GM Reference Sheet

Greetings, fellow GMs.

In the tradition of the Disadvantages cheat sheet I made, today I bring you another handy gaming aid to reference during your sessions.

When in doubt, or even at a complete loss for what to say or do next - a quick glance on this summary of your GM Agenda, Principles, and Moves may be just the thing to snap you back into your groove, or give you that crucial bit of inspiration you're fishing for.

 

Credit for the idea and initial compilation of this info in this neatly concise way goes to my long-time friend and fellow Kultist Jrmariano, who came up with the concept of this GM Reference Sheet in the first place.
All I really had to do from there was to pretty it up a bit for that Kultish look, and some minor edits for brevity and format. 

I made a printer friendly version as well:

As with the Disadvantage sheet, you can grab them from this finely crafted google folder. 

Feel free to let me know if you find them useful, leave me a comment or buy me a coffee over at my patreon. Hail Malkuth, for through tormentuous tribulations she leads us to Divine Enlightenment!

 

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!

If you enjoy the stuff I make here, please consider supporting me over here on my patreon.

My workings here on the blog are and always will be completely free. I'm doing this out of passion for the game and its lovely community. But if you join the Cult of Malkuth in earnest, you can get extra benefits - such as the opportunity to buy me coffee, make wishes for future content, and perhaps additional perks as well. Check it out!

Getting High is Only the Beginning - using (and abusing) Drugs in K:DL

 

The question occasionally comes up: How to handle drugs in Kult: Divinity Lost? 

It's by no means an unreasonable request to wanna know about - the game revolves all around the dark aspects of the human psyche, after all. Suffering, desire, anxiety, nightmares, insanity, obsession, expansion of the senses to perceive other realities... Surely intoxication, addiction, hallucinations, and other aspects of drug (ab)use firmly have a place in this!

 

Jeez, man - what the fuck you put in this drink??

(Salvador Dali)

However, the Corebook doesn't really dedicate a lot of space to the mechanical representation of this whole topic. We get the Drug Addict Disadvantage, but apart from that there are only occasional mentions, and we are never given any hard and fast rules for it.

Why is that?

Fun fact: As backers of the original K:DL kickstarter may remember, there was an early draft of the open beta for the 4th ed. Corebook which had a table with Attribute modifiers according to the effects of different drugs you might ingest. 

But it was ultimately decided to cut it out - so it never became part of the published book.

Here are a few excerpts from it:

As you can see, amphetamines improve your reflexes, while alcohol boosts endurance.
Also, cannabis apparently allows you to ignore injuries just as well as alcohol does.

Heroin looks suspiciously similar to alcohol, except it doesn't improve endurance, but at
least it also doesn't reduce your willpower. Otherwise it's much the same, just stronger.

 Evidently the effects of LSD on your intellect and perception are about on par with those
of cannabis... but you get funky visions from it, too. Sniffing glue on the other hand is the
only drug that doesn't care about which Attribute it affects - it fucks them all up equally.

(If you're interested in the full table,
find me via DMs and I'll send it over.)

Here, for comparion, the equivalent table from old Kult:

 

This one shows a very different approach. Not concerned with individual Attributes, but rather interested in the user's mental, emotional, and physical conditions - in other words, their fictional positioning... and you know what I find funny about it?

It seems perfectly fitted for adaptation into a PbtA system, with its tiered results and all!

Sure, there's some solidly Old-School Simulationism involved, with its calculation of CON-rating fractions - but just think if the terms given in it were distributed across (-9), (10-14), and (15+) instead... 

In fact, I have occasionally in my K:DL games drawn inspiration from the oldKult drugs table, playing it by ear to gauge the effects of intoxacting substances on PCs. You can let them roll +Fortitude (or +Willpower if you feel that fits better) to see how well their metabolism (and/or their mind) takes it, then adjudicate on the fly what seems to make the most sense / best drama / most terrifying horror / ... (as needed), taking into account the drug's dosage, purity, and other circumstances in the fiction.

So in comparison, this strikes me as a much more useful 'guide to drugs' than the above shown table could ever hope to be. Seems understandable why they decided to leave it out after all, eh? 

It would have just been a lot of miniscule bookkeeping for the GM, and at the same time disappointingly inconsequential most of the time.

Somewhere between the cumbersome 'keeping track of five distinct -1 penalties every time a character gets a bit drunk', and the hard-to-rationalize 'tripping on LSD or snifffing glue also giving me no more than a bunch of -1s'... 

