Also, leveling probably should been closer to thief than cleric.

Oh, and mildly sad that the players didn't learn that the sheriff that had signed off on all their wanted posters was isekai'ed before them. The name was sitting on their character sheet the whole time.
I wonder if any of them knew.

For one... never got to try magic, based loosely on half remembering that Deadlands had a gimmick of playing cards with the devil for magic.
Felt so clever for that angle, only to learn... that Swyvers already had the exact thing lmao
Will have to try, magic gunslingers is about the coolest thing.

But yeah, the system works wonderfully where everyone is very much a glass cannon, and if you are outnumbered, even by a group of dudes with rocks, you are in real danger no matter how good your gun is.

That being said, it was 4 sessions and there were still questions left unanswered.

It only lasted 4 sessions, but it proved that I was right: Frontier Scum kicks all sorts of ass.

It was also an intensely fun game. The first thing the party did was mug a traditional group of fantasy adventurers. Made friends with the lizard people, shotgun an ogre to death.

To be be clear. I changed almost nothing about keep on the borderlands or frontier scum. The players were still outlaw cowboys, the caves where still full of bugbears and goblins.

Only difference was the players started in the bandit camp instead of the keep, the one to the south.

So is this kinda like what the mork borg cult was, aka touched up modules and supplements by the community?

Describe every object like you are sponsored by them "so grab your Chessex d20 and give it a roll in your Battlezone official dice tray"

Could I have done this in B/X or Blackhack or... idk Shadow of the Demon Lord?

Maybe??

But I know how to make Mork Borg work every time. And after several short games and 3 full campaigns...

Really can't but get excited about the next one.

Every time I have run Mork Borg, I have had no idea what was going to happen. And every time I am surprised and delighted at what my players came up with. Selling Niduk on sports investment before he finishes eating bodies, escaping a forest in permanent night without fire...

In that regards Mork Borg is a very conductive game into making it into an art project. While it's true you don't need anything more than a whiteboard... just look at the rulebook, it's not about being efficient, or structured. It's about being exciting. And that's the core element of it. Excitement

Thinking about makes it work so well for me. For one, having a semi consistent style for running tokens has been helpful. There's something really nostalgic about working with Fire Emblem sprites so foundry looks like its running on the GBA. It's fairly quick to bash together sprites as well.

I understand that there's games with more mechanical complexity, allowing for elaborate character progression, for running simulated economies, or... levels. But the thing Mork Borg has over even entries in a similar genre is just how fucking excited I am to run Mork Borg at any given time.

Yeh I would take a look

Yeah its divisive. Like, its not for everyone, but to some people it's doom upon RPGs and all the inappropriate blowing it out of proportion that entails.

mork borg

Got hit with some medical bills and I gotta pay for them ASAP. Regular Commissions are still open but if you're interested in getting some portraits like the above samples, I'll be selling them for $40 a pop, $20 if it's just black-n-white.

And because players understand that their mech is repairable/replaceable, combat can be significantly more visceral. Salvage Union in particular is very good at this, but other systems do it as well.

Hard to pick one, but opportunities to improvise in spectacular ways is up there. Using an industrial tool chest as a club,
having all the weapons on a mech overheating and having wrestle a superior machine down
That kinda thing

Outside of mork borg and borg system games, what are these games that aren't doing a largely traditional layout?