Orc Borg Thoughts
Past weekend I DM’d a series of three one-shots at a local con. I chose the system ORC BORG by Grant Howitt and ROLLINKUNZ (Goblin Industries). It’s a Mork Borg derivative, which means it’s a Rules Light, OSR (Old School Renaissance) TTRPG where death waits around every corner, but that’s ok because all characters are more or less interchangable.
I brought mini’s, a battlemat and a stack of character sheets. I printed the rules (which conveniently fit on two pages) and we were off!
The One Shot
I playtested a one shot on two occasions, and somewhere in between those two playtests I realized this wasn’t an issue of rules or complicated dice rolls or maths… but of pacing.
The setting is already great: Warhammer 40K Orcs on a ship beating everything to pulp is setting enough. The color scheme (see picture of Grimy above) is bonkers but so attractive for a full blast metal ram-fest. The minis, which I borrowed and 3D-printed from WH40K Orcs and painted are awesome. The limit is imagination, but with multiple people at the table even that doesn’t seem too much of a barrier.
Now, in a con-setting, you are not just DM’ing a game. You’re also selling the system. And that means having to make sure the players have fun, but also enough of a challenge. Usually trying to gently thrum out their creative side helps. So this One Shot needed to impress. A little background: I was solo RPG’ing a different system and at some point I narrated getting chased. Now that had all the adrenaline I was looking for! Then I was reminded of the great 1979 movie The Warriors, which is in essence a chase movie. The plot is relatively simple: gangs get called to a meeting by a Big Boss, Big Boss gets shot, protaganist gang gets blamed, they need to flee using trains/subways/metro’s to their home turf, where they are able to confront and beat the Big-Boss-killer, thus getting an awesome ending.
Usually for a one shot I tend to do 3 or 4 encounters, with one being a puzzle or a mystery solving, one a diplomacy challenge and two just good old throw-downs. Not for this One Shot: it was a grind fest: 4 straight up brutal beatdowns.
The story line is like this: players at the table are a gang (they get to decide the name), they are ordered to retrieve a drum from the toughest gang on board the Derelict, located in Sevenhull: the Sevenhull Tecknos. To travel between compartments/hulls they take trains. Every train is unique in which faction controls the train (more on that later). The road tó Sevenhull is uneventful, and once they emerge in Sevenhull they find themselves in a square filled with a thousand muscle-bound orcs, all attentively listening to one giant orc in the middle of the square, on a raised platform. This is Cyrus, an orc known to have a hatred for the clergy and de-facto leadership of all the orcs, the Yellpriests. His likeness has appeared all over the derelict on these ‘obey’-like Shepard Fairey posters, thus spawning the nickname Cyrus the Virus. Once there, the crew hears Cyrus’s speech;
“[…] I’ve bullied, bargained, negotiated, seduced or stole your sh*t to get you all here, the best and strongest of all the gangs. It’s time to bring the Yellpriests down. They do not command us. They do not have the ears of the gods as they claim. They do not control us. They are weak. We are strong. Might makes right! Can you dig it, suckas? Can you dig it, suckas? CAN YOU DIG I[…]”
A minigun is pointed between the gang’s bodies, it spins up briefly and gives a single burst. Cyrus takes a hollow-point, 500-bullets-a-second burst of high-powered automated well-aimed minigun bullets to the dome, splattering the rest of his ‘suckas’ as red mist in the air and leaving the contents of his skull drifting gently down to the crowd below. He falls backward and is obviously expired. In the silence that follows, someone yells out ‘IT WAS THE __ (insert PC’s gang name here)!!!’. A thousand orcs turn around, obviously out for blood. Then follows the iconic DM line: ‘What do you do?’.
Since this is a One Shot, usually I railroad the players into taking the trains back to their home turf. Obviously flawed tactics like ‘I fight the thousand orcs’ or ‘I want to talk to them’ means a rolle with a near-impossible DC. Or a succesfull roll means they get to take down a few orcs before being bodily pushed back into the subway station.
I have players draw a subway on the battlemat, and a station next to it. Then they get to pick their mini’s, and arrange them. DM’s choice whether the train is waiting for them or needs a turn to arrive. This is basically the tutorial, so I just use a couple of the ‘fastest’ adversarial orcs, depending on the amount of PCs involved. They exchange blows for one or two turns before the train is ready to leave. Que soundeffect. Depending on which train you use (see below) you can get the orcs to give chase by jumping on the train as well. The end of the first encounter usually finds the group rolling on a loot table with awesome weird-ass loot. Then they find a radio with the DJ from The Warriors saying stuff like:
“Hello orc-boppers: Cyrus was killed today. A moment of silence. […]. I have it on good faith that it was the __ (insert player gang name here). Big Snot, new self-proclaimed leader of the Sevenhull Tecknos has kindly set a 500t bounty on these murdering scumbags. Dead not alive. Happy hunting orc-boppers!”