...well, I feel like there has to be a better way to handle this.

Because sometimes, all you want is a quick way to gauge a drug's impact on your general narration, i.e. on your game's fiction.

But sometimes, you may wish to represent a PC's intoxication mechanically in the game.

It can at times become hard to distinguish which parts
are the hallucinations and which ones are real...

(Nostradamus)

 

Here's my take on how to go about it

in six (mostly) brief steps:

- Use what the Apocalypse engine already gives you

In truth, drugs are already (kind of) part of the PbtA system. When the ingestion of stimulants or narcotics becomes part of the shared narrative, the rules for it behave exactly as the rules for any other story elements: We are being fans of the player characters, so we are highly interested in -

• "Why do you consume the drug?"
• "How do you do it?"
• "When and where? In whose company?"
• "What do you feel it helps you achieve or accomplish?"
• "What are the downsides, the complications and troubles it gives you?" 
• ...
  

In other words: What are the drug's manifold narrative functions?

- Tailor it to your PCs' needs

Discuss the characters' drug use with the player, and judge any intoxication effects accordingly, tailored to the individual user.

Does the PC snort coke to stay awake and alert for his shift at work? Or to party through the night afterwards? 

Does she shoot up heroin to soothe her wounded soul and find some small measure of comfort in this cruel world? Or pop some amphetamins to distract herself from the guilt and shame that haunt her?

Does he eat shrooms to expand his conscience and pursue his spirituality? Or smoke some weed to relax and have some laughs with the boys while playing videogames?

There are dozens of different types of drugs, and hundreds of reasons and techniques how to consume them. Find out about your characters' preferences, habits, pressures, hopes, and fears - and how they connect to the drug use.

- Tie it back to Basic Moves

One of the best game design advice I ever got for Kult: Divinity Lost was from Robin Liljenberg, when I made some writeups for the monsters and NPCs in one of the campaigns we published. I was highly enthusiastic and thinking about all kinds of special abilities and unique powers I could give to the various monsters in there, and what custom moves might be uses to represent them. Robin suggested to not focus on writing too many new special moves for each monster - but rather to simply tie things back to the Basic Moves, as much as I possibly could. 

He taught me that the game's basic engine is strong enough to carry many variations of all kinds of narratives within its genre, on the shoulders of those 10 moves alone. And as time has since proven to me, he was right. 

With this in mind, there are few very simple, and very intuitive things we can do with regard to drugs:

When Philipp gets shitfaced-drunk to forget his worries, he becomes disoriented and insensitive. Actions that would normally easily succeed may instead require a roll for him, such as Observe a Situation or Read a Person. He also becomes completely unable to meaningfully Investigate anything in this state. 

When Kenny gets shitfaced-drunk to suppress his nightmares, he becomes abrasive and clumsy. Attempts to Influence Others and Act under Pressure that would normally easily succeed may instead require a roll for him. He also automatically fails the first attempt to Avoid Harm he has to make in any given scene while still drunk.

When Gabby snorts some speed to get hyper before an illegal street race, she may take +1 to any rolls to Act under Pressure and Avoid Harm during the race, until the high wears off. Every time she wins a race while under the influence, she must Keep it Together or become Addicted to the white powder.

When Tricia is whacked out on morphium because sometimes she just needs a break from it all, it makes her feel numb and deeply at ease. She feels no pain from any kind of Wounds, and automatically succeeds to Keep it Together, should she have to. However, she must Act under Pressure in order to do anything except lethargically lie around or sluggishly shuffle about. 

When Ben hits the cocaine to get into his party mood, he becomes active and extroverted. He takes 2 Edges, usable to apply a +2 bonus when rolling for any Basic Move. At the same time however, passive and inert behaviour such as sitting still or shutting up for more than a few moments requires him to Keep it Together, and a fail compels him to keep moving and talking.

...

As you can see, positive and negative consequences can come from the same substance. All drugs have beneficial benefits (the consequences desired by the user) and unpleasant downsides. Be sure to mix up both in your custom drug moves. If the people who use drugs wouldn't get something out of it, nobody would be using them at all.
(At least before they fall victims to a crippling addiction, that is. But that comes a bit later.)

Use Basic Moves, simple numerical modifiers, and the occasional automatic success for the beneficial effects. As a general rule, make the positive aspects of drug use comparatively small bonuses, or with only a few uses.

