The last blog described how I was reintroduced to the 1990s horror RPG Kult, leading to obsessions with expanding the Taroticum scenario into a complete campaign - which in turn inspired me to create a new horror RPG to use with it: The Occult Hack. After that, I wanted to produce a new scenario to introduce the game - and ended up resurrecting The Damnation Chain from 1994.

The Damnation Chain was a scenario for Kult 1ed that I wrote for Valkyrie, a UK hobby magazine from the 1990s. It was published in issues 1 and 2, in September and October 1994. The illustrations were by Wayne 'Chig' Chisnall.

Valkyrie was sold through retailers - you could buy it in W H Smiths! - between 1994 and 1998. It took up the mantle of being the UK's independent RPG/gaming magazine, after Adventurer, G.M., and its competitor Arcane, all passed away.

Nowadays, magazines full of RPG-related reviews, scenarios, and house rules, have been utterly superseded by the Internet, for better or worse. But back in the 1990s there was still a market - and a cultural yearning! - for this among rpgers. Getting your scenario published in a magazine like Valkyrie was a Big Deal for me in my mid-Twenties. I still get a thrill of excitement looking at it.

I'm a bit puzzled about how I came to write it.

I must have submitted the scenario to Valkyrie's predecessor-magazine, Role Player Independent (RPI, also edited by the redoubtable Dave Renton). Some of Chig's illustrations bear the date '1993'. Since the English-language version of Kult was published by Metropolis Games in 1992, I must have been an early adopter.

It's easy to understand why. Kult 1ed can't compete with the new Divinity Lost rules for sumptuous art and high quality production, but it makes a little go a long way, with its pages spattered in blood-red designs, its murky two-colour art by Nils Gullikson, and that cover art by Peter Andrew Jones. 

What's harder to understand is how. In the '90s I was living in Berwick-upon-Tweed in Northumberland. Now if there is a bright star in the constellation of UK roleplaying games, Berwick-upon-Tweed is the point furthest from it. I can only imagine I came across Kult while visiting a hobby shop in Edinburgh.

I wasn't running Kult games. The only roleplaying I was doing in 1993 was Vampire: the Masquerade - along with everyone else in the Western Hemisphere. I wasn't even a big fan of horror literature or movies. I hadn't read any Clive Barker. I saw Hellraiser II on late night TV (but not the original Hellraiser, so you can imagine how confusing that would have been). Why did I set myself the task of writing a Kult scenario? 

I can only suppose it was the imaginative power of Kult itself, of its bleak and nihilistic themes, of its horrifying vignettes, and perhaps the melancholy face of actor Doug Bradley, who invested Pinhead with such haunting depth.

The Damnation Chain is a homage to Hellraiser, no doubt about that. In place of the Lament Configuration puzzle box, there's a candle that opens a portal to the dimension of sado-masochistic demons. Various NPCs acquire the candle and are murdered by the demons, their souls being tortured in Purgatory in psychologically-specific ways (which is not really a feature of Hellraiser or ​Kult, but perhaps was inspired by Mage: The Ascension, which came out in 1993 and utterly blew my mind).

The conceit - and it's a sharp one, though I say it myself - is that the demons come for the owners of the candle in order, so there's a chain of victims. When one of the PCs acquires the candle, they become the latest link in the chain. As previous owners start horribly dying, the PC realises they will be next, and searches for a way to break the curse.

There's an impressive complexity to the chain : the poseur occultist who cheats on her drug-dealer boyfriend to get the candle from his dealer, who got it from a biker gang, who stole it from a Satanist, who was trying to use it to get out of his deal with a Death Angel, but was dragged to Hell instead. The Satanist's deranged boyfriend is still out there, warping time and space (as you do, in Kult) to deliver nightmarish warnings. Ultimately, the PCs accompany the boyfriend into Purgatory to get his lover back - a Dante-esque journey through the private hells of all the NPCs who have died so far and a grim twist when the lovers are reunited at the end.

Re-reading it thirty years later, I like it. Although it's very much Kult-does-Hellraiser (right down to the sexual betrayals and obsessions driving NPCs to their doom), it leans heavily into Kult-specific tropes, like the ways Shock can make the Illusions collapse or warp your body or distort time and space.

