The Twenty-Ninth Expedition
Mörk Borg in a corner of the Hereafter
Needs: Mörk Borg. Cloud Empress and Land of Cicadas for the world, the spells, the crests, and the hexes. Not the Panic Engine.
The Position
Twenty-eight Cloudling expeditions have gone down into the Lowland Wastes to take it for the clouds. Six emperors ordered them. Every one of them failed, and the Imago did most of the failing to them.
You are in the twenty-ninth.
Officially you are here to find the missing Cloud Empress. In practice you are here because someone in Dredgeopolis promised you regular meals and a chance at a crest, or because a house guard put a hand on your shoulder, or because your village owed a levy and you were the one nobody would miss. Your unit is assembled from eighteen different Cloud Cities and cannot agree on anything, including which direction is north. Your officer was selected either for being the most experienced soldier available or for being a Lordling's drinking companion, and you will not find out which until it matters. Above the officer is a Lordling who outranks competence by law.
And the Century Brood has come up seven years early, into the middle of all this.
This is why Mörk Borg fits here and nowhere else in the Hereafter. Mörk Borg's argument is that you are cheap, the machinery above you is collapsing, and the countdown does not care what you do. That is a lie about a Farmerling village, which will still be there next spring. It is a flat description of a conscript's summer.
The Hereafter is cyclical. Your tour is not. Both things are true at once, and the second one is the only one you can see from a field.
Reading Cloud Empress at a Mörk Borg Table
Everything in Land of Cicadas runs unmodified once you convert three numbers and a damage die.
| Wounds → HP | × 5. A Cloudling soldier (W:3) has 15 HP. A full-grown Imago (W:5) has 25. |
| AP → armor | 0 = none · 1–2 = −d2 · 3–5 = −d4 · 6–9 = −d6 · 10+ = conventional weapons do nothing |
| Instinct → DR | ≤25 = DR10 · 26–40 = DR12 · 41–55 = DR14 · 56+ = DR16 |
| Instinct → Morale | Instinct ÷ 5 |
| Damage | 1d5→d2 · 1d10→d4 · 2d10→d6 · 3d10→d8 · 4d10→d10 · 5d10+→d12 |
| A Wound | is Broken. Roll Mörk Borg's d4. |
So: military rifle d6 long range, revolver d4, saber d6, flame bellows d6, hand bomb d8, long rifle d10, mounted long rifle d10. Cloudling soldier: 15 HP, −d2, DR12, morale 7. Experienced officer: 15 HP, −d4, DR16, morale 12. Inexperienced officer: 15 HP, −d4, DR10, morale 4.
Magic: chalk replaces uses per day. Presence DR12. Fail and the chalk is gone and you roll on the Miscasts table. Crests the same, and anyone can use one.
That's the whole conversion. Panic, Stress, and the rest of the Panic Engine stay in their own book.
Making a Conscript
Roll Mörk Borg abilities and HP as normal, then take a position in the unit. Omens are Luck and work exactly as printed — the difference between you and the man beside you, refreshed each dawn, for no reason anyone can name.
Everyone starts with: a mismatched uniform, a canteen, vat meat (2 servings), letters from home you have read too many times, and one day's provisions shared across the unit.
The Levy — d8 HP
Pressed. You were counted, not chosen. +2 Toughness. Revolver (d4) or farm tool (d4). Boots that fit. Nobody's Watching You. Once per session, declare that you were somewhere else when it happened. If nobody can immediately contradict it, you were.
The House Guard — d8 HP
You served a Lordling's household before this and you serve it now. +2 Strength. Saber (d6), battle casing (−d4), a token of your house. The Uniform Works. Cloudling soldiers and officers below your Lordling treat you as authority until given a reason not to. Farmerlings and the Order treat you as the first thing worth shooting.
The Unit Magician — d4 HP
There are no old Magicians. There are fewer old unit Magicians. +2 Presence. Three sticks of chalk, a stylus for cutting poems, two spells from the rulebook. Expendable and Aware Of It. Your Lordling will spend you before spending a crest. When an order would put you in front, you may refuse — but roll Luck against the officer's DR to survive having refused.
