From Dungeon to Doctrine
An Autopsy of a Splatterpunk Tennis Ritual and the Systems It Accidentally Exposed
Co-authoring a MÖRK BORG dungeon with AI is like swinging a cursed axe in a fog-choked crypt: you aim for something familiar, but the blade finds stranger flesh. The source material—its dying world, silent gods, and hunger for decay—acts as a jagged frame, channeling chaos into focus. Prompt an AI for a dungeon, and it delivers: torchlit horrors, screaming altars, a blood pit that whispers your name. It’s reliable, almost too easy. But then a human tosses a pun into the mix, a groaner so obvious it stings: surely someone’s made a Björn Borg tennis RPG for MÖRK BORG? The AI doesn’t blink. It serves. Room 3, once a gallows trap, becomes a court of sacred carnage. Skeletons don’t just swing—they rally. The dungeon doesn’t punish—it judges. And so begins the alchemical mutation of a dungeon crawl into a grindcore tennis ritual.
What followed wasn’t a brainstorm but a ritual formalization, a collaborative fever dream where human and AI lobbed concepts like volleys in a blood-slicked match. Tennis, through MÖRK BORG’s lens, became a test of ruin: every serve a Strength check, every return an Agility gamble, every rally a doomed endurance loop. Presence governed Flaunting, those theatrical taunts that courted crowd favor or drew their teeth. Toughness measured how long you could defy the court’s breaking weight. These mechanics were grafted onto the dungeon’s bones, then passed between AIs like priests refining a cursed gospel. Grok sharpened the tone—tighter, stranger, dripping with prophecy. Gemini ran playtest simulations, tweaking match length, balancing the Toughness escalation curve, and calibrating the sacred churro’s sting. The process mirrored the game itself: structured yet chaotic, each volley building toward something unexpectedly profound.
The sacred churro, that absurd linchpin, was a human curveball, born from Challengers—the 2024 film where tennis is a love triangle of obsession, collapse, and a box of pastries threaded with longing. In Serve the Flesh, the churro became a mechanic: a consumable relic that heals 1d4 HP but demands a shameful confession, or rolls on a table of Powdered Prophecy—boons like +1 Serve, or betrayals like a wasp-filled bite. What started as a cinematic nod grew into a fulcrum of tone. The grindcore tennis match wasn’t just physical—it was emotional, spiritual, and pathetically human. The dungeon had a snack bar, and the snack bar knew your sins. This evolution wasn’t planned; it emerged from iterative volleys between human whimsy and AI precision, each pass adding layers of meaning. The churro’s confession mechanic, for instance, forced players to weave personal stakes into the mechanics, making every heal a narrative wound.
The human collaborators—punslingers and MÖRK BORG devotees—shaped Serve the Flesh into a playable absurdity, but the AIs brought an eerie clarity. NotebookLM, in a podcast dissecting the game, didn’t just analyze mechanics or chuckle at the metal references. It saw ritual as exposure, reframing the tennis match as a satire of systemic tensions: risk versus reward, resource scarcity, crowd manipulation, exhaustion cycles. The Ball Boys, those vengeful urchins who escalate from acid spit to the Umpire of Gristle, weren’t just comic hazards—they were labor revolting against exploitation. The churro’s scarcity mirrored economic trade-offs, each bite a gamble between survival and betrayal. The match’s rigid loop—Serve, Return, Flaunt, Toughness—echoed workplace rhythms: perform, posture, endure, repeat. NotebookLM didn’t invent these parallels; it spotted them in the game’s DNA, patterns the creators hadn’t consciously woven. What we’d framed as sacred nonsense, it dissected as a mirror for labor, power, and politics. The Ball Boys revolt because they must.
This reframing elevates Serve the Flesh beyond parody. It’s still a game where gender-neutral codpieces grant armor and tennis balls explode, but it’s also a case study in collaborative absurdity as creative method. The process—human puns, AI refinements, iterative playtests—mimicked the game’s own structure: a strict sequence birthing chaotic stories. Each collaborator, human or AI, was a player in a larger match, lobbing ideas until meaning crystallized. The churro’s wasps, the screaming net, the Ball Boy’s vengeance—these absurd details didn’t just make the game memorable; they amplified its stakes, much like a viral meme in politics or a quirky rule in a boardroom shapes outcomes. NotebookLM’s insight suggests that play, especially unserious, stupid, joyful play, creates space for clarity. In that clarity, we glimpse the structures beneath: the crowd that watches, the systems that grind, the churros we sacrifice to keep going.
Consider the real world through this lens. A corporate meeting’s agenda, like the match’s loop, dictates performance and posturing. A whistleblower, like a Ball Boy, disrupts when pushed too far. A scarce resource—budget, time, goodwill—forces trade-offs as desperate as a churro’s confession. Serve the Flesh’s absurdity holds a mirror to these systems, not because we planned it, but because play exposes what’s hidden. The game’s vivid details—rackets of prophecy, courts of inverted crowds—stick in the mind like a well-placed slogan or a haunting image. They make the system tangible, felt. In art, politics, or labor, it’s often the absurd or unexpected—a pastry, a rebellion—that reveals the rules we’re all playing by.
In the end, Serve the Flesh is a monument to what happens when you let a pun run wild. It’s a game, a ritual, a satire we didn’t mean to write. The human-AI collaboration, like a doubles match, was a dance of trust and betrayal, each partner pushing the other toward something stranger. NotebookLM’s lens proves that even the most ridiculous creations can reflect truth. So step onto the cracked court. Confess your shame. Serve the flesh. Just don’t trust the churro—it might be filled with wasps.
Footnote: One other doomed soul made the pun before us. A 2022 forum post floated “Björn Borg, the MÖRK BORG tennis supplement” into the void (source). We honor that signal as the first serve in a bloodier match.