What I can't have realised at the time - but appreciate now - is that it conforms to the structure of official Kult scenarios too. On the downside, this means it's very linear: the PCs move from clue to clue, then go on a unidirectional journey through Hell to a preordained climax. However, it shares with Kult-designers Gunilla Jonsson and Michael Petersén's Taroticum, the conviction that PCs are not supposed to fight the overpowered monsters of the rulebook, so much as witness them and live to tell the tail.

There are themes in the scenario that I perhaps thought of as daring in 1994, but which have aged strangely.

The central gay relationship between Kyle McAllister and Ellis Wood was unusual representation at the time. Even White Wolf products (the acme of cool, for '90s RPGers) were strongly heteronormative. Remember, in the UK, same-sex marriages were unimaginably far off and Section 28 still had a chilling effect on LGB representation in the media.

On the other hand, Kyle & Ellis conform to the tired trope of the tragic/doomed gay relationship - sometimes known as 'Out of the Closet, Into the Fire.'

It's ironic that, for all Kult subverts Judeo-Christian cosmology, the style of horror it represents is sexually conservative. Hell, most horror is sexually conservative.

In the same vein, '90s Me was proud of including so many female characters in the NPC roster and giving them such important roles. That's not nothing. Play through a Call of Cthulhu scenario of that vintage and your Investigators will interrogate dudes and find the ladies in dumpsters. However, in hindsight, my female NPCs simply devolve to two archetypes: Grieving Mother (Harriet Shaw) and Amoral Slut (Melanie Prior, Bethany Yeoman), which is Freud's Madonna-Whore complex, still going strong. 

Another subversive inclusion was the Christian fundamentalist sect 'The Last Witnesses' as awkward allies of the PCs. The 'Satanic Panic' was still a big concern in the '90s UK gaming scene. This was odd, because fundamentalist moral entrepreneurs had largely moved on to new panics, and even odder because this panic barely touched British roleplayers. In this, as in so many aspects of late 20th century culture, everyone was desperate to be American, but didn't realise it.

In Kult, many of the tenets of organised religion are true, just not in the way worshippers suppose, while religions themselves are aligned with the Lictors, Archons, and Death Angels that oppress or torment humanity. By making Gavin McKnight and his sect into NPC allies (complete with their homophobic attitudes and daft conspiracy theories), I can see '90s Me striving for irony and a bit of nuance. Never a bad thing.

Were I to write the scenario today, I'd probably make the religious sect Muslim rather than Christian. I think I would gender-flip Melanie and Vernon: he's the occult poseur doomed to die, she's the drug-dealer girlfriend with hostility issues. I think I'd leave Kyle and Ellis unchanged. It might be a trope, but it works.

Once The Occult Hack went to digital press, I decided to adapt The Damnation Chain as an introductory scenario: free-to-download, or at-cost if you want a print-on-demand physical copy.

For the interior illustrations, I really wanted to re-use the original art from Valkyrie Magazine, so I reached out to Wayne Chisnall, now a very successful artist, sculptor, and scriptwriter. Wayne was incredibly gracious and not only gave permission, but sent me some scans of the originals.

Other than Stat Blocks and a few rules links, I didn't want to make alterations to the text out of respect for '90s Me. What I did do was break the scenario into 3 Acts, then include a GM's Toolkit with each Act, expanding on the original scenario.

Act I is Melanie's Party, where the PCs acquire the cursed candle - or Dark Taper. The original scenario advised the GM to 'wing it' but here was an opportunity to provide a NPC Roster of quirky guests and the shenanigans that ensue when they mix. I also added a roster of occult artwork and antiques at the apartment, some of it actually supernatural.

In Kult, your problems escalate when you go into Shock: you can project your fears, warp your body, or tear down the Illusions. The Occult Hack doesn't do this, but it does have a Horror Cascade, a series of events that occur as the Horror Usage Die exhausts. One of the problems PCs in the Occult Hack face is the presence of the Fanum, a sort of occult security force working for God and cracking down on people who threaten the Asylum's reality. At Melanie's Party, you have a Fanum spy on the lookout for occultists - and an egotistical and indiscreet occultist who will get himself into trouble.

