Mörk Hammare

I hang out with some fine folks who enjoy Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay a whole bunch. Equally enthusiastic among its three editions: first, second, and fourth. When Ben Tobbit announced a new Mörk Borg-derived system called Black Power and Brimstone with a Free Quickstart, comparison to WFRP and The Old World was guaranteed to follow.

Now, many of our conversations around WFRP center around how much are folks playing WFRP the system vs. how much are folks playing WFRP the setting and how much or little the two can or should be coupled.

Many suggestions have been proffered for a system replacement for WFRP, and some of them even present settings that are more closely aligned with the Grim World of Perilous Adventure: Kriegsmesser, Warlock!, Best Left Buried, Shadow of the Demon Lord. Even Mörk Borg itself ratchets up the camp and dreariness of the most outlandish WFRP motifs. But Black Powder and Brimstone purports to offer a world closer in tone, technology, and culture to that of The Old World.

When one of my friends expressed a little dismay that if they were to go the BP&B route, they’d be “playing WFRP with a d20”. So, recognizing that Mörk Borg’s action resolution is pretty localized to one real page of rules (p. 26), I came up with a drop-in replacement that uses percentile dice and roll-under-or-equal-to, just like WFRP: Mörk Hammare (“Dark Hammer” in Swedish). And because most Mörk Borg derivatives use the same resolution, it can easily be ported to CY_BORG, _Death in Space, Pirate Borg, Frontier Scum, Cast Away, Farewell to Arms, and more.