Friday Faction: At Death’s End

The world is dying and everyone knows it. The seas rise and the crops fail and war continues apace without reason, and the peasantry suffers taxes, plague, and worse. The prophecies of the Two-Headed Basilisks are coming to pass and for the great masses huddled on the handful of lands amidst the Endless Sea, there is no hope, only despair. Some take advantage of this empirical ennui, using the strength of their arms, to take what they want, pillaging and plundering gold and jewels, food and wine, and more—to make the time before the end, whether months, weeks, or days, at least less unpleasant, if not actually comfortable, even if this comes at the cost of the comfort, and likely the lives, of others. It is not enough for some. Three men make their way to a cemetery. The first is Lord Arrant von Shatten, a prince with something dark and offering power attached to his soul. The second is the soldier, Alstor Ironhead. The third is the dissolute wizard, Snaga. At the centre of the cemetery stands the Gates of Eternity, beyond which, if they can be opened, lie a dungeon and beyond that, on the other side of time and reason, at Death’s End, is the key and gate’s guardian. Confront them perhaps and they will find a destiny that transcends the fate that will befall the rest of the world.

The story of the three men is told in At Death’s End, a graphic novel set in a world that will be familiar to the roleplaying hobby. This is Mörk Borg, the Swedish pre-apocalypse Old School Renaissance style roleplaying game designed by Ockult Örtmästare Games and Stockholm Kartell and published by Free League Publishing. Written by Alex Jarcor and drawn by Chucho Mendoza and published by Sanity Check, this is a graphic novel that takes the reader far from the failing world, somewhere that is never depicted, but only hinted at in the setting of the roleplaying game. It is a gruelling journey, often pushing the protagonists to call upon themselves in ways that they would otherwise forget as they first seek to open and enter the gate before anyone else can and then march across the deserts of death in search of their desired destinies. Lord Arrant von Shatten wishes for the restoration of his kingdom and to be rid of the thing that leeches his soul and whispers promises of power in his ear (much like the sword Stormbringer does to Elric of Melniboné); Snaga wants to be recognised for his power and his thwarting of death; and Alstor Ironhead desires to be free of his bloody past as a soldier. In comparison to the options presented in terms of what you can play in Mörk Borg, these three are not grotesques, but they are each flawed and failed men. They arrive at their intended destination bruised, battered, and bloody, just as you would expect from a Mörk Borg tale, and once there, they do each achieve their destiny, though of course, not necessarily as they imagined. In this way, and in showing the journey through the Gates of Eternity to Death’s End, the Game Master could take inspiration should her Player Characters ever aspire to escape the fate that the mortal world otherwise has for them

If the endgame is perhaps familiar, getting there is a story of desperate violence, bloody and brutal even as the protagonists are trying to escape it. There is a tightness to Mendoza’s artwork and Jarcor’s writing that again and again explodes into swathes of frenzied action and savagery, as the three men are forced to rely on what has enabled them to make the journey, but now want to escape. At Death’s End is a dark and disturbing story that takes the protagonists and the reader to places only previously imagined in Mörk Borg, yet leaves it open for further tales that will perhaps explore its wider, doom-wracked world.