Kult (role-playing game)

The notion of an originally divine mankind being held captive by sinister forces is borrowed from gnosticism. The cosmological backdrop of Kult is largely based on the Tree of life, the Sephirot and the Qliphoth. It is balanced with the Demiurge and his Archons on one side and Astaroth and his Death Angels on the other. Each Archon or Death Angel represents a value, group or an action (aid organisations, child abuse, mafia, apathy, judicial systems, etc.) over which they have great influence. The Archons and Death Angels have various creatures and cults (thereby the name of the game) to do their bidding and promote their values. Many of these are our jailers who work to maintain the Illusion. Many of the adventures revolve around how these entities' conflicts affect the player characters and the world around them.

One of the more central elements of the game is that the Demiurge has disappeared since just before the 20th century, and since then Astaroth, the Archons and the Death Angels have been struggling for power. Many entities have vanished since, and the Illusion has been weakened. The game leaves a lot to the imagination of interpretive game masters regarding reasons for the Demiurge's disappearance as well as the earlier mentioned divinity of mankind.

The game concept relies on there being several realities that may appear when the Illusion shatters: Metropolis, the original city which interconnects with all great cities; Inferno and its purgatories, where humans are held captive and tortured after death; and Gaia, which connects to nature and nature's destructive forces. The Underworld where strange people from lost worlds lives in the depth close to infinity. Limbo, the Dream World where Dream Princes create their kingdoms and dream wanderers explore tattered dreams close to Vortex (a place of chaos and creation).

There are several different official rulesets for combat. The second and third English edition rules use a system based on Damage Effect Factors (DEF). The fourth edition, KULT: Divinity Lost, has less focus on combat than previous editions.

Kult's magic system is largely drawn on the same real-world occult belief systems as some modern magick societies. Sorcerers can cast spells from one (or rarely more) of five different Lores; Death, Dream, Madness, Passion and Time & Space. Because these spells have (very) long casting times (up to several days), highly specific and exacting verbal, material and somatic requirements, and can only be cast inside the sorcerer's consecrated temple, these spells are actually more like quasi-religious rituals.

Central to the game is the aspect of Mental Balance, which is a sanity-gauge of sorts. In the game's cosmology humans can - at least in theory - regain their lost divine status through a game concept called Awakening in which characters with an extremely high (or low, the game never values positive or moral traits higher than negative or immoral ones) mental balance are no longer restrained by the rules of the Illusion. Effectively, they escape the prison and become gods.

The closer to equilibrium the character is, the more he is anchored in everyday human reality and the harder it is for the character to see through the veil of The Illusion to the true reality beneath. On the other hand, this protects him from becoming traumatized or insane. The further from this balance point (zero) the character's Mental Balance gets, the more easily he or she will become emotionally and mentally unbalanced by shocking events. A Kult character can have positive or negative mental balance affected by trauma, influence from creatures or places, or by advantages and disadvantages. The advantages and disadvantages are typically talents and traits that work for or against the character, such as (on the positive side) having animal friendship, artistic talent, body awareness, a code of honor, or (from the negative spectrum) being socially inept, suffering from a drug addiction, sex addiction, paranoia, mystic curse or similar.

Both an unusually high or unusually low (+25/-25) Mental Balance will affect how normal people and animals react to the character in question. The further the character strays away from the zero point, the more sociopathic, strange or eccentric he becomes, as he sheds his human quirks and viewpoints and becomes more inhuman. Characters with a very high or very low Mental Balance will start to involuntarily manifest outward physical signs of their ascent or descent; they become either detached saints or Children of the Night. If Mental Balance ever reaches +500/-500, the character Awakens and regains their true potential.

In the fourth edition of Kult the Mental Balance system has been removed, the reason made by the developers is that even if it is interesting it was practically impossible to use other than as a concept.[7] instead you transcend between different types of Archetypes: The Sleeper, The Aware, The Enlightened that moves you towards Awakening.

Currently, Kult is licensed by Helmgast.[8]

A 2016 Kickstarter campaign funded a new edition of the game, entitled 'Kult: Divinity Lost'.[9] This edition uses a different rules engine than previous editions, one based on Apocalypse World and its Powered by the Apocalypse rules engine. It updates the setting to answer the question “What would Kult had been like if it was released in 2016 instead of 1991?”[10] The game was released in 2018.

In 2017 Free League published Anders Fager's novel "För Gudinnan" (for the love of goddess) set in the Kult universe. Fager has also written an audiolouge called "Faraday"[11] set in the Kult adventure Tarroticum.