Act II is the investigation, the period while the bodies pile up and the PCs discover the corpses and research into the Dark Taper. The original scenario assumed the PCs moved from clue to clue in an orderly manner and left the eventual arrival of the demons up to the GM. This time round, the Horror Cascade governs the demonic timetable and there's a timeline of events, as well as some advice on what to do if the PCs go off-script, as they inevitably will.

Act III is the Hell Walk, which requires little alteration, although Penitarchs in the Occult Hack aren't quite as formidable as Nepharites in Kult, so PCs are expected to use some physical force in places. What I have added is much more detail into the history of the Dark Taper and its creator, and a guiding intelligence behind the Hell-realm that the Taper links to. There are suggestions for different ways to end the scenario, allowing PCs to deviate from the linear path, and even setting the demons against one another - possibly involving a chagrined Lucifer in the messy business, if you like to escalate things all the way.

That's it! The Damnation Game is back from the pages of Valkyrie, reunited with its original art after 30 years, and repurposed for a new generation of horror RPGs. Leave a review, or drop me a message, and let me know what you think.

You know how you get gripped by obsessions and you just have to throw weeks of your time into them? My latest obsession was born out of GMing Kult, the contemporary horror RPG by Gunilla Jonsson & Michael Petersén (1992). We've been playing through their flawed epic The Taroticum (1994) - and my previous obsession had been to create a huge GM's supplement to expand that.

We love Kult, but of course what we love about it is the grimy contemporary horror and the cosmology, inspired by a Gnostic religious outlook (God is evil, the world is a prison) spliced with Nietzschean will to power. As a set of rules, Kult (or at least 1st and 2nd edition Kult, the '90s rules we are using) positively gets in its own way. The combat system is left over from an earlier iteration of the game, themed around mercenaries and spies, with too much focus on gunfights and injury, but not enough on negotiation, chases, and altered states of consciousness. The monsters and NPCs are way overpowered. You might say, "Well that's horror RPGs for you, look at Call of Cthulhu!" But these entities are so far off the scale they break the game's own rules.

Thus, my new obsession: creating an indie rules set to run Kult-inspired contemporary horror scenarios. I dipped into other 1990s touchstones, notably Unknown Armies by John Scott Tynes & Greg Stolze (1998),
 but also Nephilim by Greg Stafford (1994), and even In Nomine by Derek Pearcy (1997). I took a few pointers from Kevin Crawford's Silent Legions (2015). 

These inspirations combined with the Black Hack's elegant approach to OD&D and the innovative 'usage die' to produce: The Occult Hack.

Some readers will shake their heads and say, "Why did you bother when there's now Kult: Divinity Lost which de-centres combat and foregrounds all the narrative storytelling stuff you love? Plus, it looks gorgeous!"

I can't really answer that question, except to say that I like being creative and I guess I just wanted my take on Kult-inspired contemporary horror, not someone else's.

Any RPG that gives Player Characters character classes and levels is going to be empowering for the players, which isn't how most horror RPGs work. Silent Legions gets a lot of criticism for this very feature (along with praise for its marvellous campaign creation tables - seriously, track it down)..

OK, the character classes aren't really 'classes': they are Fractures, in other words, they are your particular derangement or disengagement from what everyone else calls reality. The Crucifers have fought and beaten a monster, the Lazarites have been dead but come back, the Deliriants are crazy from the starting gun, and so on. Nonetheless, these Fractures give you powers and by the time you get to 10th level (assuming you survive, ha-ha!), you will have a lot of Hit Points and abilities.

This immediately makes The Occult Hack a slightly more upbeat sort of product than Kult. It's still horror, but there's an aspiration to win. Potentially, PC Occultists could go all the way, challenge God himself, and stop (or triumph in) the Apocalypse. PCs are assumed to float around 'the Occult Street' which is a sort of supernaturally-aware subculture of urban sorcerers, exorcists-for-hire, cult recruiters, fugitive ghosts, werewolves on the lam, and down-and-out arcane scholars. That's the influence of Unknown Armies, but also the result of how Taroticum expanded during actual play.

