Notes Passed Between Me and Morgan During Algebra Class, After Discovering The Molt (If The Molt Had Been Published in 1995, When We Were in Algebra Class)

This feature is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #185. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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This series of articles is made possible through the generous sponsorship of Exalted Funeral. While Exalted Funeral puts us in touch with our subjects, they have no input or approval in the final story.

Holy shit, this is brutal!

Right? Like a Saturday morning cartoon from another dimension. Ninja Turtles meets Inhumanoids if they were both VERY rated R.

Gotta admit, the layout makes it a little hard to follow sometimes but… it kinda works? Like getting hit in the face with acid. Who put this out?

Some publisher called Exalted Funeral, which sounds metal as hell. Never heard of ‘em, but I guess they do a bunch of this stuff. Way weirder than any of the D&D shit we’ve seen at B. Dalton.

No kidding. This is even heavier than Warhammer. I mean, we’ve talked before about how cool it would be to actually get to play as the monsters, but I was thinking, like, goblins or myconids or whatever. These are way beyond that. Bad guy action figures come to life. Lava slugs and dinosaurs and dudes with faces in their chests.

Oh man, action figures of this would be so cool. Apparently, the guy who put this out actually does do, like, sculptures of them. A bunch of the illustrations in The Molt are retouched photos of those sculptures, I guess, and he sells them at conventions. They released another book called something like World of Revilo that has some of these same things in it, but it sounds way less brutal.

I want to be one of those bird oracles. They remind me of the bad guys from Dark Crystal.

I want to be a haunted triceratops that carves my horns into scary faces.

Have you ever heard of this system before?

No. It’s something called MÖRK BORG. It seems sort of like D&D but a lot… looser? messier? There’s a lot more that’s left up to you. The stats seem really broad and combat is very brutal. Did you see the table of, like, losing an eye or getting a limb hacked off or whatever?

Yeah, and it seems like you can generate most stuff by rolling on random tables, although I don’t know why you couldn’t also just pick it, if you wanted to.

Rolling is pretty fun, though. Like, I just rolled a bunch on tables last night and I got stuff like that I had looted the petrified foot of a warlock off a dead body. I was in a cavern full of “cones of dung,” and my name was Tibor. I was irritable and indecisive, and my brain was visible through a crack in my skull – and I picked my nose. I rolled all that shit on random tables.

That’s wild. I didn’t actually roll much yet, but I looked through them all. I like the idea of your group being kinda unified but also kinda tenuous. Like, you need one another, but if push comes to shove…

Do you think we could get Josh to play this?

I think so. It’s really short, and the main thing he gripes about with D&D is that there’s too much reading and rules to remember and – oh shit, Mr. Peterson is looking this way, better chill out for a bit…

Okay, film strip time!

Why the hell are we watching a film strip in algebra?

I dunno, but I’m not complaining. More time to talk about The Molt. You know what I realized this game reminds me of? Primal Rage.

Is that the fighting game where you play as, like, giant dinosaurs?

Yeah. But what really made me think of that is that the dinosaurs in it aren’t real dinosaurs. They’re, like, mashups of real dinosaurs? But also, there are all those humans running around your feet in that game, worshipping you or whatever, but you just trample them into bloody paste. That’s how this game seems to feel about humans.

Oh, you mean “meatbags”?

Haha – yeah! Which is another thing. Like, the reversal of all this. In D&D, you’re always humans (or elves or dwarves or whatever but come on, those are basically humans) and you’re going down into dungeons and fighting the things that live down there to take their treasure. Here, you ARE the things that live down there, and you’re heading toward the surface to fuck shit up.

And the world is ending.

Oh yeah. The “Molt” – like, ending or changing, right? Which, that’s always what the world ending really is. Unless the planet literally blows up or something. Mad Max or whatever, our world may be over, but the world is still there. It’s just a different world. And for somebody, for these weird flayed dinosaurs or whatever, maybe, that new world is actually better, right?

Yeah, it’s just their world now.

And some of the stuff that happens as the molting commences is wild. There’s tables for that, too, all written like prophecies. Flowing magma that’s cool to the touch, tentacled demons coming out of rifts in the ground, weird orgies, layers of the surface tearing off and flying into the atmosphere to block out the sun…

Do I remember right that there are things called Greyskrulls? Is that a He-Man reference?

And maybe also a Fantastic Four reference at the same time?

And the two-headed basilisk god is just called SHE. I wonder if it’s like that old movie?

What movie?

It was just called SHE. It’s from, like, the ’60s. I think Peter Cushing is in it. But it’s this colonial adventure story and the SHE in the title is an immortal queen, or something. It used to play on afternoon TV sometimes. It and King Solomon’s Mines, so I mix them up.

This weekend we should play the adventure in the back. Did you read all of it?

Yeah. I mean, I know I’m not supposed to unless I’m the one who’s going to run the game, but I always do, anyway.

Same here. Who doesn’t? But I’ll have forgotten enough of it by then to play, unless you want me to run.

We can flip for it or something. Didn’t it involve, like, a wrecked spaceship?

I know, right? As if this thing wasn’t already enough like a weird Saturday morning cartoon. But yeah, I remember something about a ship and cryo-sleep pods and also some kind of Frankenstein monster?

Hopefully if we play through that this weekend we’ll learn the rules enough to keep going. I’ll see if Josh is in. And when I was rolling stuff, I also rolled up some random adventure hooks on the tables in the back of the book that we can use later. The one I wrote down was that an “alien beast’s gaze is turning people to obsidian,” so we have to explore an ancient mausoleum filled with luminescent crystal where an Oracle of the Monolith now dwells. Unfortunately, everything that died in the past week has returned to life as the undead.

That’s all from tables again?

All from tables again.

They practically wrote the adventure for you!

You think you, me, and Josh will be enough, or do we need to find somebody else? Brian, maybe?

We can try it with three and see how it goes with the sample adventure. Brian… isn’t always willing to take this kind of stuff seriously enough, y’know?

With this, though, maybe he would be into it because of how intense it all is. Like, it’s kind of over the top in a way he might like. I dunno.

We can try the sample adventure this weekend and see how it goes. I can run and also throw an NPC into the group. Looking at these rules, I have a feeling our characters might die a lot anyway and

[At this point, the notes were confiscated by Mr. Peterson, who gave Morgan and I detention, during which time we continued to discuss the weekend’s game, albeit not in a written form.

As such, this notes document does not contain our discussion of any of the The Molt’s various antagonist monsters, which are accompanied by stats as well as illustrations by both game creator Brian Colin and additional artist Carey Drake. Morgan particularly liked the weird, many-legged Xagyg, with heads for hands, and the Gentrikyn Fire Bugs, while I was fond of the strange little burrowing lemming dudes called Ruchong.

Mr. Peterson did eventually return the notes, which is how they were able to be reproduced here. To our shock, however, his return of the notes was contingent on him getting to join our campaign. He wanted to play as one of the lava slugs.]

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The Molt is available now from Exalted Funeral (Regular, Deluxe).

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Orrin Grey is a writer, editor, game designer, and amateur film scholar who loves to write about monsters, movies, and monster movies. He’s the author of several spooky books, including How to See Ghosts & Other Figments. You can find him online at orringrey.com.