Doom, Despair, and Dungeon Crawls: Why MÖRK BORG is the Best TTRPG System to Emulate Elden Ring and Dark Souls
Let’s be honest: if Elden Ring and Dark Souls were a smell, they’d reek of crypt dust, ancient regret, and burning grace. They are games that demand your attention with their decayed grandeur, cryptic lore, and gleeful willingness to hurl you off cliffs or feed you to flesh dogs the size of small trucks. So naturally, the tabletop RPG that best captures this vibe must be a gaudy, gothic, doom-metal nightmare fueled by rot, madness, and the constant reminder that you will die.
Ladies, gentlemen, and undead abominations, allow me to present your perfect match: MÖRK BORG.
This isn’t a marriage of convenience—it’s a cosmic alignment. MÖRK BORG and the worlds of Elden Ring and Dark Souls go together like giant swords and tiny health bars. In fact, I’m here to argue, as both a fan and a fun-loving expert in tabletop agony, that MÖRK BORG is the best system to bring FromSoftware’s cursed, crumbling worlds to your table.
Vibes Don’t Lie: Aesthetic Alignment of the Doomed
Let’s start with the obvious: the vibes are immaculate.
MÖRK BORG’s rulebook looks like a cursed text you found in a rotting chapel, wrapped in yellowed parchment and printed with the blood of a dead prophet. It’s all chaotic layouts, neon yellow ink, woodcut horrors, and bile-drenched apocalyptic warnings. In other words: it’s peak Dark Souls energy.
Both Elden Ring and Dark Souls are defined by their decayed high fantasy: grotesque castles crumbling into ash, unknowable gods whispering from behind time, and champions who are barely clinging to their humanity (or sanity). MÖRK BORG's own setting—The Dying World—is literally falling apart, with a two-headed Basilisk god named Verhu promising the end of all things. Not eventually. Soon.
If that doesn’t scream Age of Dusk, what does?
This is a system that begins with a doomsday clock ticking towards annihilation and ends with your players praying the world dies before they do. That’s basically Dark Souls in a bottle, but with more screaming and weirder fonts.
Brutal Mechanics for a Brutal World
MÖRK BORG doesn’t pretend to care about balanced encounters or fair fights. Your players are squishy. The enemies are horrifying. You’ll die. A lot.
Sound familiar?
Dark Souls and Elden Ring are notorious for their punishing combat and lack of hand-holding. MÖRK BORG delivers that same ruthless energy in a delightfully efficient package. Characters have low hit points, swing clunky weapons, and pray to dead gods that their armor holds out. That boss fight you designed? It will kill someone. Maybe everyone. Good.
The system encourages reckless bravery and clever desperation—the exact feeling you get when you charge at a giant crucifix-headed knight in Elden Ring with 1 Estus Flask and a dream.
Even better, the mechanics are fast. A fight can last two minutes or ten, but it’s never a slog. That means more time for you to describe how the light of a dying sun glints off your jagged, rusted zweihander as it cleaves through a sorrow-drenched lich king.
Combat is deadly, loot is strange, and magic comes with consequences. Just like Dark Souls, power is tempting—but everything has a cost. Often in blood. Sometimes in limbs.
Lore? You Mean That Thing You Have to Dig For?
Let’s talk about lore. If you’re a fan of FromSoftware games, you know the drill: you pick up a sword called “Rotted Rib-Cleaver,” read its description, and learn that it was forged by the Bone Apostles of Unthinkable Sin during the Starvation Wars. None of that is explained. You piece it together from item descriptions, cryptic NPC mutterings, and haunted architecture.
MÖRK BORG is exactly the same. The book is loaded with one-line backstories, suggestive flavor text, and evocative names like "The Accursed Denial of the Nameless King" or "She of the Blistered Tongue." There’s no need for rigid worldbuilding—the mystery is the point. The players don’t need a detailed world map. They need vibes. And MÖRK BORG gives you those in spades, daggers, and blood-dripping flails.
Want to make your own Lands Between? Use MÖRK BORG's random tables. Throw together some heretical ruins, a moonlit swamp, a burning cathedral, and a merchant with no eyes and too many teeth. The result? Instant FromSoft fever dream.
