Life is Likely Hurt & Pain

Here in
DUKK BÖRG.

This one's a review. Of DUKK BÖRG by Gem Room Games and Nerdy Paper Games. It's a DuckTales-themed hack of MÖRK BORG.

Let's get the disclaimer out of the way first. This is about as biased as as a review as you're likely to find. One, Dan Phipps of Gem Room Games and I have been mutuals on social media for a few years at this point, I don't remember how many. Talking about games with Dan is a blast. I'm probably going to go into any of his work expecting to enjoy it, even if it's not particularly my jam.

This, however, is extremely my jam. I grew up on a steady diet of DuckTales, Darkwing Duck, Chip & Dale's Rescue Rangers, and Sonic the Hedgehog. You give me a game where I get to play around in those worlds, I am all-in. Hell, just let me be a duck or a mouse, even! I spent an embarrassing number of hours in 2020 playing Animal Crossing New Horizons looking like this:

 

 

 

 

Like, hundreds of hours.

Speaking of which, I should probably pick up Dragonbane at some point. 

Anyway, I bought DUKK BÖRG. Then I read it. Then I played it. Let's get into it.

Part 1: The Book

I backed the physical copy of the book when it went to crowdfunding. It's pretty, in the creepy way that many BORG games are. They nailed that MÖRK BORG-style layout, and between that and the art, it is very fun to look at. It is also less-practical to use at the table because of this. The book has a handy index on the inside back cover, and I saw they have a plain-layout pdf as well. I have ran plenty of MÖRK BORG only using the physical book, so this wasn't a hurdle for me. I could see it being a barrier to entry for others, though. 

 

This thing is fun to read. It is as stone-faced as it is silly. It dares you to take it as seriously as it takes itself (more on that later). The classes, locations—even the magic items—are rife with adventure hooks. The classes themselves nail the cartoon's archetypes, as does the equipment. Those world-ending psalms that are a hallmark of BORG games are just the DuckTales theme song. And like the theme song, they are repetitive. That might wear on anyone brave enough to live in this cartoonish hellscape for long-term play, but the text is challenging you to look at your players with a straight face and tell them what new thing is heralding the apocalypse with an oo-woo-ooo. 

 

Included is an adventure, The Aeonian Citadel. I ran it for the Tuesday crew, so without further ado...

 

Part 2: The Play

There are going to be some spoilers for the adventure. You have been warned!

 

My Tuesday table currently consists of three of my friends I have been playing games with for 8 to 20-ish years. One has played MÖRK BORG with me, the others have not.

 

They ended up making a Treasure Hunter, a Gizmo-Speaker, and a Devotee. Each of them had at least two classes they were interested in playing, deciding on one might have been the hardest part for them. One ended up rolling for it. The clan creation was a highlight for me, and a great way to tie the player characters together. I let them spend their starting silver on gear because the adventure plops you right in front of the dungeon and doesn't really let you leave. 

The dungeon itself is SKRUJ's tower, and it extends up into the sky and down into the earth. The length of it is indeterminable, because travel between each keyed floor includes a random number of unimportant floors. Unimportant, that is, unless there's a random encounter on them. My players got really lucky on those rolls, but luck has a funny way of running out.

 

See, the thing about the tower is that it's a race against time, but time only passes when the characters smell money. There are set, keyed money encounters, but they can also happen during a random encounter. If you smell money too much, game over. Once my players figured that out, the sense of foreboding only increased. 

 

Therein lies the beauty of DUKK BÖRG. The game, and by extension the starting adventure, is so full of Saturday morning zaniness that we ended up laughing and joking around. But it all rests on the bones of the incredibly dangerous MÖRK BORG skeleton. So it might be a funny mental image when a troupe of primary-color wearing ducks with slingshots pop out of a vent, but when it hits you that this is a life-or-death situation the game asks, "who's laughing now?" Like I said before, it dares you to take it seriously. There are consequences for not. 

My players decided to descend the tower, and I encountered my only hiccup in running it. See, I had read the entire dungeon when I first received my physical copy last November, but I only skimmed it before playing it last Tuesday. One subterranean floor has a freezer. 

 

The book tells you what temperature the freezer is at, and another section has a consequence for unplugging it. There's a cryptic label with letters missing on the freezer. Neither myself nor my players could figure out what was in the freezer. I'm not sure if the incomplete label refers to something in the real world, something from the DuckTales cartoon, or something I was supposed to come up with. It put me on the back foot, which was frustrating in the moment. In hindsight, I wish I had read through the adventure again in full and expanded on that dang freezer. 

But that was just a road bump during an otherwise action-packed, laugh-filled evening with my friends. Each keyed dungeon floor they explored was interesting, the multiple encounter tables kept things fresh, they even ended up finding some cool magic items. One of the players forgot he had a pet lemming for half the session, but I've never played a game where a player's pet isn't forgotten about. 

 

They made it to the very bottom vault of the tower, but didn't make it back to the ground floor before becoming indoctrinated cogs in the corporate machine. We faded on them shuffling off, holding orientation papers in their feathered hands. I couldn't think of a better end to our brief time in this fowl world. 

I asked my players if they'd like to take another run at the adventure sometime in the future, when we want a break from whatever else we're playing. After all, they only explored half of the tower. They immediately started hatching their next plan.

I'm excited to return to the Accursed City, because DUKK BÖRG isn't just a pun, it's a pun that's playable. I don't think I can give any higher praise.