The chase is on!
Trains
- One train is controlled by goblins/grots, which makes it just a undercarriage on a train track, hanging wires, no walls and a couple of seats. This train has a little red light which tells the players when to duck as it goes pedal-to-the-metal through these tunnels with hanging bars, sudden bumps etc. But hey, it works. Players loved this train because it give them so many opportunities to yeet guys off the train or to try and hang on the edge.
- A second train is operated by spacers, or a space-marine-like faction, maybe just Guardsmen. I usually don’t give them guns to stay within the flavor of the setting, since Spacers have forgotten their origin on board the Derelict. This is really clean and all the spacers lament the blood and gore covering their formerly pristine train during a scrap. Now this is a great opportunity to introduce a mech, where aboard the train a bunch of spacers are worshipping a robot/mech. If the players roll on the reaction table anything other than coming to blows there’s a great roleplay opportunity here where one of the players can strap in the mech and use it during the rest of the encounters. Obviously, it comes at a cost, like more adversaries or difficult circumstances down the line. Unfortunately, the mech model I brought during the three sessions broke in three pieces whilst carrying so I wasn’t able to use it during the one-shots, but definitely a fun idea here!
- The third train contain space dwarfs (dwarves?). I had a fun idea to make ‘em sort of Juggalo/clown characters, but to call them Dwuggalo’s. They’ll yell stuff like ‘Whoop-Whoop’ or ‘Are you down with the Dwown (dwarven clown)?’. During the con I wasn’t able to run this train since usually we were getting short on time around now, so I wanted to move on the final encounter.
Further encounters
Usually the encounters are on board the trains or in the subway stations. Player creativity really helps. One group wanted to draw a bunch of anti-homeless benches in the subway, with giant spikes since this is supposed to be the future. During the ensuing encounter they got to suplex several enemies on these benches. Points for creativity. Another group wanted to use the environment to yeet enemies into outer space. Awesome stuff!
Between encounters, narrate the radio antagonizing the PC gang, with especially Big Snot making an appearance to raise the bounty further.
Once you hit the last encounter, it’s time for Big Snot to make an appearance, with a very ‘familiar’ minigun (gasp!). Usually once the last train arrives in the station and the PC gang is technically home, I have Big Snot waiting for them in the station, once the doors open he just lets rip. Once over, I have the PCs roll on the loot table again, then have the rest of the Sevenhull Tecknos appear and judge Big Snot for muderdering his boss. And that’s it!
Thoughts on Orc Borg
So having run this system a few times now and making some tweaks to it, I really love it. It’s really easy to use, it’s easy to abuse as well. The flow-chart rules fit on two pages, printable as a single sheet. There is enough rollplay opportunity to award or punish as a DM, and player creativity is really encouraged, unlike a D&D where everything has rules. Here it’s: “I’d like to suplex this dude on anti-homeless bench spikes”. “Cool, roll a strength check with let’s say… DC12.”. Once they succeed it’s awesome but if they fail, I’d like to narrate them failing forward: “you grab this dude to slam on the spikes, but you miss the spikes and slam him into a semi-comfortable position on the bench, roll D4 damage but take one yourself for straining your back”. The light-weight flexibility of the rules also call for a more creative interpretation of equipment and loot: what are shitkicker hobnails or what can you do with a bag of hooky mushrooms?
The downsides are: you’ll have to get creative as a DM as well (which is something you have to enjoy), and to be fair: after two rounds of rolling to hit, dealing D4 damage but the armor of the guy you hit subtracts D4 as well and you dealing no damage it can get boring very very fast. So if I run this again I’ll use an escalation dice: after three rounds of combat everyone gets +1 to hit and +1 damage to show that they are getting tired. After another rounds this bonus goes up to +2, and in the 6th round it goes up to +3. I stole that from 2D6 dungeon, and in my own sessions it works well. Let’s see how it pans out in a one shot.
The final downside is: people tend to be enthusiastic about Mork Borg and Orc Borg, but everyone thinks that this is not suitable for a longer campaign. I’m aware of all the hacks and addendums on Mork Borg to make it so, but it just seems convoluted. Maybe everyone should stick to using this as intended, then moving one after one or two sessions.
So, in conclusion: for one shots this is great. Characters don’t get a lot of depth but the likelihood of dying is high so that’s fine. It inspires you to be creative, and the players as well, but you’ll need a suitable group for that. The combat is fast paced and great but tends to get a little boring after a while, so you’ll need to adjust and move it along. Having a train leave in the middle of combat is great, introducing terrain-like hazards help a lot.
All in all, I’ve learned a lot and I really enjoyed it!