Bare Bones Mork Borg – Stop Complaining it’s Hard to Read or Expensive
I don’t have a ton of experience playing or running Mork Borg. I’ve run Rotblack Sludge, the adventure included in the hardback. It’s a decent little dungeon that’s easy to run and has some wonderful little weird bits and going-ons. I’ve also run Cy-Borg and its included adventure Lucky Flight Takedown which ended up being one of the very best set of sessions I’ve had since donning the GM hat. You can read about that here.
The truth is, there is a reason the Mork Borg and games based on its rules are so popular and it has nothing to do with their “Art Punk” aesthetics, which I think are fun and very cool to be sure. Its popular because it is a really serviceable lighter rule set. It works, and it’s very easy to grok and run. That said, I’ve seen over the years lots of whining about how hard it is to read the bright and busy hardcover edition. Not completely unfair, it is an experience to read through and does not easily lend itself to reference at the table. People also like to point out how expensive it is for such a small book. Also sort of fair, but you get what you pay for in yellow and pink ink to be sure. Anyway, neither of these are good reasons to write off the game. It’s good and worth the money. However, the creators have made available a resource that completely blows these criticisms out of the water.
The FREE pdf version or “Bare Bones Edition” is a super clean, very easy to read version of the game that is, if you didn’t notice…FREE. You can find it at morkborg.com here. It has 100% of the content of the hardback minus the included adventure, which, by the way is also available FREE at the same link, as are several other adventures and rules supplements.
But Carl, I don’t like digital stuff at the table! Cool, print it out, or better yet, print a slick, custom softback, spiral bound, or hardback POD through Lulu. That’s what I did. And its great. If you you’ve never done a custom print book through Lulu this is a super easy first project and comes out really nicely. The page numbering/layout is already good to go, and you just need to design a cover. I just used a screen shot of the demon from the pdf and copy pasted some words from the game’s online description. Finalize the project, select how many copies you want and boom, a big expensive machine does some stuff and you’re in business with a nice, usable hard copy of the book. It’s not pirating, the file is free for you to use, and printing through Lulu isn’t any different than if you printed a booklet at home. Except it’s nicer and instead of grabbing it off the printer yourself someone else did and mailed it to you. Don’t sell copies, that would be bad. Seriously, don’t do that, but if you want some table copies to spread around at game night, you’re fine and I think well within the intent of the file’s usage.
Here are some pictures of my POD copy and a screenshot of the Lulu print options I used. Notice the price. $3.73. Cheap and easy to read, all Mork Borg complaints answered. I still think you should buy the real thing though. Its glorious.
