Roll and Tale

A Bad Lotto

Rotblack Sludge begins with the player characters as prisoners tasked with venturing into The Accursed Den to complete a quest for the Shadow King and earn their freedom. The quest being to try to recover the Shadow King’s heir which is being held somewhere in the Den. With only two players the deck was stacked against them early on, and being the first time running this I didn’t want to artificially lower the difficulty of the dungeon. So to get things going smoothly I let the players know ahead of time that their characters were likely to die and for this session in particular to have scvmbirther pulled up to quickly roll a new character. I go over some of the mechanics and other details about Mörk Borg in the introductory post in this series.

I set the story up as a wagon full of prisoners were brought to The Accursed Den and two by two they would be let in, and if one of them died another would replace them. Would it have made more sense for them to send the whole wagon of prisoners in at once? Probably. But the flavor text described the man who brought them as odd and delirious, so I decided it fit.

The two players rolled their first set of characters and made their way to the entrance of The Accursed Den. Upon entering the dungeon, the players were immediately presented with a choice: head left to a dining hall or right to a library.

Study Hall

The two players made the choice to go right, and one of the players had rolled a character that had a power that allowed them to do 1d10 damage to any creature within 30 feet or so, they were starting off playing incredibly cautiously and before entering the library they cast the spell successfully, targeting 3 skeletons in the room which would have attacked if disturbed. So room 1 a success for the dynamic pair, after a quick investigation of the room they decided to continue moving up. The character who cast the spell still had a couple more uses of their power that day, so they attempted to do the same thing. They rolled the dice to cast the spell and rolled a natural 1. A fumble which caused them to have to roll against the Arcane Catastrophes table, which has really nothing good on it. They rolled a 9, which sent their character a day into the future. Which on one hand does give that character a happy ending, they escape the dungeon and likely have their freedom (assuming the quest the day before ends up successful), it does have the downside of fulfilling a Misery. Which in Mörk Borg means the world is one step closer to ending, upon reaching 7 Miseries, the world is over the game ends (if you have a physical copy of the book it says to burn the book as well, if you are feeling extra dramatic). Within the first 15 minutes of the game, we lost a player character. They quickly rolled a new one and rejoined the remaining character.

Now without a spellcaster which could help them get the upper hand on enemies, they nervously marched forward into the unknown where they were met with two guards ready to attack. The first combat of the game had now triggered. And on the first defense roll for one of the characters they rolled low and took a hit from an enemy that took more than their total HP, killing them instantly. The still standing player rolled better and was able to survive and defeat the enemies. So in a span of 10 minutes of game time, two PC’s were taken out of the game and we had a brand new cast.

Dungeon Crawling Worms

With two relatively brand new characters, one a bit hot headed and the other a coward, we carried on into the dungeon, immediately there was another room with swinging chains and a couple guards, which they were able to take care of with little issue this time round. Unfortunately the door forward was blocked with no way to open it, but it did look like to the West there was a room with shining gems!

So we reach the part of the dungeon where the players can attempt to get valuable gems out of the wall, which the hot-headed character immediately starts going for it. The room itself is a bit of a scene, to the south end is the wall of gems asking to be picked off, and to the north is the Rotblack Sludge, an oily pit that smells of sulfur (which at the center of has two skeletons playing violin and dancing on a pillar, it is not explained in the text what they are doing there).

To break off a gem it is a typical difficulty check (12 is the baseline for most checks in Mörk Borg), and rolling high enough on the dice the player is able to break off a couple gems, each looking to be worth about 200 silver. Breaking a gem triggers the Gutworm’s attack—the most dangerous enemy in the dungeon. One failed Agility test against it results in the character being instantly swallowed whole.

As the Gutworm erupted from the sludge, its oily body writhing and reeking of sulfur, the hot-headed character yelled, ‘I’ve fought worse!’ Meanwhile, the cowardly one shouted, ‘Nope, I’m out!’ and fled to the room’s entrance.To the coward’s credit, they were shouting words of encouragement during the encounter. The excitement was palpable as the hot-headed character rolled to attack successfully made the hit—only to realize their weapon barely scratched the creature’s slimy hide and thick skin. After a harrowing few rounds of dodging and desperate strikes, they managed to flee, narrowly escaping death.

