Posts tagged Kult

7 of My Most Successful Campaigns (part two)

RPG Campaigns RPG Life February 1, 2026

And here’s the rest of the list of the seven most successful campaigns I have run…you can find part one here.

The Final Revelation (Trail of Cthulhu) – 2020

The pitch: In 1930s London, a group of strangers are drawn together by shared, ominous experiences. They form a group to try to understand a pattern that soon reveals itself to by a threat to the nature of humanity. This frame leads to a series of interlinked scenarios. Spoilers: the world ends when the story does.
Context: Another pandemic favorite. The otherworldly cosmic horror made for a fine, distanced counterpoint to the realities of 2020—probably drawn from equal parts escapism and catharsis.
The verdict: As investigative games go, Trail of Cthulhu is hard to beat, and the vision of both Graham Walmsley and Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan gave me a really compelling and disturbing game world to share with my players. Given the horror anthology setup, each player juggled 5 total PCs! What a weird, awesome experience.

Masks – 2022-2024

The pitch: PCs are teenaged heroes in historically super-powered Halcyon City. They struggle against evil, their own emotions, and the expectations of an older generation of super-heroes. Meanwhile, their various foes plot and scheme for world domination. Will they be able to rise above it all and save the world?
Context: I ran this game longer than any other. (Maybe longer than games in the past as well—it’s hard to remember.) Admittedly, there were two lengthy breaks, but all 5 players stayed in the game until the very end.
The verdict: This game was really one for the ages. It was mostly improvised, and as the story spun out, we wound up with a very large cast, and an epically drawn world. We wielded comic book tropes left and right—sometimes in a satirical way, but more often in a straightforwardly earnest way. It was a very emotional game with epic battles, as well as intense teenaged angst and romance.

CyBorg – 2023-2024

The pitch: Cy is a nightmarish corporate hellscape, whose citizens are all jacked in and constantly bombarded by advertisements and/or propaganda. The PCs travel into realities both virtual and concrete, taking on jobs for however many creds are offered. Everyone has debts to pay and bullets to spare as their desperation drives them ever deeper into danger and dystopian conspiracies.
Context: Potato Falls for the post-pandemic era—another very successful pickup game for our public group. As you might expect, it was a little grittier, but, as before, the game brought in new players and gave existing players something to look forward to.
The Verdict: This game was enormously fun. The many battles were explosively comedic. The weird locales and set pieces stood out against a sea of neon sludge. The pathologies of the various PCs were as difficult to fathom as they are to forget. And once again, the world ended when the story did. (Or did it? End simulation.)

The Detroit Campaign (Kult) – 2025

The pitch: In Detroit, in 1977, 5 strangers are drawn together by a shared nightmare. Gradually they discover a dark secret: that the American automobile industry was actually a decades long ritual that has allowed Hell to manifest in southeastern Michigan.
Context: I am from Flint, Michigan, and this was sort of a perverse tribute to my childhood home. It was also a chance to try a Powered by the Apocalypse horror game in a non-Cthulhu setting.
The verdict: We went really deep with this one, embracing the occult, transgressive sexuality at the heart of Kult. We also made room for Detroit style rock n’ roll, cameo appearances by the evil Henry Ford, and one of the most memorable PCs I’ve encountered—a Flint, Michigan empty-nester housewife, who sort of grew her own sub-mythos.

The Port of the West Wind (Hearts of Wulin) – 2025

The pitch: In a fantastic version of ancient China, the Port of the West Wind is a small and prosperous city, surrounded by magic and spirits. When a strange curse spreads across the land, the dead rise as puppets for demonic forces. The PCs are formidable warriors who go in search of the cause of these dark events.
Context: I ran this game in tandem with Kult, and, despite the demons, and the groundings of both rulesets in Powered by the Apocalypse mechanics, the moods involved were very different. It was very fun shifting my perspective as I moved back and forth between these games.
The verdict: Hearts of Wulin is just an amazing game. There are other systems if you want to bring wuxia storytelling to your table, but this one really sings, especially if you want to know about the inner lives of the characters. The group of players was awesome and really good about absorbing the somewhat eccentric—but effective—rules for combat, and each one of them brought a strong character to the table, all ready to undergo physical and emotional strife.

Kult Musings – Part 2

RPG Campaigns RPG Life August 8, 2025

I should mention that, while I have GMed Kult several times, I’ve always been ambivalent about the system. Generally, I love games that are Powered by the Apocalypse and run them quite often. I think I’m pretty good at separating good hacks from bad ones, and, well, Kult isn’t pretty, mechanically. Among other issues, it suffers from a flaw that is common to PbtA knockoffs—the designers don’t seem to have given much thought to really exploiting what a PbtA setup can do for the kinds of stories that they want to tell. You won’t find anything as interesting or well-suited as the mechanics for Influence in Masks or for Momentum in World Wide Wrestling, and there are no Moves here that are as clever as those found in Pasión de las Pasiones or The Warren. Kult stays safe, with only the most basic rules for combat, diplomacy, psychological stress, etc. The only basic Move that really feels like Kult is nothing new—See through the Illusion—and in practice, it often seems redundant, considering the fact that after a few sessions from most Kult campaigns, the GM may be cutting through whole swaths of the Illusion. (Obviously, you’re mileage may vary, depending on the story and the style of GMing involved. On a related note, I think that I should have made the PCs start with Aware archetypes, rather than Sleepers, but I’m not sure how much of a difference it would have made to the pacing.)