Acquiring Gnosis becomes the main route to power and, like Kult, there are light and dark paths. Magic has the grand hermetic ceremonies beloved of Kult and Nephilim, but I ported in low-key magical styles from Unknown Armies - stuff like Dipsomancy, where you get drunk to cast spells - and adapted the spell-casting rules to give PC sorcerers a chance to throw spells 'on the fly' because that's what PCs like to be able to do in an adventure.

Heaven and Hell get a treatment that has some of In Nomine's satirical thrust, with Elohim (angels) playing politics and facing a revolt by human Saints, and Lucifer wandering the Earth looking for meaning (courtesy of Neil Gaiman and Mike Carey's interpretation in DC Comics) while her demonic princes pursue the Apocalypse in contradictory ways, some of them trying to destroy their former ruler.

All of which creates a sandbox setting, in which powerful antagonists can turn into untrustworthy allies, and mortal PCs can visit Heaven, Hell, and alternate realities, without necessarily being annihilated by the first entity they meet. There's more than a little of TV's Supernatural in the set-up.

This might be your jumping-off point. 'How can it be a horror rpg if the players have agency and optimism?'

Obviously, you do things your way. I've run my share of Call of Cthulhu scenarios where everyone goes mad or gets devoured. They're fine: I like them.

But that's not what I'm aiming for here. It's still a horror rpg in that Very Bad Things can happen to PCs: you can be killed, of course, but the 'Out of Action'; rules from the Black Hack means there's only a 1 in 6 chance this will kill you; most of the time you end up insane, or in Hell, or trapped in a dream, or enslaved by angels, or captured by the Templars, or turned into an ape. But of course, there are ways back from these states: you can be rescued, or cured, given a mission by your new demon master. 

And here's the real point: this isn't just my whacky or lightweight reading of my source text. The Taroticum, written by Kult's original designers no less, is very explicitly a campaign in which the PCs are expected to survive and triumph, in which they meet cosmic entities who could obliterate them on a whim but prevail, in which powerful NPCs or hordes of ghosts come to their rescue on the few occasions where lethal combat is unavoidable. The Occult Hack is envisioned as the RPG that would make sense of The Taroticum, maybe ​(whisper it) better than Kult did.

What else have I included? The game offers profiles of some of the main Cults and Cult-leaders, Lucifer and the Golgothans (demon princes), the Seraphim (archangels) and their Saints, and a few Awakened Humans like the ubiquitous Comte de Saint Germain.

To wrap up, a list of artifacts (un-cursed and very cursed, according to taste) and tables for populating the Occult Street with NPCs and scenario hooks.

You can find The Occult Hack to download on drivethrurpg (left), or physical copies on Amazon (centre) - Amazon also has a Dark Path Edition (right) with B&W interior if you don't see the point in paying for colour

At our next Taroticum session, I will invite the players to re-create their characters as Occult Hack PCs, at 3rd level (based on their accomplishments so far). That should bolster them enough to go down into Hell, off into the Primordial Void, across the Deep Dreaming, and run around London pursued by demons and cultists.

I need to publish a scenario that illustrates the game's distinctive mechanics. Then I remembered: I've already written such a scenario, but it was for 1ed Kult, back in 1994, and it was published in the first two issues of Valkyrie, a UK hobby magazine that ran for five years in the 1990s. Of course, I keep my old magazines, so I pulled out The Damnation Chain and set about adapting it. But that will take another blog to discuss.

I've written about rediscovering Kult 1st ed. and updating the classic Taroticum scenario on a previous blog. You can read the first and second session reports of our all-day Kult session; here's the third, which picks up the action when we reconvened in the evening.

