Threedom: The Vast In The Mörk

Recently we three — Kieron “DIE” Gillen, Jim “TEETH” Rossignol, and The Mysterious Third (Chris) — embarked on a hex crawl. To do so we combined a zine, The Vast In The Dark by Charlie Ferguson-Avery, and a lite dark fantasy RPG system, Mörk Borg by Pelle Nilsson and Johan Nohr. The word Mörk means dark (or gloom), so our calling it The Vast In The Mörk is a sort of joke by virtue of it actually being the same words. We’re clever like that. But in no other way.

Here’s how we got on.

Jim: You know I just realised something as I started up this document, which is that this is the first time I have GM’d for you and Chris together, and only the second time I have GM’d for you (that I can think of) in all the years. Which is weird when usually I am the one pushing to run games. In fact, I usually get annoyed if someone else wants to GM, because that’s my job.

Kieron: Obvious question then – how did it feel? Because this is always the thing beneath any of these kinds of discussions: how much is the rules, how much is the players, how much is the holy chemistry between the two things we call “game”. I actually wrote that, and couldn’t stop myself. Like, it is weird: I was aware when I was starting to playtest DIE, I had notes from players with a suggestion of something that would improve the game, and I had to admit “yeah, that’s absolutely in the rules, but I forgot to run it”. The shitness of KG the GM frustrating KG the designer.

Jim: I did forget stuff as we went on, but usually we folded it back in and things were good. The combination of Mörk Borg and that specific zine was tonally incredibly compatible, I felt, and I am more comfortable in the role of GM. I think you and I share a trait in that when we are GMing we have to be fully engaged, and are therefore better players. I suspect The Mysterious Third (Chris) also feels more comfortable in the role of GM? (Perhaps he can confirm?) In terms of the chemistry: I don’t think that group would have lasted these years if it wasn’t there, no matter who is GMing. That said, comfort is not always optimal. I was saying to my regular group, who are currently playtesting Gold Teeth, how we’re actually suboptimal as a test group now, because we’ve been playing together weekly for seven years, and so we speedbump away rules issues through pure familiarity. And while there’s something to be said for people being able to understand immediately if you change a rule and what the implications of that might be, really you want to know if some ad hoc group who has never played your sort of game before can understand how to get fun out of it. And absolutely we got fun out of this zine and system combination, I think?

Kieron: I think so. At the absolute least, we played an OSR hexcrawl. That was the goal: Doing something that is slightly outside our area – I’ve written a narrative hexcrawl (Bizarre Love Triangles for DIE, which uses triangles rather than hexes, because no-one tells me what to do) but not actually played one that I remember. I’m furrowing my brow. It really felt like a huge place. I didn’t actually realise The Vast was just a zine sized thing until you told us at the end. In my head, it was going to randomly generate in all directions forever, and we really could get lost. I think that was the best way to experience it. It’s called the Vast, after all. I also like Mörk Borg’s horrible little guys vibes, which merges well with the material. Want to talk about the adaption process? You ran it once before, right?

Jim: Yeeess. Sort of! There are actually two versions of this zine, one that came out quite a few years back and was a very slim A5 thing. This was really very lovely but only had a few pages of material. And then there was the Extended Edition which landed more recently (he says, in Old Man speak, so it’s still several years ago). The Extended Edition was much more developed and the one we ended up playing here.

Now, what happened with the original was that we were playing a campaign of Blades In The Dark and I wanted to use the Leviathans hack, which lets you hunt the giant sea demons which Doskvol’s economy depends on. One of the things which appears in that are these “Dreamer” leviathans which send everyone to sleep and to dream. And I think the hack itself suggests that you run a dream scene, perhaps in another system even, and so that’s what we did. And I was originally planning a one-shot, but we ended up using it to play several games that I hadn’t found a way to get to the table. First Troika, then Vast, then something else — I think it might have been a scenario from Numenera? 