Backtracking

With no way forward, the players reluctantly retraced their steps, hoping the left-hand path would offer better luck—or at least fewer Gutworms. The left-hand path led them through a prison room where a handful of prisoners begged to be set free. The two player characters did not care at all about the prisoners and kept moving forward, (caring in this game tends to be punished, and this is one of those scenarios that if they got close to the prisoners they’d try to choke the player characters. ) and made into a lovely corridor with a bunch of lovely paintings. A high enough Presence test would reveal that adjusting the paintings opens a trap door. Neither player succeeded, and upon interacting with the paintings, they were dropped into a tunnel that rolled them right back to the gem room, triggering another battle with the worm

The players tried a couple rounds again of trying to fight the worm, taking some damage but none fatal before successfully fleeing again. So they were back to going to that corridor this time aware of the trap. This time avoiding the room with the prisoners and going through a dining hall that had one old man sitting at a table. The players spent some time trying to get useful information from the man, but he seemed indifferent to their presence and appeared somewhat ‘otherworldly.’ He rambled nonsensically before trailing off into silence.

After surviving their second encounter with the Gutworm, the players returned to the corridor. This time, they spotted a path to the west leading to a greenhouse, where an NPC named Lesdy and her 3 companions awaited.

Battle in the Greenhouse

Lesdy began kindly, offering the players something to drink. Remembering lessons from childhood about not taking things from strangers, the player characters politely declined. Lesdy is kind enough to explain she’s here to figure out how to control that worm to take control of The Accursed Den. I had Lesdy speak in a calm and quiet manner. When pressed by the players about why she wanted to control the Den, she simply responded that the power would be nice. Both player characters, thinking this was nothing but bad news, decided to quietly leave the greenhouse. This triggered Lesdy’s three companions to start a fight encounter.

Unfortunately the numbers and dice rolls were against my two players this time around, though they fought valiantly they were both eventually struck down in combat. Two more characters were down and both players were back to scvmbirther to roll a couple new characters.

To make this particular module flow better I had it that even upon a total party kill the characters would be able to know what has already been explore in the dungeon and were to go next, just to avoid an infinite loop while we were learning this. So the next two characters, and final two characters came up Zolton and Nagle, they picked up where the others left off and instead of going to the greenhouse just went north where they saw a trap door that led to the BBEG room.

Boss Battle

Upon entering the room with the dungeon boss, a cannibal warlock named Fletcher, they were greeted by a room with bodies hanging down by hooks. There were a couple of attempts to either sneak around Fletcher or persuade him not to start a fight. The dice gods however wanted to see a fight and all rolls ended up leading to the boss battle. Other than the worm Fletcher is set to be the most difficult encounter of the module. Any time the players landed a hit, they took damage from body parts falling from the sky. Every three rounds, Fletcher used a magic power. The battle lasts for multiple rounds with the players running low on health, but end being able to work together to bring down Fletcher, ending his reign in The Accursed Den. On his neck is key that leads into the next room, which holds various items for the players to grab, which that room leads to the final puzzle.

There is a statue with one eye, on examining it the empty eye is coated in blood. Nagle picks up on this immediately and goes back to Fletcher’s body to remove an eye and place it into the eye socket of the statue. (There is a semi time limit in the room that if the players can’t figure it out get dumped into the sludge pit). Upon putting the eye into the socket a secret door opens, revealing the Shadow King’s heir. Although the heir doesn’t really want to leave he doesn’t put up any fight as Zolton and Nagle lead him out of the dungeon. The man that hired the players greets them warmly seeing their success, and leads them to be rewarded at the Shadow Kings castle. The rest of the prisoners that didn’t get a chance to go in are stuck locked in the carriage as it is lit on fire and pushed down a hill. Fireworks to end the day.

Nagle and Zolton are eventually rewarded at the castle with some silver and some horses to ride to their much earned freedom. From the castle they head South in search of a new adventure.

Final thoughts

Admittedly my players went into this dungeon more gung-ho to cause carnage and beat people up, which I usually discourage in my games, however this was a smaller game where we were all learning the systems in real time so it worked out pretty well in this particular case. If I was to run this module again I’d definitely take more time to take it slow, give the guards more personality and talking lines rather than just being bodies to throw at the players.

I think this works as a really good first module for both a game master and players to run in Mörk Borg. There is a clear goal to accomplish and the dungeon naturally leads them into the paths that put them directly in the chaos. I didn’t touch on it as much in this post, but the module includes a random encounter guide which you roll on in certain rooms that adds an encounter, this is great since you can run this module multiple times and get a different experience. The encounters with both the Gutworm and Fletcher help set up the unforgiving nature of Mörk Borg encounters, where a single bad dice roll can mean the end of your character’s story.

For a first module, and first time playing Mörk Borg for all of us this was a complete blast. In the next couple sessions we played we carried on with their two final characters which survived this dungeon and have turned this into a small mini campaign with each session being a new episode and dungeon to crawl.

Their next adventure would take them deep into the murky swamps and the mysterious Sepulchre of the Swamp Witch—but more on that in the next post.