In September, the heavy metal tabletop RPG MÖRK BORG announced that the meat grinder of a game would receive a Ukrainian edition. Translation itself is no mean feat, but bringing MÖRK BORG to Ukraine meant a mountain of extra hurdles for the team at M87 Games. The finished product is inventive in the face of its many obstacles. Its very letters are an act of political defiance, a personal passion project that honors a country living through the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II.
The original MÖRK BORG was published in English and Swedish, two languages that use an internationally agreed version of the basic Latin alphabet. Since you're likely reading this article in English, you'll be intimately familiar with its letters. They are both ancient and widespread, and sharing these characters can help simplify the translation of a text - at least from a graphic design perspective.
Ukrainian instead derives from Cyrillic script, which is used by around 250 million people across Europe and Asia. Around half of that population is apparently in Russia alone.
Recreating MÖRK BORG with Cyrillic script creates both practical and political problems. First, the logistics. Oleksandr Trifan, founder of M87 Games, tells me that Ukrainian as a language is around 25% longer than English, so the new edition faced a battle for space. "Every headline, every spell name, every title has to be re-worked to fit the same visual rhythm."
The biggest fight of all was on the font front. "One of the biggest challenges in localizing MÖRK BORG into Ukrainian was the typography", Trifan tells me. "The original leans heavily on gothic and blackletter typefaces - which simply don't exist in Cyrillic culture in the same way." "Finding fonts that matched the tone of the original book was nearly impossible", he adds.
Here, the search for fonts becomes political. A large number of existing Cyrillic fonts were produced by Russian designers. "That's simply not an option for us", Trifan says. "Every purchase from a Russian creator directly supports the state that's been bombing our cities for years."
The Russo-Ukrainian war has been ongoing since 2014, though its current 'phase' began on February 24, 2022, when Russia's forces invaded Ukraine. Millions of deaths have been confirmed since 2022, though there is currently no way to determine a precise number of casualties.
Two arrest warrants have been submitted against Russian officials for war crimes. The first, issued against Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova in 2023, is for alleged child abductions during the invasion of Ukraine. The second came in 2024 against four top Russian military officers, and it accused these individuals of attacking civilians and civilian objects in Ukraine.
This latter crime has directly affected the production of Ukrainian MÖRK BORG, as Trifan tells me that Russia's attacks on energy infrastructure have impacted the project. Amnesty International reported in 2022 that around 40% of Ukraine's energy facilities had been damaged by Russian attacks. "From time to time our crew is working while using generators and batteries because there's no electricity", he says.
Trifan says that the desire to share no ties with Russia is "deeply personal" as well as political. "Most Ukrainians have lost someone - friends, relatives, people from our own community." "Even a small connection to Russia is painful. So as a Ukrainian publisher, we just can't cross that line", he explains. "Our goal is to support a young and fragile hobby community here, during the hardest time in our country's history - and to do it on our own terms."
Limitations often feed creativity, and this has certainly been the case for Ukrainian MÖRK BORG. To get the perfect fonts for its project, M87 Games decided to build them from the ground up. "We repurposed Latin letters, reworked shapes, and hand-drew missing Cyrillic characters from scratch", Trifan tells me.
"We're incredibly lucky to have our art director, Daria Yehorova, who treats this project like her own child - and, honestly, she's doing it for free." "Otherwise, this book would cost as much as gold", he adds. "Thanks to her, we've managed to keep the same raw visual aesthetic that defines MÖRK BORG."
These immense efforts will bring Ukrainian tabletop RPG fans a faithful adaptation of MÖRK BORG. And, however personal the motivation, the letters have a political story woven within.
This is far from the first time that a font has reflected the politics of its printers. Blackletter, the typeface that MÖRK BORG relies so heavily upon, was the site of much political debate in Germany through the 19th and 20th centuries. Two blackletter variants, Fraktur and Antiqua, took on separate cultural and historical connotations, with intense debate about which best represented the nation.
In 1941, Adolf Hitler would discontinue Fraktur. It was publicly claimed that the font had too much 'Jewish influence', and the move seems to have partly been performed to make it easier to manufacture propaganda outside of Germany.
"I'm no font historian, but I do understand that typefaces carry meaning", Trifan tells me. "Some were born from propaganda or totalitarian regimes, others from rebellion and counterculture." "MÖRK BORG is inspired by heavy music - sludge, black metal etc. And all of that is about rebellion and freedom, about rejecting tyranny, resisting the system, and creating something raw and honest. And that's exactly what this project feels like for us."
"No fonts? We'll make them. Other publishers said it's too much trouble? We'll still do it. Our community is small? They deserve this game in their own language. No electricity because of airstrikes? Our designers plug into generators and keep going." "That's the spirit of the game", Trifan says, "defiant." "And that's the spirit of Ukraine right now. So… perfect match."
If you'd like to talk more about tabletop RPG design, join us in the Wargamer Discord. For more on MÖRK BORG, check out this expansion designed by a five-year-old.