I suppose there’s one other place where the game does do something with PBtA rules that is sort of individuated: Advantages and Disadvantages. Akin to what other PbtA games might designate as Playbook Moves, Advantages vary wildly in scale and usefulness. They’re OK. Disadvantages mostly amount to inducements to extra GM Moves. (The worst one might be the nadir of the entire game—the consent-breaking “Sexual Neurosis.” I can’t imagine ever allowing it in a game that I would run.) I have no idea who wants dice rolls to prescribe this stuff—but it makes a pretty good case for all those people who say that PbtA places too much control on what a GM can do and when. Under normal circumstances, I’d say that they just don’t get it, but when I look at Kult’s Disadvantages, I’m really not sure.

In truth, the real problem with Disadvantages that I discovered was that they push you to do too much. If you followed them strictly, I think it would lead the game to feel like a never-ending river of melodrama, with one PC’s stalker showing up, just as another’s demonic curse spikes. If you GM it by the rules, you may find that you have little room for the story ideas that you do like, because you’re always hurrying to spend Hold on ideas that you don’t like.

I would almost go so far as to say that Kult shouldn’t be PbtA at all. The only open acknowledgement of the game engine is buried on the bottom of p. 369 of the rulebook. (Predictably, it makes no mention whatsoever of Meguey Baker, though I have to acknowledge that, however egregious that omission may be, it is not unique to Kult.) What’s more, Kult’s designers have shifted the dice involved from d6s to d10s, skewing stats and bonuses into atypical arrangements. In Kult, rolling dice is like playing power ballads on a ukulele: you can do it, but the results don’t feel appropriate.

Regardless, gameplay is generally so straightforwardly task-oriented that you might do just as well with a solid d20 or d100 system. I know: Kult doesn’t want to be D&D or (especially?) Call of Cthulhu. It doesn’t even want to be Vampire: The Masquerade, however familiar the goth-BDSM trappings may seem. It wants to share its own vision. Unfortunately, this vision is muddled, at best.

At worst, it’s just unpleasant—and maybe it says something about my taste in horror that I’m not really into reflexive cynicism and bad Beat-influenced flavor text—for example, the way in which the first person plural musings of Kult—wherein “we/us/our” seem to refer to humanity in general. The trouble is: “we/etc.” also seems to refer to a bunch of rich assholes, who are hustling past some creepy, possibly unhoused guy ignoring the prophecies he calls out while we stare at pornography on our cell phones. I’m uncertain of demographics, but, in terms of point-of-view, I think something may be askew here.

I would look up more examples to quote from the core rulebook, but the truth is that I had to psyche myself up to look at the book every single week when I was running the campaign, and I’m not sure I’m ready to face it again. I might trigger some horrible break within myself. To be clear, any reheated trauma would have very little to do with the art found in the rulebook. It features sexual images that are suggestive enough that you have to verify your age to view it on Drivethru RPG. Still, if you have an iota of imagination, you probably won’t be too shocked by Kult’s visuals, especially if you’ve seen Hellraiser recently. It’s strictly BDSM for prudes and cosplayers.

Anyway, I did my time with the rulebook. Every week, when it came time to prep my game, there I would be: wincing as I walked over to pick up this bloated, battered “rulebook,” with a bland-out image of a chained angel on its cover (dark, “urban fantasy” skyscrapers in the background, naturally). Once more, beyond the Illusion…The game was good, the players were better.

Closing thoughts: a warning about Gnosticism…by virtue of its preoccupation with the idea of the illusory nature of our world, and given its terminology, (archons, demiurge, etc.,) Kult is, evidently, a little bit Gnostic. When I was in college, I took a course called “Medieval Sources of Modern Culture.” In it, we read excerpts from early Christian and Christian-adjacent stuff that included bits of Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, etc. The teacher’s written evaluation of me mentioned how my comments were “rare, but germane” and how I was often asleep during class. (What do you want? I had a 40 credit hour course load, as well as a part time job.) So maybe it’s understandable that I remember next to nothing about Gnosticism, but the good news is that about 75% of my players are Gnostic scholars, apparently. I have learned from them that it’s sort of like “if Christianity were cool.” Apparently Kult is “Gnostic,” so if you’re looking to GM your own campaign, may I recommend appropriate glossings of wikipedia. Don’t admit to knowing nothing about Gnosticism, or you’ll never hear the end of it from your players!

And if you’re running a Kult one-shot, just don’t worry about it at all. Nobody seems to notice.

Good luck, and may the Demiurge help us all!

Kult Musings 2025 – Part 1

RPG Campaigns RPG Life Uncategorized July 26, 2025 1 Comment

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.