Anyway, for the Vast bit we used Knave 1.0, and dispensed with the hexcrawl. It was just an encounter with some weirdos and an adventure inside one of the hyperstructure ruins. Two sessions, I think. But when I ran it for you and The Mysterious Third (Chris) we were doing it to hexcrawl specifically. Crucially, I had never run one, despite running The Vast before and you didn’t think you had played one? So it was Very Much Time. And we were running The Vast to play with this extremely cool zine setting that had been fleshed out of the extended version. In terms of adaptation, there was stuff to do: in The Vast In The Dark the author suggests a load of D&D-adjacent rules, but I didn’t really want to run it on a system like that, so we went with the idea of Mörk Borg and its rudimentary rules and fucked up little guys. It meant I had to twist The Vast’s navigation, encumbrance and exhaustion systems to fit, so that meant we had some other metrics to play with in terms of getting lost and suffering survival-conditions. We merged MB’s powers and things with those in the zine, and the hybrid offspring was healthy.

The other thing that struck me was that it’s been so long since we’ve played something where money really mattered! I actually really got something out of you guys browsing equipment lists and saying “can i buy a 15-ft chain?” That’s the good stuff, right? You like visiting a faceless subterranean dust merchant, KG?

Kieron: I do like a little retail therapy, it’s true. That said, I more imagine the  faceless subterranean dust merchant looking at us as we just browse their stock, never looking up. It didn’t take me out the world, per se, but certainly brought the game bits to the fore. That’s what all the small crunchy simulation stuff does – but when our interests align to the interests of the characters, that’s not exactly a major problem. Our characters want to survive in this hell dimension. We want them to survive in the hell dimension.

There is the trick of working in the two modes – the OSR Dungeon-as-puzzle stuff and the heavily flavourful I-Am-A-Philosopher-death-cultist stuff. If we had to choose, we chose the former. In sessions where I felt I was on, I managed to put a crown of narrative on top of this dungeon-solving-machine, but it was very much one mode which was more important to play here than the other.

I felt you could split my sessions into two – basically ones where I used my 15ft chain to try and solve a problem and ones where I didn’t. The former ones were where what I think of as an OSR brain was engaged. The others were ones where I wasn’t. I much more enjoyed the former, and felt like I was engaging it with as intended… but it’s a weird one, for someone who has a strongly narrative-forward bent to his play. Like, I remember the first time I ran a classic dungeon for friends post coming back to RPGs, and one friend instantly got a solution involving capturing wind in a bag. She was an escape room designer. That kind of ludic thinking is where I felt it was working. I do have the theory that OSR is actually replacing the computer with a person in a classic 1980s-1990s graphic adventure. As in, you’re basically meant to combine objects in the world in novel ways to deal with a problem, and if you fail, instead of getting an Sierra-games insta-death you get a tedious fight sequence. A comparison which I’m sure will piss off literally everyone.

But the bit where I attached a lantern to the bear-trap and the chain to the bear-trap and then lowered it into the chasm, and swung it back and forth so we could see if the giant beastie was hiding beneath the bridge? That’s absolutely a point and click adventure solution, but powered by a universe simulated in Jim Rossignol’s brain. I loved it. It was better than those Sierra adventures as it wasn’t a puzzle (i.e. a set solution) but a problem (i.e. something to be overcome.)

But when I worked that out, I do feel myself let go of the character. Which is the sort of game it is. That was a funny thing – it’s a wild universe, full of berserk horror stuff (it really is gnarly) but sung most when approaching it with cool logic.

I sensed you pulling against the tendency – you wanted to do a story. A rudimentary basic one, but still an actual structure – also you really wanted to roll. You made me roll for that previous solution, and I did think “I wonder if someone who was hardcore OSR would have done that?”

Jim: Yeah, I actually switched gears on checks a chunk of the way through. Initially I was steering away from dice. So for example, in the first dungeon you combined the chain with a bear-trap to slow down monster that was above your pay grade, and then hit it with a choking power to overwhelm it, although I think you rolled for the choke power doing its work, the rest of it was just “that’s a good plan, that’s what happens”. But then later, as we got further into the Vast material, and had you visiting the various weird rooms in the ruins, well, those are often fights or difficulty checks. Not a great deal of what was there was really puzzle-y in any sense that was useful, and a lot of other stuff, such as navigation, the random encounters, and the hex-contents generation, is all dice roll randomisation. A lot of it is really vibey like “this giant dancing statue thing has a psychic aura which will harm you if you walk through here”, and we managed to get around bits of that without rolls, like it works in some cases (don’t look at it! Distract it by throwing a thing!), and then in others it made more sense for it to be some sort of mandatory check to get through. In the end I was happy to roll a bunch, because actually we seemed to have a good rhythm. And I think it ended up being a reasonable midway path to take.