For the downsides, employ your GM Moves, give (stronger) numerical penalties (and the occasional automatic failure) to certain Basic Moves, and generally adjust your measures for when something should and shouldn't be a roll in the first place.
Make the complications that arise from intoxication rather situational perhaps, but more severe.

Example: For people who like dropping acid, it's not normally a huge problem that you would be very bad at talking to your parents, teachers, or boss while under its influence - because you wouldn't usually be around them when you're tripping on it. But if you are forced into that situation anyways... it's not unreasonable that you should suffer strong complications.)

This precarious balance between effects and downsides is fluid, however. 

Eventually, When Addiction sets in, i.e when a PC gets the Drug Addict Disadvantage, this should mark the point when the positive effects rapidly start to diminish, and the downsides escalate to swiftly become dominant in the user's life. 

As the GM, you are always free to drift and change the details of your players' custom drug moves, according to whatever the fiction suggests and your devious mind sees as fitting.

They say drugs, you say how high!

(Mahadma Ghandi)

- Explore the Fiction: habits, rituals, attitudes, uses...

We are already knee-deep into this, in fact, but it cannot hurt to recall: The fiction is the most important thing. Take care not to get lost in just numbers and dice rolls. None of that is important (or interesting) if it doesn't facilitate the telling of a gripping and horrifying story. 

Take a look back at the first two headers here, What the Apocalypse engine already gives you and Tailor it to the PC's needs, and double-check the questions there. Are they being answered? 

It's okay if they are being answered in-game, doesn't have to be up-front. As long as you got the feeling that the conversation is moving in a way that is getting you closer to getting them answered eventually, you can afford to be patient for now.

- 'Specialize' your rulings from Basic Moves to Dis/Ads, Stability, Relations...
  (but only if you're feelin' it)

There are some situations that justify writing up your very own, unique special moves for a game. Compare, for example, my recent blog post about Refusing Death, which I think constitutes such a case. This is comparatively rare however, and most of the time you should prefer to employ the core mechanics that already exist in the game.

This doesn't have to be Basic Moves only. It can easily extend (if you want it) to Advantages, Disadvantages, Stability, Relations, Wounds, personal drives, etc.

In real life, drug users - especially the more experienced and routined ones - often have very precise cocktails of substances, or ways how they use them, in order to achieve highly specific results. They're proficient in using their drugs of choice, you see. All of these substances have very particular effects, and we are extremely adept at tailoring our consumption to meet our individual needs.

Even outside of illegal/excessive drug use, people are taking their psych meds to counteract their depression, anxiety, or schizophrenia. They take sleeping pills against their insomnia, and painkillers to make it through the day in spite of their bad back. Coffee to get started into the day fresh and vivid, an aspirin against the headache, a glass of wine to enliven the conversation... 

We have our habits, rituals, and custom using techniques with these substances, as well. We know to take our dixanephram with half a cup of coffee, to even out the early onset tiredness. We have learned that smoking cigarettes and drinking beer combines to produce that mild euphoria we so like. We bring a whole assortment of different pills and powders to the party, to finetune our personal experience for many hours to come.

Applying the same ideas to encompass a PC's various mechanical Traits, then:

We have already gotten to know Kenny, above, who uses strong alcohol to suppress his nightmares. This might be ruled to, unsurprisingly, affect his Nightmares. Perhaps when he gets hammered before going to sleep at night, the GM rules that he automatically passes his roll for the Disadvantage that night. 

(Although maybe after a while the effects become weaker as his metabolism becomes more used to them, so he merely gains a +2 to his roll against the Nightmares anymore... and it may deteriorate further from there.)

We have also briefly met Gabby and Ben, the racer and the party tiger. For Gabby, an alternate ruling for her consumption of stimulants before a race might be to give her bonuses on her Driver Advantage.
For Ben, we don't know precise what it is he does when he gets into his "party mood" - but it might be that he snorts the coke to boost his abilities related to the use of Forked Tongue, Artistic Talent, or as a Seducer. 

(Note that such a limited area of benefit is much 'weaker' than the blanket bonuses to any Basic Move that we gave him above. Perhaps, therefore, grant a slightly larger number of Edges to him, or even allow the occasional auto-success perhaps?)

Conversely, maybe Tricia doesn't shoot up heroin in order to suppress any particular one of her chronic mental or social problems (i.e. Disadvantages), nor to improve her performance in certain fields of expertise (Advantages). Instead, perhaps she uses it to soothe her tormented soul, seeking to regain a measure of comfort and stability amidst her cruel and miserable life. 

