Homebrew Move: "Refuse Death"

 

Death can be a pesky problem for a GM, especially if it happens right in the middle of a session and would leave the player without something to do for the rest of it - and doubly so if their character's involvement in the story just got interesting, and you are loathe to just let that doomed soul go.

Fortunately, in KULT, Death is Only the Beginning, and so you never have to let it force your hand.

Some of the official and unoffical scenarios for the game already have built-in countermeasures against untimely character annihilation. Island of the Dead, The Summit, and Wind on the Leaves for example, all have their various workarounds to prevent players becoming deprived of a way to keep participating in all the  fun  ahem, horror!  we're having...

Often, such workarounds are based on the pervasive presence of the Death Angels in the fiction. But the ability to cheat the Reaper is not exclusive to the forces of Inferno. In fact, souls fall through the cracks in the Demiurge's crumbling machinery all the time - and through Limbo, Gaia, Metropolis, or the extremes of their own Madness or Passion, may well find their way back to Elysium.

Here's a custom Move to represent this:

(Disclaimer: Yes, as the GM you should only use this move if you're comfortable with it happening in your scenario or campaign.
If you don't feel that the Illusion is sufficiently unstable, or powerful otherwordly entities may be paying attention in the general vicinity this happens, by all means don't use it!)

 

Refuse Death

When you die but refuse to give in the afterlife's pull on your soul, roll +Soul.

(15+)

You may return into your body (if it's not too destroyed) in short order and inhabit it again, at relatively small cost. 

Alternatively, you find another corpse nearby that is well suited to contain you.

In either of these cases, you become a living soul animating a dead body.
Talk to your GM about the exact ramifications of that.

Also choose 1:

• Reduce your Stability by -2, or to Anxious (whichever is lower).
• Mark a permanent Serious Wound that cannot be stabilized or healed except by restorative Death Magic.

(10-14)

You manage to struggle back into the world, but it may take some time (though merely a couple of scenes may pass in Elysium), and it will cost you. Reduce Stability by -4, or to Unhinged (whichever is lower).

Also, choose 1:

• You had to escape purgatory: Mark 2 permanent Serious Wounds and get the Limitation Inhuman Appearance, all of which is only curable by Magic or the interference of Higher Powers.
• You were forced to make a Pact with a powerful entity in order to come back.
  Perhaps an Angel of Netzach, a Death Magician in service to Malkuth, or a Nepharite of Thaumiel...?
  Your body is fully restored, but the entity will demand services from you in the future.
• You became an incorporeal ghost: Free of spiritual debts or physical wounds, but you'll need to find (and possess) a new body on your own, if you want to become anything else than an aetherial phantom again.

(-9)

That went really badly. You cannot return during the ongoing session.
(But maybe ask your GM if there's some nice NPC nearby that you could play for the remainder of it?)

During downtime before the next session, discuss with the GM what your options are.

Examples:

• You return in the body of a young child or frail elderly person,
• You're wholly enslaved by a Higher Power,
• You have permanently turned into a Child of the Night as you succumbed to your Shadow while on the other side,
• You only have very little time to spend in Elysium before you're reclaimed by whatever terrifying afterlife awaits you,
• ...
  

Alternatively, perhaps your soul was dragged into the abyss after all. Maybe it's time to put together a new character and talk to the GM about how to introduce it into the story. Perhaps some fates are to be averted neither by men, nor gods...

GM-Advice on getting Broken

in the course of Refusing Death:

For characters of low Stability, the trauma of death - not to mention the harrowing experience of fighting one's way back from it - may prove fatal to what remains of their frayed emotional composure and mental resilience. If that happens, roll with it for all it's worth!

When a PC gets Broken by the Stability loss prescribed by the above move, let this happen as normal in the game: The GM makes a Move... or hell, Make Two! Simply because, shit, that was a fucked up thing to go through, right? Right!

Often when coming back from the other side, and all the terrifying sights and sensations it inflicts, we feel drawn to reunite with those we love and trust the most. You can Shift a PC Through Time and/or Space, and let them appear at the doorstep of their family's home, or in another player character's immediate vicinity. Very little time may have subjectively passed in Elysium, while the returned person may have weeks, or even years, worth of memories of the suffering they endured to get back here.

Having Fragments of the PC's Dark Secret Manifest around them can be used to convey the sense that something has come back with them, and is haunting them now. You can blur the lines about whether these manifestations are just figments of the character's imagination, demonic emanations from the netherrealms that followed them here, or independent entities all on their own. But either way, they will bodily exist, living and breathing (or at least solid and tangible, in the case of it being objects or locations) in Elysium, now.

Getting a New Disadvantage is also entirely not unreasonable. Perhaps a Sexual Neurosis for someone who escaped the hells of Gamaliel, Greed for someone who had to bargain with Yesod for their return, or a Drug Addiction for someone who has felt the sweet embrace of Achlys while on the other side.
Nightmares, Phobias, Mental Compulsions, and Repressed Memories make for viable choices across a wide range of otherworldly experiences, as well.
Becoming a Fanatic is another highly viable option for someone who has faced extradimensional entities, and the organisations and monsters serving them - and may express as either a determined support of their means and ends, or as an equally relentless opposition against them.

