I guess there are at least a few people interested enough in my tepid takes about Tephrotic Nightmares, so I'm writing this up. Quick introduction: I'm an experienced GM and player of several TTRPGs, but I'm pretty new to Mörk Borg and OSR games generally, so it's possible likely that many of my observations are obvious for those who have been in this space for longer. OSR games are my current hyperfocus though - I've been devouring as much Mörk Borg and Mothership content as I can recently. Now maybe I have an audience to rant to about them other than my spouse, who's quickly losing patience with me bringing up these games whenever I get a chance, as well as the player group I've talked into into agreeing to play one of these days.
I'll try and organize this post loosely on the order of stuff in the book. It's mostly my impressions of what I found most interesting. Johan Nohr, Luke Gearing, and Jarrett Crader have really outdone themselves. Tephrotic Nightmares really is a fantastic book, but I don't think it's useful for me to gush about how great it is, so I'll stick to writing about what particularly stood out to me, good or bad. I do have to note how great it was to open the book when it finally arrived in the mail and crunch the pages open while ranting to my family about the Arsonist's fires and the necessity of breaking the book like a human spine. I'm not immune to marketing.
Everything past here is major spoilers for the book. I guess I should say that.
So, Tephrotic Nightmares is subtitled "an adventure campaign for MÖRK BORG." I've seen this criticism said before about it: that description is maybe a little misleading, because this book isn't very much like many other "adventure" modules out there for TTRPGs. It's more like a campaign setting; the Sea of Ash is the main character, much more so than the Arsonist, and there's less of a linear story, more just a sandbox (ashbox?), a jumping-off point for telling stories rather than the story itself. That's the through-line with most of my impressions of Tephrotic Nightmares: this book is a great starting point for GMs to work with and make the Ashen Sea their own. It takes a little prep work; it's not the kind of module you can just open and run from start to finish.
That being said, that's exactly the kind of book of I was looking for when I bought it. It's got just enough description that I'm not starting from a blank canvas, but enough room for me to personalize it. Despite its scale, it remains minimalist, like one expects from a Mörk Borg supplement. The Ashmouth Raiders, for example, are not really defined past the tables to create them. It's up to the GM to create those four factions. The framework is there without being didactic or prescriptive. We're not told how to interpret the factions, just given sketches to work from.
I've come to expect that style from Luke Gearing - I've recently read two of the great modules for Mothership he worked on, A Pound of Flesh and Gradient Descent. The first of those two is actually quite similar in structure to Tephrotic Nightmares. Both paint, in broad strokes, a setting for a GM to use, with the details left up to the table, and while both have a "final boss" of sorts, there's no need for a GM to funnel their party towards those encounters. Prospero's Dream and the Ashen Sea can both be used as a background to any story the GM wants to tell, and that makes them incredible resources. Gradient Descent also has similarities to Tephrotic Nightmares, but I'll come back to that later.
Boats, Travel, Ashcrawling
The pages on boats, travel, and weather are all great for setting the scene, establishing what makes the Ashen Sea unique. The little details here set the tone for the rest of the book, from the oppressive gloom and macabre boat designs to the absurdity of the scapegoat homunculus. Like anything Mörk Borg, it's on the razor edge between comedy and tragedy. Something something Nietzsche - the Birth of Tragedy probably isn't his best work for a number of reasons, but it describes pretty well the idea I'm trying to get at here. The combination of absurdism and dead-serious themes strikes a certain balance that elevates both - in particular, my favorite section, the Cannibal Count's Mount-Manse. More on that below.
Like 1000 Crows
Perfect. No notes.
The Factions
I'll keep saying the same line over and over but I love how open-ended the faction descriptions are. Their motivations are hinted at but the final building blocks to make the Ashen Sea a living world are up to each GM to place. Nothing is so rigid that GMs can't adapt to however their players interact with each faction. I love a lot of the little details about each faction, like how the Burnt Offerings units have progressively less HP as they get promoted, or the implied (or explicit) tensions between different members/ranks of the same faction. There's a lot to work with for any of them, but not very much stated directly.
The Cannibal Count's Mount-Manse
Maybe it's my own experience with Kafkaesque bureaucratic systems, but this is hands-down my favorite dungeon in the book, and definitely one of the funniest dungeons I've ever had the pleasure to read. There's little to no combat and very little reason given for any party to venture into the Manse, but that's part of what makes it special. It's aggressively useless, inconceivably cruel, and yet wildly hilarious. I want to run a party through here just to see the look on their faces when they realize the Count hasn't been in residence for decades. As a note, there's also a lot of treasure in assorted valuables throughout the Manse. A clever party could make a lot of money with minimal effort by taking advantage of the Manse, but they might just go mad trying to get all the right forms signed in triplicate.
