From apple press to cult - Mörk Borg and the art-punk RPG

Sweden, 2018. Pelle Nilsson is standing in line at the apple press with a load of apples waiting to be juiced. It is busy. So busy that, by his own account, he has to wait eight hours. He uses those hours to press something else: a roleplaying game about the end of the world.

Two years later, that game is named roleplaying product of the year. Not because it had the most elegant rules, but because it looked like nothing else on the shelf. This is the story of Mörk Borg, and of the idea that a game book can itself be the game.

A zine for ourselves

Nilsson did not work alone. With graphic designer Johan Nohr he had already made Barkhäxan, a folk horror roleplaying game that only ever appeared in Swedish. They discovered they worked well together: fast, without stress, and without stopping until something was done.

The ambition was small. They wanted to print a cool zine, mostly for themselves, with a promise to break rules and do exactly what they wanted. Nilsson had a few pages of basic rules and classes. The inspiration, he later said, came more from DIY punk zines than from other roleplaying games. And from metal, of course: sludge, doom, and black.

What set it apart was the method. Text and art grew together, spread by spread. There was no manuscript laid out afterward. Every two-page spread was built as a single piece, with screaming fonts, ink stains, and color splattering off the paper. Nohr made the book deliberately hard to read, like a cursed scripture that fights back. How that feels at the table, with a doom record playing, is something we describe in our piece on the sound of Mörk Borg. This chapter is about something else: the moment layout itself became a rule.

From zine to trophy case

The zine kept growing. In the end it made more sense as a hardcover, and when Nilsson and Nohr signed with a publisher, they tested the waters with a Kickstarter. Even before the book was out, the first backers were making material for it. That publisher was Free League, the Swedish house whose rise we follow in From Drakar to Dragonbane. Mörk Borg became the first title on a new sub-label, Free League Workshop, meant for games designed outside the studio. On February 25, 2020, it hit the shelves.

A few weeks later, the world locked down. A game about the last days arrived just as many people were stuck at home and moving their games online. At the ENnie Awards, held by livestream that year, Mörk Borg took gold for Product of the Year, Best Writing, and Best Layout and Design, plus silver for Best Game. Gold for Best Game went that night to ALIEN, also from Free League. And silver for Product of the Year went to a very different little marvel: Thousand Year Old Vampire.

The cult

What Mörk Borg truly changed was not in the rules but in the license. Nilsson and Nohr set up a third-party license: under a few simple conditions, anyone could make and sell their own Mörk Borg material. It echoed the generosity we saw in From gift to fight, only at the scale of a punk collective.

The makers built a home around it themselves: MÖRK BORG CULT, where players send in their classes, monsters, and adventures. The best of it went online for free and then into print, as zines. The first, Feretory, won a gold ENnie of its own in 2021 for best supplement. The Kickstarter for the second, Heretic, hit its goal within seven minutes in January 2021.

Then came the flood. By October 2021, nearly a thousand titles had been released under the license, and whole games grew out of it. Luke Stratton, a maker of pirate battle maps known online as Limithron, wrote Pirate Borg, funded it on Kickstarter in 2022, and then saw it published by Free League. Nohr himself teamed up with writer Christian Sahlén on Cy_Borg, which traded the sound of doom for noise, industrial, and underground hip-hop. And smaller makers released games like Kinless, a solo game about a lone Viking in the same grim key.

Mörk Borg was no longer a single game but a style. The cover already called it an artpunk RPG. The word stuck, and came to name a whole corner of the hobby.

Where it grinds

Fair is fair: the art-punk story has frayed edges. A book that is deliberately hard to read is also simply hard to read. If you have low vision or dyslexia, or just want to look up a rule in the middle of a fight, it is a struggle. Tellingly, there is now a free Bare Bones Edition: the same rules as plain text, without the noise.

The style also became a template. After Mörk Borg, a whole shelf of games picked up a skull, a loud accent color, and a name ending in -borg. Some of them are beautiful. Others borrow the packaging without the discovery underneath. And there is an irony in the punk story itself: a game that began as a self-printed zine now sits in stores as a luxury hardcover. That tension between a modest promise and a costly finish is one we know from From photocopier to shelf.

What came out of the press

Today Mörk Borg sits in our Metal & Doom corner, next to its children. How the tone of doom first found its way into fantasy, you can read in From career to grave. What Mörk Borg added was permission to let that tone show on every page.

A character, a scene, or a game becomes real through one concrete detail and one desire. For Mörk Borg, the desire was small: a cool zine, for ourselves. The detail was the spread, the two-page canvas where text and art could no longer be pulled apart. Everything after that, the awards, the cult, and the thousand imitation skulls, flowed from there.

Like juice from an apple. You line up a row of rough fruit, you wait eight hours, and what comes out tastes like nothing else.