The options of Undergoing Change, where two Attribute values are switched, is especially fitting for PCs who have just overtaken a new body. Or, you know, those who had their personality sufficiently torn apart and remade differently than before.

Similarly, Switching to a New Archetype can also be highly believable in a situation like that, depending on the character and details of the surrounding fiction.

Perhaps he used to be a Drifter, or a Ronin, or a Scientist...
Whatever it was, he may be something different now.

Finally, attaining a Glimpse of the Truth can in fact almost be taken for granted, considering the entire circumstances of the very roll that led to all this.

As a note on personal GMing style, I tend to play this particular option way stronger than the corebook suggests, since I consider +1 experience a bit mild, all things considered. I usually give them +5 xp, so in effect a free advancement. This option is clearly meant to alleviate any other consequences you may choose to inflict on the PC, and I find it works very well to 'reconcile' players a little bit with the horrible costs of their mental breakdown.

That said, it also makes for a very good takeaway from a trip beyond Death itself. It's a fairly common pattern in folklore and myth, after all: The traveller to the spirit realms brings something back with them upon their return. Deep insights, newly acquired powers, or another reward for their harrowing tribulations on the other side...

Homebrewed "Observe the Situation" Variant Move

 

Hot take:
The Observe a Situation move is the single weakest and most awkward of all PbtA basic moves. 

Always has been, ever since the hallowed and sanctified forefather-game Apocalypse World itself.

There, I said it. 

It just never really worked smoothly for me. I feel it breaks the immersion in a totally odd way, and distributes narrative rights (and player input / reactions / consequences) somehow clumsily and counterintuitively. It just tends to break the flow of the conversation, while at the same time weirdly boxing in the fiction as well.

On top of that, it doesn't explain its trigger - not just not very well, but not at all... "When you observe the situation" is just a repetition of the move's name, for Demiroth's sake! We don't get that with other moves. Most of them generally describe what the fictional action of the character should roughly look like in order to trigger them.

And finally, the questions the move allows: These shouldn't be the literal questions the players get to ask. They are good categories, by and large, but they shouldn't be categories the players are made to think in. Instead, they should be seen as "General Areas of Situational Observance", and should be for the GM to keep in mind, when looking out for things in the conversation that might trigger the move.

Apocalypse World (and all the games that followed it, and kept the move's structure by and large the same) wasn't totally off, you see. 

Just like, I get the impression that the intended design wasn't completely thought through, just yet.

Aw crap, now we got a bunch of mafia thugs powerwalking right at us! Not good! At a quick
glance, if shit was to hit the fan, I wonder which one of them would be the most dangerous?

Here's my take on it:

- Make the players' questions be what triggers the move!

- Make the answers give the players what they're asking for, if they rolled well enough (arguing that highly perceptive characters would know what they want to look for, and wouldn't ask if there wasn't a reasonable chance for it to be discoverable here), instead of dictating their next actions so they can get that little bonus to them.

- Sure, sometime your prep may prevent [this specific thing they wanted], but then the move (if you trigger it, see the Disclaimer below) has to make you offer suitable replacement observations.

 

With these guiding principles in mind, I have written a new move, radically revamped and intended to replace the OaS from the corebook:

(Disclaimer: Activating this move is subject to the usual rule-of-thumb to "say yes, or no, or roll the dice". In other words, only let the player roll if neither your prepwork, nor the established fiction, or anything else in the game pre-empts it by already providing a clear answer to the triggering question. You could quickly rack up a real high number of rolls otherwise, and that might end up more disruptive than helpful to the game.)

Assess or Exploit the Environment

When you are looking to spot details about your surroundings in order to find advantages or gain insights you can exploit, ask the GM what you wanna know about and roll +Perception. 

The GM will reveal potential exploits and discoveries according to how well you roll, while also honoring the limits decreed by the game's already-established fiction and the GM's own secret prep work.

General Uses of Perception in Charged Situations:

(directions to think in / aspects of a situation to ask about)

• Threat assessment
• Searching for hidden things or subtle details
  
• Checking for dangers or threats
• Looking for advantages or beneficent ways to proceed
• ...
  

 

Example Questions: 

(if you ask something like these, the GM can trigger the move)

• Which one of them is the greatest threat?
• Which one of them is weakest against [this thing we got]?
• Can I see a terminal or something, where this could be switched off?
• Where did her dropped gun go? Can I perhaps locate and pick it up?
• Are there any more [soldiers / gang members / cultists] hidden somewhere nearby?
• Wait, is this corridor trapped, perhaps? Do I see any wires or odd sections of floor or the like?
• Is there a chandelier I could use to swing on, to escape these thugs?
• I look out the window - is there a fire escape we could flee down?
• Is there any way to block that door? Just to buy us a couple minutes maybe?
• Could I distract those goons, perhaps by toppling over a big bookshelf or something? I wanna get straight to the chanting man by the altar without them getting in the way.
• Is there something I could use as an improvised weapon? Like a fire poker, metal statuette, or dunno, a big flower vase maybe... or a chair I could break or something?
  