Your players don’t need to know what’s going on. They need to feel the weight of a fallen empire in every moss-covered obelisk and hollow-eyed wanderer. They’ll fill in the blanks with awe and fear.
That’s not a bug—it’s the design philosophy.
Character Creation: Broken, Bleeding, and Beautiful
If you’ve ever looked at your Dark Souls character—clad in mismatched rags, wielding a fork, carrying a cursed ring that whispers your childhood sins—and thought, “This guy’s a mess,” then MÖRK BORG is your home.
Character creation is fast, random, and absolutely bonkers. You might be a “Heretical Priest who reeks of goat,” or a “Fanged Deserter with a stolen face and no eyes.” You roll stats. You roll gear. You roll traits. No point-buy, no theorycrafting, no spreadsheets. Just pain and chaos.
It’s not about building an optimal character. It’s about roleplaying the least optimal character in the worst possible world. And that is very much the soul of Dark Souls. You start weak, confused, and unimportant. Over time, you might become powerful—but you’ll never be whole. That’s the magic.
Also, the MÖRK BORG character sheets look like ransom notes written by witches. Which is neat.
Magic That Should Not Be
FromSoftware magic is never just "fireball go boom." It's always haunted. Spells are ancient, obscure, and often feel like you’re channeling something you really shouldn’t be touching. You cast a spell and something notices.
MÖRK BORG gets this. Magic in MÖRK BORG is dangerous. It often fails. Sometimes it backfires. Sometimes it wakes things up. You cast a spell like “Putrefy” or “Unclean Scroll of Droning Whisper” and hope it does what you think it does. You can feel the risk in every roll.
This isn't the magic of polished wizards. This is grave-dirt, blood-rune, tongue-biting, soul-ripping weirdness. It’s rotten and glorious and half the time it makes things worse. Perfect.
Monsters? Oh, They’re Monstrous
The best part of any Soulsborne game is the moment you meet a new creature and go:
“Oh. No. That’s horrible. I love it.”
MÖRK BORG’s monster design hits this exact sweet spot. There’s a focus on the grotesque, the tragic, and the unknowable. Monsters often feel like they used to be people—or maybe gods—or maybe dreams that went wrong. Sound familiar?
Best of all, you don’t need stat blocks longer than your arm. MÖRK BORG monsters are lightweight but lethal. They’re defined more by their mood and special abilities than granular rules. This frees you, the GM, to focus on terrifying your players with mood, description, and implications. Let their imagination fill in the horror.
And if you need help? There are hundreds of fan-made creatures, encounters, and expansions. (Bless the third-party content license. Verhu be praised.)
The World Is Ending and That’s the Point
If Dark Souls is about the world already being dead and the fire just pretending to burn, and Elden Ring is about a cosmic order that’s already been shattered, then MÖRK BORG is about watching the apocalypse in real time.
The game includes a doomsday clock—the calendar of Nechrubel—that ticks forward based on player action and dice rolls. When it reaches its end, the world dies. That’s not a metaphor. The game ends. Your doomed little story wraps in blood and ash.
This isn’t a flaw. It’s the point. It adds urgency, dread, and an incredible storytelling tool. The world doesn’t need saving. It needs witnesses.
Just like Elden Ring, the goal isn’t to restore things to glory. It’s to find meaning—any meaning—before it all crumbles. Maybe you become the new monarch. Maybe you’re just the last thing that screams. Either way, it’s a journey worth telling.
Git Mörk’d
If you love Elden Ring, Dark Souls, and all things cursed, cryptic and Dark Fantasy, MÖRK BORG isn’t just a good fit—it’s the perfect one. It’s fast, brutal, atmospheric, and beautifully broken. It doesn’t try to explain everything. It doesn’t hold your hand. It just throws you into the blackened world with a rusted sword and a whisper:
“You will not survive this.”
But damn, will it be fun to try.
So grab your friends, light a candle, turn on some doom metal, and prepare to roll dice in the dying lands. The Age of Fire is ash. The Erdtree is rotting. The world is ending.
MÖRK BORG is ready.
Are you?
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