is a great and very versatile scenario to begin with. It can be played as a relatively quick one-shot (recommended for a long session of 7-9 hours, although I've heard of one playthrough that did it in an incredibly short 4 hours), or as a longer series of sessions, up to a mini-campaign of perhaps 4-6 sessions. If you really delve into the survival challenges, and let your player characters explore the island and all its many threats in great detail, you could easily get 30 hours of gameplay or more out of it.
So... if it's that great, why hack it?
Well, as good as it is, it can always be improved, eh? One of the most frequently asked questions about it concerns the presence of any Gaia related elements in the adventure. Which, going by the text as written, we have to negate. No influences from the Hungering Wilderness seems to exist on the island.
This seems unintuitive, however, and while certainly not necessary in order to make it an enjoyable - and thoroughly horrifying - experience, I have seen it argued several times that it might be even better if something along those lines were included in it.
So, What Are We Hacking In?
Here's my agenda:
- add some Gaia to it, in the form of
- a beastly supernatural creature
- an otherworldly plant
- an eerie, surreal location - diversify the portrayal of the native tribes a little bit
- create some additional character ideas (for use as PCs or NPCs)
I think these are pretty much self-explanatory, so let's get right to it.
More Gaia, Please!
One of the island's regions could be easily be made to be an extended area of especially dense jungle with patches of fetid swamp, an ancient and utterly untamed expanse of extraordinarily primordial nature, where the Illusion easily breaks towards the Borderlands of Gaia. So we'll do just that. This area exists on the island. You decide where exactly it's located. (My suggestion, if you use the provided map, would be somewhere around halfways between the mountains and the north-eastern tip of the island, perhaps.)
Some, if not all of the native tribes will be fully aware of this area, and have their own myths and beliefs about it. They might mostly avoid it out of abject fear, or hold a religious reverence for it and bring sacrifices there on certain nights of the year.
When travailing this part of the island, one may encounter strange beasts and unfamiliar plants. Naturally, this will not be readily apparent to city-dwelling 'visitors' however, since very many of the exotic plants and animals will appear strange and unfamiliar to them either way. Additionally, the Illusion may obscure some of the clearly otherworldly creatures and other phenomena with its powerful Veil, at least in the beginning of an encounter, or on but a casual glance.
When blood is shed here, though, the Illusion can easily tear, and reveal the Living Wilderness of Gaia beyond. The same can happen when someone is overwhelmed by the intense feelings of primal anxiety and stress associated with hunting or being hunted, when human flesh is eaten, or when wild and uninhibited sex is had here.
There are scary monsters and weird plants and otherworldly locations to be discovered here - but we'll get to these a bit later. Let's lay some more groundwork for them, first.
Unite Diversify the Tribes!
There's absolutely nothing wrong with uniting the tribes, mind you. But, that's the job of the player characters, if they so choose - and incidentally, I'm about to make it a good bit harder for them in fact, with this very hack.
As written, the island's three tribes are very much homogenous. Little to no detail is given as to their various differences, if any. Now this makes perfect sense if you want to keep them as a incommunicado threat factor, an alien 'other' that cannot be negotiated or cooperated with. In that case, it doesn't matter.
But the scenario does in fact specify that they have learned some amount of English due to their prolonged contact with Harkness' sailor-cultists. So it would be perfectly possible for the characters to talk to the natives, and try to reach some agreement or other. (If things go well, that is. Of course, this being Kult, they very often don't.)
So to repeat, in the original text the native tribes are very much the same. Basically everyone on the island is under the influence of the Death Angel Golab, and will accordingly be sadistically hostile towards anyone else they meet - very much including (though not limited to) the PCs.
I want to vary that up a bit.
Since we are adding Gaia as an additional influence on the island, I think it would be interesting to make things more nuanced, but also even more tense right off the bat, if the tribes were already in conflict with each other when the PCs arrive. Everyone will still be hostile to virtually anyone else, but on different spiritual/metaphysical sides.
So we'll have one tribe that is pretty firmly under the influence of Gaia. They revere the otherworldly manifestations of the Living Wilderness, and worship an Enwildened God that can sometimes enter our world under the right circumstances. They are fiercely in conflict with another one of the tribes, who have fallen entirely under the sway of the Golab-worshipping cult long ago, and with the sailor cultists as well, of course.
The third tribe has for the longest time tried to stay out of all that, and just keep to themselves. However, the influence of Golab that permeates the island has spread to them as well, and they are now on the brink of embracing it more completely.
All the tribes, in spite of their differences, still share some characteristics though. Their overarching culture is largely untouched by outside influences - such as so called civilisation for example - and so has remained very similar for many generations of their isolation on the island. Perhaps most relevantly to the scenario's unfolding events, the tribes all still respect displays of strength. Success at hunting and proficiency in melee combat will likewise impress them and make them willing to talk to the PCs.
This can come in especially handy when (and if) the characters have come across the dormant remainders of a certain Archon's last lingering presence on the island...
