Your body, a prison. Your mind, a trap. Your world, a tool of torture...
KULT was written by Gunilla Jonsson and Michael Petersen and was first published by Target Games in Sweden in 1991, then by Metropolis in 1993 in the US. KULT is now published by 7th Circle in its 2002 3rd edition.
KULT defines the RPG horror genre. Taken alone, this is both its strength and weakness. The first edition of the game was surrounded by controversy and resulted in sensationalist headlines and a ban in the game's origin country of Sweden. The adult content and themes (insanity, serial killings, rape, incest, Satanism, torture, lies) as well as the magic system and cosmology provoked Christian reactionaries and conservatives, and provided excuses for disenchanted and alienated youths. KULT deserves its reputation as a taboo challenging game, but suffers from the usual problems RPGs do. So much of the rules are devoted to combat, guns, cool equipment. Every character is an crazed ex-veteran, a cool secret agent, a femme fatal, a guilty ronin. Archetypes, skill-lists and the usual pit- falls of character generation blunt the players imagination from the outset. As an RPG KULT suffers from the same conventions, the same habits. But this suffering is not only inflicted by game designers, but players. Well equipped but mindless pseudo-personalities will shoot & drop-kick their way through many a blood and guts linear plot.
But enough complaining. Rules can be dropped, and so can dice-loving, statistic loving, Procrustean players. KULT is an RPG, but it can also be an artwork, an interactive novel and a philosophical game. The cosmology of KULT, perhaps one of the best on the market, and certainly the games major success, is complex, intricate and Gnostic. The characters in a KULT story-game may slowly learn that they are more than they seem, more than flesh and blood. Old religions contain embers of truth, the world and the afterlife are clever prisons designed and arranged to keep humanity ignorant of its true potential. But there are more, and worse truths. The prison, filled with traps and mazes itself, seems to be falling apart. When the ignorant children of humanity step out through the cracks in the walls they find that the Jailors seem to be missing and the prison's Architect and Creator seems to have left it all in disrepair. Or perhaps the Creator is dead, killed? Or a suicide? Perhaps He was driven insane. Or was always insane. Perhaps He is under siege, other forces working against him. Or... or...? Or perhaps it is just another cruel trick. And just what is humanity's potential? How were we enslaved? And how can we be freed?
The creeping atmospheres of H P Lovecraft's careless universe can be married to the shock and torn flesh of Clive Barker's nightmares. Horror can be something explored in the bad dreams and lives of thought- provoking and subtle characterisations. Ordinary people and gifted people go about their lives. The players in the game create these characters, and these characters live in a world just like ours. Then one day, strange things happen, what seems fundamental and ordinary becomes questioned. Slowly, these people find themselves caught in strange passions, victims of brutalisation, witnesses of death, damaged by fear. How they react to the whispers, the blood or the shining visions depends on who they are, what they want, how they love and hate. Then, if they avoid jail or hospital , they go beyond passions, beyond sanity, beyond death.
Your life, a lie. Your death, eternal pain.
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