Kieron: Yeah, I’d agree with that – basically, it felt like it worked, which is half the battle when you’re hacking a bunch of things together. Actually, in terms of system, It’s interesting that you went with Mörk Borg – there’s other OSR systems which carry less flavour, while you added something which is heavily flavourful with a scenario which is ALSO heavily flavourful. That the two aesthetics are at least adjacent to each other helped, I think…. Though I also don’t know how far apart they were. Which you’ll tell me. 

Jim: If Mörk Borg is like classic black and white makeup death metal, then The Vast In The Dark is the same but with a progressive streak, and maybe a melodic vocalist. They probably read M John Harrison novels. So the zine and the rules definitely fell in sight of each other in the landscape of That Sort Of Thing. However, the character sheet that comes with Vast wants you to adapt D&D or something very close. So while one of the suggested systems to run it literally is MB, I do think there’s a bunch in there that expects people to come in with D&D in mind, systemically. Nevertheless I felt like they meshed really well once we’d done that bit of adaptation, because it is a world full of fucked up little men, with their swords and with their candle-covered armour and horrible gelatinous ghost horrors, and bringing in the flavour-text powers of MB worked really well. All that said, as soon as we hit a miss-miss-miss combat sequence I regretted it, and began to fantasize about running it in a story-game system. The Vast is filled with story stuff: the weird characters, the idea that The Vast is infinite and inescapable, the deletion of memories. Good stuff. And that has actually led me to mull over running something way more trad in setting than Vast, with a much more defined quest structure and so forth, but in a story-game system. The Mysterious Third (Chris) had a good suggestion there. 

Kieron: And I suggested Mörk Borg, right? I really don’t remember why I suggested it, except it’s the one I’ve run a couple of times. I’ve run Mörk Borg for you once, so this is the third game I’ve played – which makes me think we could do a Threedom on Mörk Bork by itself. Which makes me think – what are we writing about here? This is a question that you can ask about any table’s experience of basically anything, but scrolling the above, I feel we’re mainly writing about Vast In the Dark, but that’s mainly as the Mörk Borg-ian elements synthesised so well with it. Also, if we were writing about Mörk Borg, we’d be writing about Mörk Borg. We’ll be talking about the aesthetic that runs through it and the influence of that – the “we’re going to spend pages upon pages doing information that another game would do in a short list”. I don’t think we’re going to do that. We’d be talking about its rules more. I think… that is about to happen. 

For a rules lite game, I’m tempted to just do the criticism-lite approach: the rules are there and allow problems’ failures and successes to be ascertained. It excels in its random tables – there is no finer weird little guy generator in the world, and you’ll love these physically and emotionally wrecked beings in a few throws of the dice. The horror of the various spells is a joy – I got a lot of mileage out of the vomiting blood one. As a basic skill-success-ascertainment it does the job. But – and I think The Mysterious Third would agree – it does make you think that “if you’re rolling you’re losing” in OSR isn’t really about combat meaning character death is likely – but that player death by boredom is likely. Rolling is the lose state as rolling is not much fun in these games, as there’s nothing there.

That’s not true. Mörk Borg is very specific with what it does – it’s all player facing (you roll to hit, you roll to dodge). The above “skill-success-ascertainment” does its job isn’t a small thing. It gets out of the way. Even in combat this integrates with the economics of the survival and exploration game interestingly as well – when the combats started, we did have a handful of resources to use. We had the Omens – the re-roll/bonus/whatever system you could use. We had our (er) scrolls. We had a number of items, which may be useable once a day or one-off. All of which may end a combat quicker and the game is that sort of resource management – what do we spend now we don’t have later? I think the marriage of Mörk and Vast worked well in this bit – we’ve worked hard to get everything, and it integrated with the shopping aspect too. 

The problem is when you’re out of them, you’re just rolling, and losing your will to live.

