Quick and Dirty Skills for K:DL

 

So, normally this game really doesn't need a detailed skill list, nor countless numerical stats for all kinds of things a character can do.

Also, the PCs' Advantages tend to cover what little is needed in that vein - and even more elementary than that, we can usually make do with clever employing of some Basic Moves, or just letting the fiction guide us in our judgment calls. 

But...

some players have expressed a certain feeling of being somewhat at a loss "when looking at my char sheet for clues for what my character could possibly try to do in [any given] situation"...

Because sure, especially as a player new to the system you can get the impression that, yes, you get your basic attributes, and they're kinda sorta supposed to tell you about your character's overall strengths and weaknesses. But if you're not yet very well trained in reading those Attributes and the attached Basic Moves for the full wealth of what actions they can represent in the game - well, then you might be missing a certain 'middle ground', namely the area between "those three extra-special thing you get to be able to do" and "just the basic Attributes and Moves".

Thinking about how to help those kind of players find into their groove with the game more easily, I remembered something I did almost two years ago now, when adapting An Echo From the Past  to the new 4th edition ruleset.

See, the original premade PCs for that scenario, from 1st edition Kult, had a shitload of skills with various numerical values, as they would. Naturally, when adapting things to K:DL, I sought to identify the two or three most essential aspects of these characters' abilities and turned selected appropriate Advantages to represent those. But I was left with a lot of additinal info, which somehow would've felt wrong to just omit, and so I decided to add the boxes you can see above and below to each of their sheets.

(pictured are excerpts from Mats' and Marcus' sheets. The full scenario including premade PCs is available for free at https://kultdivinitylost.com/resources/)

Some of my players who come from more traditional gaming backgrounds have commented that these "skill boxes" have rather helped them gauge their characters and get into their roles a little bit better and quicker than in RAW K:DL sessions they had for comparison.

The observation has stuck with me in some corner of my brain and now recently I've gotten to thinking...

So Here's A Little Homebrew System 

Adding quick and easy "areas of general competence" like that to your PC sheets:

Look at your Active Attributes. The four of them that have positive values attached (+1 or better) you can pick skills for. For each of those Attributes choose one or more skills that fit the areas of life covered by that Attribute, and the number of skills you may select is equal to the modifier you have in the respective Attribute. 

For example, Coolness +1 will allow you to choose one (1) Coolness-based or Coolness-appropriate area of general competece.

Intuition +3 will allow you to select three (3) areas of competence that seem fitting to your character being able to read persons very well, act empathetic with people, lead them on, or otherwise understand what makes them tick.

If you're playing with standard starting characters, your positive Active Attributes of +1, +1, +2, and +3 will give you seven (7) slots to fill in the beginning. At your GM's discretion, you might be asked/allowed to add more later, for example when you increase your Attributes through advancements.

Note that the characters in Echo do not precisely conform to these guidelines, since I just made them up, but those PCs were written a couple years ago! Upon a second look, however, I seem to intuitively have arranged things so that it largely makes sense after all. The PCs sheets in there could be adapted to this newly minted homebrew system with minimal effort, in fact.

You can make up the names for the areas of competence (vulgo: skills) yourself. Try to stick to a middleground between specific and general - just like most trad games tend to have them. WoD, CoC, D&D etc all make for okay sources of inspiration there. Ideally, they'll be a bit less specific than Advantages, but a bit more so than Basic Moves. 

(So don't port over 'Perception' from D&D because that's already an Attribute in K:DL. But Stealth, Acrobatics, Lore: _______, Sense Motive, or whatever might be just fine. Probably don't take something like Use Magic Item though, since that feels like it would be a whole Advantage all of its own in K:DL)

 

     Examples:

A junior police detective who turned into The Avenger after the death of his brother at the hands of an organized crime ring led by corrupt state attourney. He has Perception +3, Violence +2, Coolness +1, Reason +1, and his Advantages are Instinct, Intimidating, and Survival Instincts.

He might go for being skilled in the areas of:

Sharp ears, Search, Assess Group Dynamics, Handguns, Grappling, Move Silently, Police Procedures.

