An Echo From the Past

This classic scenario, first presented at LinCon in 1991, has become legendary for its controversial content, and is without a doubt partly - if not substantially - responsible for the outrage KULT caused in the early 90s, and the lasting notoriety it has acquired.

It was written by the original authors of the game, Gunilla Jonsson and Michael Petersén, and only available in Swedish for the next 28 years.

Late in 2019, Helmgast re-released it for a wider audience - translated into English, adapted to the new rules of the current edition, and freely available for download.

You can find it here on their website:

https://kultdivinitylost.com/resources/

Or directly from here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EKG4k9Py94BhFF1OxXkwVu3rpWl4fz_j/view?usp=sharing


I had the great honor to be asked by Petter Nallo to take care of the rules adaptations. I had greatly enjoyed my previous work on Taroticum and Other Tales, so of course I gladly accepted that invitation. I can just never decline a chance to work with classic KULT material - I love it too much!

The scenario is not very rules-heavy, especially by the standards of 1st ed. KULT, and I had heard that Gunilla and Michael used to run it mostly in a freeform kind of way, themselves.

But there were of course a number of NPC statblocks to convert to K:DL, the PCs themselves needed their character sheets adapted, and the scenes had to be checked for situations where a Basic Move or the use of an Advantage might be suggested here or there.

Of all these, the biggest challenge was perhaps the PCs themselves - and the powers that are unlocked for them as the Seven Seals are broken, one by one. That's clearly what I spent most of my time on with this one.

In the end, we decided to keep the characters rather on the rules-light side - at least in the beginning - to fit with the scenario itself. We gave them only two Advantages, and no Disadvantages because the scenario is so focussed that having these would run a risk of unnecessarily derailing it.  
Relations are likewise merely described informally, since there will be hardly any time to socialize with them anyways.

We did give them short write-ups about areas they are generally competent in, in which I carried over a number of the Skills they used to have in the old edition. These boxes on the sheet are intended to convey to the players a quick and easy to grasp impression of what their characters are, well, "generally competent in", i.e. which kinds of tasks they can be expected to perform with confidence and ease.

And then there were the Effects on the PCs When the Seals Are Broken. There was a bit of going back and forth on these - how to translate this, how to adapt that... But I think I like the way they turned out in the end.
I tried to time them a bit to some possible sequences of events, such as when the Angels are liable to attack them, or when they are hunted by the police while searching for Jim in Rome... but at the same time they had to synergize with the PCs' Attributes and previously existing Advantages, and ideally also with their themes as both the Riders and the Apostles.

Ultimately, only your own playthroughs can show whether these ideas have indeed succeeded - so if you have played or run it, let me know in the comments how it went!


On the other hand, if you're still wondering whether to try it with your group, or have already decided you will but didn't get around to it yet... Here's a podcast to inspire you, where the original authors play it with the awesome guys from Redmoon Roleplaying:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aj45s1-APlE

What Jim never told us... The Riders are the Storm!

Unofficial Homebrew Magic Playbooks

The Search for Truth and Our Own Inner Divinity is tightly tied to the practices of Magic.

There are Five Schools of Magic in the classic Kult fluff, and they conform to the "Five Pillars of Divinity" - Death, Passion, Madness, Dreams, and Time and Space.

The Kult: Divinity Lost corebook gives us The Death Magician, to portray members of perhaps the most iconic School of Magic.

However, the release of rules for the other Schools has been postponed to a future supplement, which will deal much more in-depth with all matters of Magic and Enlightenment.

In the meantime though, to tide you over, we have gotten busy over on Kult - Elysium and cooked up homebrew rules for the remaining four types of Magicians. Here they are:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1BJ8nsh0DKtavU_8J0b9ZiDR4gLAEDGLE

Please note that these are entirely unofficial, and purely fanmade content.

That said, they have been laid out and formatted by Lessavini, who also made the playbooks in my previous post here. More power to him, he's awesome!

I myself wrote the majority of the mechanics for these, and I based them firmly off of the template provided by The Death Magician. However, each of them has gotten an in-depth treatment as to their respective Dark Secrets, Dis/Advantages, Abilities, Looks, Relations, Gear, Fields of Expertise, and other details, so as to make sure they're all uniquely distinct from each other.

