Corp Borg

We played a two day game of Corp Borg as the opening act of Borgfest: my summer holiday run of three different Mörk Borg derivatives. The other acts are Blood Borg and Cy_Borg.

Corp Borg brings Borg to modern times, where capitalism has made deals with the devils, and the world is ending in an infernal, capitalist frenzy. Players are cogs in a corporate machine that is literally killing the society, or the world. But a better world without these corporations can be glimpsed.

This alternate world – our world, with the implication the apocalypse could still be averted here – isn’t really revisited. There’s a couple of entries on being able to see or visit the other world momentarily, but nothing on how these worlds interact, or how one might seek to escape the hellscape. Being the main mystery and tension at the core of the concept, it feels like a big miss.

Reading the book, it doesn’t come across as very polished, or playtested. While Mörk Borg games aren’t known for their balance, they should have an internal logic and consistency to them, as unhinged as they may appear on the surface. That is not the case here. Sections are frequently at odds with each other, mechanical effects don’t add up, and a lot is expected from the reader to make the connections on their own. An editor is sorely needed here.

Borg games are dependent on numerous random tables generating play on the fly. Most of them open and close with random tables, and the tables typically do much of the heavy lifting in the world setting. Corp Borg follows this pattern, but fails to follow through.

There are inspired moments here. The D66 random important emails is a great start. The random table on who do you meet on the elevator is brilliant, even if I don’t quite connect with all the entries. But with most tables, from character creation to equipment and things happening at the infernal office buildings, I feel like I could make one up on the spot that would do a more comprehensive job at hitting the notes I expect from this game. Whereas Mörk Borg makes me want to bring every spell and ritual to the table, little of this sparks that same curiosity and delight. Some work as jokes, but even the odd ones just aren’t odd enough to make me care.

That may be the problem: whereas Mörk Borg does a fantastic job in delivering on its mood, I am at a loss with what to do with this game. Perhaps my expectations are off. Is it supposed to be a dreary existence at the office sliding into a hellscape? Or a straight up dungeon crawl through possessed cubicles?

The solo rules in the end finally bring some idea of how the game is supposed to work. My plan was to use the solo rules to run the actual game for a table – generating tasks and complications and circumstances that the poor corporats need to get through to get home after a very hard day’s work. This is a great concept, and it baffles me this isn’t how the whole game is presented.

The cover does a great job of setting a tone. The interior does not keep up. It toes the Borg line by going hard with typefaces and colors, but does not know how to use them for effect, instead coming across as immature and messy. Thankfully and in a redeeming way, that doesn’t mean it’s hard to read or use, just a shame. I wish it was illustrated with generic corporate stock art with occult shit scribbled on top.

There are flashes of brilliance, like the resume generation at game start, and how all HP generation revolves around coffee, and how useless office supplies are in fighting, yet they’re all the characters likely have at hand. But this core material has not been expanded upon in a way that holds up, or even makes sense.

As a detail, leveling up feels like a missed opportunity to play on corporate politics. Surely you should push someone else down to get ahead. And why have the “getting worse” rules been removed, while slow onset depression at the dreary job is a big part of the setting?

I’m thinking of not using the classes, not because I want a classless game, but because none of these classes make me excited to see them in play.

How it went down

Based on everything above, I was about to bring an unusual game to the table: I was in love with the concept, but felt that the game delivering on that was not up to the task. We went with classless corporats, and I had pre-generated a list of tasks they needed to get through before Friday evening, starting on Monday. This structure worked great!

As is typical of Borg games, the situation quickly developed into straight up comedy, albeit one with few morals. I was expecting a lot more violence, but my players ended up solving the problems their tasks presented with social and practical means, I believe only once resorting to outright violence.

In this sense this was a very OSR type experience: player ingenuity getting around the fact that their first to second level characters were useless in most things, and fragile in most situations.

We had a lot of fun, to the point that the players would like to continue with the same characters. I can’t credit much of this to the game. I ended up mostly using the oracle rules (which are good) and the random elevator encounters (pretty good!) throughout the two days of play. The few exploratory rolls on other tables were met with unusable or uninteresting results, and I either picked something I liked from the table, or indeed ended up having to improvise something completely new.

At the same time, the tasks the player characters were trying to get through created most of the entertainment at the table, and those were directly from the solo rules. I do have to give credit for delivering on what I wanted from the game, even if it’s just the one page, and not part of the core rules.

Not very many roleplaying games are likely to end with the player characters organizing an infernal office building’s karaoke night, inviting every adversary they meet on the way, cheering for them when they sing (to varying results), and getting signatures from everyone on the stage to a document that makes them liable for their demon boss’s failures, and taking that as a win, as it was their last task for the week. We loved it, and this outcome is all thanks to the content of Corp Borg. That only a small part of this book contributed to that is a shame.

There’s apparently a second edition on the way. I hope they take more time to develop, and the concept gets to really deliver. The next product is an expansion on unions in this world, and I have to say that sounds good. My players were driven to oppose the capitalist machine, which feels very natural and the kind of wish fulfillment roleplaying games are great for, and it’s a shame the book didn’t really support that in any way.