 

A trader of antique books and trinkets who became The Occultist after stumbling onto an unsettling undercurrent of Hidden Truths gleaned in artifacts from a number of apparently unrelated ancient cultures. She has Reason +3, Intuition +2, Soul +1, Charisma +1, and her Advantages are Crafty, Occult Library, and Thirst for Knowledge. 

She might choose to be competent in:

Research Rarities, Appraise, Identify Ancient Languages, Sense Buyer's Interests, Leading Questions, Meditation, Haggling.

 

GMs may wonder how to handle these areas of competence mechanically in their games. 

• Most simply, let it influence your decisions on when to require a dice roll  for some action a player announces, and when not to. In areas the PCs are competent in, they should more often succeed without needing to roll.
• When in doubt, consider allowing the character to take a +1 to their roll  in cases where they are competent but you still deem it necessary to ask the dice for input as well.
  
• Additionally, you can encourage players to add a greater amount of input  to the communally created fiction of the game.
  

Someone who plays a character that has Lore: Ancient Religions may welcome opportunities to tell the group some nifty details about that stuff every now and then.

Someone who is adept at messing with Security Systems can share their ideas about how these might work in a situation like the one at hand, what might be necessary to circumvent or disable them, and what risks it might entail to attempt doing so.

• Finally, make it a habit to be more forthcoming with information  when telling the players about their characters' observations in the world, when these observations revolve around their areas of competence.
  

Someone who is explicitly adept at conducting Obductions should probably get told more details about a mutilated corpse the group is examining, than someone whose best skill in that vein is First Aid.

Someone competent at Reading Body Language might gain easy insights on most people, but could be fooled by a competent actor, or when a conversation happens without the ability to see the other person (e.g. in a phone call or voice chat, confession booth, another inmate heard only through the airvents from another cell in the mental facility's high-security tract...)

 

At first glance this may seem like a lot of additional minutiae to track, but I wager you won't need to worry too much about it. Most likely, you'll practically never have to think of those 'skills' yourself - the players will remind you of them when they feel they're needed.

A typical request may sound something like 

   "Yo, so it says here that my guy is good at _______, maybe that can help us here?", 

or maybe 

   "I wrote down I'm trained in _______, so I might want to use that to..."

You'll have to make a judgment call then, but you'll do so in the sweet glow of the player already being invested in the scene, since they're looking for creative uses to apply their character's capabilities to the horrifying problems you put before them.

And isn't that exactly what we're wanting them to do?

The Importance of Structure

 

The vast and complex setting of Kult is mesmerizingly rich in terrifying horrors to confront your players with. It can be tempting to use as many of these as possible, and revel with abandon in the gleefully nihilistic depravity of the game's background. 

There is a risk there, however, and it's the danger of you ending up throwing everything against the wall - and watching with dismay as nothing sticks.

But it's not just in interaction with your players that you may struggle with the chaotic glory of Kult's cosmology. You may simply feel insecure in running a game the background of which you do not feel you have a solid grasp on - and especially in the horror genre, where a GM needs to steer their group with a firm hand sometimes, that can be a considerable challenge to your own ability to enjoy the game to its fullest.

 

Fortunately, both of the above dilemmas do have the same solution: 

You may simply need some structure.

Admittedly, the whole cosmology... it's just a lot, and you wanna do it justice as a GM but also not to overexert yourself in trying to lift too much of it at once. There's a fear that you might lose control over your own narrative and that it might fray out into disconnected, random-feeling bits and pieces that fail to convey any strong thematic or stylistic underpinnings.

In addition, there's this feeling as a GM that your players may well expect a consistent portrayal of things in the game world. And indeed, it can be problematic to pull out the rug from under your players too many times, as it risks making the setting feel too incoherent, chaotic, and ultimately meaningless. This could rob the players of a certain kind of fun that is strongly catered to - and can thus come to be expected - in many of the widely popular RPGs out there...

We'll deal with the former of these two aspects first:

 

The GM's Side of Things

So, how do we surf the waves of all this anticosmic insanity without falling off and drowning in the very floods that should propel and elevate our game?