The GM may therefore change her Heroin Move to: 

When you shoot up heroin after suffering a shock, trauma, or other severe emotional pain, you may retroactively ignore your most recent decrease in Stability. Unmark those boxes on your sheet as you regain these Stability levels.

In any such endeavors, remember to mix benefits and downsides into interesting cocktails of potential narrative developments - related both to potential progress, and looming complications.

Except for dope, we operate in all aspects of organized
crime. If there's one thing I'm sure of, it's that drugs
destroy your mind, and destroy your family.
In the end, it will only lead our country into ruin.

(John F. Kennedy)

 - When they break, escalate the Bad Things... hard!

When a PC goes Broken in the course of drug (ab)use, the time for being patient with them is over. No more slow buildup of tension, gradual deterioration of social relations, creeping threats to their bodiyl and mental health, etc. Make a Move, and make it hard.

You may confer the Drug Addict Disadvantage on the PC, if they don't have it yet. If they are already addicted, consider giving them a Mental Compulsion, Obsession, Phobia, or even inflict Schizophrenia, a paranoia of imagined (or are they?) Stalkers, or simply a cripping Depression.

Certain drugs also have the potential to take our minds to the borderlands of the Illusion, and sinister otherwordly entities are always lurking there, waiting for confused and helpless victims to stumble by. So you could also choose to subject the PC to a Curse, have them become Haunted, or turn them into an Involuntary Medium perhaps?

From this point onwards, continued consumption may see its benefits diminishing rapidly, or no longer apply at all - while the downsides should escalate radically. It's all in your GMly hands now. The player character has ventured too deep into the forbidden abyss, and their compulsion have gotten out of hand, driving them to ever greater depravities, and tormenting them with ever worsening consequences.

 

 

Hangovers - the Inevitable Price We Pay

Those precious moments when you swear you're never drinking again. They're fleeting, but right then and there, the sentiment is usually an honest one.

Much less fleeting are the various physical, mental, and emotional aftermaths of drug (ab)use, that can plague the afflicted for hours, an entire day, or even several days after the high wears off. 

We have described benefits and downsides of drug consumption, but these mechanics are only applicable while the intoxication still lasts. They only shape up into a wholesome trinity when a third aspect is added: the drug's after-effects. The hangover. The crash. The puking. The shakes. The relentlessly racing thoughts. The itching. The restless legs. The intermittently returning hallucinations. The insomnia. The screaming agony from the yawning void inside yourself.

It's bad enough to make you go look for another hit, just a tiny little one perhaps... just to take the edge off. And most usally, you'll give in. You go score some more of that good stuff, sooner than later.

Such is the cycle of using, elation, suffering, abuse, and addiction. 

Mechanically, when representing the effects of a hangover, try and go for those aspects of the rules that were not employed by either the drug's benefits or downsides. 

• If the rush gives the PC a numerical bonus to some roll or other, don't give them a numerical penalty the next day. Perhaps target their Stability instead.
• If the ingestion of a feel-good drug raises their Stability, the hangover might see them feel jaded and detached - reducing (either temporarily or for good) one of their Relations by 1 level...
• ...or perhaps they get nauseous, distrought, and bad-tempered upon coming down, and take -1 ongoing to all rolls, until well-rested or using again.
• If you have to (or want to) use numerical modifiers on both sides of the comedown - which you fully might, it's totally up to you - try and vary up which of the PC's Moves are affected. Perhaps a drug that makes them astute at paying attention to people and situations (i.e. bonuses to Intuition and Perception) leaves them fatigued and shaky (translating into penalties to Fortitude, Reflexes, and Coolness) the next day...
  

This, too, may be expanded to include Dis/Advantages as well. Perhaps when coming down from heroin, every roll against your Nightmares automatically fails for the next three days. Or maybe you get a -2 to your next roll for being an Exorcist during the after-effects of the mescalin. This too is fluid, and can (and should) be gradually drifted according to how the ongoing fiction of the game develops across time.

Doing this mechanical switch-up between benefits, downsides, and after-effects creates a well-varied playing field - while still firmly rooted in the game's existing core mechanics - on which you can establish interesting trade-offs, hard choices, and dramatic challenges for your players to enjoy as they steer their characters across the slippery, and ever-steepening slope they have maneuvered themselves onto. 