The Dry-Witches and Glassthrone
Glassthrone is incredibly evocative even in just a few pages, though it also draws on the descriptions of each of the Dry-Witches earlier in the book. For my part, these are the most interesting "villains" in the book. They are unknowable eldritch beings with inscrutable goals. Whole campaign story arcs can probably be woven out of just one of the eight Dry-Witches. Like we said in the discussion on Discord, they can be fought, but are incredibly strong, or they can be interacted with, which underlines one of the most interesting things about not just Tephrotic Nightmares but Mörk Borg and OSR games in general. Not every scary thing has to be a combat encounter, and it probably shouldn't be. A party of Mörk Borg characters is not strong enough to face eldritch horrors head-on in most cases. We've already discussed in Discord how this is one of the biggest factors separating OSR games from more "heroic" systems, and that topic can probably make a whole article by itself. Maybe I'll write that next if there's interest, but it's probably been written about before by GMs with more experience in this space.
Other Locations
The rest of the Ashen Sea is full of interesting locations that help set the tone of the module, but I don't know that I have enough interesting things to say about them, not without having run the module yet anyway. I'm excited to see how my players interact with them though,. The other dungeons are all unique and include interesting "OSR problems" to deal with, but I haven't yet decided how I might incorporate those into a game yet.
HER STRONGHOLD UNVANQUISHED
Okay, so this is actually the part of the book that stood out the most for me as being different, almost out of place within the rest of the Ashen Sea, which seems odd, given that the Arsonist is the driving force in the creation of the Sea. The book builds up to this dungeon but it's a little underwhelming, and maybe intentionally so. That's what makes it interesting.
The first thing that's odd is that, as written, a party can miss this dungeon entirely by failing a DR18 Presence test. That's probably okay for some tables. There's no need to interact with every bit of content in the book - but it did get me thinking about how I run games. I've seen this talked about a bit online, so I won't go too far into the idea, but I think I'm going to cut out the use of Presence for perception and charm in most cases going forward. Mothership actually got me down this line of thought: players don't roll to search for hidden enemies/traps, or to convince NPCs. If a player says, "I want to search that cabinet," they can find the hidden door behind it without rolling. I can write about this idea in more detail, but it's been done before by other writers and isn't relevant past the point of possibly missing this dungeon. I'll write about this more if there's interest.
Next, the structure of this dungeon is almost inverted compared to what would be a climactic showdown with a villain in other modules. Here's where maybe I actually have a hot take. I'm not sure. The Arsonist isn't finishing off the remnants of the Forest, not really. She's not at the height of her power, daring any challengers to face her. She's trapped, and stuck in a desperate struggle to the death against the equally trapped and exhausted defenders of the Forest. No one's winning this fight. The Arsonist doesn't come across as the mythical destroyer that she's built up to be, not a rival to the Basilisks, but a petty tyrant who couldn't capitalize on her greatest triumph. She destroyed the Forest, sure. But what did that gain her? Her armies are not patrolling the Sea. She does not demand tribute from the other factions. She only sends out Black Iron Guardians and war dogs to kill the War-Dryads and boars that the Forest sends at her. It's a stalemate, and her stronghold is cracking. Her houndmasters are tamed by their own hounds, her Executioner can't be bothered to get up from his seat, and her Faithful huddle in a corner. The defenders of the Forest aren't in much better shape, and this sad situation underscores the futility of this siege in the first place. I don't know if that's how it's meant to come across, but that kind of futile desperation is very Mörk Borg, and reads as a criticism of authoritarianism and mythic figures. That's how I'd run it anyway.
Luke Gearing's sparse room descriptions come into play here. I noticed this style reading Gradient Descent, and it's where the parallels between those two books are noticeable. Maybe that is something of an OSR thing rather than his writing style, but both books describe dungeon rooms with only a few words. There's a lot left to interpretation, which is how I got to my view of the Arsonist. A different GM can write in different details to this fortress - maybe the Arsonist really is just playing a long game, waiting and building strength. But ultimately time is probably short, depending on how quickly Miseries are ticking up. I don't know if that's the intended reading, but I don't know that it matters. It's open-ended enough that each GM can interpret it differently to best fit their game.
My one real criticism with this dungeon (and the book generally) is that it has some typos and what appear to be editing errors, which have maybe already been fixed for future printings, but they did stand out to me. The most notable example was the reference to "entries in italics" at the beginning of the dungeon description. I assume that's meant to be the first sentence or two in each room description, but the italics are missing from the printed book. That and a few things like the description of First Floor Room 12. Warrior-Womb referring to "the Forge" when it probably means Room 13. Armourers, make reading this dungeon feel a bit off, as if the editing was rushed a little. None of those errors are deal-breakers, but they are small disappointments in what is otherwise a phenomenal work.
There was a discussion on the Discord about whether any Mörk Borg party can defeat the Arsonist - I won't repeat that here (unless this somehow gets to a wider audience I guess. Then I'll rewrite this section so it makes sense), but it is a difficult fight, to say the least. Even in what I've interpreted as a weakened state, the Arsonist is a force to be reckoned with. It raises questions: What are her goals? Why does she stay in her crumbling stronghold rather than attempt escape? Why did she burn the Forest in the first place? None of these questions need answers to run a satisfactory game, but that's all left up to the GM to answer (or not) at the table.
Tephrotic Nightmares leaves more questions than answers, but in the end that's a good thing. It gives GMs a lot of freedom and breathing room. After all, it's Mörk Borg. It doesn't matter if questions are answered when 7:7 rolls around. There's enough in here that you can play it twice with the same group and have an entirely different experience.