• ...
  

A burglar wondering what may be the smoothest way
for him to get into (and out of) this fancy crib...

GM-Reminder: Only trigger the move if you're not prepared to answer the question anyways.
If you decide to let your player make the roll even though your prep or the established fiction alredy prescribes (or prevents) certain answers, proceed as described below.

If and when the GM asks you to roll +Perception after you asked a question similar to the above,

On (15+), if the GM's prep doesn't explicitly state something contrary, the GM will give you what you're looking for, plus something extra (such as letting you ask an additional question, or answering another question or two for free), and you take +1 to act upon (either of) these reveals.

(Example of prep-induced negation: There cannot be a terminal in this room to switch off the poison gas with, because it is established in prep that the machinery that pumps it in is controlled from a hidden panic room in the basement.) 

If the GM's prep does prevent you from getting what you asked for, the GM will offer you two alternate observations - ideally adjacent, if not fully equivalent, to what you originally went for. You may additionally also get something extra, such as another question answered for free, as per above.

(Example of alternate offerings: Though you cannot locate a mechanism to switch off the poison gas, you see a way to plug the vents it streams in through (if you act fast enough, or in concert with a helper), and you spot a cupboard across the room with its door ajar so so you can see that there are a handful of gas masks inside (but to get there you have to go through the crossfire from the cultists shooting in through the door).

 

On (10-14), you spot something useful, but the GM will make it something less effective, hard to attain, or that comes with consequences or a cost attached. You still take +1 to exploit this insight, discovery, or observation.

(Example of "something less": Yes, you see gas vents that you could plug up, but it will not be perfect, just prolonging the time until the room fills up with it... Or alternatively, the GM may decide that it can be done, but the one that does the plugging (getting closest to the vents) must still suffer the effects of the gas - though then your comrades will be safe from it...)

 

On (-9), you do not find what you're looking for, and no close substitute either. In fact, you may have distracted yourself looking in all the wrong spots, and overlooked something dangerous. The GM makes a move.

Terrain ahead is contested. Death can lurk anywhere. Better make damn sure.

Special Case: Avoidance Questions

Sometimes when asking about threats or dangers, what the player really wants to hear is "No. There's nothing like that here."  That's an entirely legit and valid thing to ask about, too.

Examples:

• Are there any more soldiers lying in hiding, ready to flank us once we advance?
• Does this corridor look like it might be trapped?
• I look behind me every now and again, to make sure I'm not being followed...?
  

 

In such cases: On a successful roll, give the player that certainty, and let them take the +1 as well. Now that they know there are no hidden reinforcements over there, they can advance with improved confidence and bravado.

On a partial, you can give them something like: "Yeah, there might be a few guys hiding there... but it couldn't possibly be many, and you can see they'd have a shoddy angle for shooting at you guys anyways, from that particular spot". And still give the player that +1, that's cool, they earned it.

On a fail, feel free to go: "You can't be sure about that... in fact you can hear a rustling sound from those very bushes, and did you just spot a dark silhouette moving over there, too?"
And you can make a move, because of course you can.

Oh shit, wait - I'm not being followed by anyone... or am I?!

Note on Avoidance Questions vs. Pre-Existing GM Prep:

If your prep and the result of this roll come into conflict - say, if you had totally planned to have some soldiers hidden in the bushes off to the side... or to have the PC shadowed by an insane stalker... then you face an immediate choice: 

• Abandon your plans and let the player have the certainty of having made damn sure there can't be any nasty surprises coming that way.
• Reveal the threat's presence to the player, regardless of the roll's result. In this case, also double the bonus the PC gets to act upon (or against) the newly discovered revelation, making it a +2.

NB: If the player rolled a fail and you go for the second option, you can make a move for the hidden threats, even immediately (if you want to). But if you do, give the PC that fat bonus against [those soldiers / that stalker / ...] anyways.

Yes, also to dodging their [gunfire / knife stabs / ...] during this "surprise round", or similar stuff.

That player just totally guessed your devious trap! That deserves rewarding.

Or well, you know... at least a fair shot at surviving said trap. 

Yeah, we can give 'em that much.

Bottom Line: 

Play it reactively, take your cues from the players and what they're interested in / looking for. 

Don't make them jump through weird conversational hoops. Do your best to keep the game flowing smoothly - while also giving fair dues to your own prep and the fiction as established. 

Ask the dice only as a last resort. If you do, and they roll well, grant them what they wanted.

But if they roll badly, don't hesitate to dish out some fierce consequences.

You can hear the killer's steps slowly descending the stairs as you find yourselves in
this room. You said you look around for anything useful, yes? What are you trying to
find most urgently? A weapon? A place to hide? An escape route? Something else?
Ask, and you shall be given. Maybe.