Which maybe is fine! I’m reminded of talking to a designer of the seminal stealth computer game Thief back in the day, telling me about a junior team member wanting to improve the combat routines. However: “If we improve the combat, people will want to do combat – that’s the last thing we want!” You make a complicated, sophisticated and fun system, and of course people are going to want to interact with that bit.

Jim: One thing that’s worth noting within this is that some of the abilities, which were weird and ugly and gnarly, were from Vast. It has some quirks for the characters, and magic objects, as well as powers you can earn or be afflicted with from The Vast, and all of these felt like the meshed with Mörk Borg. They’re really great: The Mysterious Third (Chris) having a calming presence, you eating bugs to read their minds, and the structure collapsing object which was easily the most powerful object there, which I think you forgot to use? 

Kieron: No, I always had it in my back pocket, but it was a classic “this is so valuable I want to be sure I use it properly” so never used it at all. But I enjoyed having it – it was certainly always in my head as the option. The Boba Fett “this is a thermal detonator” gambit was always on the table.

Jim: Anyway, my point is all works really well together. We had no idea it does, but it REALLY does. And that led me to shriek when I saw MB and TVITD both on Bundle Of Holding at the same time, which I actually mentioned in the newsletter if you want even more Mörk-Vast wittering. But yes: these things all dovetailed to the point where I had basically lost track of which were from the game system and which were from the zine. Which perhaps suggests that while the zine intends to bend D&D to work with its vibe, it actually bends far more easily to Mörk Borg’s. 

Kieron: I am resisting the urge into segueing the conversation into “All games are either Mörk Borgs or Wanderhomes”. 

Jim: Anyway, we probably don’t need to upset any more people by treading on dice rolling and should talk about the other really cool thing: the monsters. Now, I fucked them up a bit, because I confused the ogre with the minotaur (the minotaur being a sort of super-entity and manifestation of the soul-draining powers of The Vast) but I think the overall delivery of the monsters was some of the best stuff in that short campaign. And it reminded me how much I like GMing monsters! It’s a bit of the job I am good at. And actually I haven’t been doing that much lately. You liked the monsters, I think? I could see you and The Mysterious Third (Chris) both making faces at the horribleness of them? The spine-centipede-mangled-corpse thing beneath the bridge, which you alluded to earlier, was a particular delight.

Kieron: I loved them. After the first session with Ogre-not-Minotaur was such a strikingly horrible visual that I had to go and tell C about it afterwards, which I’m sure she appreciated hugely when trying to get to sleep. That each one actually was named after a classic monster and then wasn’t actually the classic monster in a 1:1 way added to it. Hell, even you messing up and getting the name wrong earlier on added to it – we had enough to hold onto (the name) and presented with a visual entirely against that. That was some sense of wonder stuff. The giant dancing statue thing! What was going on? We would probably die if we tried to find out. It’s golden.

I did find myself thinking about the power of Ignorance. I knew you were running Vast in the Dark, but I had no idea of the size of Vast in the Dark. I presumed it was some kind of huge campaign book we were going to play a splice of. I looked at the hex map, and this world we were generating and didn’t know where the bounds of it was the exciting this. If I knew it was just a zine and we burned through almost all the content in the time we played, that wouldn’t be there. It was really primal RPG stuff.

Which got me thinking quite closely about what narrative-based-player-generative systems lose. I mainly play them – hell, I mainly design them – and there’s obvious huge strengths (player buy-in for a start, and shared creation and a whole lot of great stuff). But you do lose the black box. You are inside the black box. What the Vast does is create an obsidian black box and opens slightly, letting you peak at things just enough to make you wonder what the fuck that horrible thing is. 

There’s compromises between the poles, of course – I was thinking about Trophy Gold’s customising of set experiences, and how it’s actually a deconstructed Point-Crawl. But playing this in Trophy Gold would lose some of what I loved about this, and vice versa. Which is, of course, why we have different games, and different foods, and different musics and everything else.

Jim: Agreed on all that. It worked and it has me thinking about what hybrid thing I want to run next. Taking a setting, applying a system. It’s a bit like the time my mate Tim converted Rifts into D&D.

But that’s a story for another time.