Yes—I published something!
I had finished the first inkling of a ‘draft’ for Carousing in the Dying World and posted it to the MÖRK BORG Discord just minutes before there was an announcement of the brand-new MÖRK BORG Third Party License. My fun carousing tables got buried. Truly, I wasn’t bitter—I was excited about the new license. It just gave me a chuckle. So, I posted it over in another channel on the Discord, and a member tagged me in the Forever GM Discord we hang out in and was like, Hey, you got a web page for your stuff? Because it’s good and people should be able to give you money. That was the moment that I became a capitalist and started worshiping Ayn Rand. Well, maybe I would have, but I didn’t have a page for my stuff.
See, I love GURPS—everyone knows that—, but all of my ideas were super-duper free because GURPS isn’t very open with its license. Which is cool. I respect that. But, because I was too scared to ever submit anything to the Pyramid magazine while it was still alive, that meant I wasn’t selling anything. Anyway, I didn’t really want to.
But this guy was like, Let me help you. So, I let him. (If you want to know who he is, then go check out his stuff. Matthew is great.) Of course, I didn’t have anything to sell, but he really encouraged me to throw something out there. So, with a little help and encouragement from my partner, I threw together my carousing rules and made them ‘real’.
Well, why did I make them? I love the OSR idea of having XP revolve around loot and using carousing as a way to part them from said loot. I first really saw this in Ultraviolet Grasslands by Luka Rejec, but that iteration led me to dozens of other takes on that idea, and many go quite a ways back.
I’ll admit that they’re probably a bit sillier than the dark tone of MÖRK BORG, but I original wrote these up for my own use, so they’re made to fit at my table.
I’ve already got some more ideas. I don’t imagine I’ll be going anywhere anytime soon.
That being said, some really incredible work has already come out that dwarfs mine, which has really reminded me that I’ve got a lot of growing to do in this space, but I am so honored to be able to give back to a community and a hobby that has given so much to me. I was very lucky to get in on the license so early, be mentioned in a tweet by the MÖRK BORG account, mentioned on their Facebook page, and mentioned in this article on Geek Native.
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