Playing – Shadow Borg ??? Homebrew

I have the good fortune to have a brother who games. In grade school, he designed a game inspired by Talisman for a school project to explain a concept. As a parent, he continues to game with his kids. When I go to visit them, it’s a board game marathon of games new and old, so much so it seems like cheating to count them towards my New Year’s Gaming goals, having played over 20 different games this visit.

I’ve also cobbled together a home brew RPG for them a couple of times, usually rooted in something semi familiar to them like reskinning Hero Kids RPG with Skylander characters and using a Scrabble board for a tactical grid. They apparently kept a folder of these home brew games in a file folder! There’s some great creativity and art that they used for these. It was important to keep it simple and quick to meet with the ages involved. This year, the older two are in high school and the younger two in grade school. so I reckoned it was time for something closer to a d20 RPG (the eldest was part of a D&D lunch club at school during Junior High but apparently not much came out of it beyond character creation).

Previously, I had left a D&D Starter Set with them but it had basically set in a drawer for a couple of years. I looked over some quick and simple ones RPGs (Mausritter & Cairn – both available for free so check them out) but settled on Mork Borg (Bare Bones Edition) / Pirate Borg and Shadowdark (Quickstart). Aiming for less doom and darkness, I took the Pirate Borg character creation, stats, and basic d20 vs Target Number 12 mechanics and cross pollinated them with the Shadowdark Classes, Races, Spells, and Talents system. I threw in a couple of extra Borg spells for some more twisted descriptions. Then I reskinned the Mork Borg adventure of Rotblack Sludge to fit something a bit more fantastical with a minotaur as the final boss instead of a cannibal warlock.

Not wanting to keep things simple, the kids started with some preconceptions about who and what their character was going to be and I went with it best I could on the fly. Thus did Father Bonaventure (cleric with a whip and a bottle of wine), Wu (fighter and half brother to the Monkey King), Wonsler (wizard and self proclaimed elemental master) and Ruskin (small dragon and thief) set off to the Tomb of the Cursed Flame, to confront an evil band of marauders and steal back a magic crown.

Armed with home made character sheets and hand written character creation notes, we raced against time (bed time was coming soon and parents had an early morning coming up). Dice were rolled, fumbles and crits were had, and overall we had a good time. The kids thought making their own custom characters was the best (they had experience with Talisman and Gloomhaven so there was their chief adventure RPG lite prior experience) and got really detailed describing their actions (particularly the wizard who declared that enemies defeated with his Cursed Word spell were sucked into his spell book as a picture). I wasn’t sure how things were going to work out with the Shadowdark spell system of being able to cast a spell until failing but the power level appeared balanced enough with a fighter’s melee attack.

Now there’s talk of maybe trying something like this over Zoom or similar. I’m going to call this a win and I look forward to seeing where they run with this. I will say this though – run a game for younger kids and you will get to flex those creative improv skills in trying to keep up with their story creation.