The Runner — d6 HP
Dispatches between units that hate each other, across ground that moves. +2 Agility. Bicycle-rover or packsquab, weather cloak, a map that cannot stay correct. You Know Where You Are. You alone always know the party's actual hex. When the roads slip, you notice within the hour.
The Quartermaster's Clerk — d6 HP
The stamp is the weapon. Paper turns theft into requisition. +2 Presence. Requisition stamp, ledger, revolver (d4), three days' provisions you are not supposed to have. Signed and Sealed. Once per day, produce a document that makes something the unit has already done retroactively lawful. Officers must test DR14 to see through it. Lordlings do not read.
The Farmerling Auxiliary — d8 HP
Local. Conscripted, bought, or volunteered, and it hardly matters which to the people who used to know you. +2 Toughness. Hunting rifle (d6), knowledge of the ground, a name in three villages. You Know What's Poison. Advantage on tests to find water, food, or shelter, and to identify what in a field will kill you slowly. The Order of the Broken Bread knows your face.
Your Officer
Roll once, at the start, in front of everyone.
d10. On 1–5 your officer is experienced: DR16, morale 12. On 6–10 they are not: DR10, morale 4.
The unit does not get told which. Play it out.
Then roll d6 for why they hold the post: the most experienced soldier available · a Lordling's personal assistant · a Lordling's drinking companion · a Lordling's secret lover · the only one who could read · nobody else came back.
An officer is a doom source with a name, and that is the design. Mörk Borg's Calendar is impersonal; here a substantial share of what kills you reports to someone you eat with. When an inexperienced officer gives an order, the players know exactly what the die said and have to decide anyway. That decision is the game.
The Tour
This replaces the Calendar of Nechrubel. Seven stages. The world does not end at the seventh — the Expedition does, as the twenty-eight before it did. What ends for you is your tour, which from a field is indistinguishable from the world ending.
The Tour advances when: the unit completes an assignment, the unit fails one publicly, or at dawn on 2d6 doubles.
Note what that means. Doing your job burns the clock. Obedience is the accelerant. There is no way to advance the Tour by being brave and no way to stop it by being careful, and a unit that works out how to be useless for a week has genuinely bought a week.
1. Deployment. Thopters down onto ground that has swallowed twenty-eight of these. Speeches. Full rations, for the last time. Someone reads the roll of the previous expeditions aloud, believing it inspiring.
Provisions are plentiful. Enjoy it.
2. Requisition. You begin taking food from people who have less than you. The first villager spits at your boots and nothing happens to them, and somehow that is worse than if something had.
Every Reaction roll with Lowlanders is at −2. Villages start hiding provisions on sight.
3. The Bridge. A position you are told to hold. Nobody explains why, and the explanation would not survive contact with the position. Casualties stop being numbers.
An NPC the players know dies. The Warden picks. Not a roll.
4. Reprisal. Something cuts a supply line. Orders come down about Farmerling sabotage, and the orders are specific. You are asked for a thing you will not be able to un-do.
The Order of the Broken Bread now appears on every encounter roll of 1. They know which unit you are.
5. The Competition. Your Lordling wants a trophy — an Imago horn, a relic, a village with a name worth saying at court. Your unit is the means. None of this appears in any written order, which is the point of it.
Your officer's orders and your Lordling's wishes now conflict openly. Following either is disobeying the other.
6. The Brood. The migration front crosses your position. Prince Bug is somewhere in it. The chain of command evaporates inside an hour and for two days nobody outranks anybody.
No orders. No reinforcements. Imago on every encounter roll of 1–3. Anyone can leave, and leaving is survivable, and everyone knows both of those things now.
7. The Twenty-Ninth Ends. As the twenty-eight ended. Whatever is left of your unit is somewhere it was never assigned, holding equipment belonging to a command structure that no longer answers, and the summer is over.
Survivors are discharged, deserted, or unaccounted for — and the distinction is now purely a matter of paperwork.
Loot Logic
There is no money in the Hereafter. You barter with your name and what you carry. Mörk Borg's grammar wants everything to be treasure; this field runs on a different economy and the Warden should be firm about it.
Actually worth taking: chalk, always, from anyone. Dry socks. Med-paste. Ammunition that fits what you have. A requisition stamp, which makes theft into procedure. A signed order, which makes disobedience into procedure. Other people's letters from home — grief has a resale value and you will hate learning this. A crest, which is what you were promised at recruitment and which perhaps four soldiers in the Expedition will ever hold.
