October is not only „cocktober“ to some people, but also „mörktober“, i.e. a month dedicated to fan work around the wham-bam-rules lite-osr-let’s vibe in yellow/black/pink-metalmetalmetal game Mörk Borg. I found Mörk Bork interesting and took the opportunity to a)produce some weirdo art (all my art is weirdo, but this time I collaged and scribbled) and b) write an adventure.
Pretty soon I discovered that, while I liked a lot of Mörk Borg’s ideas, the diy spirit it exudes most of all, I kind of didn´t like the game *as a game* too much. It’s not bad. I’d play it. But when I run things, I’ve got alternatives that suit me better. And a lot of the material is vibe, vibe, vibe, bro, but I can vibe all day long myself (and a good part of the night), and need someone to draw me an actual map and figure out probabilities and shit (as they’d say over in the Mörk Borg camp) instead. So, no hard feelings, it’s a fun thing, but not quite my thing.
The adventure as an adventure turned out meh. BUT … some of the stuff I made up is quite nice. It’d be a shame to just dump it. So I’ll break it up into smaller bits that you can use in whatever campaign you’re running. Some of them should be pretty easy to flesh out for a one shot adventure.
Let’s start with the Cantankerous Crusaders. They are a bunch of misfits grouped around a blind child prodigy, who got it into their heads to travel through a very dangerous stretch of your campaign world in order to bring gifts to a mighty magical being. They think that this being can stop the end of the world. Here’s what they look like:
And here’s who they are, kind of.
- Ahab, tall, thin and bald, with a potted plant that thrives in darkness. He got the plant when he drank from a well with a corpse in it and pissed on something green.
- Boris, very small, who walks on a stick, with a green egg that emits a soft cooing. He discovered the egg with one of his hens, after he fed the birds small lizard-like creatures he found in his rain barrel.
- Luna, white-haired, blue-eyed, and barefooted, with a music box that has three lights on top, two of which are burning. She was a toy maker’s apprentice and stole the box from her master.
- Dorian, a blind child, with a beetle in a box that has a tiny human head. None of the other kids wanted to play with him, so he found the beetle as a friend, talked to it, shared his food with it. He was surprised to hear about the head and is quite sure that it wasn’t there when the beetle came to him. Dorian leads the group, following directions from the voices in his head.
- Gnaw, who has nothing, but looks so beautiful that he has to wear a hood at all times, and plans to give himself as a gift. Yes, he was born that way.
- Krux, soft-spoken and very well-behaved, with a painting of landscape that moves everyone to tears and is partially blurred because of that effect. A guy he rented out his shed to painted it and gave it to him in lieu of the rent. Krux found him dead one morning, looking kind of blurry, like a big thumb had smeared him across the wall.
- Yob, an ex-sailor in a tar jacket, wild-eyed and fierce, with a bottle full of a golden liquid labeled ‘sunshine’. He fished the bottle out of the Endless Sea. He guards the child Dorian at all times and loves the boy like a son.
Your characters in the game can be scouts/guides to these guys (a classic). They can be after their wondrous items. They can be servants or adversaries of the magical being the crusaders are trying to meet. They can be relatives, lovers or friends. They can be crusaders themselves. I’m sure you can think of nice messes to get them into. I’ll post some for inspiration later.