The Dissident Maze, Part 5: Flails Akimbo

I know I said it was going to be a few weeks before the next installment, but scheduling issues with our Vamp game lead to me learning on Sunday night that I'd be running a one shot Monday night.

Some background on this whole thing: I'm attempting to play through every module in Dissident Whispers with the same players, and the same characters (or at least alternate universe versions of them). I don't really expect to actually accomplish this, but I think it'll be fun to see how far I can get. Dissident Whispers is a community created collection of one page RPG adventures to raise money for Black Lives Matter, I personally wrote a Troika! adventure, and a Mausritter adventure location for the project.

See Week 1 for more background on Dissident Whispers, as well as the setup for how I'm running a single party of adventurers through wildly different modules and systems. I will admit, now that we're 5 sessions in, my original framework of an interplanar maze, with soul points and such, has almost entirely been tossed by the wayside. As I very often do, I underestimated how much players will self motivate to explore modules and find their own fun, so I really didn't need to set up an elaborate system to encourage them.

Last week the players were hunting for Snail Eggs in Ootheca, this week they're fighting for their lives in Flails Akimbo!

The Module

The full art and layout for this module is worth seeing, go buy the book!

 

Flails Akmibo is an adventure for MÖRK BORG written by Pablo Dapena (with art by Michael Harmon, layout by Matthew Johnson, Rolland and Pablo, and editing by Flora Van Den Berg). It's an over the top, hyperviolence send up of Guns Akimbo. I'd actually had the pleasure of playing through this module when a friend ran it, so I had a pretty good handle on it going in (part of what contributed to me picking it as a last minute thing).

The System

MÖRK BORG is the recently Ennie award winning Art Punk created by Pelle Nilsson and Johan Nohr. 

Play Report

I started off by telling them they were almost certain to die during this, so to be prepared for that. When I played in this, I personally died 3 times, so I felt pretty confident in this warning.

 

Tenzin, Gunter and Dillinger awake with spinning heads and hurting hands in small stone cells (Garimir couldn't make it this week). They look down, and each realize that weapons have been crudely nailed to their hands! Tenzin has warhammers, Dillinger has knives, and Gunter has a zweihänder fixed to each hand (lots of damage, but combat rolls are penalized due to the difficulty).

They immediately come to the conclusion that this is some sort of battle royale thing, and Gunter loudly yells that he can't wait to kill Dillinger before the booming announcer voice even has a chance to introduce today's game of DEATH GALORE.

Finding their cages unlocked, they all run out and through the only door into the next room. Two cagefighters, and a handful of terrified looking prisoners were waiting in the room, and leap to attack the players as soon as the announcer's monologue was finished.

One cagefighter runs with spinning axes towards the zweihänder wielding Gunter, and this is where the first hints of how absurdly lucky my players would get in this module appeared. Gunter gets a critical success on defense, giving a free attack, which hits, and one shots the cagefighter.

Dillinger rushes the other cagefighter, managing to get behind him and slashing through the tendons in the back of his feet. Tenzin, meanwhile, avoids the fray and tries to figure out where the hell the announcer's voice is coming from. Seeing this as a sign of weakness the small band of prisoners try and swarm him, but Tenzin spins into a whirlwind of smashing hammers (using the special "Thou twirl me fair round, dearest, fair round. Like a breaking wheel, fair round round round" move included in this module) driving them off and narrowly avoiding falling into the huge open pit in the middle of the room.

Gunter finishes off the wounded cagefighter, Tenzin kills two of the prisoners attacking him with another spinning attack, and Dillinger shoves the remaining live prisoner down into the pit. Dillinger briefly considers going full Hunger Games by shoving Gunter into the pit, but is interrupted as Tenzin hears some "booing" sounds coming from the bottom of the pit where one of the prisoners had landed.

With some difficulty due to their weapon hands, they quickly splice together a rope out of the clothing of the dead, and lower Tenzin down into the pit to see what's going on. Dangling from the end of the rope, Tenzin finds a three fancily dressed, and very drunk, nobles halfheartedly punching and stabbing the body of the dead prisoner, complaining that they paid good money for this and it's bullshit that this guy is already dead. As Tenzin drops in among them though, they excitedly turn to him and declare joy at the prospect of a "meat pinata" and rush in. He releases the rope, and unleashes another cyclone of hammers upon the nobles. Hearing the commotion, Dillinger takes a high risk leap into the pit, managing to land on and messily crush one of the dilettantes, sending the other two fleeing in fear. 

While Gunter more carefully and safely climbs down into the pit, Tenzin and Dillinger chase down and finish off the two remaining nobles. Through a door and up a set of stairs, the players find themselves in a narrow hallway populated by spear wielding nobles, after bringing destruction down upon them they find they can see into areas of "The Stage" through small slits in the walls. This, along with interrogating the lone noble they spared, allows them to realize these are the "spectator booths" through which the slaughter can be witnessed (and participated in by poking spears through slits). While looking through one of these slits, they see a group of three cagefighters dash through a door after hearing the announcer call for someone to go deal with the PCs.

Rounding a corner, and pushing their noble captive ahead of them, a huge armored man wearing a leather pig mask bursts through a door at the far end of the hallway, as the announcer introduces SNOUTFACE and promises a spectacular fight, even if it's a shame their paying audience can't see it.

The captive noble is shoved into Snoutface's path, bravely soaking a massive mace attack to protect the players. Then Tenzin rolls past Snoutface's feet, coming up behind the gladiator and smashing his warhammers directly into the back of his head (a critical hit, dealing almost all of Snoutface's HP, and damaging his armor). Gunter quickly follows up with his zweihänders and finishes off poor Snoutface before he managed to do anything more than kill a single noble.

