GM cheat sheet: Disadvantages

 

Greetings, fellow GMs. 

Today I bring you a gaming aid I have developed in response to an often-seen question:

How on earth do we keep track of all the Disadvantages, their triggers, effects, and - perhaps most importantly - the Holds they garner?

It's not only new and inexperienced GMs who can sometimes struggle with this. It can be a bit overwhelming even to those of us who have been running games for years or even decades.

Disadvantages are a very important, even essential, part of the Kult: Divinity Lost game engine. Therefore, it stands to reason that they employ a somewhat more involved system to represent them. 

But, I decided, that there must be some way to handle them more sleekly during our games!

So I dug out my various back-of-an-envelope, improvised notes for that sort of stuff that I had made during various of my K:DL games, studied them for patterns, and crystallized my findings into this:

 

As you can see, there is actually just a rather small number of "categories", for want of a better term, that we really need to list and keep track of. 

The trick is all in how to visually organize that info so you can quickly find and use it during a game.

Here's an example of how I fill them in:

 

(click to enlarge)

Not sure if it isn't self-explanatory, or mostly so anyways. But just in case, here's a little rundown.

We can see that:

• Jim has the Disadvantages Depression and Stalkers.
• Ivy's Nightmares trigger whenever she is asleep during a scene. 
• Scar has got to have a pretty shitty life. The GM has already used 1 Hold from his being Haunted, and no less than 3 Holds from his being a Liar. 3 more Holds are still retained by the GM, so more bad times seem to lay ahead for the poor guy. 
• When the time comes to address Bea's Guilt, the GM can quickly see that she might be sought out by her previous victims, or their vengeful relations, or even a demon of punishment perhaps. Alternatively, she might be beset by nightmares or visions, or might suffer bouts of anxiety and self-doubt. 
• SIT. means "situational", and marks those Disads that don't give holds for later but instead resolve directly in the situation in which they were triggered.
  

Simple and easy, eh? 

Everything you'll ever need to reference, on one quick glance.

 

Finally, while I was already at it, I also made another variant. This one is for the especially style-conscious GMs out there. Here is the Prestige Version of it:

This is without a doubt the coolest looking of the bunch! Might be a bit harsh on some printers, admittedly... but if you can get around that somehow (print at work, shell out some small bucks at a shop...) you get a real nifty GMing aid that maintains the look and feel of the official K:DL materials. 

And if you should happen to be playing online, these are extremely low-effort to use. Good looks is cheap and easy in the digital realms of the Deep Dark Net, after all!

Okay cool, how do I get them?!

You can grab them from this finely crafted gdrive folder over here.

Or click on the images above to enlarge, then right-click on that and either select to open in a new tab (and DL it from there), or save it directly to your device from the enlarged preview.

For printing, these are designed to look good in A5 landscape format. That gives them the right size to scribble your handwrite notes onto. 

A4 landscape works as well if you prefer that, though that might make it a bit bigger than strictly needed perhaps. But perhaps you just have a bit larger handwriting, or maybe you like to pin it to a wall nearby from where you GM - and so prefer a bit bigger format to be able to reference the info even at some distance.

So, in conclusion: 

I hope these can be useful for people out there. Please feel free to let me know if you use them, and whether they worked for you!

Could they be further improved? Or do you perhaps happen to already have some other, completely different way of tracking Triggers and Holds for your PCs' Disads?

Let me know in the comments or on the usual socials!

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