"Banned In Sweden!"

​My 2025 resolution is to play a bunch of those RPGs of my youth that shamefully gather dust on my shelves. It​ has delivered a great Pendragon campaign and thoroughly enjoyable Bushido games. Now it’s time to tackle somethin​g difficult. Something dark. Let’s play Kult.

​Yes, Kult. A game so shocking they banned it in Sweden. Well, no they didn’t, but there was certainly a moral panic about it in the Nineties, similar to the US ‘Satanic Panic’ about D&D in the ‘80s. With its graphic themes of death and madness and anti-religious imagery, Kult was an incongruous product in Swedish toy shops (where RPGs were sold, Scandinavia lacking specialist hobby shops at that time). It was cited in a 1997 motion in the Swedish Parliament, which sought to cut public funding for youth groups involved in RPGs, referencing the Bjuv murder, where two teens allegedly influenced by Kult killed a friend. Critics linked Kult to further tragedies, including a teenage suicide and a missing persons case, and the book De Övergivnas Armé warned that RPGs like Kult preyed on neglected children. Kult became a symbol of anxiety about youth, violence, and occult subcultures.

The Ominous Allure

​Ed Grabianowski describes Kult as ‘the most controversial RPG ever made’ in his 2013 Gizmodo review. " 'It's banned in Sweden,' is pretty much the best possible sales pitch you can make to a couple of 14-year-old boys,” he says, reminiscing about shopping for the game in his youth. “Kult was never a big success in North America, it still holds that strange frisson of ominous allure."

As it did for me, when it blew my mind back in my Twenties. It was a game that seemed too problematic to play. I stuck to World of Darkness roleplaying, with its safety rails of consent and high-mindedness.

​Kult was created by Gunilla Jonsson and Michael Petersen in 1991 and first published in Sweden and France by Target Games. It was later translated into English and released in 1993–1994 by Metropolis Ltd - a company created by Terry Amthor of Iron Crown Enterprises with the sole aim of making Kult more widely loved. Unfortunately, the game’s sheer unremitting bleakness and its unsettling treatment of themes like rape and child sexual abuse kept mainstream gamers at bay. But it developed a … ahem… kult following, despite its high ‘ick’ quotient and somewhat boilerplate rules.

The gory and blasphemous 1st edition and the ... errr ... different aesthetic for the 2nd edition, which was in fact (and to everyone's relief) just as gory and blasphemous.

​More recently, there’s been a deluxe crowdfunded reinterpretation titled Kult: Divinity Lost, but that’s not what I’m talking about. No, I’m going back to the 1st edition, the one with the tortured angel on the front and blood-spattered imagery all over the pages. The version that caused all the trouble.

​Beau​tiful, right? But - and maybe this is just me - ever so slightly less gory and blasphemous than it could have been?

​​Kult is a modern-day cosmic horror RPG, with a particular focus on gritty urban settings and psychologically-troubled anti-heroes. Like Call of Cthulhu, it positions PCs as people who stumble into the horror of a wider supernatural reality populated by lunatic cults, alien gods, and portals to other dimensions. But rather than homaging Lovecraft, Kult takes its aesthetic from antinomian Christian heresies, Gnosticism, Kabbalah, and Clive Barker’s Books ​of Blood.

Hellraiser (1997), based on Barker's stories and a big influence on Kult

What's The Verdict?

