A mini solo Mörk Borg, a video game to inspire your TTRPG and shoegaze music

Sleepdrifter's Newsletter #3 📜

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Deep forests, giant mountains & weird dungeons. I speak about TTRPGs, video games, music and what I like.

Summary

1. 🎲Mini Mörk: A Solo Condensed Mörk Borg / Hexcrawl game

2. 👿Diablo 1 & 2: Hacking & Slashing Your Way Down The Dungeon

3. 🎸Live Shows Of The Week: Slowdive / Drab Majesty

4. 🧙What I’m Up To

This week was a sort of continuation of what I did, watched and played last week. Also, it’s springtime where I live, and I’m in a house with a garden, so, it was lawn mowing and gardening all week 🌱
As there may be less stuff to read today, I hope you’ll like it anyway 🙂🌼

🎲Mini Mörk: A Solo Condensed Mörk Borg / Hexcrawl game

Mini Mörk - picture by Booger Goblin

In the Vale beastmen bay for blood and witches steal babies from their cribs but the knights and nobles only count their silver and drink their wine. Curse those curs! But fear not! Two lowborn skum just crawled forth from yon hovel, pitchforks in hand, ready to fight back. Swing hard and merciless!

This is how Booger Goblin’s Mini Mörk started. Simple and efficient.

Mini Mörk is a rework of Mörk Borg with a twist: it’s a solo one-page RPG, plus another page for the Dungeon-Crawling rules.

The game is heavily inspired by

Castle Grief

’s Kal-Arath,

Perplexing Ruins

’s Oracle and 1d10+5’s Solitary Defilement (The most popular solo rules for Mörk Borg at the moment).

You play as two characters with Mörk Borg’s stats on those cursed lands. The game is made for hex-crawling with all the rules you need to do so and add a whole Dungeon-Crawling layer on the top of it. It’s perfect for easily solo playing Mörk Borg when you’re not “good” at the kind of solo narrative play offered by Solitary Defilement, which builds its core gameplay on Ironsworn.

I love the minimalism of it, and the whole vibe it gives. It’s a good Mörk Borg game to play while waiting for the upcoming Solo Borg by

Patrick Buechner

.

You can find it for free on Booger Goblin’s itch.io page, and you can find the Dungeon-Crawling rules here.

👿Diablo: Hacking & Slashing Your Way Down The Dungeon

Last week, I brought you the amazing Jwlar’s retrospective about a video game I love : Diablo 1.
It really makes me want to play it again, so I delved into that amazing old-school Dungeon Crawler with the help of Devilution X to easily play it on my Windows 10 (but don’t worry, I own the computer physical version 😉).

It’s the first time I’ve played as a mage, as I usually play a warrior or rogue. The game felt really different this way with all the mana management and magic power/staff power stuff.

Level structure plan from the Diablo Pitch Condor (1994). The town on top followed by level after level of the procedurally generated dungeon.

I love the way the first Diablo is constructed, inspired by old-school Roguelike Angband / Moria.
You got a town where you got everything you need:

• a blacksmith, to buy weapon and armor, and repair all your stuff

• a healer, who heals you when you speak to him and who sells life potion

• a scholar, who can identify your items and that something very important if you want to truly understand what your magical gear does. This character is called Deckard Cain and is one of the most important characters of the Diablo series.

• a witch, who sells you mana potion, staff and also refill the magical power of your staff

• some other people to add quest and lore, other stuff to buy and a chest management (only with Devilution X but this was planned on the original version)

Then, under the town, you get the whole procedurally generated dungeon with 16 layers of depth. Each 4 layers, you got a new area theme with its own monsters:

• Cathedral (from level 1 to 4)

• Catacombs (from level 5 to 8)

• Caves (from level 9 to 12)

• Hell (from level 13 to 16)

You have to delve to the last one and kill Diablo. Easy to understand.
You can easily return to the surface while walking to the stairs or use a town scroll. The game even adds some shortcuts as you delve deeper.

