2026 Reviews - Tephrotic Nightmares
I'm back for another sporadic review! As I've mentioned before, I'm running fewer one-shots and short games this year, so these reviews will be for medium to long campaigns. This time I revisited Mörk Borg, which has long held a special place in my heart, and we delved into Tephrotic Nightmares, by Luke Gearing.
This campaign-style sandbox adventure was released through Exalted Funeral, and it features more of Johan Nohr's incredible art. The physical book got quite a lot of attention when it was released due to the unique design, but I'm going to focus on the content.
The book details the Ashen Sea, a new region of the Dying Lands that could potentially go any place you like in your Mörk Borg game-- it could replace one of the regions from the core book, be tacked onto it, or even be a sort of weird pocket dimension. There's even a sidebar in the introduction that suggests a few locations for it. In any event, the Ashen Sea is the work of a being known simply as The Arsonist, who triggered a great conflagration long ago, reducing a great forest to nothing but ash. Now, mountaintops are islands in the sea of ash, and doomed figures eke out a living, seeking the scarce water that has become currency.
Getting it to the Table
There is a huge amount of information packed into this book, and all of it is presented in classic Luke Gearing style, for better or for worse. After a brief introduction that sets the stage and establishes the way that water is used as currency, the book leads into the procedures for traveling across the ash. This is essentially a nautical campaign, with a variety of unique boats, ship weapons, and procedures for generating weather and wind direction that can impact travel, as well as a naval combat system. The ships and equipment do a great job of setting the tone of the campaign, and your mind is immediately filled with images of these desperate people on their bizarre boats (the sled pulled by carnivorous seagulls is one of my favorites) fighting for survival on the Ashen Sea.
The final section of that chapter is the general encounter table, which looks simple at first glance but ended up getting a little complex in play-- many of the results require additional rolls, and the table recommends rolling some things in advance to speed up play. Some of the entries also vary depending on where the PCs are on the map, so it's important for the GM to be able to keep track of their location on two maps-- the unmarked Player Map and the GM Map which shows the zones of influence for the various factions at play.
Speaking of factions, there's a lot of them! From the various flavor of Ashmouth Raider to the bureaucrats of the Cannibal Count and the scientists of the Urniversity, there's a great deal of opportunity for faction play, and each group has tables to generate unique encounters when they show up on the Ashen Sea. They are all detailed in the "Denizens of the Ashen Sea" chapter along with the various monsters and other dangerous entities that could be encountered.
Next we have the location key for the various points of interest in the Ashen Sea. Some of these are meant to be mere oddities encountered in the wastes, while others are full-blown dungeons. Tying many of these scattered location together are a number of "jobs" for the PCs to undertake to earn some water, so there's some benefit to interacting with NPCs and getting hooks to explore more of the area.
Lastly, we have a new loot table and a helpful index, since it can be tricky to remember exactly where you saw the details of something in the various sections.
What Worked?
- Lots of good faction play potential. Every group has their own goals and personality, and if you put in the prep work you could have a great time just interacting with them all. My players ended up capturing some Ashmouth Raiders and convincing them to join as crewmembers for a fledgling armada.
- Really chewy and bizarre Luke Gearing stuff. There's some truly weird encounters and mysteries to be found here, but I will say that that cuts both ways-- more on that in the next section.
- Lovely art by Johan Nohr. This was a particularly good selection of his work and it was nice to see him working tightly within a particular theme and style as opposed to the variety that you see in the core book and other Mörk Borg products. The grey and white ink on black background gives you a great burnt and claustrophobic feel that matches the tone of the campaign quite well.
What Didn't Work?
- Tendency towards nihilism. One thing that I kept running into over and over were mysteries that either did not have an answer, or had an answer that led to nothing-- nothing for the story, and nothing for the party. Two examples of this in particular that stood out were the Sunken Temple and the Wasser Koenig wreck. The Sunken Temple is a medium-sized dungeon with numerous strange and mysterious rooms containing strange and mysterious things. There was certainly loot to be found and monsters to fight, but my players had so many questions about the weird features that simply had no answers in the book. Sometimes they would explicitly be meaningless; the Devotion Wheel in room 3, for example, specifically says that nothing will happen if the PCs manage to overcome the steep strength requirement to turn the wheel. So while there was technically a point to going inside the Sunken Temple (finding loot), there was no depth as to why the temple was part of this campaign. The Wasser Koenig wreck had the opposite problem. Ostensibly there is a quest involved (the creature that infests the wreck demands that the PCs locate and bring the "beloved captain" back to it), but there is absolutely nothing to be gained from completing this quest. Indeed, the real incentive is to save the life of whichever PC has been infected and thus held hostage by the entity, rather than any tangible reward. This could easily feel like a big sidetrack that ultimately uses up a lot of game time for nothing. Comparing these two locations and the others to other examples of Luke Gearing's work (Wolves Upon the Coast in particular), where practically everything is interconnected and mysteries posed in one hex are answered in another, this ended up feeling a little bit thin and nihilistic at the table. Yeah, I know, Mörk Borg, all must blacken and burn, yada yada, but I still think you want to reward exploration with something the players can sink their teeth into.
Final Thoughts
Overall, this campaign is a beautiful work of art, and I'm glad that I bought it and had a chance to run it. At the end of the day, though, I think that I'm more glad that I bought it to enjoy the physicality of the book and its unique design. The campaign itself has a great deal of potential, but I think it would require a lot of additional work on my part to really tighten up the loose ends and create a larger sense of cohesion and purpose beyond just a grim ashy crawl around a hex map full of weird stuff that wants to kill you.
You can get Tephrotic Nightmares via Exalted Funeral https://www.exaltedfuneral.com/products/tephrotic-nightmares and make sure you savor cracking apart the pages! Thanks for reading!