​​Derek Guder has a great review of Kult on RPGNet and I can’t improve on his summary of the deep lore in Kult, so I’ll reprint it here: 

"T​he reality behind the game is that God is out to get you. Not test you to see if you are worthy or punish you for the sins you committed in a life you can’t remember, just simply out to get you. You personally. He (the Demiurge) created the world as we know it (the Illusion) to serve as a prison for humanity, supposedly afraid of the divine nature within each of us. Trapping mankind for all eternity as they continue to chug through a constant cycle of life, death, suffering in Hell until they don’t remember anything anymore and finally reincarnation. Hell isn’t a punishment for the sinful, it’s a metaphysical dishwasher set to burn the memories of your life right out of you." ​

​In Call of Cthulh​u, sanity is a resource that you lose as you penetrate the secret truths of the Mythos, especially when you encounter monsters or cast spells. In Kult, you have Mental Balance, which is zero for an ordinary person, but can swing into high or low (negative) scores. Both types of extreme Mental Balance are ‘crazy’ by ordinary standards, but Kult encourages you to lean into the crazy: as your Mental Balance veers to the extreme, you get more powerful, not less, eventually transcending humanity and awakening to your true divinity. The Light and Dark Roads (of high or low Mental Balance) both involve turning yourself into something that is, by ordinary standards, deeply abnormal, possibly monstrous.

Such a game demands maturity from players and GMs and considerable trust. The setting puts PCs through the mill and, if handled badly, the game itself can become sadistic or crass, with themes of torture, abuse, and sexual degradation played for kicks, or else instrumentally, as a crass way of minimaxing.
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On the other hand, if done right, the game’s weird aesthetic invites some profound roleplaying, tackling head on the big themes of religion, mental illness, free will, and existentialism. Its demented Judeo-Christian lore is also more frightening – because it is more personal – than the aimless octopoid menaces of Lovecraftian horror.

How Does It Work?

In the 1st edition, you have 8 Abilities similar to the ‘Big Six’ of D&D, but adding Comeliness and Perception, and substituting Education and Ego for Intelligence and Wisdom. You can roll them on 2d20 or assign 100 points between them.

You also have 150 points to distribute between Skills, each on a 20-point scale – although ‘Basic Skills’ start at 3 rather than 1 and it costs extra points to raise a Skill higher than its governing Ability. For example, if a knowledge skill is governed by EDU, then it costs extra points to raise that knowledge higher than your score in Education.

As with most '80s games (and despite its commitment to lore and richly-conceived characters, Kult is an '80s game at heart), there are far too many skills. Compare and contrast Vampire: the Masquerade (also a product of 1991) which condensed skills to sets of broad aptitudes. Kult would have benefited from a similar radicalism.
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The main mechanic is a d20 roll, looking to roll equal to or less than your Skill or Ability: 1s are crits (1s or 2s if your score is 15+) and 20s are fumbles (19 or 20 if your score is 4 or less). How much you roll under what you needed to is your ‘Effect’ that determines degree of success – except in combat where you determine ‘Effect’ by rolling on a table for that weapon type and applying modifiers based on Damage Bonus and Armour. It’s simple enough.

The main thing about your new PC, however, is not her Skills but her Advantages and Disadvantages, perhaps especially the Disadvantages. You can choose as many of these as you like and tot up their point values. If the Disadvantages have a higher total, your Mental Balance is negative, but you get extra Skill Points; if Advantages add up to more, you are blessed with a positive Mental Balance but fewer Skill Points. Anyone with a negative Mental Balance has to choose a Dark Secret, so character creation involves producing, not wide-eyed ingenues, but scarred and possibly corrupted veterans, already knee-deep in personal horror, and that’s all before the awful Razides come a-calling.

In a nutshell, high Mental Balance characters will be a bit less competent, but more psychologically resilient. Low Mental Balance characters will have lots more abilities, but struggle under the burden of more flaws and react worse to horror (if you fail your EGO throw against something awful, one of your Disadvantages takes over).