Looks valuable, will kill you: Imago chitin, which marks you to Brood Monks as a poacher and to your own Lordling as a thief, because trophies belong to trophy-takers. Relics of any kind, for the same reason and more so. Anything bearing a Cloud City house mark, which is someone's property and that someone has retainers. Alcohol, which is currency right up until the night it isn't.
Worthless: coins, scrip, and any ancient money at all. Rank insignia off a corpse — everyone can tell. Maps, unless a Runner made them this month.
What Kills You, In Order
Your own side. Eighteen Cloud Cities in one force, infighting and self-sabotage as a standing condition, an officer who is a coin flip, and a Lordling whose authority is legal rather than earned. Any band of soldiers larger than five contains an officer. Reinforcements arrive sixty minutes after a fight starts, which is a threat as often as a promise.
The Order of the Broken Bread. 15 HP, −d4, DR12, long rifle (d10) or hand bombs (d8). Farmerling saboteurs in canvas and braids who were laughed at for ten years and then turned out to be the only ones ready. They do not fight your unit. They cut what feeds it.
The ground itself. The soil, water, and air are all quietly poisonous; Farmerlings live with the coughs and the chills as ordinary features of being alive. You have no such tolerance. Run this as infection under Mörk Borg's rules — no healing from rest, d6 a day — whenever the fiction earns it. Fields, ditches, and standing water earn it.
The Brood. Juvenile: 15 HP, −d4, DR14, chitin horn d6; wound one and on a d10 of 7+ an adult arrives. Full-grown: 25 HP, −d6, DR12, horns d6 and telekinesis d4 at range. Ancient: 60 HP, DR16, immune to every weapon your unit owns. Imago cast without spending chalk and without consequence. They are not encounters. They are weather with intent, and the correct response to all three is to be elsewhere.
Prince Bug. Not a statblock. When Prince Bug is on the field, Cloudlings are consumed by the dozen and the question is only which direction you were facing.
Running It
Orders arrive from people who cannot see the field. This is the single most useful Warden habit here. The assignment should be plausible from a map and absurd from the ground. The players' real work is the gap between those two things.
The world is not scenery, but you can't afford to know that. Cloud Empress's ecology is genuinely alive and genuinely not about you. A conscript unit has neither the time nor the standing to engage with any of it. Let that ache. Let a Brood Monk explain what the Imago actually are, once, to soldiers who have to move out in ten minutes.
Let the failure of the twenty-eight be common knowledge. Every Farmerling knows. Some of them will tell you kindly. The elders' standing advice to their own people during war and cicadas — stay light, stay moving, stay small — is also, if anyone in the unit is listening, the only viable strategy available to a conscript.
Deserting is on the table from session one. It should be genuinely survivable and genuinely costly, and the Tour should make it more attractive every stage. A game where the players discover in stage six that they could have walked away in stage two has worked correctly.
The Other Three Fields
Same chassis, different roll of the same dice. Each swaps the positions, the seven-stage clock, and the loot logic; the conversion math and the world are untouched.
Sellswords on a Lordling's payroll. Removes the orders and keeps the disposability. The clock is a contract with clauses you didn't read. Loot logic inverts — you can keep things, which is the entire reason you are here and the entire reason you will die.
A chalk crew in the molt-fields. Purest attrition. The clock is the season, the resource is finite and poisonous, and the Brood Monks and the Expedition both want the field. No enemy is required; the work does it.
Salvage in Torturer-era ruins. The most Mörk-Borg-native of the four and the least Cloud Empress. Closed spaces, ancient machines still executing orders, relics that are somebody's trophy the moment you surface with them. Best run as a short arc rather than a summer.
And they connect. A unit that survives stage seven is discharged, deserted, or unaccounted for — which is to say, available. The three reserve packs are what happens to the people who walked out of the twenty-ninth.
Cloud Empress is by worlds by watt; Mörk Borg is by Ockult Örtmästare Games and Stockholm Kartell. This is an unofficial play aid, requires both, and reproduces neither. Check the MÖRK BORG Third Party License and worlds by watt's fan-content position before distributing.