BORGED AGAIN!

Grab your cutlass, femur, pulse rifle, and smart gun; you’ll need all four for this collection of adventures. Original modules for the originals; Mörk Borg, Cy-Borg and also Pirate Borg, and Vast Grimm. Learn one basic rule set and experience pain and suffering in the four corners of reality. Travel the sundered lands in Cat Claw Clism, explore an unchartered isle in Relique of the Crab, mine the cyber verse in Children of the Data Crypt, and survive würm-infested animals in a wildlife preserve in Future Bleak: Nature is Lit. They are all part of the epic collection: Borged Again!  Live on Kickstarter.

The format of the foursome gives the one-finger salute to Jack Chick (See his Dark Dungeon chick tract book) and provides a better reason for idolatry and worship, at least that is what Prince Butterscotch Spittoon claims in their introduction…

The ancient Chick Tracts are relegated to a single color, albeit a good one - black. Ours are tainted with putrid, eye-blistering color on EVERY SINGLE PAGE. Their graphic design just sits there proselytizing like an underfed Chicken; ours grabs you by the NOSE HAIRS and tugs hard. Their tracts are puny 3” by 5” (8x13 cm for you Canadians and, well, the rest of the planet); ours are a BONE CRUNCHING 5.5” x 8.5”.

His tracts are not MÖRK BORG, CY_BORG, PIRATE BORG, or VAST GRIMM compatible; we have one of each. Theirs do not use dice, won’t kill your friend’s PCs, contain few puns, and will not get you kicked out of your parent’s basement; ours have all that and much, much more.

The Borged Again! collection will consist of four full-color zines, ranging from 24 to 28 pages each, in total that’s over one hundred pages, dozens of locations, NPCs, treasures, and miseries. Funded in 24 minutes, GNAW is racing to the finish line of their campaign.  Along the way, they are adding stretch goals, including more art, VTT compatibility, custom Alchemy RPG assets, and a soundtrack by Composer and Guitarist, Chaz Underriner, along with performers  Carlos Martinez, David Weatherspoon, Jarobi Watts, Dan Walters, Garrett Wingfield, Tim Rosenberg.  Come join us!

Cat Claw Clism is Mauricio’s contribution to the Borged Again! quadrilogy and will take players from the Sundered Lands to a “friendly” town full of smiling people, and a hex crawl through bright sunny terrain and clear blue skies to where they might find a peaceful temple dwellers in possession of a valuable artifact. This is Mörk Borg? OH YES, they’ll have to avoid being ripped apart by claw, tooth, and beak, dodge backstabbers, fight off all manner of insects, extreme weather, cunning duplicity, idiocy and maybe a gargantuan space traveler; all with little more than a femur and a pointy stick. Clean living was never so dirty.

Future Bleak : Nature is Lit is the first in a series of Future Bleak adventures set in the Vast Grimm universe. A tense romp through a Grimm-decimated nature preserve.  There is no such thing as a straightforward mission. You know you are one infection away from joining The Grimm.  Survival may seem futile, but fuck if you’re going to let those damn Würms win.

The ideas and inspirations of Children of the Data Crypt are firmly rooted in the cyberfuture lore of Cy Borg, but these ideas are taken to ridiculous extremes. Puzzles, hacks, code and crime. A cyberfuture homage to the great adventures of the early days of ttRPGs. Go crazy or go home.

Take an evolved crab that sees itself as a god, add in hallucinogenic substances, mutated humanoid worshippers, a holy relic, and a skeletal monkey, then shove it all into an eldritch being’s skull, and shake. The result is Relique of the Crab. Can the party infiltrate the island, find a missing girl, and make off with the booty? Or will they be swayed to worship their crustacean superiors?

Mauricio Cordero and Rob Knaack founded GNAW Guild Publishing last year in order to publish the kinds of adventures they like to play: dark, dank, and humorous. For this project, they’ve brought in two friends from their weekly dice table, Xris Parcell and Adam Dahlheim

Mauricio

“Growing up Latino, a comic book fan, and a proud heretic, I was outraged when I got my hands on my first Chick Tract. How could they take something so dear to me and profane it with divisive pseudo-religious diatribes? Homophobia, racism, anti-semitism; all the greatest hits of crypto-fascism are right there on the pages of Jack Chick’s religious propaganda. 

My early career began with CAUTION!, a punk art and poetry magazine in the late 80s. My last few years were spent teaching comic book production and ttRPG design at MIT and now Northwestern. I thought it was time to get back to my first love, zines and polyhedral dice in the DIY spirit.”

Rob

“When I came across the batshit craziness of Chick Tracts, the tracts were objects of bemusement, like Plan 9 from Outer Space, so absurd it is comical. As tools for indoctrination, they are dangerous.”

“After years creating video games and animated movies, TTRPGs were a natural progression of my desire to build engrossing experiences for people.” says Rob Knaack, creator of FB:NIL

Xris

As Xris Parcell puts it, “I’ve had so much fun designing the world of the Data Crypt, inspired by some of my favorite cyberpunk media, and combining them into a visceral and puzzle-filled adventure. I’ve hacked the cyberpunk tropes, pulling them apart, deconstructing their code sequences, and reassembling them to feed off of the same raw energy and attitude as the more fantasy-fuelled Mork Borg adventures.

CofDC is inspired by and invokes some of the earliest fantasy-based dungeon crawlers of the late 70s. Including some classics from the Monster Manual re-imagined for Cy Borg and my twisted world-building.” 

He adds, “Adding the Chick Tract angle to the narrative was great. When I was a teenage punk in NYC during the 80s, it was always a game to try and find some Chick Tracts left in the wild. Incorporating Chick Tracts' insanity into the game hook and referencing my own experiences with them throughout CofDC took the game design to another level.” 

Adam

“I was only vaguely aware of Chick Tracts while growing up, but I didn’t really investigate them until Mauricio and Rob approached me about this project,” Adam admitted. “They are great…as fodder for ridicule and to use as adventure hooks in a dystopian world. I immediately saw a few ways that I could work it into an adventure, and doing the Pirate Borg portion was the vile icing on the cake. I had just read about crabs and convergent evolution, so I was off to the races. Was I doing research into how to become a crab myself? I can neither confirm nor deny this.”

It’s time for you to join in the Borg madness on Kickstarter before March 22nd.  Come join Borged Again! on Kickstarter!

That's right, this and all GNAW Guild projects and products are made by humans without the mucky muck AI or “Machine Learning”.

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