As Tenzin retrieves the leather pig mask as a trophy, Dillinger passes through the door Snoutface has entered through. He finds a storage area with an armored, locked door, and a portcullis leading to a large amphitheater. In this room he can hear some very loud panicked breathing coming from behind a set of shelves storing hammers and nails. As the other two join him, the portcullis begins to open, and the three cagefighters they had seen before arrive in the amphitheater and rush towards the PCs.

Tenzin, however, simply steps forward and tosses the bloody pig mask of the arena champion onto the ground striking FEAR into the hearts of these three men. Two immediately break and run, while the last collapses the ground begging for his life.

GM Note: Tossing down the mask of the defeated arena champion, someone the cage fighters would fear, was a clever idea and I decided to simply roll morale checks for the three men. ALL THREE FAILED! After rooms of nothing but successful combat checks (by this point, the PCs had taken a grand total of 2 damage, and that was to the guy who started with NINE HEALTH) this was the final nail in the coffin for any hope I had of demonstrating how lethal this game was. At this point, I had no choice but to bow my head and accept that my players were simply too lucky to be killed.

The players then tore down the shelves, revealing the poorly hidden announcer (a man with a megaphone sewn to his mouth), then made their way through a door to find the "Bacchanalian Chamber" the secret room containing the hidden master of this blood arena the Grand Duchess Rottundha. Cowering with her are all the remaining nobles that had fled from the players approach, and Tenzin fell upon them in a tornado of whirling hammers.

His constant use of the spin attack finally almost came back to bite him as he managed to donk himself in the head. Fortunately, for him, his absurdly good HP roll meant he was pretty much fine. The rest of the players joined, and they made short work of the Dutchess and the remaining nobles. From the corpses, they retrieved the key to their freedom, and left the bloody arena injured but very much unkilled.

Thoughts on the Module

Well, first of all, my players had an absolutely fantastic time. After we finished they couldn't stop gushing about how fun it was, although they admitted it was likely in part to how absolutely unstoppable they were. Gunter's player did express some sadness that they hadn't died, after I'd hyped up how unforgivably deadly the module was. They loved being put in an awful, probably unwinnable situation and being able to let loose and damn the consequences in a bid for revenge.

This module is jam packed with horrible, hilarious, and fun things. The setup is perfect for putting players into the right frame of mind to play MÖRK BORG. You start off in a cell with weapons nailed to your hands, you're probably not getting out of here! Might as well go down swinging! The announcer provides a really fun excuse to give dumb, booming voice narration to everything the players do, and a vehicle to try to goad them into poor decision making.

I can't say that my players' experience will be the common one, my own experience playing in it had 5+ deaths among 3 players. However, from a player perspective, everything was so over the top, bloody, and gruesome that dying never felt bad. No matter if you defy the odds and escape alive, or die half a dozen times trying this module is a fantastic introduction to MÖRK BORG and I can't recommend it enough.

Thoughts on the System

I'm not going to have many original thoughts on MÖRK BORG, people much more eloquent than me have already waxed poetic about the incredible layout, the heavy metal influences, the fantastically disturbing artwork, and more. 

 

The mechanics are light, but very functional. Character creation is extremely fast, a thing you need in a (usually) very lethal game. All the rolls are player facing (players roll both to attack and defend) and against generally fixed difficulties which is a thing I really enjoy. It always puts the ball in the players' courts, and means the game runs very fast and easily. Being able to quickly tweak the target numbers based on whatever goofball thing the players were describing let me mechanically show the impact of their ideas, which is not something I always want in a game (see Chris McDowall's blog post about handling variable difficulty in a game with fixed rolls) but it worked really well for this group. 

The main thing running the game made me realize though, is how brilliant the "Calendar of Nechrubel" and the Miseries are. For those unfamiliar during a game of MÖRK BORG each dawn the GM rolls a die (size chosen based on the intended length of the campaign) and on a 1 a Misery is activated. When the 7th Misery occurs, well, I'll let the book express itself:

The table you roll the other miseries on is the coolest looking random table I've ever seen in an rpg.

 

When I first read this my reaction was, "Woah, extremely metal and cool. Sounds kind of annoying to use at the table though, since you'd get a weird anticlimax end to your campaign, right?" However, reflecting on Flails Akimbo I've realized this does something very important.

Since the world is going to end, DAMN THE CONSEQUENCES AND GO DOWN SWINGING. Players enter the game knowing that their characters will assuredly die and the entire world is going to end, and there's nothing they can do about it! They're already in an awful situation, so there's no need to be precious with their characters, instead they should play them like you'd drive a stolen car. 

 

Flails Akimbo does this on a smaller scale, it puts the players in an awful, essentially unwinnable situation. They're going to die so they might as well try to strike back and take everyone else down with them. And hell, if they manage not to die? That makes a story worth telling.

Final Thoughts

Both the system and the module are great but I won't retread what I've said above. If you were looking for a way to get players introduced to the nihilistic, black metal violence of MÖRK BORG I can't imagine a better vehicle than Flails Akimbo.

 

My RPG schedule is still a bit up in the air, so I'm not sure when the next time we'll be playing a Dissident Whispers module is, but keep an eye out for our next adventure (where we'll return to my players voting on the next module). If this sounded great, and it was, go buy Dissident Whispers! It's got fifty seven more modules in there, including five (!!!) other MÖRK BORG modules. It even has a MB module written by Johan Nohr himself, and other amazing layout work by him can be found in a couple other places in the book.