First, a couple of reflections. Taroticum is structured in a heavy-handed way. The PCs are drawn to Sandburn Hospital to rescue Mary Langsbury, but 24 hours later the evil Barkley returns from Hell. The original scenario states:

The authors also say: "The only way he can miss her is if she is in a place with a high magical aura that it pains him to visit - for example a cathedral." The idea that creatures of Inferno are pained when they visit Christian holy places is a novel addition to Kult's lore and, I must confess, rather at odds with its antinomian themes. Yet this is from the pen of Gunilla Jonsson and Michael Petersen themselves. It's not a concept I'll be adopting (except perhaps for the sacred geometry in some of those Nicholas Hawksmoor London churches).

The main point, though, is the railroad-y structure of the plot: Mary "cannot be saved" and "will die, regardless of what the PCs do." This imposes a frustrating restriction on the PCs' autonomy and a burden on the GM, who must come up with a way for Barkley to kill Mary that succeeds come-what-may, even if the PCs are armed with bazookas.

Taroticum Unbound takes some liberties with this plot twist, by ruling that the PCs are still under Barkley's control, despite being reincarnated. It is the PCs who must abduct Mary and bring her to Barkley; it is the PCs (along with Leonore Carver the necromancer) who cut the foetus from her body and present it to Barkley. Only when they come back into contact with the Taroticum is his control over them broken.

This gives the PCs existential horror: they must secure their own free will, before they can start getting concerned about the Child of Magick. They also have a powerfully personal reason to hate and fear Barkley.

Faraday explains that, for the Child of Magick to be born, the foetus must be given a soul - not a tired old soul, reincarnated from many previous lifetimes, but a brand new soul. Such a soul can be created out of Achlys, 'the abyss that was before Chaos,' but he does not know how to reach Achlys. ​He recognises Mary's references to the "fools on the Isle of Dogs" as the 'Court of Fools' which is somewhere in London's Docklands. He advises that, if the PCs go among the fools, they wear a third eye painted on their foreheads.

Faraday predicts that Barkley will send his agent Leonore Carver to seize the cards and advises the PCs to parley with her: she is not as loyal to Barkley as she appears. 

The Taroticum Unbound encounter tables generate some pleasing weirdness. Sir Phillip witnesses riot police brutally dealing with peaceful protesters but finds his government contacts utterly indifferent: he senses the influence of the Taroticum strengthening over London. Mike Batton looks into a Goth band called Subhuman Channel whose lyrics reference Achlys. In his work at the prison, he deals with prisoners who seem to be disappearing as they become 'forgotten.' 

Sam Jones work as a paramedic, but his ambulance becomes lost as the London streets warp and change. HIs driver disappears and the ambulance is stranded in Metropolis; his dead patient reanimates and joins a hooded and masked procession that winds through the empty streets, ringing a rusty bell. When Sam returns to the streets of London, he is miles away from the hospital. Unable to account for the disappearance of his driver and patient, he is given time off to recover. The police will be in touch.

Sir Phillip's contacts reveal that there is a secret government policy to get homeless people and mentally ill rough sleepers off the streets. Those rounded up in the Isle of Dogs are being kept at a detention centre in a former school in Richmond, a leafy suburb in south west London.

The PCs interact with the weird Bazaar in Metropolis. Mike purchases a Bible that belonged to a past life from the English Civil War, in exchange for a year of his own life. When demonic Erinyaes attack, Sam has to drive through the crowd. The Illusion seals behind them and the bus crashes in an abandoned car park in the Isle of Dogs. They have rescued Waya, her two dozen mad fools, and escaped.

What follows is the extended passage where Waya directs the PCs on a mystical journey to integrate their hundreds of past lives - which she then tattoos onto their flesh while they sleep. These tattoos will protect them when they travel beyond the Illusion and enable them to journey to the very edge of Achlys, where being is consumed by nothingness. But that is in the future.

For my group of gamers, it is 9.30pm, the end of a solid day of roleplaying in the world of Kult. For the PCs, they awaken, covered in magical tattoos but entirely naked, in an empty Docklands car park, in the small hours of Christmas morning. It starts to rain.

Well, everyone had a great time. We will resume on the next day when we can all be free, hopefully early in May.

