Fomoria’s folk horror is a little bit MÖRK BORG and a little bit freaky
Sink deeper into the void alongside your occult friends.
Fomoria’s folk horror has a distinctly paganistic aesthetic: a towering goat priest, a scowling pangolin warrior, and a grinning bat figure with vacant, bloodshot eyes count among your morbid crew. These travellers navigate a grim purgatory that festers with Darkness (that’s with a capital D), an encroaching sickness that eventually devours all light and life. Then there’s the tabletop RPG’s quickstart guide, which is also resplendent with illustrations of these bestial beings. Wielding gnarly staffs and oversized swords, they are seen fending off howling eldritich terrors while descending — or falling — endlessly into voids. In other words, its horrors are extremely primal, and extremely my jam.
“Fomoria [takes] place in an uncanny, shifting underworld where the Sun and the Surface are but a myth. The horror is intimate, communal and rooted in tradition and survival. The world is not evil. It is old, hungry and indifferent to your existence,” said Tania Herrero, the creator of Fomoria, in an email to Rascal. “To endure, your people, The Folk, have learned to bargain with beings that were there long before they descended to these depths.” And if these illustrations seem somewhat — dare I say it — black metal, it’s because Fomoria is a collaborative effort between Herrero and Johan Nohr, the creator behind the apocalyptic RPG, MÖRK BORG. Nohr provided graphic and layout design to complement Herrero’s occult imaginings.
How did this unhallowed project come about? “I just asked politely!” Herrero said, laughing. “I've been a huge fan of his work and philosophy behind it since I discovered MÖRK BORG, and I had been in contact with him to do a collab in the past that, unfortunately, due to time constraints on both sides, didn't come to fruition.” Of course, this flavor of macabre isn’t solely Nohr’s handiwork; Herrero’s past projects, such as Menagerie of Unbearable Things and The White Horse of Lowvale, are just as hauntingly atmospheric and spooky.
