In some ways, I’m surprised it took this long, but that doesn’t reduce the excitement: Mörk Borg – easily the most original, impactful, and simply rad tabletop roleplaying game released in the last five years – is being made into a “grimdark, apocalyptic action RPG”, set to release on Steam in late 2025.
Announced to the press with a magnificently doom-laden, stygian trailer on Tuesday (watch it below), Mörk Borg Heresy Supreme is being developed by Rome-based startup Morbidware, in collaboration with Stockholm Kartell, the Swedish group that published 2020’s Mörk Borg.
And I’m excited, because Mörk Borg was, and is, one of the best tabletop roleplaying games ever made.
Morbidware says the Heresy Supreme Kickstarter will kick off in early October, promising a single player, side-scrolling “doom-metal action RPG where antiheroes navigate a brutal, semi-procedural world”, featuring “fast, strategic combat” and “grimdark quests, inspired by the tabletop RPG”.
Johan Nohr, lead artist and co-creator of the original Mörk Borg horror tabletop RPG, is very much on board with the project, saying in Tuesday’s announcement that “Morbidware really GETS the grim world, the dark humor and the whole philosophy” – and teasing fans with “the amount of extra stuff we’re creating specifically for this Kickstarter campaign”.
“It’s gonna be a damn fine video game, but we’re not just making a video game,” he adds – “[i]t’s a whole apocalyptic package.”
And, considering release is over a year away, Tuesday’s announcement tells us quite a lot about what we can expect from exploring Heresy Supreme’s blasted, hopeless hellscape.
According to Morbidware, we’ll play as “cursed walkers” – pitiful, selfish anti-heroes set on a desperate quest to gather relics to appease the two-headed Basilisk, and (hopefully) hold up an apocalypse that’s already starting all around us.
We’ll explore different regions of Mörk Borg’s infamously horrible, permanently dying world (“each one worse than the other”) fighting enemies and rolling Dungeons and Dragons style D20+modifier ability checks to complete quests and survive perils.
In perfect Mörk Borg style, though, everything is going to get darker, worse, harder, and swingier as you proceed. Unlike a DnD level up, leveling up your character in Heresy Supreme makes you worse at some things as much as it make you better at others.
You’ll get omens that let you auto-pass challenges, but it seems clear they’ll be limited. Some player classes can unleash powerful arcane catastrophes that could do spectacular damage – but they might just as easily make you explode.
Apocalyptic events called miseries trigger more often the longer you play, meaning the world is literally collapsing about your ears. And – most excitingly – you can welcome NPC comrades to your party, but “each companion has their own agenda” and might end up stabbing you in the back for their own ends.
It all sounds deliciously horrible, and we can’t wait to learn more when the Mörk Borg Heresy Supreme Kickstarter goes live in October. In the meantime, you can dig into more of Stockholm Kartell’s bizarre alt RPG worlds by reading our reviews of Mörk Borg spinoffs Cy_Borg (technicolor cyberpunk) and Pirate Borg (exactly what it sounds like).
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Source: Wargamer