GM-Note about "reparation shots": Of course it is possibe to find a different drug which counteracts the after-effect of the one you took before. IRL drug users do this all the time. Naturally however, that new drug will have after-effects of its own... But you shouldn't shy away from letting players try to alleviate their problematic consequences in this way. Ultimately, it will only feed into them getting further entangled in the vicious cycle(s), and allow you to explore yet more of their personal horrors.

What Music Would You Like Them to Play at Your Funeral?

In the long run, using drugs rarely works out well for those who do it. But then again, in Kult, what else ever does? And ultimately, it is the journey that counts, not the doom it ultimately leads you to... right?

But will it be worth it?

Will you be able to rise above your addictions, to become something more than a glorified animal enslaved by its own brain chemistry?

Or will it end up consuming you, devour you whole and destroy you... just to spit you right back into the endless cycle of hopeless misery and blind ignorance that we call life?

Go ahead, give  your next character the Drug Addict Disadvantage, or even just a mild flirtation with some substance-related habit or other... and play to find out!

Hey children, drugs are bad,
and if you don't believe me ask your dad.
And if you don't believe him ask your mom,
she'll tell you how she does 'em all the time.
So kids, say no to drugs
so you don't act like everyone else does.
You know there's really nothing else to say,
Drugs are just bad, m'kay?

(Friedrich Nietzsche)

 

Alternate Wound Penalties Chart

This comes up occasionally on various socials, and I've been wanting to make a handy blog post to point to, for my own personal houserules about the matter.

Wound Penalties and how I handle them.

So, we all know the original chart for numerical penalties to actions performed by PCs on the basis of physical injuries they previously sustained, from page 124 of the K:DL Corebook.

I use those pretty much rules-as-written, but modified the numbers a little bit. This caused me to make an alternative version of the chart itself, in order to easily present the slight increase in granularity... and vehemence.

You can see it here:

So your first Serious Wound gives you a -1 modifier to any rolls, ongoing until the wound has been stabilized or healed.

The second Serious Wound you suffer will increase this penalty to -2, with the same conditions as above.

(Wounds that have been stabilized - even if not healed - do not count for this consideration of "Is it two or more Wounds?", only non-stabilized ones do. Naturally though, stabilized Wounds can always reopen, especially when engaging in hurried and/or rowdy physical action, and, say, rolling a (-9) for something wild or risky... And when the stitches tear and your bandages start soaking red, or when that improvised splint breaks and your bone starts cracking again... Well then the Wound very much counts once more!)

The same would happen if you got a Critical Wound right away: -2 to any actions for which it makes sense that the injury could hinder you in your performance. And since this category of Wounds has such lovely examples given for it in the corebook such as: punctured lung, severed aorta, ruptured eyeball, or spinal cord damage, amongst others - well, let's just say it may be most rolls that could reasonably be affected...

Here I am already being a little more harsh than the corebook is with its -1 for a Critical.

The final step, then, aggravates it to -3, when you have both Serious and Critical Wounds. I feel this reasonable for such a messed up state of physical health. Also, perhaps I just like my players to suffer and despair. But what can I say? The game - and especially all sorts of combat and violence in it - is supposed to be harsh and brutal, after all.

 

A note on crunch - If you're wondering about the level of severity this adds, and whether you'd want it in your game, here's some maths if it helps:

So, I wanted to know what a +1 modifier would do in K:DL's 2d10 system, in percentages, so I crunched the numbers (which is rather easy, since for a roll of 2d10 there's exactly 100 possible outcomes. So that maps to percentages very nicely. And it turns out that a +1 bonus (or penalty) will affect the rolled result in exactly 15% of all possible rolls. 

By "affect the result" I mean that this single modifier makes the difference between either a full success and a partial, or a partial and a miss. In other words, the question was "How often does a +1 penalty end up turning my 9 into a 10, or my 14 into a 15?"

And the answer is, 15% of the time. 

(This remains true also when you factor in Attribute bonuses, it only becomes slightly less at extreme values, such as at a +4 Attribute, another +1 bonus will increase your result only around 13% of the time. Attributes of -3 or lower are likewise affected. But for our purposes here, that is largely negligible. Let's just operate on the assumption of "+/-15% for every +/-1 bonus/penalty".)

So a -3 penalty adds up to 45%. That's how often your combined Serious and Critical Wounds will reduce your 10 to a 7, your 11 to an 8, your 12 to a 9, your 15 to a 12, your 16 to a 13, or your 17 to a 14.

