The Death Ziggurat is "a cosmic necrocrawl" scenario for Mörk Borg. It is written by Carl Niblaeus with editing, graphic design, and art by Johan Nohr.
As always, the art of Johan Nohr is evocative, pulpy, and generally great. The illustrations include a small hex map, an illustrated border around a page of random tables, the death ziggurat itself, and the scenario's primary BBEG - Big Bad Evil (Demon) Girl, in this case.
The whole scenario has a light blue and yellow aesthetic theme which looks great. If Sepulchre of the Swamp Witch's green and black palette evoked the swamp, then The Death Ziggurat's evokes the frozen wastes.
SPOILERS for the Death Ziggurat!
The scenario takes place within Sarkash, the great northern forest of the Mörk Borg setting. Inside the forest is an unnaturally cold depression. Inside the depression is the ziggurat, where the demon child Akünh was imprisoned long ago. The magic imprisoning Akünh has weakened, and she has escaped to raise an army of undead and, along with her fanatical rot priest followers, ravage the world before its end.
An order of Cretun monks hires the party to investigate and, presumably, thwart Akünh. They tell the party that the ziggurat is "hidden in another realm" and that "the [rot] priests carry keys".
Apparently the monks are paying the party generously for their services, though the scenario doesn't specify what qualifies as generous pay. Mörk Borg itself never gives any indication as to how much silver is considered a little or a lot, so it's entirely up to GM discretion. Not my favorite, but not terrible either. I went with 200 silver for my game, which in retrospect may have been too much.
The presentation of information is not as elegant as in other Mörk Borg scenarios like Rotblack Sludge and Sepulchre of the Swamp Witch. Information is not organized into bullet points with bolded keywords. Instead, all information is presented as prose, broken up by bolded headings. Names of NPCs and monsters are bolded, as well as the occasional important location or item, but it's rather inconsistent.
I'm not always crazy about the bullet points and bolded keywords approach, particularly because it favors terseness and at-the-table utility over clarity or thoroughness, however I do wish the writing here was a bit more utilitarian.
The Depression Crawl
The scenario includes an illustrated hex map of the depression. There are two locations outside of the depression: a camp of death-obsessed cultists (not to be confused with the camp of demon cultists that shows up later) and a bloody, rotting mouth which conceals a tunnel leading into the depression. You need to feed it blood for it to open.
The walls of the depression are 150 to 300 feet high, so as far as I can tell the only way to get down is to climb (which seems highly unlikely) or pass through the mouth. I started the players traveling through the forest, with only the smoke from the death cultist camp in sight. The cultists told them about the rotting mouth. The players went there, had a fun social interaction scene with the mouth, and figured out how to open it.
The cultists are kind of a weird inclusion. They are different from the rot priests who worship Akünh. The death cultists and the rot priests both have camps. Perhaps the players are meant to expect that the rot priest camp is another death cultist camp? I don't mind the inclusion of both, but it seems that the players could easily get confused by the two camps of religious people fixated on death.
Inside the depression, there's a cave connecting to the rotting mouth, a frozen lake, a rot priest camp, the Spiral Chapel, and the necropolis and ziggurat, both of which are hidden in the Death Realm.
The hexes in between locations are also filled with ruins. I think all of the hexes that aren't otherwise keyed are supposed to contain ruins, but it's not entirely clear. Some of the hexes obviously contain ruins, but a few look empty, and others may only contain trees. The map isn't super clear.
Random Rules
Once per hex, the GM rolls a random event, which range from nothing happening to an important NPC showing up. Five of the twelve possible results are of the "nothing happens" variety, but the "nothing" is described evocatively: clouds gather and thunder rumbles, everything gets cold and freezes over, or a spiraling galaxy opens up above. I could take or leave these. They're the sort of things that the players will either fruitlessly fixate on or go "Oh, okay. So...we keep walking..."
One result is an undead attack (personally, I'd have them burst out of the snow). Two results are encounters with rot priests (which aren't explicitly combat encounters). Two results are encounters with Sarku, Akünh's former closest advisor who is now a blood-sucking ghost, and who knows that to defeat her, her heart (hidden in the ziggurat) must be destroyed. Best of all, two results are encounters with Akünh herself.