Because I do not want to keep calling them "tribe 1", "tribe 2", etc. for the whole rest of this post, we'll come up with some fictionalized names for them.
Let's call the first tribe, the close-to-Gaia one, the Abawi,
the second one, who worship Golab in the form of Babi Ngepet, will be the Baluwa,
and the third one described above we'll call the Yori.
In case you don't like these names, and want to make your own, here is a short list of examples. These are actually existant tribal communities in Indonesia. I used them as a basis to make up my own, fictitious names for the tribes in the game.
Korowai Dani Dayak
Asmat Yali Mentawai
Bajau Lamalera Orang Rimba
Baduy Abui Bali Mula
You can google them to find additional inspiration about their IRL traditions, myths, lifestyles close to nature, and possibly even for visual handouts to show your players to give them an idea of how they dress and look.
So, the Yori are the ones that are teetering between Influences. Like the other tribes, they respect strength. In their case, prowess at hunting and fishing is most important. They adhere to an ancient culture that holds up the island's leopards as sacred animals and spirit patrons, and practice a form of magic known as ilmu siluman macan tutul, which allows them to imbue certain select newborn children - usually the firstborn offspring of the tribe's current chief - with the mental and spiritual traits of a leopard. This is held to guarantee them success in life, as long as they don't offend or disappoint their patron spirit animal.
The Babingepa leopards' unnatural cruelty and persistent thirst for blood are influences of Golab - and they mirror the Yori's own creeping infestation with the Death Angel's Principle of Torment. Their seasonal rites have gradually incorporated more bloodletting, whipping, scalding, piercing, and other sadistic elements, and their disputes are more often settled with physical violence or contests of who is able to torment a small animal for a longer time before it dies of its wounds.
It is unknown - and perhaps unknowable - whether the tribe itself has started to become corrupted first, and that has bled over to their spirit animals, or whether it was the other way around. Can the player characters' actions nudge the tribe back from the brink of full and open Inferno worship yet?
I cannot ultimately say, so I figure you'll have to play to find out!
In any event, the Yori are nowhere near as fully gone over to Golab as the Baluwa are. Their entire culture has been permeated by the Lord of Screams' vile compulsions. Their hunting, their language, their social hierarchy, hell even their singing and lovemaking all have a pervasive undercurrent of sinister cruelty. A bitter climate of scorn and spite, and mutual torment at any turn. Whenever any one tribemember shows weakness, even just for a moment, it is the other tribemembers' duty and opportunity to make them suffer for it. Punishments are draconic, and needlessly elaborate - not to mention agonizingly painful, of course. To impress these people with strength means to impress them with superior viciousness and inventive ways to inflict mind-rending pain on someone.
Not a very nice bunch to encounter, and the player characters are admittedly (probably) unlikely to make allies - let alone friends - of them.
Finally, the Abawi. They are probably the most remote tribe from where the characters' plane crashed, and it takes quite a hike across the island to get to their village. (And you'll come close by, or even through, that patch of highly-Gaia-infested jungle on the way there.)
But, if the PCs are travelling in the jungles east of the mountains, the Abawi may well come their way.
Their traditions and culture are the most down-to-earth of the three tribes. They still hunt, fish, and farm, but they use only very basic tools and techniques. This is by choice. The Abawi rever closeness to nature, and accept its harsh and often fearsome embrace into their daily lives willingly.
All the same, the rift towards Gaia that is in the jungles does not extend all the way to their settlement. Far from it. Even these very primordially-living people still have footpaths, acres, huts, boats, and push carts. They value the concepts of generosity, hermitage, and patience at difficult or lenghty tasks. They respect the abilities to weave good fishing baskets and to build musical instruments (keeping in mind that what they build is hardly more sophisticated than basic flutes and drums, but even these simple implements can either be remarkably well-made, or, well... less so).
But they do remember the old traditions, and have in recent generations actually moved back closer to them again. They have, under the duress of their Golab-worshipping rival tribes' sinister excesses, started to practice certain ancient and forbidden rites again - occult rituals that are designed to connect their souls to the mother spirit. Through these practices, their shaman has remembered the knowledge of how to summon Mayas, the Terrible Grandfather of the Forest, and the tribe is currently preparing to do so.
This article has gotten a good bit longer and more elaborate than I initially thought it would, so I'm splitting it up into several pieces, and we'll get to see what's up with Mayas (and a lot of other stuff I promised above) in Part 2 of this Hack.
No rhyme, no reason.
We tame the world around us predominantly by attributing meaning to it, but The Living Wilderness defies our every meek attempt at this. The unbridled randomness and ultimate pointlessness of its everlasting chaotic excesses of birth, growth, disease, strife, death, decay, and rebirth mercilessly overwhelms our senses. It is enough to stagger even the sturdiest mind into broken ramblings of nihilistic despair. I must proceed cautiously...
(one of the last journal entries of a truth seeker who has since gone missing)
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