​​Kult gives a bunch of colourful ‘Archetypes’ to guide you in the game's style: they seem to draw heavily on '80s action movies. Like many ‘80s and ‘90s games that supposedly eschew violence in favour of tone and storytelling, we are treated to a huge arsenal of guns, detailed rules for poisons and explosions, and complicated mechanics for kick-ass martial arts. Let’s be clear: n​one of these things will do you any good

Let’s look at the stat block for a Razide, the game’s signature demonic adversary: imagine an alien xenomorph converted into one of Hellraiser’s Cenobites, with a lot of steampunk prosthesis bolted on for good measure. They have an Initiative Bonus of +19, you (a human) might have +3 or +4 if you have one at all – so they will go first in combat. They have melee skills of 40, so they crit on a 1-5 and cannot miss, except on a double-20 (and even then they won’t fumble). With a +11 damage bonus, they deal fatal wounds on a d20 result of 12+. Oh, and they get 5 attacks per round. For scale, understand that you probably get 1, maybe 2 or 3 actions at most. Even if you somehow manage to land a good blow, it takes 3 fatal wounds to kill one. Nobody’s kung fu is that strong. Heck, nobody's assault rifle is that strong.
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You have to wonder why the designers even bothered statting these entities, but I suppose there are spells to summon and bind such monsters: perhaps powerful PCs might make them fight each other ?

Is  There A Problem With The Kult-i-verse?

​All of this points to the fundamental problem with Kult, which becomes very clear in the published scenarios: the players are, by necessity, passive - they just can't accomplish much in the face of such perils - so scenarios have to be linear and railroading.

Think of Call of Cthulhu’s famous ‘onion skin’ approach to scenario construction. For most of the scenario, the PCs are researching. Perhaps they do a bit of interrogating or breaking-and-entering, maybe they rough-house with some goons. This is all well within the parameters of PC skills. At the end of the scenario, you meet Deep Ones or Mi-Go or Star Vampires or Shoggoths. These things can kill you out of hand, but by then you’ve gotten hold of an Elder Sign or a Spell, or just enough dynamite to seal that well shaft forever. If the PCs have failed their research, they will go up against the Big Bad armed with only their stats and guns. Puny humans will die. But serves them right: there was always another way.

Kult is much less coy than Call of Cthulhu. Its horrors don’t wait offstage for their third act cue. The beasties of Kult aren’t sealed away or waiting for the stars to be right. They are here among us, or just on the other side of the Illusion, and they’re not going to wait until the third act to start causing trouble. Moreover, there are no Elder Signs to wave in their faces. If PCs are to use Spells, they need to choose these Advantages and Skills at character creation and starting PCs will never be able to cast the demanding Binding Spells.

Kult’s solution seems to be to introduce PCs to powerful NPCs who can keep them safe then railroad them through a linear plot that introduces them to the horrors of the Kult-i-verse: not much player agency going on, because of course if the players make choices then there’s every chance they will make suboptimal ones and that will kill their characters.

Let's Talk Taroticum

Time to look at the scenario I'm going to be running: The Taroticum (1994). The adventure comes direct from the pens of Kult designers Gunilla Jonsson and Michael Petersén. They have described Taroticum as their favourite Kult adventure, believing it best embodies the game’s core spirit of metaphysical horror and personal awakening, so it’s a valuable insight into how the designers themselves think the game should be played.

Taroticum has also been adapted for the new Kult: Divinity Lost, but, other than re-naming the main villain, I believe the new shares many of the features of the original (above)

​The story begins in 1894, as a sinister conjurer in London summons the Goddess of the Forgotten, keeper of the Taroticum—a deck of cards representing the hidden forces governing reality. When the ritual goes awry, the Taroticum fuses with London’s spiritual fabric, subtly reshaping lives and places across the city. A century later, in 1994, the player characters uncover their spiritual link to those past events—and undertake a desperate mission to bring into existence the only being who might shatter the occult framework that now binds their destinies.
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Great stuff. Unfortunately, the scenario (or rather, mini-campaign) was widely decried for railroading PCs to a shameless degree. The excellent Reflections & Refereeing blog sums up the critical consensus:

​"There’s a couple of bits where players might choose to prioritise one set of tasks above another, but ultimately the adventure expects the players to accomplish all the tasks it sets them in the way it anticipates them to do it, and it gives almost no consideration to what happens if the players decide to take a different route. To a large extent it’s an exercise in witnessing weird metaphysical happenings which you may or may not understand, and to invoke a cliche that is sorely deserved at this point it would work much better as a movie or a novel than as an interactive entertainment. "

Yeah, I can't disagree. The Taroticum does read like a movie treatment  or the outline for a (brilliant!) graphic novel.