At the same time, I kept the Perform a Ritual move intact for all of them, and retained the idea of School-themed artifacts and aural powers in the Talisman and Dark Aura moves.

These rules have not been fully playtested, and thus might be subject to further revision at some point in the ungiven future.
(but, as of Feb 2020, the Magicians of Dreams and of Passion have seen actual play in a campaign - and worked without major hickups, I'm proud to report)

If you use these in a game, or have thoughts upon reading them: Please feel welcome to let me know in the comments! I'm always happy about feedback about them.

You can use them just like regular playbooks - print them, let the players have their choice, create characters with them, and get rolling on that darkly epic Enlightened-level campaign we all know you've been wanting to get into for a while!

What are you waiting for?

 
The Truth is Dark, and Full of Terrors!

Playbooks for All the Official K:DL Archetypes

Hi Kids, it's me - The Abomination.

Oh come on, don't act like that... I know you recognize me from when we met before!

That's much better. Today I bring you glad tidings. I want you to meet a couple good friends of mine.

Like this young lady:

Aaah. Nothing like a good, long, loving hug to soothe those frayed nerves, eh?

But there are more. So many more.

I know you've seen them before... But trust me, you ain't never seen them like this. 

No, not even him. He gets worse all the time. But there may yet be some hope left for him... or may there?
Fucked if I know, truth be told.

But today, even he is elated. He feels as presentable as never before, in fact.

Because he got a new playbook. They all got new playbooks!

You see, the Archetypes in Kult: Divinity Lost are essentially PbtA playbooks, right? But they never got the "true" playbook treatment by the authors of the new edition. They're just not presented in that format in the book. There is the Archetype Bundle, a separately sold product which comes close, but there were certain entities beyond the Veil who felt that, well, not quite close enough...

Long story short, this miscondition has now been rectified, in the name of my Mistress Malkuth. 
Soon May She Reveal To Us More Of Her Truths Splendid and Fearsome.

Ahem. Let me see... ah yes, I'm sure my next friend here has got a link for you:

Try this one:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1gTN8C2ENcJKNF57d8Hjxa9EePoT6tUPX?ths=true

You can find them all there, at your beck and call to Tear Back the Illusion, Reveal the True Reality Beyond, and Play to Find Out What Impact Your Characters Might Make on the World.

They were made by Vinicus Lessa, who also goes by Lessavini or Vini Lessa in various places. He's a cool guy, smooth and talented, much like this next fellow down here:

And just like him, he don't be doin' no half jobs!

He made them so that you can print them single-sided on four pages, or double-sided on two sheets of paper, and fold them up in that cool way that playbooks are supposed to be folded. It gives the players all they need to insta-make a character, and remains useful during play for making notes, tracking advancement, harm, Stability, etc.

The Kult - Elysium Discord community of course wouldn't pass up the chance to help him out (read: torment him exquisitely) by giving advice, opinions, and feedback. And we even came up with some suggested starting gear: flavorful items, trademark tools, and backstory-evoking trinkets that characters can have, or that can serve as inspiration for players to come up with their own. 

They're also rather printer friendly, except for those little bits of red... and the big pic on the first page of course. You could print just the first page in black and white, and the rest in colour - or just do all of them in b/w, they'll still work perfectly well for all your gaming needs. 

Helmgast themselves even endorsed this final product, and welcomed its existence by sharing it on their social media, which was a great source of joy to us! 

So go ahead, grab 'em all, bring 'em to your next Session 0... and go mess with the Dark Powers!

If you need any help in getting ready for that, I'm sure
my friend here can help you catch up on your basics.

Alternate Stability Track for K:DL

Slightly unhappy with the Stability Track as it is on the Kult: Divinity Lost character sheet, I decided to make a slightly modifed version that would suit my tastes better. I ended up making several versions, since I couldn't fully decide which one was the ultimate best. Here I offer them to you, for use in your own games if you will.

This one sticks the closest to the original layout, but if you compare them you can see that I added numbers (1-10) next to the Stability boxes, instead of the "psychological conditions" terms that each level of Stability originally has associated with it.

Those terms were one of my gripes with the Stab Track to begin with. Some of them, like Neurotic didn't seem to fit in there, while others, like Anxious seemed misplaced.

They also sometimes caused confusion for players, when they got the impression that they were expected to roleplay the specific condition that is given for their character's current level of Stability. 

