Blunderbuss vs Mörk Borg - which grimdark game fits your table?

Mörk Borg is a scream. Blunderbuss is a long march. Both are grimdark fantasy, both put filthy, doomed nobodies at the centre of the table, and both would rather be strange than safe. But one wants to burn out in a night, and the other wants to grind you down over a year. Which one you need depends on how long you plan to suffer.

The short answer

Pick Mörk Borg if you want the apocalypse in a single sitting: a game you can read in an hour, run tonight, and lose your character in before the second beer. It is a piece of art as much as a rulebook, and it plays like the album cover looks.

Pick Blunderbuss if you want a world to live in. It is a full hardcover with a city, a hundred careers, a percentile system that rewards specialising, and the bones of a long campaign. It is the game you buy when you want grimdark as a place, not as a mood.

What these two games have in common

Both draw from the same well. The grim world of perilous adventure that Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay opened in 1986, and that we traced in From career to grave, runs straight through both books: your character is nobody special, the world is rotten, and the humour is black. Both use player-facing rolls, so the game master rarely touches the dice. Both make magic dangerous to the caster. Both are built by small teams rather than big publishers, Mörk Borg out of Sweden and Blunderbuss out of Poland, and both look like nothing else on the shelf.

And both are honest about death. In Mörk Borg you will die. In Blunderbuss you might survive, but you will not come out clean.

Where they really differ

The length of the night. Mörk Borg is ninety-six digest-sized pages, and a good third of them are art and typography. The rules fit on a spread. The world, the Dying Land, is described in a few pages of lists and a map, and the Calendar of Nechrubel counts down to the end of everything: each in-game dawn the game master rolls a die, and when enough Miseries have fallen, the world is over. A campaign has an expiry date built in. Blunderbuss is the opposite kind of book: a complete hardcover with the free city of Danswijk at the mouth of the Visula, the surrounding lands of the Pommeren, a bestiary, rules for a base of operations, a starting adventure and solo rules. It is written to be lived in for a long time.

The dice. Mörk Borg rolls a d20 against a difficulty, usually 12, with a bonus from one of four abilities rolled on 3d6. Omens let you cheat fate a little: a reroll, a better wound, a lower difficulty. That is nearly the whole system. Blunderbuss rolls percentile dice under one of two numbers: Skill if you are trained in what you are trying, Luck if you are not. As you advance, you specialise, and each level of specialisation makes you better at that one thing. Two games, two philosophies: Mörk Borg wants the dice to be quick and cruel, Blunderbuss wants them to remember who you are.

The character. A Mörk Borg character is a handful of rolls: abilities, hit points, a weapon, a few items and, if you use the optional classes, a Fanged Deserter or Gutterborn Scum with a quirk. Five minutes, and when it dies you roll another. A Blunderbuss character has a career, and there are more than a hundred of them, from halfling guerrilla to witch hunter, arranged in basic, advanced and master tiers. You do not level up; you change job, and the jobs tell the story of a life.

The world. The Dying Land is a mood more than a map: Galgenbeck, the two-headed basilisks, the Shadow King's palace, all sketched in a line or two so your table fills in the rest. Danswijk is a city with streets. Blunderbuss sets itself in a warped sixteenth-century Europe, in the year 1597 of the Era of Sin, with black powder, corrupt priests, sin-worshipping cults and dragon lairs beyond the walls. One world is an apocalypse; the other is a Renaissance with the rot showing.

The joke. Both are funny, but differently. Mörk Borg's humour is nihilist: the world ends anyway, so laugh. Blunderbuss's humour is the gallows kind that Warhammer taught, the small vicious dog kind: your ratcatcher matters precisely because nobody thinks he does.

What it feels like at the table

A Mörk Borg session is loud. You open the book, someone reads a Misery aloud, the party stumbles into Rotblack Sludge or whatever the tables cough up, and within an hour a character is dead and everyone is laughing. It is a superb one-shot and a fine short campaign, and it is the game that converts board gamers and metalheads to roleplaying. It is not a game for long character arcs, and it does not pretend to be.

A Blunderbuss session is slower and thicker. There is a city to walk through, coin to earn, a career to work toward, a headquarters to keep. The percentile rolls make you feel every point of specialisation you have earned. Fights are dangerous and wounds linger. It rewards a group that returns to Danswijk week after week and starts to know the streets. It asks more of the game master, too: there is more book, and more world, to hold.

Neither is hard to learn. Mörk Borg takes minutes; Blunderbuss takes an evening, mostly because you will want to read the careers.

What you actually need to buy

For Mörk Borg, the Mörk Borg core book is everything: rules, world, calendar, classes, tables and the starter dungeon Rotblack Sludge. It is the cheapest complete roleplaying game we sell. If you want to play alone in the same world, Kinless is a solo Viking game built on the Mörk Borg engine.

For Blunderbuss, the Blunderbuss RPG hardcover is the complete game: rules, careers, Danswijk, bestiary, base rules, the adventure Curse of the Oostbrug Tower and solo rules. Nothing else is required. The free quick-start adventure from the crowdfunding campaign is a good way to test the water before you commit.

Price follows page count. Mörk Borg is a small book at a small price; Blunderbuss costs more and gives you a campaign's worth of material for it.

Choose Blunderbuss if ... Choose Mörk Borg if ...

Choose Blunderbuss if you want grimdark with a city in it, if your group likes careers and coin and slow advancement, if you play with the same people for months, and if you miss the feeling of the old Warhammer campaigns: a conspiracy closing in, a ratcatcher who becomes a witch hunter, a world that does not care. Choose it, too, if you like black powder and a sixteenth century that never quite happened.

Choose Mörk Borg if you want the apocalypse tonight, if your group changes from week to week, if you run one-shots at conventions or game nights, or if you want a book you will show to people who do not play roleplaying games. Choose it if you like your rules on one page and your art on every other.

If you want the Mörk Borg engine with a bigger world attached, look sideways rather than up: Pirate Borg and Cy_Borg both take the same rules to a fuller setting, and our Pirate Borg vs Cy_Borg comparison sorts them out.

Where to start at Netherbook

Our Mörk Borg starter guide and Blunderbuss starter guide each walk through a first session. If Mörk Borg is your pick but you are weighing it against the rest of the old-school shelf, Shadowdark vs Mörk Borg vs Old School Essentials covers that. Everything in the Borg family lives in the Mörk Borg collection; the wider genre is in Metal & Doom and the OSR collection.

And if you are still torn: buy Mörk Borg first. If the scream leaves you wanting a world to walk through afterwards, Blunderbuss is where the march begins.