Kult Musings 2025 – Part 1

The following is a deposition drawn from many days of working with Kult. It mostly deals with things that I don’t like about the game. There are good things about Kult as well, but, mostly, I think these things can be found in other games that don’t share Kult’s mechanical and stylistic problems. Also, I think that superlative reviews are easy to find elsewhere. (In fact, as far as reviews of TTRPGs go, they are almost inescapable.) Anyway, this isn’t a review. It’s just a personal reflection.

Where to begin with Kult? I feel like I’ve been having a toxic hate sex relationship with it for sometime now, and I’m not really sure how to express all of my gross icky feelings. Here’s something cogent from the notes I took while prepping and running the game: “Kult—a game for people who are too dumb to understand the concept of symbolism.”

See, but that’s harsh, and part of what bums me out about Kult is how it brings out the worst in me. Maybe that’s the point? After all the game’s designers like to prop up Ayn Rand-style assholery such as “Our families, our friends, our place in society, and our roles in the community are like cement around our feet, dragging us down to the ocean floor. We’re instilled with the false conception of being responsible for each other, that we belong together in the prison created for us. Those who realise this is untrue break free. Those who wish to awake cut their ties with a vengeance, whether that is by no longer returning phone calls or actively destroying the ones they love. This deed in  itself encourages the Illusion to crumble.”

For what it’s worth, when I read the above I realized how cool I was, (cooler than all of you people, obviously,) and leapt into action. But it wasn’t much of a leap, because I couldn’t decide whether to ignore calls, (I do let things go to voicemail a lot, it is true,) or to destroy my loved ones. Trapped on the horns of a dilemma, coward that I am, I decided to just stick with the Illusion and run a Kult campaign instead.

On Friday, March 28, my home group concluded a mini-campaign of Kult. The game ran for eight sessions, plus a session 0, and was set in the Detroit area in February of 1977. The setting was home brewed, in part, from my own childhood. I was born in 1969 in Flint Michigan, and spent the first 18 years of my life there, before heading off to the University of Michigan in nearby Ann Arbor, and then eventually making my way to Chicago. My memories of southeastern Michigan in the 1970s have lingered. It is a place and time for which I feel a great nostalgia, but, more than that, I feel it all imprinted itself on me to such a degree that I experience very basic things through a filter of Flint in the 1970s/1980s. Flint informs my dreams and my nightmares, and so, I suppose, it was inevitable that I would eventually use it as the setting for a larger story.

I have taken stabs at capturing Flint in short stories—even in a feature length student film—but the idea of using it for a TTRPG occurred to me only about 6 years ago. Actually, it occurred to my players, in Chicago, when I gave them the option of picking a setting for a more comedic game. (To the players of that game, I say once again: ha ha…very funny…) It was fun, but we didn’t get especially deep into the setting. It wasn’t until more recently that I started to think about using Flint as the location of a deeper game.

I decided that the game would last for a limited number of sessions, while leaving the door open to a second arc, set in the 1980s, that I might run sometime in the future. I outlined the setting and themes that I wanted to get into, and then formally pitched the concept to my players. I sent along a playlist and a list of suggested media. Everyone confirmed that they were up for the game, which ran mostly weekly, with a couple of breaks.

Here are some excerpts from general notes I took while running the campaign:

“On the rules: Just a bloated, overly descriptive list of bad faith GM Moves.

On the lore: Mostly shallow. It’s an art book that bamboozles the impressionable. Filled with tedious ‘edginess.’

Players seem to love it.”

And doesn’t that last part just figure? I don’t mean to say anything bad about my players. They threw themselves into the game, making it much more than the sum of its parts. What I was commenting on was the ever-looming discrepancy between GM and player experiences of a traditional TTRPG. Still, whenever I was working privately on the game, I would grow impatient with its rules and esthetics, while still feeling that I had to hold onto them at least long enough to finish the mini-campaign. I found myself resenting the whole endeavor, while, at the same time, really enjoying and admiring the story we were telling as a group.

More in Part 2…