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.
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