"Uh, I've lost another 2 points there... do I have to become Distressed now? 

Does that even make sense for my character at this point in the game?"

And either way, I couldn't ever remember their order off the top of my head anyways - so I decided to throw those out and instead offer a collection of possible "states of mental desolation" for each of the Stress Brackets (Moderate, Serious, and Critical Stress, as well as Composed and Broken).

I came up with the new terms in collaboration with Kult - Elysium Discord user Victor the Villain, who conveniently has a background in clinical psychology, and helped me vet them for a sensible selection and placement.

The idea is that players are now offered a grab-bag of possible conditions to look to for inspiration, when wondering how to portray the current state of their character's emotional and psychological deterioration at any given point in the game.
You can circle or underline the one that seems most fitting at the moment, as a roleplaying reminder to yourself. But you can also change which one to act like from one scene to the next. Or if you lose another point of Stability but are still in the same bracket... Anything goes, as long as it works for everyone involved and helps improve your game at your table! 


* * *

Finally, while I was at it, I also fixed the number of boxes on that Track. Because the Broken condition should not be one of the 10 boxes (as the original has it), otherwise the math doesn't add up.
(If Composed is 10 and Distressed is 6, as the corebook tells us, then Broken isn't 0, it's 1... and that seemed definitely wrong to me.)

Here's another one I made, this one following a different approach to layout and presentation:

This one aims to present fiction before mechanics, which I find fitting for a PbtA game such as K:DL.

However, the layout still struck me as a bit blocky, so I made two more.

This one, which has them the most free-floating:

And this one, which appears to me as the ideal compromise:

I like this last one best, and will use it in my own games going forward. If you want to use one of them too, you're welcome to just copy-paste it from here onto the K:DL character sheet of your choice, print it a couple times and go see how your players do with it!

Please also feel free to let me know in the comments if you used it, which one your favorite version is, or if you have any suggestions for how to make them even better.  

We see the Truth only in fragmented glimpses, and the road to Divinity is a long one yet!

The Lake

Here is another picture, this one posted by user Gabe on the Kult - Elysium Discord server.
I captioned it with what I thought must be the story behind it.



 "Even as a little kid, when I would feel bad, I would like to go stand by the shore of the lake and envy my mirror image down below the waves. I always wanted to be where it was, down there where its quiet and peaceful and the worst thing that happens to you is that the wind ripples up the surface and you can't see out for a short little while. 

I never realized that when I would finally go down there, I wouldn't replace it - I would join it. Now there's two of us down here and none of us up there any more. I've always wanted a brother... but now I have something even better!"

The Baron's Bastard Daughter

Here is a picture that user junneh posted on the Kult - Elysium Discord server.





The question was brought up what the hell might be going on there, so I opened my senses to the Truth beyond the Veil, let my mind drift through the Abyss of Time, and discovered the only logical explanation.

* * *

Many would have thought the baron's bastard daughter utterly mad for her vicious endeavors - but her father sensed there might just be a spark of promise behind her depraved ramblings and murderous desires. Had it not, after all, been his own late mother who had spoken the prophecy in her dying hours? And now his illegitimate offspring reminded him so much of her ever since she had come of age... 

"There will be born a babe of man, who shall not break when smitten with hammers and shall not scorch when kissed by flames. This child shall be the second coming of our lord and saviour, and those who find and rear it as their own shall know much blessings, and be gifted with wisdoms beyond the scope of mortal men." 

 What could it hurt, the baron thought. Children were many in his realm, and more would always yet be born. And if she should, indeed, find the one... So he closed his ears against the tiny screams echoing from her chamber daily, and sent out his knights anew, to fetch more newborns from the lands. She would soon be out of babes again, and could develop an insufferable temper if not allowed to pursue her sacred destiny. Just like mother always had...

The Illusion

This picture was made by Petter Nallo early on during the development of the new edition of Kult: Divinity Lost.

It describes The Illusion in a visually powerful way.

And here I translated the texts therein with the help of Basilides Thelema, in order to allow the Illusion to crumble that much faster, and this darkly beautiful pic to attain a wider range of audiences:

This is humankind's prison, in which so many of us are such willing participants.  But the prison is falling apart, a little more each day.

Now that we have shown you the Truth, only one question remains: What will you do with it?