Sarku, unfortunately, doesn't show up anywhere else in the scenario, so there is a chance that the players will miss him entirely. I just decided that he could be found in the Spiral Chapel if the players didn't encounter him elsewhere. I think he's an important NPC to include, and he ended up being quite important when I ran the scenario myself.
The only other random encounter I rolled was with a small group of cautious rot priests, which presented a unique opportunity for the players to obtain the priests' medallions. So that was fun.
There's a table for generating ruin types (short descriptions like "Unholy chapel" or "Basalt mausoleum", not a procedure for running a short dungeoncrawl on the fly, which might have been cool). The party can also take 15 minutes to search the ruins for treasure, but might trigger a trap or another random event in so doing.
I rolled "overgrown ziggurat" something like three times, which was really funny considering that the party knew only that they were looking for a ziggurat. I explained to them the meta mechanics of searching the ruins (i.e., you can take a bit of extra time and maybe find some treasure at the risk of triggering an encounter), but they weren't interested at all.
The frozen lake is covered in black flowers that have strange effects when crushed, which are tied to a table of hourly, weekly, and permanent effects. The effects are fine. One of them turns the character into a ghoul and the other causes them to age in reverse. The implications of both are left entirely to the GM. The players didn't engage with this location at all.
The rot priests are nothing to write home about. They're fascinated by the metaphysical. They have mouths in their abdomens. They carry medallions that allow them to find the necropolis and ziggurat in the Death Realm. They don't really seem to be doing anything besides two that are summoning horn beasts from a bottomless pit in the necropolis, and a few guarding the ziggurat. I wish the others were a bit more active. My players just snuck by most of them.
The Spiral Chapel houses a little puzzle which, when solved, yields the Spiral Crown. The Crown turns its wearer into a cosmic vessel. The wearer gets three DR 12 Presence tests to remove it, otherwise they are "irrevocably lost to the Cosmos", whatever that means. It sounds like a "Your character is now an NPC, through no fault of your own" situation. I had Sarku allude to the awesome power of the crown, and the players had a nice long discussion about who should wear it.
Wearing the Crown also reverses Akünh's channeling of the demonic world's power, which she needs to raise her undead army. Reversing the channeling also drains Akünh's health each round, causing her to appear and battle the Crown-bearer. My understanding is that, even if she dies here, one still needs to destroy her heart at the ziggurat to destroy her permanently. That makes the Crown a very useful but dangerous and not necessary tool, which I like.
I did change it so that passing the Presence test allowed the character to wield the Crown without being lost to the Cosmos, rather than to simply remove the Crown. The character could instead attempt a Strength test at any time during the "attunement" process to remove the Crown. This way, there are three outcomes: wear the Crown but be lost to the Cosmos, remove the Crown before becoming lost to the Cosmos, or master the Crown and retain your personality.
One of the player characters wore the Crown and mastered it. Akünh showed up and tried to kill them. That character had 1 hit point. Fortunately, the party's Fanged Deserter scored a critical hit with their Croaking Trident from Sepulchre of the Swamp Witch, slaying Akünh (temporarily) instantly. Cool! Now, all that was left was to go find the ziggurat and destroy Akünh's heart.
The Death Realm
To find the necropolis and ziggurat in the Death Realm, the party needs a rot priest medallion. Otherwise, they find only a barren waste, concealed by fog or mist, swarming with undead. If the party doesn't have a medallion, they see a funnel of clouds being sucked down into a sinkhole where the ziggurat would be.
At the necropolis, there are some rot priests summoning horn beasts from a bottomless pit. They are seemingly the only proactive rot priests in the whole area. It's unclear if their summoning is tied to Akünh's channeling and whether disrupting the channeling stops the summoning. My players saw the horn beasts crawling out of the pit and asked "Can we sneak around them?" I didn't see why not.
Finally, inside the Death Ziggurat are some rot priests and their horn beasts, guarding a rotten mouth sucking in the cloud funnel. If the party crawls down the wet throat, they'll find Akünh's heart. Destroying it banishes her to the void and instantly triggers a Misery from Mörk Borg's Calendar of Nechrubel.
