Good evening, beloved -
Growing up, my neighbor Pam Stein always seemed to be a step ahead of everyone else I knew, and a step and a half ahead of me. We’d lie around on the floor of her room, listening to Pink Floyd’s The Wall and poring over Gerald Scarfe’s scabrous illustrations on the gatefold, weeks before “Another Brick In The Wall, Part II” hit the charts. Or she’d let me play games on the TRS-80 her father had, ostensibly to do the taxes on — the first personal computer I ever laid hands on. I had falafel for the first time hanging out with Pam (most unfortunately, at an Israel Day celebration downtown she dragged me to, but we will not speak of this). And I’ll never forget settling down with her in front of Channel 12 to watch the first episode of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, when that felt like a promise beamed to us from a future of unlimited inquiry and exploration.
I think each one of these micro-events was consequential in its own way, which is to say that it’s not hard for me to connect each of them with some later chain of experiences. There was one other thing Pam turned me on to, though, that left a far stranger and less linear imprint on my life — uniquely influential for the few years that followed, and then put away with other childish things, to lay fallow for decades.
It came in the form of a white cardboard box. Pam called it “a game,” though unlike any of the games I was familiar with, it didn’t seem to have a board, or pieces — or, for that matter, cards, or money, or any of the other paraphernalia you’d find tucked into the little plastic trays inside the typical Milton Bradley game of the 1970s. All I found inside the box was three slim pamphlets, printed on an odd paper stock that was wrinkled like old leather. And on the cover of each one — above an illustration I was even then able to recognize as cheesy and amateurish, not much better than something I might have drawn myself — it said the same thing, in a corny Olde Tyme font: DUNGEONS & DRAGONS.
Dungeons & Dragons (or “D&D,” as Pam referred to it) announced itself as a set of Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures. And each one of the three pamphlets discoursed on a different aspect of these Fantastic Medieval Wargames: “Men and Magic,” “Monsters and Treasure,” and “The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures.” It took me awhile, but with Pam’s help I was able to figure out that, instead of the shoe or brightly-colored little peg or cardboard counters that represented you in the other games I knew, in a “role-playing” game like D&D, you took on a persona to act out in the course of play, in this case either a Fighting Man (sic), a Magic-User or a Cleric. You’d roll some dice, to determine your basic attributes — Strength, Intelligence, Dexterity and so on — and then you were thrown into a world devised by another player, called the Dungeon Master.
And each turn forward, from that point, you’d have to tell the Dungeon Master what you intended to do, in the persona of the character you’d chosen, and they’d tell you whether or not you’d be able to. Occasionally you’d have to roll some dice against whichever of your attributes was most relevant, to see whether you’d succeeded: testing Strength, for example, to see if you could pry open a trapdoor that had rusted shut, or against Constitution to see if you could make it across a freezing stream without passing out. And over the next few hours, or evenings, or weeks, you’d make your way across the graph-paper universe the Dungeon Master had dreamt up ahead of time, overcoming challenges, besting weird adversaries, garnering treasure and occasionally emerging triumphant.
All of this blew my got-damn mind. I’d read the Narnia books. I’d read The Hobbit. I’d read Lloyd Alexander’s gentle, Welsh-inflected tales of Taran, Assistant Pig-Keeper. But at twelve, I’d never yet heard of “sword & sorcery” as a genre. I was completely unfamiliar with Lord of the Rings, or Conan, or Fritz Leiber, let alone Michael Moorcock’s far weirder Elric books. So however obvious it became in retrospect, I had not the slightest clue that D&D’s “Fantastic Medieval” rules were pretty nakedly an attempt to allow early-‘70s grognards to adventure in the style of the fantasy realms so beloved to them.
It didn’t matter. Within days, I had my own set of the three books.
§ And then, pretty quickly thereafter — because honestly, the three books didn’t make much sense, and outright contradicted one another on a few points — I bought myself a somewhat more recent, consolidated edition of the rules. Swiftly thereafter, because D&D publisher TSR had by the end of the ‘70s already figured out how to milk their audience for unthinkable sums of revenue by doing the work of imagination would-be Dungeon Masters weren’t inclined to, I picked up a stack of prewritten scenario modules. And it went on like this for hundreds and hundreds of dollars. I don’t really want to speculate how much I dropped at the Compleat Strategist over the few years that followed, buying further D&D rulesets and modules whenever I had the ten dollars to spare (followed inevitably by their science fiction-themed equivalents).
The reason I’m not particularly inclined to tote up how much allowance I spent on these games, though, isn’t that it adds up to an embarrassing sum of money. It’s that I never played a single one of them. After I moved houses, and Pam slipped out of my life in the way of all kidly friendships, I only ever once met someone willing to roll up a character and adventure in the worlds of fantasy I set to paper. And that was a jittery kid from my new school called Phil that I had to stop meeting up with after two sessions, because he only ever wanted his fighting man to rape all the female non-player characters. Roleplaying games, by definition, are a social pursuit, and the shelves of unplayed RPG material I accumulated an implacable physical index of just how lonely and desperately sad those years were for me.
But really, all of this — from Pam Stein to rapey Phil to the teetering stack of never-played D&D modules that piled up on my desk — is preamble. Because about a year and a half ago I somehow steeled myself against the risk that it, too, would sit on a shelf never to be played, and at the age of 56 bought myself a new roleplaying game.