Establish certain anchor points that you can stick to.

You don't have to implement all of the ideas below. Instead, use them as a toolbox to pick and choose from.

Consider the following: 

Even though the Truth may be subjective, the horror personal, and the setting background fragmented and disjointed to the point of nihilistic chaos... there are still certain hard facts that can be determined. These can be telegraphed to the players by consistently keeping them True throughout the gameplay, re-establishing their Reality during whichever scenes may arise in the campaign that may reveal echoes of their metaphysical resonance.

Death is neither inevitable, nor final.
You can delay it long beyond your mortal years, come back from it, or inhabit a liminal space between living and dead. Ghosts and phantoms can cross the border from the afterlife, just as mediums and magicians can communicate with the deceased - and summon entities from the domains they occupy.

Dreams are not fleeting phantasms.
They are very real. They can hurt you, trap you, even kill you. You can learn things there that prove true even in the waking world, and experiences there may change you in ways that leave their marks long after your slumber has ended.

Passions are not a weakness of our fickle emotions.
They are the most powerful, and most consistent drive of our very existence. They pull and push us constantly, mild infatuations growing into single-minded obsessions, carnal lusts seeking ever further extremes to explore, and primal instincts liberating our feeble rational minds from the burdens placed upon them by our imprisonment.

Madness is not a deficiency of the mind.
It's a feat of strength, a roaring assertion of intellectual autarchy in the face of a world that is nothing but lies and betrayals. While usually incomplete, what most perceive as insanity is really an attempt at escape. It can leave you with broken but powerful insights and epiphanies, e.g. into other minds, the worlds beyond the Illusion, and/or the beings that invade our world from there.

Time is neither linear, nor irreversible.
It is malleable, negotiable, infinitely split and interwoven. You can see through it, walk through it, contract and dilate and bend and twist it. You can find alternate histories, or reset your entire life. Freeze someone in a single moment for eternity, or skip back and forth across the centuries.

Space is neither rigid, nor finite.
It can be fragile, elastic, and ultimately entirely circumventable. It contains many more dimensions than we are able to perceive, and there are alien creatures inhabiting these - who look upon us like we look at stick figure drawings on a piece of paper. You can stretch and compress distances, shift directions, shrink and enlarge the proportions of objects or people, or straight up punch a hole into the very fabric of space to slip right through the cracks.

All this is - needless to say - frought with danger, especially to the ignorant and the foolish. With increased knowledge of the Pillars of Divinity comes improved Mastery of Self... but it also works the other way around. Only the desperate dare step forth into the borderlands, and only the divine can hope to emerge from them unscathed.

As I said, you don't have to try and squeeze all of the above into your campaign just to stay true to the cosmology. You can pick one or two, and focus your game around them. Like any good horror movie, take care to establish what portions of the fiction follow particular rules, and then stick to these.

You don't even have to use the whole 'Dreams' or 'Time' thing. Sometimes it is perfectly sufficient for a scenario to revolve around the idea that, yes, that maniac in your nightmares can indeed kill you. You've watched it happen to your friends, and now everything points towards it soon happening to you. What do you do?
(You don't need to additionally employ the idea of learning truths in the dreams, or bringing back bodily changes with you from your sleep, unless you feel like it fits and you want to.) 

Likewise, a tekron assassin appearing from the future to murder you because the Archons know you will have ruined their plans decades down the line is plenty of material for several scenarios, perhaps even a full campaign.
(You don't need to have the PCs do any timetravelling themselves, nor do you need to have magicians able to perceive the past, future, or alternate presents... Enabling you to save those ideas for another game, at another time.)

If you keep those Truths you have chosen to be True, invariably True throughout the game, it will allow the players to get used to the established fiction, possibly figure out some of the mysteries under their own power, and perhaps even exploit the workings of True Reality to their own ends, if they're daring and smart.

This doesn't mean you can't sometimes confront your players with the bad end of a spiritual misconception or overly rash conclusion, going "sure, you thought that was how it works... and why wouldn't you... it did seem a reasonable assumption at the time... But evidently you just mistook a Lie for the Truth... again!" 