Taroticum has certainly shown the main features of Kult in a good light. I take these to be: a setting where ordinary reality can melt away at any moment and be replaced by a terrifying and perilous true reality, humans who are really monsters, madness as a tool for understanding reality and having power over it, Mental Balance getting more extreme the longer you play, and a sense of unremitting menace right from the very beginning.

The scenario also introduced a nice blend of detective work, exploration, incidents of action and violence, and occasion black humour (the final bus chase verged on knockabout comedy, but the supernatural danger kept everyone focused).

Some features need altering. I've already discussed the changes made with Barkley controlling the PCs and Leonore Carver as an unlikely ally. Carver is too good a NPC to waste on the story's final chapter. By bringing her in early, she can be a useful patron, instigator of disturbing quests, and source of information.

Likewise, Tabitha Kreel is a useful addition. If the PCs have to do too much of their own detective work, the pace slackens. The published scenario gives little thought to this. For example, after Barkley murders Mary and seizes the foetus and the cards, there is then a good week or fortnight delay until Rupert Faraday writes his expose in The Times. Once the PCs read this, they are supposed to seek Faraday out and receive his guidance. What are they supposed to be doing in the meantime?

In the original scenario, it's proposed that they go questing to retrieve the foetus, but, frankly, that's a big ask. The PCs have just had the asses handed to them by Barkley and witnessed Mary's murder; are they really going to go straight back to Sandburn? Hardly!

In my telling, the PCs knew to seek Faraday out straight away, because they had seen him at Sandburn Gaol in their previous life, found his photograph at the Old Gaol in 1994, and discovered who he was from Tabitha Kreel's notes. Approaching Faraday was at their own instigation: much needed autonomy in a scenario where passivity and helplessness are too common.

Speaking of which ...

The 'Way of Waya,' in which the mad sorcereress leads the PCs on a baffling journey into ... well, who can say? ... is an uninterrupted GM-driven narrative where the only role for players is to nod. I've added a few occasions for dice rolls, just to generate some mechanistic drama, but there's definitely too much of this in Taroticum. It's only a partial solution, but Taroticum Unbound​ leavens this material with opportunities for PCs to explore and instigate change. I wonder, is there a way of going further with this and radically reinterpreting the frequent 'dream voyage' sequences in the scenario?

Finally, I have a concern about roleplaying which is, to be fair, a common problem with horror RPGs. Kult invites players to create PCs with provocative and troubled back stories - especially, compared to, say, Call of Cthulhu, where you are just another dusty academic, gumshoe, or dilettante. My players certainly embraced the opportunity to create some very rich characters, with lots of potential for interpersonal, emotional, and psychological conflict.

However, Taroticum doesn't really offer opportunities for any of this to matter. Indeed, it rather assumes the PCs are rootless loners who can disappear for days on end, or devote themselves to spying on a mental hospital with a bunch of people they only just met. Once the action kicks in, the PCs are on the run or out of their minds. The promise of a personal horror experience goes unfulfilled.

But perhaps it doesn't have to. I have some ideas for how the story can develop in a way that draws in the PCs' relationships, past histories, and personal crises. Can't wait to see how that works out!

If you read my previous blog, you'll know all about The Taroticum, a classic 1974 adventure for Kult 1st edition, written by the game's designers, Gunilla Jonsson and Michael Petersen. The Taroticum hwas their inspiord scenario/mini-campaign for the game's 1st edition and Taroticum Unbound is the expanded scenario I've been running, incorporating all the London-set plot hooks mentioned in the 1st edition and its supplements Metropolis and Legions of Darkness. The result is a big open-ended sandbox adventure and my plucky players committed to a marathon all-day session to get as far through it as possible.

In the Prelude, the players were doomed prison guards at Sandburn Gaol, which slipped into Inferno under the demoniac rule of Governor Barkley. Now it's a century later. It's a wet, foggy December in London. Interview With The Vampire is showing at the cinemas, serial killers Fred and Rosemary West are on trial, and East 17's Christmas hit Stay is stuck to the top of the charts.

Let's introduce the new PCs. To create them, we used a Kult Character Generator, which makes use of the Tarotica Deck, which now exists, thanks to the Kult: Divinity Lost (AKA 4th edition) crowdfunded campaign.

