I checked and apparently my symptoms are consistent with a particularly nasty strain of flu going around Sydney at the moment. It is utterly miserable. Today was the worst day yet – it just seems to get worse every passing day. A few days ago I’d been feeling relatively okay in the mornings and deteriorating later in the day. But today I’ve been feeling messed up all day. barely got any sleep again last night, up with constantly blocked and dripping nose and coughing.
I was thinking it would be bad if I cancelled a whole week of Outschool classes and was feeling better by Tuesday or Wednesday – I could be teaching kids later in the week. But now I’m starting to feel like I won’t even be in fit shape to teach a class on Sunday.
I marked another couple of university assessment reports and videos. It turns out the Beatles break-up team did in fact submit two separate reports. I had to ask the professor to send me the other one. The two halves of the team seem to have worked almost completely independently, because even though they started with the same project idea, they went completely different directions with it and used different datasets.
But in good news, I got some new roleplaying games! I was thinking about the store credit I still have at the game shop, and what to spend it on, and decided to look at some recent games that have been well received, and also browse through what else they had available that struck my fancy. I ordered them by email, and my wife was in the city so I messaged her and she dropped in to the game shop to pick them up on her way home.
I decided to get:
- The One Ring RPG – the third of the four roleplaying games based on the works of Tolkien.
- Blades in the Dark – a heist-based game set in a fantastic Victorian era city, acclaimed because of its innovative mechanics.
- Monster of the Week – a game using the other recent acclaimed “Powered by the Apocalypse” mechanics, reproducing an X-Files/Buffy style monster hunt in the modern day.
- Mörk Borg – a real outlier; an award-winning dark, gritty, fantasy game inspired by heavy metal.
The last one, Mörk Borg, has made a real name for itself recently, so it was the first one I cracked open. It’s a short book, and… flipping through it is an experience. The graphic design is all over the place – it feels like your brain is being ripped out as you read it. But it works. The text is dark and disgusting and strangely compelling. The PCs in this game are not heroes. They’re doomed to die, as is everyone in this bleak world, and soon! When starting a campaign the GM basically sets up a world-destroying apocalypse that will end the game at some random time in the future. And unlike heroic games, the PCs can’t do anything about it – the world will end. Their only job is to make their short lives more comfortable for themselves at the expense of everyone else. It sounds awful, but you can’t take your eyes off it. I’m not sure if I’ll ever run this game, but it’s definitely one for aficionados of RPGs to absorb and mine for dark ideas.
How dark? Let me just say that I think what I have is the Mörk Borg of flus.
New content today:
I’m sorry about your flu, I hope it gets better soon.
Nice RPGs you got there! I’ve played a bit of Blades in the Dark and run some Scum & Villainy, which is an adaptation of BitD IN SPAACE. Basically your Star Wars/Firefly/Traveller type thing but with nice mechanics. I like them, and have plans to run BitD in the near future.
Others I haven’t played but some Powered by the Apocalypse games have been fun, for example Monsterhearts, but it’s a quite different game from Monster of the Week.
Have fun with the games! I hope you get to play at least some of them, if not Mörk Borg.
Yesterday I got some new books for “Forbidden lands”, maybe I should consider running that as well. It’s a hex-crawl type sandbox thing, so might be a bit difficult to get players for it, though.