The real problem with the Hasbro monolith re-defining “indie RPG” to mean “literally any tabletop RPG that isn’t Dungeons & Dragons” is that now when you ask somebody what their favourite obscure indie RPG is, that twelve page zine game about robot catgirls having sex with each other is competing for oxygen with, like, Vampire: The Masquerade, and that’s just not good for the ecosystem.
Somebody over on my Bluesky jokingly referred to the hypothetical game described in the preceding post as “Sapphörk Borg”, and I can’t get the image out of my head. Like… what would building a lightweight zine game about lesbian robot catgirls making out using fucking Mörk Borg as its foundation look like in practice?
Anyway, here’s my Mörk Borg hack about lesbian robot catgirls making out. I don’t know whether a digital publication counts as a “zine,” but it is 12 pages.
I meant for this to be a shitpost game, but I think it started being good??? at some point. It also might not work even a little. It’s a weird game. I had the note “Resist the urge to make this a GMless hack of Mörk Borg about gay robot catgirls,” in my design document for most of the process, but I think it ended up being a teensy bit GMless anyway.
I haven’t playtested it at all as you might expect based on the one-week turnover, so if anyone does run it please tell me what happened.
Without further ado, it is with great pride and even greater apologies to the Swedish language that I present…
If I had a nickel for every time someone wrote a short-form tabletop RPG about gay catgirls based on one of my Tumblr posts, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.