Your players will be able to handle this - as long as you don't invalidate too many of their working hypotheses, or get into a habit of sweepingly declaring things as irrelevant that have happened before in the fiction.

And it gives you a framework to keep building upon, like a scaffolding for the cathedral of gaming goodness you are erecting in the honor of the dark gods. A sacred geometry that focuses your mind amidst the mayhem of a cosmos of chaos and cacophony.

The Players' Side of Things

Time to elaborate a bit on that "certain kind of fun" alluded to in the introduction section of this post, and already hinted at in the GM section as well:

The big merit of consistency and reliability in a game's setting (and mechanics, though that is an aside probably better left to a whole 'nother article all of its own) is that it enables players to observe patterns in the events they experience, form hypotheses about their true causes and workings, experiment with the world around themselves... and achieve meaningful results in doing so.

Don't make it too easy on them, for sure - since the world is by no means a safe, sane, and consensual place, easy to make reason of. Much to the contrary, in fact. But amidst all the unknowable horrors, take care to allow for certain red threads that are woven throughout. 

One part of this is to not go all-out random, throwing style elements into your game at the drop of a hat. Another part of it is to play with the precarious balance of establishing facts in the fiction, and then alternately reaffirming and challenging or subverting them - but never too much of either.

In order to demonstrate the first, I'll borrow an example originally written by Kraetyz (check out his awesome blog over at Beyond Elysium!) as part of a discussion on the Kult: Elysium discord server:

You will only needlessly confuse your players by making them have an encounter with dream creatures just because they all went to sleep on-screen at some point, but then the next day when they go into a haunted house to explore the spooky basement there, you let them meet totally unrelated monsters from the Underworld... and the week after that, when they witness a gruesome murder, a Razide shows up because that's what Inferno guys do!!

This is a good example for how not to think as a GM of Kult. This game doesn't do monster-of-the-week very well, and if the wildly disjointed threats and experiences are not tied together by some strong thematic connection or personal horrors (such as the PCs' own Dark Secrets, or the campaigns as-yet-unrevealed Big Bad who totally is behind all these seemingly random encounters)... well, then the gaming experience may drift apart into confusing non-sequiturs and frustrating defeats.

(Make no mistake, you want defeats! But they're better when they're of the "tragic demise" variety, fueled by the PCs own inability to choose a different course than the one leading to their ultimate horrible doom. And a random werecrocodile eating them because they chose to flee through the sewers... is not exactly gonna go a long way towards that.)

Here's another example, this one written by myself during the same chats, about how to play with your players' expectations by first establishing fictional facts, then questioning, reaffirming, subverting, and contrasting them.

Let's say you've put some lictors in your campaign, and are establishing them as "jailor" types. That's cool shit, but now you're gonna want to stick with that for a while. In fact, you'll all but have to - because if you don't, you're not establishing anything, you've just let it occur once or twice. 

There are many different types of lictors in the setting, some more hands-on types, some more of the power-behind-the-throne variety. Some are self-serving rogue ones, others have turned Infernalist and serve the Death Angels now. A few especially delinquent lictors are still (or newly) loyal to Malkuth post-rebellion...

And introducing some variety is good, over a long time of gameplay. But if every lictor the PCs discover is of a different 'alignment' from these assorted options, the players will never get a grip on what motifs and themes this type of creature is even supposed to represent in your story, right?

Right. So like, it's probably cool to reveal an unexpected "wants to help you break free" ttype of lictor at some point in the story - because then it will be surprising, after the first three they dealt with were all portrayed as following a distinct, uniform, "jailer-type" pattern. Now they'll be wondering what's up with this new drift?!

Keep them on their toes, enrich the setting gradually. While also allowing them a certain amount of reliability and "hard facts", never overwhelming them with too much of an endless and erratic series of lictors who might as well be nepharites who might as well be libiths who might as well be enwildened gods...