​The blog continues:

"​It’s also really badly designed even if you want a hyper-linear railroad. The adventure kicks off with a prelude section taking place in 1894, where the players get to play their past incarnations who turn out to have been complicit in kicking off the action of the adventure. However, to successfully bring this portion of the adventure to a close the PCs have to undertake a very specific series of tasks which they could quite conceivably fail to think of, or actually botch; this is demanded by the metaphysical axioms the adventure works on. Consequently, as written it is decidedly possible for the campaign to be utterly derailed before the players even get to play their main PCs." -- Arthur

​Here's where I think this criticism is overstated. The PCs in the Prelude are pregenerated characters and the behaviours attributed to them in the scenario are pretty plausible. Even if you have players who are particularly dense or who subscribe to the “it’s-what-my-character-would-do” school of RPG perversity, the significant NPCs can bring about the Prelude’s denouement and, for the rest of the scenario, the PCs can be assumed to be the reincarnation of those characters. Some dramatic unity is lost, but nothing is derailed.

​Over on the r/Kult Reddit, there’s a great thread on ‘Taroticum Reshuffled’ which tries to redress the linear plotting.

​"... the Taroticum is a complete mcguffin with no actual bearing on the plot, I hate this. As written it could be literally anything, a magic wand, talisman or a tea set, it being a deck of cards never comes into play as it can seemingly do whatever the user wants it to do if they know how to manipulate it in the correct way, so let's change that ...” -- Responsible-Catch903

Kult: Divinity Lost has produced an actual Tarotica deck, only described back in 1994. Eerie!

​Redditor Responsible-Catch903 suggests adapting the scenario so that the PCs are tracking down the Taroticum cards across London, gaining powers and fulfilling destinies by so doing. That’s a pretty ambitious re-write, effectively treating The Taroticum as a setting guide. He goes on to break the story down rather brilliantly to illustrate his ideas.

I find The Taroticum a puzzling product in other ways.

Each of the Taroticum’s 7 chapters ends with stat blocks of the main NPCs, but, as we’ve seen, the supernatural antagonists are so powerful that stat blocks read like a cruel joke, or perhaps a type of modernist poem on existential dread.

Moreover, none of Kult's rule mechanics is referred to anywhere. There are no suggestions for when you should make EGO rolls, or for the  Terror modifiers when you do. The PCs will experience physical and spiritual transformations, but none of this is interpreted in terms of Mental Balance. The PCs might be minor sorcerers themselves, but no consideration is given to what might happen if they try to use spells to resolve situations.

Given that this is the Kult’s actual designers composing this, one can only assume that, despite the rulebook’s plethora of rules for guns, bombs, and spells, Jonsson and Petersén far prefer theatre of the mind and don’t really intend for all those rules to be used anyway.

Now, run as theatre of the mind, Taroticum could be a vivid exercise in storytelling. Nonetheless, I’m looking to introduce my players to Kult as a set of rules as well as a storytelling setting, and I want to provide a ‘sandbox’ experience where the players have genuine choices about where to go and what to do in the wider metaphysical world of Kult.

The Kult 1e rulebook gives quite a few locations and NPCs in London, and these sourcebooks offer more.

I want PCs to have the option of visiting Metropolis, recruiting Dream Princes, descending into Ktonor, and encountering the other London-based allies and antagonists described in 1st ed. Kult and its supplements, like the Lorelai, the Gelochelis, and Dr Lazarus.

To that end, I’m writing an expansive ‘Taroticum Unbound’ modular guide to the scenario. More on that in the next blog, after I’ve playtested. Stay tuned!