So the question one can ask themselves when pondering whether to use the original chart or the above depicted one, is basically this: Do I feel that "Oh man, 15% are plenty and 30% is properly hurtful?" 

Or can I get on board with "Yes, a really badly mangled person should when acting under duress be performing less well than normally around half the time they try to do something ambitious, complicated, or dangerous?

My game, my table? Solidly in the latter camp. Your table? Your call!

She says she wants to playtest her new homebrew damage rules.
What do you do?

 

A bit later, after a couple games with the above table, I had another idea, and wanted to see if it could be incorporated into it.

I made a second version of my chart from above, which features a little extra twist I came up with:

 

Numerically, this is the exact same as the one shown above - except for the addition of the new modifier to See Through The Illusion. 

I found this enjoyable for two reasons: 

- it fits that Basic Move's trigger, when you suffer shock, injury, or distort your perception through drugs or rituals..., and thus is just too sweet of an opportunity to pass up for making move snowballs and mechanically funnel the fiction into driving towards my GMing Agenda: Tear back the Illusion to reveal the True Reality behind it.

- it mirrors the thing that happens from Stability at its lowest levels, so I feel that neatly ties together the Madness and Death aspects of these two mechanical subsystems. 

I've been using this one in my games ever since, but am sad to have to report that it hasn't yet triggered in an actual game. Hmmm, could it be because I'm still being too nice to my players... Perhaps I should punish them even harder... Yes, that must be it!

Excuse me while I go cook up some new depravities and mutilations for them to suffer through.

Be back to you soon with the next update!

Alternate Stability Chart for one-shots

Have you ever ran a one-shot scenario, fierce and intense, intended to deliver a fast escalation of horrors and swiftly dovetail into some hard and cruel resolutions towards the end?

Have you ever, in such an endeavor, found the Stability chart of K:DL as written just, well... 

...a bit too slow?

Here is an alternate version I made, designed to cater to just that kind of situations:

 

Description:

Compared to the default variant, this chart obviously features fewer boxes, and you will notice it does not include any mention of Disadvantages. Instead it frontlines Keep it Together as the move that gets penalized earliest, and hardest.

In addition, there is a penalty to "all other rolls" - which is of course intended to be read with "...at the GM's discretion" attached at the end. Naturally, if you ever deign that any given roll should not be penalized under the present circumstance in the fiction, you may freely ignore this modifier in that case. 

Finally, this chart gives a bit of a bump to the Illusion-tearing properties of low mental stability, doubling the bonus to See Through the IIllusion when down to your last couple boxes. 

Design Notes:

The fewer boxes are there simply for a faster progression towards the player characters' madness. The original Stability chart strongly feels like it was designed primarily with longer-running campaigns and multi-session scenarios in mind. It excels at providing a slow burn, a steepening decrease which increasingly spirals out of control over some time. 

But in a one-shot (or two-parter), how many scares and horrors can you feasibly throw at your players? Taking into account that they'll succeed on some of those Keep it Together rolls, or get (10-14) results which cost them only 1 Stability (if that)... you will often never manage to really whittle them down in time for the session to wrap up and any meaningful breakdowns have happened. (Which would make for good resolution fodder / epilogue material, however, and so are seen as highly desired in this hacked version.)

The focus on Keep it Together over Disadvantages is due to the fact that many oneshots and shoter scenarios don't even use Disadvantages. Certainly many of the published and fanmade ones don't include them; thinking of Oakwood Heights, The Driver, Divided We Run...
The mechanics of Disadvantages (meaning Holds, mainly, but also the frequency with which their triggers are designed to be fulfilled in the fiction) are more suitable to longer gameplay as well. And they perform admirably in that setup, but can often be a bit redundant for shorter, quicker, and more focussed affairs.

Of course, penalizing Keep it Together rolls earlier, and harder throughout, also increases the speed with with more Stability is lost during the session. This is what we want, here. We want to see them break. And if we don't get there now, we'll never see it happen.

The penalty to "any other rolls" is there simply to give the GM a mechanical angle to represent the general strain of stress and terror on the human capability to perform risky and dangerous actions.
It can be used or waived as seen fit, and is phrased briskly enough to not take up a lot of space on the chart - while also general enough to give the players (who will of course see and read it on their sheets before their PC ever descends to those levels of Stability) a bit of a scary anticipation of madness to come.

