Mörktober 2025 Day 1 Prompt (Frog): The Crossing

Here's my work for the first day of  Mörktober 2025! I'm introducing my players to the Ashen Sea and Tephrotic Nightmares next week, so I designed a town on the border of the Sea with some inspiration from this year's first prompt: frog. It's still something of a work in progress, so suggestions are welcome. For now it's just words on a page because I'm not up on graphic design, but maybe one day I'll flesh it out and make it look nice. This is of course designed to be used with Tephrotic Nightmares, but the biggest inspiration is Saltburg from Tania Herrero's excellent Crown of Salt, as a town in a liminal space adapting to an extreme change in the environment. Oh, and feel free to use any or all of this for your own games!

The Crossing

At the edge of the Ashen Sea sits a decrepit village on the River Rana, a few rotting huts rising out of the muck. It was once a prosperous farming settlement, but their crops were swallowed up by the Arsonist’s fires. In the time since, the rising tide of Ash has choked the river, conglomerating into a muddy sludge at the town’s edge. With little left to sustain them, those who could left the village. However, the muddy ash slurry proved the perfect habitat for insects and the frogs that feed on them. The buzzing of flies and gurgling of frogs is near constant.

                For those who stayed, it became a surprisingly lucrative connection between the Sea of Ash and the rest of the Dying Lands. The inhabitants sell the silty, muddy water of the Rana River to travelers going to and from the Ashen Sea, as well as supplies and boats for crossing the Ash. The town is busy again but populated more by travelers than residents. Whatever the village used to be called has been forgotten. Now it is known as the Crossing.

                The few original houses remaining are slowly sinking into the muck, desperately propped up by ramshackle additions. However, several new houses have been built, purpose-made to rise above the mud on high stilts. The biggest of these constructions is the Shipyard. Built on the very edge of the ash, the shipyard is home to the town’s carpenters, who fashion boats for traversing the Ashen Sea. It is also attached to docks in the Ash, where ships arriving from the Sea are moored.

                The next largest, though perhaps even more significant, is the Water Exchange. Here travelers can trade their silver for water. The rate of exchange shifts daily and is posted in chalk on a large sign outside. The Head Water Clerk explains this is due to market fluctuations. There is a chalkboard of calculations behind the front desk, equations of weights and measures. On closer inspection, none of them are related or mathematically sound. Inside the building are enormous tanks filled with water and workers busy filling barrels and other containers. Behind the building is a huge pumping and filtration system run by undead servitors on loan from the Burnt Offerings, bringing water in from the river. The town’s relative isolation means it’s usually ignored by raiders, but the importance of water to the Ashen Sea makes the Water Exchange the only building in town with armed guards.

                There is also a tavern on swaying stilts, with a sign out front identifying it as the Muckraker. The staff serve frog legs and stale beer at exorbitant rates, but it’s the only gathering spot in town. Travelers looking to hitch a ride to locations in the Ashen Sea often stop here. There are piles of hay in the stables behind the building that can be rented for the night.

                Finally, the operation that feeds the town is the Frogcatchers’ Shack. A visitor to the village may first see the masked Frogcatchers outside of town, either wading through the muck or above it on stilts, armed with nets, spears, bows, frog traps, and other custom-made frog-catching equipment. They wear masks with enormous goggles and sometimes snorkels for diving into the river. Visibility in the water is next to nothing, but they still come up with frogs, if they come back up at all. Their shack in town is identifiable by the rows of dried frog legs hanging outside.

Services Available

·         The Shipyard: Players can buy boats and boat modules for crossing the Sea of Ash. I would limit the options available to maybe the first four boats and simpler modules, but do what works for the campaign. Stilts are also available for a nominal fee. Their resources are limited, and they pay well for boat-building supplies. This includes wood, metal, bone, and sinew, but also the more exotic materials only found in the Ashen Sea. They can build rare/complex modules if provided the right supplies.

·         The Water Exchange: Players can trade silver for water (or vice-versa) at varying exchange rates. To keep it simple, use the rates on page 3 of Tephrotic Nightmares. To complicate it, roll 1d4 and add or subtract that to the rate each time the players visit, however you want (the Market works in mysterious ways). Also, the Water Exchange takes 3% of each transaction as a service fee, or however much they can talk the players into, whichever is greater.

o   There is a 20% chance of encountering a clerk from the Cannibal Count’s Mount-Manse with a wagonful of stinking meat and a massive pile of paperwork, arguing with the Water Clerks over the exchange rate.

o   Attached to the Water Exchange is a general store. They sell whatever supplies and equipment they have on hand, often items traded for water by travelers.

·         The Muckraker Tavern: Food, drink, a pile of hay for the night at double the usual rates. Hirelings and outcasts can also be found here, including members of different factions from the Ashen Sea.

·         The Frogcatchers’ Shack: Dried frog legs at wholesale prices. You can buy them cheap here but only in bulk quantities.

NPCs

·         Working on it. Maybe I’ll use the next day’s prompt for that. Suggestions are welcome!

Thoughts about Tephrotic Nightmares

     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.