Unconventional inspiration: black metal, TTRPGs & board game design
Some of the best lessons in innovation come from outside branding entirely. In this clip from You’re Not the Audience, Parliament Creative Director Calvin Ross Carl looks at three worlds that broke their own rules: Scandinavian black metal, whose lo-fi, unreadable aesthetic became a genre-defining strength; Mörk Borg, the tabletop role-playing game that traded textbook layouts for a punk zine look; and Root, the board game that reimagined historical war games with woodland animals. Each one shows that a breakthrough rarely comes from asking the established experts. It’s from the You’re Not the Audience episode on best practices and innovation, How Best Practices Kill Innovation.
Watch the full episode
Outline
Summary
Calvin Ross Carl steps away from brands to look at innovations that inspire him. He starts with Scandinavian black metal, a movement defined by rejection: screaming instead of singing, unreadable logos, and terrible lo-fi production often recorded in bathrooms. Darkthrone’s Transilvanian Hunger cover looks rough, but its total commitment to the vision created an aesthetic people recognize even outside metal.
He then turns to games. Dungeons & Dragons set the standard for role-playing books that read like textbooks, until Mörk Borg, with art direction by Johan Nohr, turned the rules into a messy, metal-inspired zine. The game exploded in popularity and encouraged a new wave of designers to make their own games.
Finally, Calvin points to Root, which kept the structure of historical war games but brought in illustrator Kyle Ferrin to build a world of woodland animals fighting over a forest. Longtime war gamers complained, but the art shift changed how everyone thinks about the genre.
Highlights
Black metal turned doing it wrong into the strength of an entire genre.
Unreadable logos meant you had to be in the know to understand the band’s name.
Mörk Borg threw out the textbook style of role-playing games for a punk zine aesthetic.
Root changed only the setting of a war game, and the genre took notice.
Asking experts how to improve their genre rarely produces the breakthrough.
Key insights
Commitment makes imperfection powerful
Black metal’s rough production worked because the bands were so committed to it that it became the aesthetic rather than a flaw.
Question what everyone accepts
Role-playing games looked the same for decades until someone asked why nobody had tried something different.
Aesthetics can open a category
Mörk Borg’s style didn’t just sell copies. It made more people feel they could design games themselves.
Insiders defend the status quo
The war game veterans who rejected Root would never have proposed it. Innovation came from someone willing to take a risk.
Detailed analysis
The three examples share a pattern. Each existed in a world with firmly established conventions, and each broke through by changing the expression rather than the fundamentals. Black metal was still music, Mörk Borg was still a rulebook, and Root still plays like a war game. What changed was the aesthetic and the world around it.
For brands, the lesson is that best practices are defined by insiders, so the people most fluent in a category are often the least likely to reinvent it. Calvin also acknowledges that not everything about black metal was admirable, noting the scene’s many problems while focusing on its aesthetic influence.
Conclusion
Whether it’s a music genre, a role-playing game, or a board game, the innovation came from someone who dared to take a risk. Brands can borrow that same willingness to reject the expected.
Transcript
Let’s talk about some fun things, because I always like to bring back some things from past episodes. Before we dive into more innovation talk, let’s talk about some things that aren’t brands that I think did innovation really well, and big worlds that they have affected.
So let’s go all the way back to the beginning. I think in maybe my first episode of this, we talked about good old black metal music from Scandinavia. Okay, if there’s anyone who ever watches this who is a diehard black metal person, they’ll be like, “Well, this band that you see here—you can’t read their logo, Darkthrone—is technically a part of the second wave of the black metal movement.” But this is, I feel like, when it really peaked and started hitting the aesthetic that we now think of.
So I want to run through some things that I think are innovations that I get inspired by. This one is thinking about how Scandinavian black metal was an absolute rejection of everything, and there isn’t any reason we can’t apply this to how we think about brands. Black metal was constant screaming, no singing, unreadable logos. With the branding, you had to be in the know to understand even their name. It had terrible, shitty, lo-fi production. They were mostly all recorded in bathrooms, and that actually became a part of the aesthetic because they did it so well. The whole idea of doing it wrong became the strength of this whole genre, which is why we now understand this as an aesthetic. Even if you’re not a metal person, you understand this aesthetic of these guys.
This, from the mid-’90s, is the cover for Transilvanian Hunger, a classic album by Darkthrone. And honestly, it looks terrible, but it was so committed to the vision, and they inspired so many other people, that it created that whole movement. I mean, look at these, just a bunch of dummies. This is Mayhem. They were a very problematic band. This is also to say they didn’t do everything right. Lots of problems in the Scandinavian black metal world, but we’ll save that for another chat someday.
Then there are some things like—oh, I didn’t pull up images for this, but I will. We’ve talked about games a lot, and we all know D&D, the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. It is now the standard of what role-playing games look like. If you’re a nerd into games like that, the books you buy are these big, thick textbooks. Let’s just pull up some images, because not everyone knows. They have this cool old-school fantasy stuff, but one thing I want to show you is how the interiors of these look. They’ve got cool illustrations and stuff like that, but they still read like textbooks. It’s all about rules and things like that.
And there became a big shift when a new role-playing game came out called Mörk Borg. I think it was a really interesting example of looking at how everyone has done it. These games have been around for a long time, 30, 40, 50 years, and somebody looked at it and was like, “Why hasn’t anybody tried this?” So Mörk Borg was created by—oh my god, I’m going to blank on his name—the aesthetic of it was created by a guy named Johan Nohr, another Scandinavian fella. He had this idea of taking the rules for this game and basically defining this whole aesthetic where it just looks like a punk or metal zine. It’s messy. It’s janky. It communicates the world in this gnarly, gross, heavy metal, insane way. Some of the pages become almost unreadable. It definitely feels like the resurgence of David Carson’s school of grunge design, but no one had created books that looked like this, and it’s exploded in popularity. It threw out that old, boring textbook style and leaned into this heavy art, heavy metal punk aesthetic.
I think it was really, really great at doing that, and the proof is in the pudding. Since this game has come out, it inspired this whole new wave of thinking about games and designing them and who gets to design them. There are a lot more role-playing game designers who feel like they can make games now because they work in this kind of punk zine style. So it is very popular. It’s cool.
Let’s talk about one other one. We’re going to keep talking games. I’m in the mood today. Actually, let me pull this up. There is a large world of board games usually called historical war games, and they tend to be games that look like this. They’re for—being nice—old guys that still love to think about World War II and every other war, and about simulationist games where you’re recreating battles. So this is an established genre. It’s small, but it’s definitely an established genre of games.
And then along came this great board game called Root. Their huge innovation is all art related. That’s kind of why I love this one. You can see some images here. It is very similar in structure and play style to those old-school war games that are only for crazy military heads, but their innovation was they pulled in an illustrator named Kyle Ferrin, and he created this whole world of, as it says, a game of woodland might and right. He created this whole aesthetic of anthropomorphized animals, and it’s about them fighting over territory in a forest. This game is massive now. It’s blown up like crazy. Just by them doing that art shift, it changes the way everyone thinks about it, and no one was doing anything like this.
And all those old heads were like, “These aren’t war games. They’ve got cute animals in it.” Of course, they got all upset. Yeah, Ryan. Boomer. Yeah, major boomer time. They just got really upset. They were like, “This isn’t a war game.” And you’re like, “The only thing that changed is the setting.” It is also an incredible game, but I think that’s worth noting: if you went and asked every single one of those war game guys what’s the best way to make a new war game, you wouldn’t have gotten this from a single one of them. This was all in someone’s head, someone who dared to take a risk. And that is good. I love it so much.