READ & REVIEWED: Punk is Dead

by Mark Wallace

When I was playing bass in punk bands in the 80s (and somewhat more recently, for that matter), it wasn't always easy to see the point. We might rage against the machine, but the machine just raged on, and didn't seem much impressed with what we had to say. If the machine took any notice of us, it was only to absorb punk's noise and dissonance, add a splash of capitalism, and spit it out the ass end of things wrapped in a shiny package and ready for consumption by all. Not that this went against the "spirit" of punk, necessarily — punk was part nihilistic rage and part political statement, but it was also part pose and part that thing that makes every 13-year-old want to pick up a guitar: the desire to impress (in my case) girls. Punk stood for something, sure. But few people could agree on what that was, and even fewer really cared.

A Few Epic Gigs

Tim Roberts captures that sense of frustration and futility well in his new game, Punk is Dead, which is published by Critical Kit, the indie TTRPG company Roberts runs with his wife. (Critical Kit also publishes Be Like A Crow, Roberts's award-winning solo RPG about... being a crow.)  A Mörk Borg hack (more on that in a bit), the 96-page hardcover takes the form of a bloodspattered 7" single: black vinyl on a pink background, 45 RPM. You play as members of a punk band, touring the last music venues of a dying hellscape, trying to bring hope to the darkness, or at least pull off a few epic gigs.

The game welcomes us (as much as a Mörk world can be welcoming) to the Ununited Kingdom, where a nuclear war has ushered in the age of Quantum Fuckery. In a world ruled by "every nightmare and myth lost to time," only the Ununited Kingdom still supports life more or less as we know it — although it's a grim life, natch, and one with a countdown attached. Punk is Dead swaps in the nicely thematic Pirate Radio die for Mörk Borg's Misery die: on a roll of 1, an Emergency Broadcast is heard, describing the successively more terrible events that lead eventually to the Black Hole Sun consuming the world. The rest of the time, the radio pirates play music (punk music, presumably), and try to unite the disparate communities of the UUK in an uprising against the powers that be.

Tune In, Piss Off

Punk is Dead is filled with nice touches like the Pirate Radio broadcasts. Some of the main bad guys in this scenario are corporate vampires — literally. That is, they're LCVs: Literal Corporate Vampires, who will return to "life" unless beheaded and who breed flying "batstards" whose bite can put band members in a foul mood for d8 hours — if they weren't already. The LCVs' undead minions are the shambling First Wave, whose bodies were melted by bombs and have fused with concrete and leather. They're a bit of a mess, the Wave — which is probably why the Undead Queen of Avalon has moved on to Black Hole Sun Zealots for support. They wander about speaking in tongues and can mimic the mutations that give the PCs their special powers.

The band members themselves you've met before — probably in the alley behind the Mab or in the toilets at the Roxy. You can play as vocals, guitar, drums, or keys, or — a stretch goal in the game's £72,700 crowdfunding campaign — emcee, DJ, or breaker, if you like your post-apocalypse with hip-hop sprinkles on top. (The fact that bass players get nothing more than a single flavorpill in the guitarists' playbook hasn't biased this review. Much.)

How Do You Play That Song?

Mörk Borg's four abilities — nicely recast as Deft, Stage Presence, NNGH, and Tough — are joined here by Yeet ("Throwing stuff. That's all.") and Streetwise, for "working stuff out and not getting mugged off." PCs' special powers come from the Quantum Fuckery: things like the singer's Feedback Collar that shuts down all electronic devices and turns off anything mechanical within 30 feet, the keyboardist's Calming Concerto, or the guitarist's Power Chord, which, on a successful Tough test, pushes anyone nearby 10 feet away.

Punk is Dead also adds "creativity points," both individual and shared amongst the band, that players can spend to turn a failed test into a success. Creativity seems an odd thing to value in a hack of a doomed Swedish post-apocalypse — until you remember that Punk is Dead bills itself as "a post-apocalyptic songwriting TTRPG." (Emphasis added.) And in fact the game envisions its players actually sitting around writing songs, although "there's no right or wrong way to craft a punk song," as the text points out. Instead, players propose a lyric or piece of music to add to a song, and if the band votes to accept it, you get a creativity point.

The game is solid; it's designed to be fully compatible with Mörk Borg, so that you can bring the bads from the base game into the Ununited Kingdom, or you could have your punk band play a gig at the Mabuhay Galgenbeck. The book itself is of a piece with Mörk Borg in style, as well, with Roberts's layout and riot of fonts tipping its hat to Johan Nohr's, if not with quite as much polish. (Nohr is the professional designer, after all.)

The difference is in the music, and it's here, if anywhere, that Punk is Dead and I part ways. No band I was in ever voted on whether a lyric should go in a song. It seems a small point, but in a game about music, it's the music part I want to be able to dance to, and there's something off about Punk is Dead's backbeat. The game gives the drummer a crash cymbal for a shield, which is outstanding — but for weapons we get things like knuckle dusters, a steak tenderizer, a crossbow, and an 8-ball in a sock. These are great for the Peaky Blinders, but give me a piano string garrotte, a sharpened guitar neck, a mic stand glaive, or Paul Simonon smashing his bass on the cover of London Calling. There's a reason they call it an axe, you know.

Are You Punk Enough? Is Punk is Dead? 

I can't fault Tim Roberts his punk bona fides. He named his game for an uncompromising song by one of punk's most uncompromising bands, and he's spoken in interviews about how important punk was in his youth. I love the optional rule called Music is Hope, whereby if you play three epic gigs, the next Pirate Radio broadcast is postponed. The roll to see how the gig went is smart, too. (Mechanics to represent collective action aren't easy.) Each band member rolls a d20; add the highest roll to the highest Stage Presence to get the result: shit-show, bad, good, or epic.

This is all great color and style — Roberts gets that part right — and as a love letter to the punk scene of the late 70s and early 80s, Punk is Dead is a great game to have on your shelf, as much for the occasional van trip to a gig in the Ununited Kingdom as for an ongoing campaign.

But I used the word scenario back there intentionally: Punk is Dead at times feels too much like an add-on to Mörk Borg and not enough its own thing, too much like a 45 and not enough like an album. (It's hard to find third-party adventures for Punk is Dead, and there doesn't seem to be much on the Patreon where Roberts had planned to post additional content.) There are two inspired random tables, "Get in the Van," which lets you know how your trip to the next gig goes, and "What's Your Teenage Trauma?" But that's all we get other than character creation, a loot table, and a table for rolling up band names. (I rolled The Piss Sticks. I really did.)

Punk may not have known what it stood for, but a lot of it was about people going down in flames: flaming out, selling out, just disappearing. A lot of it was about fashion, but a lot of it was about pain and frustration and helplessness and how to deal with or even fittingly express those things. The Ununited Kingdom certainly has more than its share of pain. But Punk is Dead doesn't quite meet those things, or those people. It's a great game about punk, but it's not quite a game about punks. It's a fun new addition to Mörk Borg and the OSR, but it's not really a game about music. (At least, not the bass player.) Like Mörk Borg, it's a game about having adventures and then dying. And what could be more punk than that? So get in the van.

Mark Wallace (he/him) has written about games for Shut Up & Sit Down, Rock Paper Shotgun, and The Escapist, as well as hobbyist publications like The New York Times, GQ, Wired, and many more. Find him on Bluesky at @markwallace.bsky.social.