'BAGS

Somewhere out there, an organization has a weapon. The Asset. It might be humanoid. It might even nod your way. Definitely not human. It's what the organization deployed. GM-controlled. Not a PC, not quite an ally, not a stat block. An event.

Your job is to do everything it cannot do: identify the correct target, extract the living asset, grab the hard drive, convince the hostage not to run, plant the beacon, keep command from pushing the red button before you're clear of the blast.

Your core fear is not can we win the fight?

It is can we finish our task before the violence reaches our part of the building?

What 'BAGS Is

A complete one-shot framework built on MÖRK BORG's core rules. Three to four hours. Three to five players plus a GM. It will burn through characters. It ends with a choice the survivors have to make with what they know, which will be less than they started with.

The session runs across seven scenes. The Clock runs openly in front of the players. When it fills, Act III begins whether the 'bags are ready or not.

The Asset is always GM-controlled. It moves through the session like weather. You work in the negative space it leaves behind.

What's Inside

'BAGS — the complete one-shot engine:

• Four roles: Handler, Medic, Spotter, Scrounger
• Proximity Bands: Blast Radius, Operational Range, Exposed
• The Asset — including Rage State, Detachment State, and Comms Integrity rules for the Handler
• Collateral Damage table (d8)
• The Clock — six ticks, visible, inexorable
• Replacement Flesh table — 14 entries, one sentence each
• The Seven Scenes — Scene Zero through Convergence
• Three Convergence endings: The Managed Outcome, The Broken Arrangement, The Stopped Clock
• The Asset's Arrangement — why it cooperates, why that might change, and who had it before
• GM notes, mission types, and the Principal Question framework
• On Disposability — a designer's essay on what it means to spend a character rather than protect one

Glass Corridor — a complete sample one-shot:

• Mission type: Negotiation
• Organization: The Vektor Directorate — a shadow network that has funded the Tselostnost Children's Medical Foundation for thirty-one years. The foundation is genuine. This does not cancel anything out.
• Dr. Elena Voss — full stats, five layers of what she knows, and instructions for running her as a juncture rather than a package
• The opposing 'bags — four fully described NPCs mirroring the player team exactly
• Three complication tables: The Building (d6), The Population (d6), The Flatline (d6)

The Auditor — an optional fifth role

• The armed Cassandra. Presence and Toughness primary.
• Accurate Assessment, Suppression Coaching, The Record
• A liability that is cognitive rather than physical
• For tables that want someone in the blast radius taking notes on the organization's bad faith in real time

The Vocabulary

The Asset. What the organization deployed. Not a PC, not quite an ally, not a stat block. An event.

'Bags. The PCs. The organization calls them meatbags in paperwork. The 'bags call themselves 'bags in the field. Same word, different weight. The distinction is the only dignity available.

The Clock. Six ticks. Visible. It was always going to fill.

Replacement Flesh. When a 'bag dies, the next one arrives. The organization has a pipeline. Names in a folder. It does not pause.

Design Philosophy

'BAGS strips the power fantasy from the immortal weapon premise. The Asset cannot be ordered. It can be pointed. The 'bags are the pointing mechanism — and the cleanup crew, and the thing the organization sends when it needs the job done without leaving evidence, and the variable in an equation they were never shown.

The game asks: what is it like to be close enough to the weapon that command considers you expendable, and far enough away that it does not know your name?

The Clock is visible. The Asset is not fully controllable. The organization has a hidden agenda. The 'bags have each other, a set of functional roles, and whatever they manage to learn before Convergence.

Play to find out what they do with it.

Compatible with 2nd Amendment Borg — if your table uses those gun rules, they slot directly in. Gun attacks hit automatically unless the shot is tough. Running out of bullets at the wrong moment is a feature.

Inspirations

Thematically indebted to:

• Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts and Eisenhorn — humans in the margins of forces beyond their scale
• Predator (1987) — if it bleeds, that's the wrong question
• The Terminator (1984) — the people around the unstoppable thing, not the thing itself
• Akira (1988) — containment fails; what returns has opinions
• The Cabin in the Woods (2012) — the mechanism, and the choice to stop maintaining it
• Warhammer 40,000 — specifically the Guardsman, not the Astartes
• George Baker's Sad Sack — the institutional military and the individual human being inside it, in permanent irreconcilable conflict

Content Notes

This game depicts:

• Black-ops violence and organizational bad faith
• PC death as a structural feature, not a setback
• Institutions that fund children's hospitals and also do this
• A principal question with no clean answer
• The specific horror of being close enough to something unkillable to be collateral

The game's thesis is not anti-violence. It is about scale — the vast difference between what the Asset is and what the 'bags are, and what that difference means for the people asked to work in the gap.

Why It's Free

'BAGS exists because the most interesting person in the room with an immortal weapon is never the weapon.

Run it at a con. Photocopy it. Hand it to your table on a Friday night and tell them the Clock ticks whether they're ready or not.

The Asset will still be here tomorrow. The 'bags won't. Make it count.

Credits

Design & Writing: The Grey Ledger Society + CGCG Helix

License: CC BY-SA 4.0

'BAGS is an independent production by The Grey Ledger Society and is not affiliated with Ockult Örtmästare Games or Stockholm Kartell. It is published under the MÖRK BORG Third Party License. MÖRK BORG is copyright Ockult Örtmästare Games and Stockholm Kartell.