Now consider a slightly different example to the above:

The first lictor the PCs are introduced to is a Black Lictor, in service to Inferno. Later, when they encounter other lictors, their perceptions of them will already be colored differently, their expectations skewed towards a certain angle. Now what if they realize that these new monsters of the same type are actually acting in opposition to that first one? Will they be able to trust them? Should they? What other, heretofore unknown dangers do these new exemplars of the same species pose to them? Can they play both sides against the middle?

And that's all before you introduce any "independent" or "rebel" lictors, as well as nepharites, angels, forgotten gods, azadaevae, or mancipia on top of those initial lictors, adding them to the complex mix of convoluted loyalties, rivalries, mutual deceptions, and outright hostilities. 

 

In conclusion, structure and reliability are great and can add a lot to your game. The operative term here being your game. As in, this one game of yours, right here, right now. NOT the entire cosmology of all games ever.

Story consistency is more key than mythos consistency. It is not that important for two vastly different characters in two vastly different games of Kult to have comparable, consistent experiences and perceptions of Reality. 

Rather, you may wish to keep it to a personal or group basis. One specific character, or group of them, can benefit from have hard facts and reliable structures of existence established for the particular scenario or campaign they're in.

 

Finally, if you ever feel like you're overdoing it on the Structure thing, like your game has become too orderly, too predictable... check out this other article over here, for thoughts on how to add a little infusion of life-restoring chaos perhaps.

 

 

The Importance of Chaos

 

There is a certain kind of GMs who, upon first reading the Kult: Divinity Lost corebook, seem to be enraptured on the one hand, but also a bit disappointed by the lore presented within.

I've seen them come online and share their precarious mixture of confusion and frustration with the book's setting info, often enough to discern a certain pattern. Here's how their argument tends to go:

I find the descriptions very general and example-based, and while I get the idea - they want to leave a lot of room for interpretation and personalizing your own games - I feel a need to squeeze out a more concrete picture from all the fragmented and contradicting tidbits.

I need to create a coherent, holistic view of the background and lore in my mind, in order to be able to tell good stories in the setting. Sure, it should all stay mysterious to the players - at least in the beginning - but to me, the GM, things have to make sense.

There is such a thing as too vague, too open-ended, too much of a-thousand-snippets-but-never-a-complete-picture. I want there to be concrete rules for how things work in the world. I want exact statements about the Illusion and how it interacts with other dimensions and what the creatures there can and cannot do.

Especially as the game focuses so much on "What is Real?", there should be actual Truths for the players to pick up on.

To that, I say: Yes I get it.

But I'm afraid you are over-fixating on something that will not work in the game - simply because this was never what it was intended to do.

It is impossible for us to coax "exact statements" and "coherent truths" from the disjointed and contradictive lore. Or it might be possible, but it would be counter-productive in the end. This is very much on purpose.

Here's the thing: Yes, the game focuses on finding out about 'what is real' - but the intrinsic horror of it is that this question can never be fully answered. 

 

 

For one thing, in order to write down the exact rules of what the Illusion-Machinery does and how it works, you'd need to have a Demiurge-level intellect, and the vocabulary and syntax to express it... which we simply don't, so we can't. 

Consider, in addition, that the Machinery is not only vast and ancient and unspeakably complex, but also deteriorated and breaking down - which manifests in different ways at different locations and different times, and even for different people at the same location and time.

All this means that you cannot (meaningfully) follow a "physics engine" approach to the game's setting and lore.

Example: What happens when I See Through the Illusion at, say, a supermarket? How do I GM such a scene so it makes sense in the whole context of the metaphysical background?

Answer: you don't. It won't. 

Good news is, it doesn't have to.

Where one person may witness an infernal caricature of a supermarket where the employees are demons that prey on the unwitting customers, another might see the working poor as purgatides being tormented in customer-pleasing hells. Yet another may perceive all participants in the scene being ground up between the cogwheels of Yesod, or maddeningly haunted and driven by Limbo-spawned feverdreams of luxury and plenty for everyone - while stuffing themselves with rotten morsels and maggot-ridden refuse in 'reality'...