Finally, the bonus to See Through the Illusion has been upped for basically the same reason as the frontlining of Keep it Together and the reduction in number of boxes - we want to see this sort of stuff happen, and we only got one shot to get there! Consider that even in a very fast and furious, crazy and chaotic, madness and mayhem filled session, you'll be lucky to get maybe one or two rolls for this, per player, roughly...

Additionally, the game's very GMing Agenda (corebook, p.145) tell us to:
Tear back the Illusion to reveal the True Reality behind it.
...and also to let the PCs' actions make an impact [...], which totally ties into this as well.

So that sounds like hopefully this variant Stability chart might be keeping things firmly in the spirit of that, helping us GMs of Kult: Divinity Lost to make our one-shot games even better than ever before!

In fact, now that I made this thing, I can't wait to try it out in one of my own games! 

I'll keep y'all posted on any new insights I may or may not derive from any such attempts, sooner or later. Game design is an ongoing adventure of trial, playtesting, and error, after all.
In the meantime, your opinions and experiences are always welcome - did you use similar things or ideas in your your own games? Found different workarounds or hacks to achieve similar intents? Does this look like something you could see yourself using in the future? Are there any painfully obvious weaknesses to its design? 

Hit me up here in the comments or over on Discord, always excited to discuss hacks and houserules of any kind!

Unofficial Homebrew Magic Playbooks

The Search for Truth and Our Own Inner Divinity is tightly tied to the practices of Magic.

There are Five Schools of Magic in the classic Kult fluff, and they conform to the "Five Pillars of Divinity" - Death, Passion, Madness, Dreams, and Time and Space.

The Kult: Divinity Lost corebook gives us The Death Magician, to portray members of perhaps the most iconic School of Magic.

However, the release of rules for the other Schools has been postponed to a future supplement, which will deal much more in-depth with all matters of Magic and Enlightenment.

In the meantime though, to tide you over, we have gotten busy over on Kult - Elysium and cooked up homebrew rules for the remaining four types of Magicians. Here they are:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1BJ8nsh0DKtavU_8J0b9ZiDR4gLAEDGLE

Please note that these are entirely unofficial, and purely fanmade content.

That said, they have been laid out and formatted by Lessavini, who also made the playbooks in my previous post here. More power to him, he's awesome!

I myself wrote the majority of the mechanics for these, and I based them firmly off of the template provided by The Death Magician. However, each of them has gotten an in-depth treatment as to their respective Dark Secrets, Dis/Advantages, Abilities, Looks, Relations, Gear, Fields of Expertise, and other details, so as to make sure they're all uniquely distinct from each other.

At the same time, I kept the Perform a Ritual move intact for all of them, and retained the idea of School-themed artifacts and aural powers in the Talisman and Dark Aura moves.

These rules have not been fully playtested, and thus might be subject to further revision at some point in the ungiven future.
(but, as of Feb 2020, the Magicians of Dreams and of Passion have seen actual play in a campaign - and worked without major hickups, I'm proud to report)

If you use these in a game, or have thoughts upon reading them: Please feel welcome to let me know in the comments! I'm always happy about feedback about them.

You can use them just like regular playbooks - print them, let the players have their choice, create characters with them, and get rolling on that darkly epic Enlightened-level campaign we all know you've been wanting to get into for a while!

What are you waiting for?

 
The Truth is Dark, and Full of Terrors!

Playbooks for All the Official K:DL Archetypes

Hi Kids, it's me - The Abomination.

Oh come on, don't act like that... I know you recognize me from when we met before!

That's much better. Today I bring you glad tidings. I want you to meet a couple good friends of mine.

Like this young lady:

Aaah. Nothing like a good, long, loving hug to soothe those frayed nerves, eh?

But there are more. So many more.

I know you've seen them before... But trust me, you ain't never seen them like this. 

No, not even him. He gets worse all the time. But there may yet be some hope left for him... or may there?
Fucked if I know, truth be told.

But today, even he is elated. He feels as presentable as never before, in fact.

Because he got a new playbook. They all got new playbooks!

You see, the Archetypes in Kult: Divinity Lost are essentially PbtA playbooks, right? But they never got the "true" playbook treatment by the authors of the new edition. They're just not presented in that format in the book. There is the Archetype Bundle, a separately sold product which comes close, but there were certain entities beyond the Veil who felt that, well, not quite close enough...

Long story short, this miscondition has now been rectified, in the name of my Mistress Malkuth. 
Soon May She Reveal To Us More Of Her Truths Splendid and Fearsome.

