(All art in this post is by Tania Herrero from the unbelievably generous Fomoria Quick Start)

Fomoria is pitched as epic horror. Epic. Horror.

Horror

The horror bit is clear, the setting includes all the trappings of a horrid existence: All society has been forced into an endless labyrinth deep underground where true sunlight never touches and if spending too much time away from established light sources, the darkness will literally feed on your mind. Oh, and before these communities arrived, age old eldritch beings walked these tunnels. They are still here and they hate you.

This is clearly reflected in the art and the mechanics. A team up of Tania Herrero and Johan Nohr was guaranteed to result in the grittiest, most unsettling world. All of the art is seen through the light of a flame, obscuring faces and throwing shadows far into the distance. Almost everything lives in grey tones except for depictions of light, blood, and the magic of the eldritch ones. Every other stroke of color seems to be a reflection or reference to these themes. 

In the mechanics, you have the deadly chassis of Mörk Borg where you will feel blessed to have a 50% chance of passing a check, and your life will hang in the balance any time initiative is rolled. 

But it’s not just your body at risk of breaking down. You have a separate stat for stability (SP), representing the state or your mind and your soul. Hitting zero SP will result in fates worse than death. You may be left in the dark, cursed to mutter obsessive rituals and strike out against invisible foes until your flame is finally snuffed out.

And I would love this game if I were playing a nasty little man going into a hole in the ground, but it’s even more impressive that they captured that vibe with animal folk?

Every other animal folk game I have played deals with little creatures, mice and weasels, and has a cute pastoral feeling, even if the gameplay is dangerous. In Fomoria you get to choose between a pangolin with a hammer or the most fucked up goat you have ever seen. It is clear from the art that these animals lived through something horrible down in the dark, and are willing to do bad things to stay alive. These are not heroes by any means.

Epic

I think that the epic in epic horror is to be taken less in the current colloquial slang, and more in the original meaning. The Iliad and the Odyssey epics, where there are no pure hearted heroes, where morals are thrown to the wind in the name of survival, and yet, the names of greats are etched into histories and imaginations forever.

You aren’t supposed to die in the dark, you are supposed to scratch your name into the walls of the labyrinth with blood and sweat and pure power of will. Very few do.

Again, this is reflected in the art and the mechanics. A whole art page devoted to the light and its keepers, images of adventures, not hiding in the light, but facing trials in the dark with no one but each other. The art paints this beautiful picture of ravaged animal folk, on the brink of death and madness, performing the feats of the gods.

And in the mechanics, you are given boons from your people, strengths you can carry into the darkness and keep your flame alright. And when you get knocked down, you have a fair chance of getting back up again, of fighting for another day, though each time you’ll come out more bruised and broken.

Each type of animal folk has their own folk feat. I played Jotna the wolf (Morvarg) who could increase their strength by 2 and deal an additional d4 in combat, which was an enormous boon. But it was limited. Only a few times per day. A flash in the darkness. Safety was never in abundance.

And while hitting 0 HP only has a 1/10 chance of killing you outright, you are guaranteed some debilitating injury. It will make your miserable life even worse, and if you receive too many, death becomes inevitable.

This is still horror. Just epic horror. Herrero gives you just enough hope to hang yourself with. And the final glimmer of hope rests in the darkness itself. If your need is dire, you can pray to the darkness, offer a piece of your soul to succeed when it really counts.¹ This is a fool’s path, as the darkness is hungry and will not rest once it has tasted of your blood.

The effects of experience on play

I had no issues flipping through the quickstart and feeling ready to play, but a few online friends mentioned troubles understanding the rulebook on the first read.² It became clear this was a familiarity problem, that anyone who had already play a Mörk Borg style game had no issues.

But someone brand new to this style of game, especially if it is their first ever OSR-ish experience, may struggle with how all the mechanics link together. I remember having similar confusions in my first foray into borg, and the table got some pretty significant rules wrong, which led to me to think I did not like Mörk Borg for years. So while I’m not immediately concerned since this is a quick start with limited space, I do hope the full text of Fomoria does as much as possible to onboard entirely new tables to this incredible game. I just don’t want anyone turned off due to a misread of the rules.

In the meantime, I call on all of you veteran borg-heads to pick this quickstart up and run it for your friends, run it at your game stores, and run it with strangers on the internet. The more people whose first experience with the game is at the table, the easier we make it for everyone to hop on the Fomoria bandwagon.

Recommendation

Obviously I love this game. My main annoyance is that I can’t buy it right now and use it to play Crown of Salt with. So we pray for a high-yeilding crowdfunder and a speedy delivery. I also am so hopeful this ends up as a full A4 book because I want the space and the art as big as possible in my bookshelf, but will settle for any form it comes to me.

This game is magic. Play it as soon as you can.

Acknowledgements

Go follow the Kickstarter here and download the pay-what-you-want quickstart here, which generously includes the base rules, a set of pregens including a platypus bard and an unhinged bat, and a full adventure to get you started, all fully laid out with beautiful art.

Thank you to Tania Herrero and Johan Nohr for making some of the most creative stuff in rpgs right now, and to Jordan Boschman for doing the editing on the quickstart.

Thank you to TundraFundra for running the quickstart adventure for us, and for my fellow cabal members, Zadig the spider-trainer and Wyversary the sacrificed and reborn. I think we took that module to places it shouldn’t have gone.

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1. I love games with built in deals with the devil. At my table they have always been available, though I first came across them formalized into rules with Blightfall and I believe the Devil’s Bargain is an major mechanic of Blades in the Dark ↩︎
2. Some of the concerns were minor, and I think just realities that come with stuffing as much as possible into a quickstart: for instance, abbreviations are occasionally used before they are defined, e.g. DR and SP. Those problems are smoothed over by reading the document more than once.
   
   Other problems were not obvious in the text, but would be clear to a veteran Mörk Borg player, e.g. knowing if individual initiative is an optional rule or a component of the cabal vs enemies initiative. These really need either a better explanation of initiative in the book or some clear gameplay examples. ↩︎