Also, your character starts at level 1, with almost no equipment, and you’ll loot a lot of stuff and rapidly gain level to go deeper and fight more monsters in that dungeon. That way, even if the dungeon lacks much to do besides crushing enemies, you are never bored.

And that’s something you can definitely build upon, to make a simple yet challenging campaign of your favorite RPG.

• Build a mega-dungeon

• Add a town with all the stuff needed for your PCs

• Throw a big fight at the end, and you’re good to go!

• Put every PC at level 1

• Make their fight fast and deadly

• Make a lot of stuff to collect and experience to get.

You can find Diablo on GOG.

Diablo 2 original cover

This week, we also played Diablo 2 Resurrected co-op with my SO, on Switch, and this was very cool.

Diablo 2 is very different in its design than Diablo.

There is no megadungeon, rather 4 areas (+1 with the DLC) to visit with quests to finish that allow you to progress and travel to the next area.

So this one is not a Dungeon Crawler for say, even if you got some dungeon to delve in. But you’ll sure get the fast Hack & Slash mood with even more loot to get than Diablo.

🎸Live Shows Of The Week: Slowdive / Drab Majesty

This is something I’m not talking a lot about around here, but I’ve been to a lot of musical live shows since I turned 18. I’ve currently seen almost 800 bands live, for a total of almost 1100 shows (note that there’s almost always more than one show a night).

And that’s something I still love to do now.

Last Sunday, I saw the Shoegaze / Dream Pop band Slowdive at La Carrière, Nantes (France’s biggest western city).

The opening band was Drab Majesty, a Cold-Wave band from Los Angeles I previously seen in a smaller venue in the same city.

I wasn’t really hoping for something incredible with that show, as I wasn’t convinced with the previous one I saw. I like the band’s album, but I feel it misses something when they go live.

It’s 2 guys, one playing the guitar and the other one on synths and they both sing. There’s no problem with that kind of minimal setting for say, but their very steady posture doesn’t help.

I feel their catchy music will probably be better live with someone at the drums and at the bass to add more depth and movement to the whole thing. It’s my personal taste of course.

Then came Slowdive. For someone who loves Shoegaze and Dream Pop, Slowdive is a must heard and a must see. And this was something I lacked, as I’ve never listened to any album of the band (what a shame!).

The show was awesome, well executed and with that beautiful music to cradle your ears! The visual was stunning with a very well used of progressive stroboscopic effect.

They played for one hour and a half and that quickly passed. According to my SO and friends who were with me and who are fans of the band, the setlist was very generous with all of their best songs. As someone who doesn’t know the band’s songs, I felt that this setlist was great, with a lot of epic stunning moments and more quiet yet very emotional ones.

This is my favorite live show of 2025 so far BUT I’m going to see A Place To Bury Strangers’ explosive shoegaze this evening (yes, shoegaze again, but not the same kind. This one is loud and noisy!). And I know for good that they always steal the first place as “Best Live Show Ever” and “Best Show Of The Year” as I saw them 3 times now! Can’t wait!

🧙What I’m Up To

As I’ve said in this newsletter introduction, this week was oriented towards outdoor stuff so I haven’t had a lot of time to work on stuff. But, this was a fun week nonetheless!

Last Friday was my first time playing at the casino, it was pretty fun and I didn’t lose any money (probably because my brother is one lucky guy who won 500€ this night and gave me all the money to cover my loss 😂). I had a really good time with my brothers and my father!

A lil’ weird dungeon I’ve done some times ago

Otherwise, I consider making a special post about Gygax’s 1975 solo Dungeon-Crawler. I think it will be interesting to check on some historical pieces of TTRPG and the niche solo history.

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That’s it for this week!
Let me know if you enjoyed this article, if you played/read/watch any of the stuff I mentioned this week 😀

See you next Friday!

Cheers !
Sleepdrifter

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