§ I’d popped into a Seven Dials game shop called, perfectly, The Android’s Dungeon The Orc’s Nest, looking for a gift for some friends’ kids. They didn’t have the game I was looking for, but what they did have was a shelf of shrink-wrapped little booklets that all looked like they’d been mistakenly delivered here, rather than to Crypt of the Wizard across town where they properly belonged. They were grimm. They were kvlt AF. They were gorgeous. I flipped one over, curious despite myself, and read these words: “A doom metal album of a game. A spiked flail to the face. Light on rules, heavy everything else.”
Ooh. Beloved friend: I was, for the first time, in the presence of the MÖRK BORG range of rules and accessories, and I have only rarely in life felt myself so cleaved down to my root and torn in two. I mean, look: on the one hand, I was sold. I have, in raw point of fact, not especially often been more sold. They had me at the first sentence. Of course they did. Take my money, please.
On the other...on the other. I was, again, fifty-six years of age in that moment. My friends are wonderful human beings, but they’re, y’know, adults. I only know a very few I can tempt into joining me for an entirely serious metal gig, even fewer who have the right sense of humor to find Helgi’s amusing. Who amongst’d’ve them would be down to spend an evening hacking their way through the marrow-spattered shadows of a damned, cursed and doomed world? I might get the thing to entertain myself, sure — it didn’t cost any more than a trade paperback, and I buy plenty of those on purest spec. But you could not possibly devise a more perfect reminder and totem of the worst, most anguished stretch of my existence to date than a role-playing game that I would acquire and thereafter fail to interest anyone in playing.
I left the shop emptyhanded, certain I’d made the correct, the mature, the wise choice. And spent the next week thinking about the “heavy everything else” thing I’d left behind on the shelf.
Finally, I resolved to just bite the bullet. What beset me at this point was that I couldn’t quite remember the damn thing’s name, and eventually found myself resorting to Googling “doom metal RPG.” It worked. And this is how I learned that MÖRK BORG was even cooler than I’d initially understood.
First off, I discovered that the game’s creators, Pelle Nilsson of Ockult Örtmästare Games and Johan Nohr of Stockholm Kartell, had made it freely available under a Creative Commons license. Spurred to your own acts of vile imagination by the world they’d wrestled into being? Use and build on whatever part or parts of it you want, and ask for it whatever price you will, just so long as you do so under the liberal terms of the MÖRK BORG Third-Party License. Intrigued by the evocative gameworld, but not quite ready to drop £whatever? Go ahead, download a bare-bones version for free, so can spring it on your worthless associates and see how they react. I gather that these have become somewhat standard tactics for indie game developers looking to build a community, but so far as I’m concerned that doesn’t make them any less impressive.
Now I did wind up downloading the free version — you know I did. And I did spend some time rolling up characters for it, and seeing how they’d react to various scenarios I threw at them. (This wasn’t as big an investment of time and effort as it might sound: there are both character and lightweight dungeon generators on the official site, which made quick work of it.) And I did have great fun, if admittedly of a disturbingly high-body-count sort. Could things have ended there? Sure. Could I have taken the bare-bones ruleset, some pre-rolled characters and a dungeon ginned up by the site to some friends, and asked if they’d maybe spend an evening down the pub rolling d20s by candlelight with me? Of course I could have. I did not.
The very next time I was somewhere halfway-convenient to that part of town, I ducked into The Orc’s Nest, made a beeline for the shelf with all the MÖRK BORG books, and moments thereafter made my first purchase of any kind of content or material for role-playing games in four full decades. I couldn’t even wait to get the thing home. I tore the shrinkwrap off right there on the 73 bus.
Everything about the book made me howl. Its illustrations, its prose, its humor: all calibrated with the most exquisite care to land just so. I began to feel, very firmly, as though I’d made the right choice. And then, in smallish print at the bottom of page 18, I found this: “MÖRK BORG is dedicated to Pelle ‘Dead’ Ohlin (1969-1991). Let the good times roll.” This is the kind of IYKYK signal flare that slips harmlessly past people for whom it’s meaningless, and signifies everything to those for whom it very much is not. I don’t know why it took those two sentences to turn the key in the lock, but that’s pretty much what they did. I rode the rest of the way home with the shit-eatingest of all grins.
§ When I got home, I put the MÖRK BORG book, yes, up on a shelf to mock me. I tried not to think too much about what that had always implied: I was, after all, finishing up my PhD, and then touring behind Lifehouse, and had all manner of Srs Adult Obligations to see to.
That was, as I say, just about a year and a half ago. Last week I got the rulebook down to share with a visiting friend, and left it sitting on my desk when they handed it back to me. Day before yesterday it prompted me to dig up the notes I’d written up when I’d first tinkered with the free ruleset.
Today I got out a graph-paper notebook and began drawing up a dungeon (swiping freely and without apology from Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Hellraiser and Peter Watts’s novel Echopraxia, among other, more eldritch sources). And sometime later on this month, certain unwary friends of mine have agreed to clear an evening, choose from among the characters I’ve rolled for them or roll their own, and head unsteadily into the unslaked dark. I cannot fucking wait.
§ Right now I'm reading a novel called Diary of a Body, by Daniel Pennac, and just started another, Samantha Schweblin’s Mouthful of Birds; listening to The Crying Game soundtrack (?) and, inevitably, the official MÖRK BORG playlist; and watching Frederick Wiseman’s flat-out astonishing 1969 Law and Order.
That’s it for now. As always, I hope that you are well, that you have your feet planted solidly on the good Earth, and that you are taking care of those who need you, taking care of yourself, and letting others take care of you. You have
all my faith,
ag
ldn