Ahem. Let me see... ah yes, I'm sure my next friend here has got a link for you:

Try this one:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1gTN8C2ENcJKNF57d8Hjxa9EePoT6tUPX?ths=true

You can find them all there, at your beck and call to Tear Back the Illusion, Reveal the True Reality Beyond, and Play to Find Out What Impact Your Characters Might Make on the World.

They were made by Vinicus Lessa, who also goes by Lessavini or Vini Lessa in various places. He's a cool guy, smooth and talented, much like this next fellow down here:

And just like him, he don't be doin' no half jobs!

He made them so that you can print them single-sided on four pages, or double-sided on two sheets of paper, and fold them up in that cool way that playbooks are supposed to be folded. It gives the players all they need to insta-make a character, and remains useful during play for making notes, tracking advancement, harm, Stability, etc.

The Kult - Elysium Discord community of course wouldn't pass up the chance to help him out (read: torment him exquisitely) by giving advice, opinions, and feedback. And we even came up with some suggested starting gear: flavorful items, trademark tools, and backstory-evoking trinkets that characters can have, or that can serve as inspiration for players to come up with their own. 

They're also rather printer friendly, except for those little bits of red... and the big pic on the first page of course. You could print just the first page in black and white, and the rest in colour - or just do all of them in b/w, they'll still work perfectly well for all your gaming needs. 

Helmgast themselves even endorsed this final product, and welcomed its existence by sharing it on their social media, which was a great source of joy to us! 

So go ahead, grab 'em all, bring 'em to your next Session 0... and go mess with the Dark Powers!

If you need any help in getting ready for that, I'm sure
my friend here can help you catch up on your basics.

Alternate Stability Track for K:DL

Slightly unhappy with the Stability Track as it is on the Kult: Divinity Lost character sheet, I decided to make a slightly modifed version that would suit my tastes better. I ended up making several versions, since I couldn't fully decide which one was the ultimate best. Here I offer them to you, for use in your own games if you will.

This one sticks the closest to the original layout, but if you compare them you can see that I added numbers (1-10) next to the Stability boxes, instead of the "psychological conditions" terms that each level of Stability originally has associated with it.

Those terms were one of my gripes with the Stab Track to begin with. Some of them, like Neurotic didn't seem to fit in there, while others, like Anxious seemed misplaced.

They also sometimes caused confusion for players, when they got the impression that they were expected to roleplay the specific condition that is given for their character's current level of Stability. 

"Uh, I've lost another 2 points there... do I have to become Distressed now? 

Does that even make sense for my character at this point in the game?"

And either way, I couldn't ever remember their order off the top of my head anyways - so I decided to throw those out and instead offer a collection of possible "states of mental desolation" for each of the Stress Brackets (Moderate, Serious, and Critical Stress, as well as Composed and Broken).

I came up with the new terms in collaboration with Kult - Elysium Discord user Victor the Villain, who conveniently has a background in clinical psychology, and helped me vet them for a sensible selection and placement.

The idea is that players are now offered a grab-bag of possible conditions to look to for inspiration, when wondering how to portray the current state of their character's emotional and psychological deterioration at any given point in the game.
You can circle or underline the one that seems most fitting at the moment, as a roleplaying reminder to yourself. But you can also change which one to act like from one scene to the next. Or if you lose another point of Stability but are still in the same bracket... Anything goes, as long as it works for everyone involved and helps improve your game at your table! 


* * *

Finally, while I was at it, I also fixed the number of boxes on that Track. Because the Broken condition should not be one of the 10 boxes (as the original has it), otherwise the math doesn't add up.
(If Composed is 10 and Distressed is 6, as the corebook tells us, then Broken isn't 0, it's 1... and that seemed definitely wrong to me.)

Here's another one I made, this one following a different approach to layout and presentation:

This one aims to present fiction before mechanics, which I find fitting for a PbtA game such as K:DL.

However, the layout still struck me as a bit blocky, so I made two more.

This one, which has them the most free-floating:

And this one, which appears to me as the ideal compromise:

I like this last one best, and will use it in my own games going forward. If you want to use one of them too, you're welcome to just copy-paste it from here onto the K:DL character sheet of your choice, print it a couple times and go see how your players do with it!

Please also feel free to let me know in the comments if you used it, which one your favorite version is, or if you have any suggestions for how to make them even better.  

We see the Truth only in fragmented glimpses, and the road to Divinity is a long one yet!