Have you ever ran a one-shot scenario, fierce and intense, intended to deliver a fast escalation of horrors and swiftly dovetail into some hard and cruel resolutions towards the end?
Have you ever, in such an endeavor, found the Stability chart of K:DL as written just, well...
...a bit too slow?
Here is an alternate version I made, designed to cater to just that kind of situations:
Description:
Compared to the default variant, this chart obviously features fewer boxes, and you will notice it does not include any mention of Disadvantages. Instead it frontlines Keep it Together as the move that gets penalized earliest, and hardest.
In addition, there is a penalty to "all other rolls" - which is of course intended to be read with "...at the GM's discretion" attached at the end. Naturally, if you ever deign that any given roll should not be penalized under the present circumstance in the fiction, you may freely ignore this modifier in that case.
Finally, this chart gives a bit of a bump to the Illusion-tearing properties of low mental stability, doubling the bonus to See Through the IIllusion when down to your last couple boxes.
Design Notes:
The fewer boxes are there simply for a faster progression towards the player characters' madness. The original Stability chart strongly feels like it was designed primarily with longer-running campaigns and multi-session scenarios in mind. It excels at providing a slow burn, a steepening decrease which increasingly spirals out of control over some time.
But in a one-shot (or two-parter), how many scares and horrors can you feasibly throw at your players? Taking into account that they'll succeed on some of those Keep it Together rolls, or get (10-14) results which cost them only 1 Stability (if that)... you will often never manage to really whittle them down in time for the session to wrap up and any meaningful breakdowns have happened. (Which would make for good resolution fodder / epilogue material, however, and so are seen as highly desired in this hacked version.)
The focus on Keep it Together over Disadvantages is due to the fact that many oneshots and shoter scenarios don't even use Disadvantages. Certainly many of the published and fanmade ones don't include them; thinking of Oakwood Heights, The Driver, Divided We Run...
The mechanics of Disadvantages (meaning Holds, mainly, but also the frequency with which their triggers are designed to be fulfilled in the fiction) are more suitable to longer gameplay as well. And they perform admirably in that setup, but can often be a bit redundant for shorter, quicker, and more focussed affairs.
Of course, penalizing Keep it Together rolls earlier, and harder throughout, also increases the speed with with more Stability is lost during the session. This is what we want, here. We want to see them break. And if we don't get there now, we'll never see it happen.
The penalty to "any other rolls" is there simply to give the GM a mechanical angle to represent the general strain of stress and terror on the human capability to perform risky and dangerous actions.
It can be used or waived as seen fit, and is phrased briskly enough to not take up a lot of space on the chart - while also general enough to give the players (who will of course see and read it on their sheets before their PC ever descends to those levels of Stability) a bit of a scary anticipation of madness to come.
Finally, the bonus to See Through the Illusion has been upped for basically the same reason as the frontlining of Keep it Together and the reduction in number of boxes - we want to see this sort of stuff happen, and we only got one shot to get there! Consider that even in a very fast and furious, crazy and chaotic, madness and mayhem filled session, you'll be lucky to get maybe one or two rolls for this, per player, roughly...
Additionally, the game's very GMing Agenda (corebook, p.145) tell us to:
Tear back the Illusion to reveal the True Reality behind it.
...and also to let the PCs' actions make an impact [...], which totally ties into this as well.
So that sounds like hopefully this variant Stability chart might be keeping things firmly in the spirit of that, helping us GMs of Kult: Divinity Lost to make our one-shot games even better than ever before!
In fact, now that I made this thing, I can't wait to try it out in one of my own games!
I'll keep y'all posted on any new insights I may or may not derive from any such attempts, sooner or later. Game design is an ongoing adventure of trial, playtesting, and error, after all.
In the meantime, your opinions and experiences are always welcome - did you use similar things or ideas in your your own games? Found different workarounds or hacks to achieve similar intents? Does this look like something you could see yourself using in the future? Are there any painfully obvious weaknesses to its design?
Hit me up here in the comments or over on Discord, always excited to discuss hacks and houserules of any kind!
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