And then, when you come back the next day, and See Through the Illusion again, it might be something totally different you behold. But maybe not for your friend - who has been seeing different Truths beyond the Veil all along. So who is right? Which one of you is perceiving the actually real Reality? 

It's like that in the big scope of things, too.

We know some things, but there are large gaps (the heart of horror is the omission of information, after all), and there are countless contradictions that happily refuse our feeble attempts at resolving them.

You see, God is evil and not at all interested in loving mankind or guiding us to salvation. The idea of free will is a cruel joke and paradise is but a pipe dream, spoon-fed to us by the deceptive half-deity's depraved minions... But actually that doesn't matter anymore, since God is also dead (or at least gone), and so any Grand Designs of His are left discarded and abandoned... But that doesn't really change anything because the Archons and their servants are still maintaining our imprisonment, and so we are all still wandering, blind and crippled, through the derelict ruins of Metropolis, shackled by ties that we cannot even perceive... But that won't last for long because it's in our very nature to break free of any limitations placed upon our divine selves, and the Illusion is crumbling all on its own anyways... But that may never happen because Inferno is encroaching on our very souls to drag us to hell for eternal torture over sins both imagined and real, making a new prison even as the old one is failing... But that doesn't matter because Gaia ever intrudes into Elysium and seeks to corrode and mutate and decay everything... Except that doesn't matter either, since the Void of Achlys is also encroaching and will inevitably devour everything into its very own brand of oblivion... But then you got Limbo, and...

You get the idea.

To return to the question, then... Which Truths Are Really True?

Either of them? None of them? Only the ones we choose for ourselves?

Perhaps all of them.

Is this madness? Yes.

Or is it divine understanding? Also yes.

The ultimate horror is not found in how terrifying the objective metaphysical Reality out there is in its workings. (Like in the Cthulhu Mythos, for comparison)

The best horror in Kult is personal. How you react to the things you see and feel. What you discover inside yourself that makes you feel and see things in that particular way. And how you deal with that...

 

So the next time you are getting doubts about your GMing, feeling that maybe it's not enough when Seeing Through the Illusion that - 

"there are disgusting maggots everywhere and the person you're talking to has an inverted face"

and you're afraid that your players might demand to know "yeah? so? why is that?"...

Feel free to throw the question right back to them:

Why do you think that is? 

What do disgusting maggots mean to you(r PC)? Did you experience something like that in early childhood perhaps? What does an 'inverted face' mean? Do you think its symbolic maybe? Are you projecting that from your own twisted mind? Or is it external, some demonic imagery superimposed on your perceptions?

Can you discern the difference? And if so, could you live with the answers?

 

Finally, remember that there's never just one layer to the Truth. 

The Illusion is not like the Masquerade, or the Matrix, or even the Cthulhu Mythos to some degree, where you're either in on the secret behind-the-scenes stuff going on in the world, or not (yet) wise to how things really are.

It's layers and layers of lies. The worst of them are the ones we tell ourselves. But of course, there's no shortage of other beings in the cosmos who are more than willing to add their own spins to the narrative as well. 

The mentor who teaches you magic in order to enable you to break free of the lictors' control is really looking to enslave you to himself. 

The dream wanderer who helps you overcome that sorcerous would-be despot is actually a psyphago trying to lure you into its nightmare prison where it collects human offerings to a Dream Prince it seeks to appease.

The nepharite that offers you assistance in the form a pact in order to get out of that wants to make you believe it is an angel, so you'll become its prophet and spread a subtly perverted gospel that may drag countless other souls into a vicious circle of sin, self-loathing, and eternal torment in its own private hell...

Allowing for a large amount of unbridled chaos in your setting presentations as a GM can give you something that's much better than the feeble promises of consistency and reliability. It gives you the power to keep your players guessing, uncertain, unsettled, surprised, constantly needing to adapt... and you know what that adds up to, right? 

You're keeping them scared!

 

That said, sometimes too much of a good thing may be detrimental as well. Check out this other article I wrote, for a contrasting argument, if you ever feel like you overdid it on the chaos factor, and would like to steer things back to a little bit more structure and coherency.