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.