by Johan Nohr
For as long as I can remember, I have drawn monsters and weird little guys. It’s automatic, or compulsive. Pages filling up with teeth, skulls and slime—visions influenced by cartoons and comics, video games and album covers. Young me drew when I should’ve been doing other things: after bedtime, in class, taking tests, or talking on the phone.
But most of all, I drew when we played role-playing games. Whatever happened in the game would end up inked on the page.
Not long ago, I was digging through the many boxes I have in my office storage, and I found piles of ancient game notes and character sheets. Their marginalia doodles let me relive our old adventures. Even though my style and technique may have since evolved, the subject matters and my approach to art remain the same; lots of monsters, fast and violent, all the time. Perfection is the enemy. Make it loud and full of fury. Have fun and embrace the mistakes.
Never in my wildest dreams could I’ve imagined the kind of ripples my scribbles would make, but Mörk Borg took the scene and our lives by storm and proved that this isn’t just for marginalia forgotten in boxes—it can inspire artists all around the world.
And if the games we play inspire the art, the opposite is also true: Just flip through the book, look at the pictures and you should get it. Get the mood, the motion, the sounds of this horrible, dying world. With the art fresh in your mind, you’ll be able to bring all that to life at the table. When you describe the land, it’ll be dark and grimy. The trees will be withered and contorted like broken, skeletal hands. The people will have sunken eyes and corpse-pale skin and the monsters that prey on them will bare too many, too sharp teeth. And it’ll be awesome.
As I’m an illustrator, you should take this with a barrel of salt, but I truly believe all that ‘one picture and a thousand words’ stuff. At the very least, pictures are faster and vaguer than words, meaning you can take a bunch of them, throw them into your brain, mix them around a bit, and pretty quickly be able to use them as prompts to spit out ideas that follow their general direction. Now, if the entire table of nerds does this, using the same pictures, there’s a pretty decent chance that the things you do and say during play will tonally align. Art as a navigational aid.
Severed Toys and Stockholm Kartell have teamed up on a Kickstarter campaign for four seven-inch, fully articulated Mörk Borg action figures. Backers who pledge in the first 48 hours will get a free, exclusive Flanged Mace weapon for their figure, and a variety of weapon packs and other upgrades will be available as stretch goals if the campaign surpasses its goal. Every action figure will come with an original zine from Mörk Borg co-creators Nohr and Pelle Nilsson.
The Kickstarter campaign is live now.
