long distance into a haze.  Kash stood there, trying to process what he just witnessed.  If half of the things he heard were true, the smart thing to do would be to turn around and walk away.

He looked at the broken club left behind, and then at his hand as it curled into a fist.  The Fist of the People, he said in the ring.  It was all just an act, one that drew the adulation of the crowd.

But he knew there was real power in that fist, and the idea of walking away while one of the Association’s most beloved announcers faced who knows what rankled him.

Plus, he wouldn’t like it if anything happened to his ratings booster.

Welcome to the Cataclysm Coast!

The Legion Of The Blackened Sun have taken Hellskull island. They have sealed the sun under Mt Apocalypse and razed the ancient cities. Their pirate fleets raid alliance ships by the screaming cliffs, their snake cult armies have occupied elvish ruins from before time began, and the Apolutrosis Horde threaten to drown the world in ichor and salt water.

The Coast Alliance, cut off from the world and their colonial masters, scramble to find allies and strength in the face of the inferno. Their vast navy only now rousing itself to life, creeping over the floating boards of their brother’s wooden tombs. Roiyand Pearlborn is vanished, their body swallowed by the foam around the same razor-rock his linage had stewarded for centuries. The Fishman Liberation Army awaits its moment, balancing apocalypse and freedom aboard their cruisers and deep in their coastal cave cities.

Meanwhile the Rapscallion Union gathers its strength and power, allied nominally with the Pearl Kingdoms. The Boundless Empire of the Rat has opened a new embassy, the Goldkin-Warrior Fleet engages in privateering skirmishes with Legion ships, and the Salt Militia’s 3rd generation arrays their ancestral warcamps. All contact with the Hermetic Order of the Drowned and Silent has been lost, and if anyone noticed, they’re not telling.

The sea boils. The sky is black. The End is here.

And now, so are you.

My late piece for Mörktober 2023 day 1, the theme was 'teeth'.

The text reads: Crown of Teeth

Should any who count themself among the living bear this crown of gums and iron, rip out one of their own teeth and place it upon the crown they gain control of the dead whose teeth adorned the crown before (Presence + d4 Skeletons initially).