My players encountered the maximum number of rot priests here. Not good! A battle ensued (one of the characters was still wearing the Crown, so the rot priests instantly recognized them as enemies). As the party's Shedding Vicar summoned a gang of zombies to tilt the numbers in the party's favor, the Forlorn Philosopher slipped past the priests and down into the mouth (they slipped and fell in, actually, barely surviving the fall), where they found Akünh regenerating around her still-beating heart.
Before they could destroy the heart, a horn beast tore the Crown-bearer apart. Akünh's power was restored! Her eyes snapped open. The Forlorn Philosopher stabbed her heart. She screamed in pain and fury and pursued the Philosopher. The Philosopher barely managed to climb back up out of the throat. The party's Gutterborn Scum rushed to put on the Crown, struggling to master it while the rest of the party held off Akünh and her priests and beasts.
Akünh drew the Crown-bearer towards her with her scream, grabbed them, and bit them in half, killing them instantly. But not before the Fanged Deserter once more delivered the killing blow. I described Akünh falling backwards into the mouth-pit, Crown and upper half of Crown-bearer chewed up by her abdomen-mouth. Through the hole in the top of the ziggurat, the Cosmos swirled. A bolt of prismatic lightning shot down from the heavens and smote Akünh in her pit. The priests' morale broke and they fled. The day was won, but not without great cost!
Monsters and NPCs
The scenario's final spread provides details about monsters and NPCs, plus a great illustration of Akünh. There's a lot to like here.
The rot priests have mouths in their abdomens. They try to grab you and stuff you inside. Any damage they cause does not heal except by magic or after resting one night at least a day's travel from the ziggurat (which means characters are unlikely to heal mid-scenario).
Horn beasts are moderately armored masses of horns and bones with lots of teeth that attack twice per round (which is pretty rare in Mörk Borg). They are pretty nasty and, as I mentioned earlier, managed to score the (surprisingly) first player character kill since we've been playing.
Undead are slow. You can always outrun them, unless they grapple you (which is the first thing they try to do). They are weak, but only stay "dead" for one round before rising with 1 hit point. I like them a lot. Unfortunately my players did not encounter any.
The death cultists are not too exciting. The "most high ranking cultists" (the scenario does not say how many such cultists are in the present group of 25) can deafen you for d10 minutes, which doesn't seem like it would be that big of a deal.
Sarku is awesome. He's a ghost that sucks people's blood with his long, sharp tongue (which also stretches the victim's tongue for some reason). He hangs their desiccated husks from trees. He has combat statistics, even though he's immune to physical harm, and I can't see why he would fight the player characters anyway. His goal is to be freed from his earthly prison. The scenario does not suggest how this is to be accomplished, but I imagine that slaying Akünh would do the trick.
Akünh is also awesome. She can scream to magically pull you within arm's reach. She can attack twice with her claws, and if both hit, the target must test Strength or be devoured by her abdomen mouth and die instantly (this is what killed the party's Gutterborn Scum, who's been with us since the beginning). She can shoot lasers out of her eyes, affecting d6 targets. She can also teleport to anywhere inside of the depression, climbing from a rotting mouth eating out of the ground. The scenario is not clear as to how much of this stuff she can do in a single round. When she reaches 0 HP, she resurrects at her heart beneath the ziggurat, though it isn't clear if this is at full health or if she needs time to heal.
Conclusion
All in all, this is a solid scenario. While the information presentation isn't the most utilitarian, and there are some holes to fill and things I changed, this is the most ready-to-run-as-is Mörk Borg scenario I've reviewed yet. It's not setting the world on fire, but it also isn't trying to do too much, which makes the GM's load significantly lighter.
I managed to run it in just one 3-hour session, which is the quickest we've gotten through any Mörk Borg scenario so far. It was exciting and deadly. I can imagine that multiple playthroughs would be sufficiently distinct to keep me coming back to this one. My favorite Mörk Borg scenario yet. Run it!
Where to Buy/Download
You can get the Death Ziggurat for free on the Mörk Borg website. Here is a direct link to where you can download it from Google Drive.
If you want a physical copy, you will have to purchase Mörk Borg Cult: Feretory, which includes Death Ziggurat and many other adventures and Mörk Borg content (travel and hunting rules, random tables, magic items, new classes, etc.). I can't really recommend it enough.
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