When our story begins, our heroes do not know each other. Nonetheless, they are all disturbed by the same nightmares: a pregnant woman named Mary, dishevelled and dirty, in an abandoned building, in possession of a magical set of cards; she pleads for help, she is terrified someone will harm her baby, she tells the PCs this is all their fault. Her gown identifies her as a patient at Sandburn Psychiatric Hospital.

As the nightmares recur, they entangle themselves with the PCs' own traumas: Mike dreams of Mary being the victim of his brother's attack, Sir Phillip dreams of Mary being the girl he trafficked for a sacrificial ritual, Sam dreams of Mary as the medic who saved him in Iraq.

Taroticum Unbound generates further strangeness. Sam argues with his brother about being excluded from the family Christmas plans, and his brother calls him 'Michael' then denies doing so. Sir Phillip dozes on his sofa and watches a late night horror film, set in a Victorian prison, where the actor playing the chaplain looks exactly like him, but he cannot find any record of the film in the TV listings afterwards. 

The PCs flee to Sir Phillip's well-appointed flat in Clapham to work out what to do next. They study the Taroticum and find a card linked to each one of them, but try as they may they cannot separate cards from the deck.

Sir Phillip explores the Isle of Dogs, where the Docklands development has created an urban wasteland of derelict factories and office blocks standing empty. Homeless people have occupied this area, in huge numbers, but Phillip is robbed by feral youths. When he gives chase onto an empty Underground station, he is confronted by a mob of insane, possibly undead, youths. He flees, but has learned to fear a name: Gelocheli.

Their enemy has returned from Inferno and remains their master. What are they to do?

This is the point we broke for supper (a pint and a pizza, courtesy of J D Wetherspoons). The action has reached its point of absolute despair and catastrophe. We've covered most of the material from the Prelude and Chapter 1 of The Taroticum and, even though they feel utterly defeated, the PCs have interesting choices to make.

If you read my last blog, you'll know all about The Taroticum, a classic 1974 adventure for Kult 1st edition, written by the game's designers, Gunilla Jonsson and Michael Petersen. I'm currently on a project to revive and enjoy the various RPGs from my youth that never got played. Bushido never got played because teenaged-me simply didn't know enough about Japan to wrap my head round it - but that's working out fine now. Kult never got played because twenty-something me didn't know gamers with the sort of demented imaginations who would enjoy it - this too has changed.

The Taroticum has been widely praised for its imaginative story and widely panned for its linear plotting and railroading assumptions. To address thus, I spent far too long composing Taroticum Unbound, an expanded version of the scenario incorporating all the London-set plot hooks mentioned in the 1st edition and its supplements Metropolis and Legions of Darkness. The result is a big open-ended sandbox adventure.

The scenario features the titular magical deck of cards, and the new edition of the game has brought us an actual version of the Taroticum deck. I've incorporated the deck into the encounter tables for Taroticum Unbound and use it through the session to generate plot twists, spooky atmosphere, and background detail. 

There was a time, before the forging of the One Ring, when I used to meet up with friends at lunchtime and play RPGs through until the end of the evening - a good 10 or 12 hour marathon. When I was a schoolboy, this would be interrupted by my saintly mother bringing us tea and sandwiches. As a university student, it would be accompanied by beer and cigarettes and much else besides. Those days are long gone: a RPG session for me now occupies a tidy two hour slot, maybe two-and-a-half, from 7.30pm and over by 10pm. Admittedly, the games can be a bit intense and the plotting is pretty freewheeling, so I guess they're a bit more exhausting than the dungeoncrawling of my youth. Nevertheless, I worry that I've gotten too timid. I never cut loose any more. We don't commit to a game and go where it takes us, for as long as that takes.

The story begins in London, 1894, at Sandburn Gaol, a disease-ridden, overcrowded, and brutal Victorian prison, at which the PCs are staff. Things change with the arrival of a new Prison Governor, a man named Barkley who has unconventional methods. The regime becomes strict, then cruel, then demented in its excesses. Finally, in the depths of winter, Barkley recruits the PCs to carry out a dreadful ritual in the basement of the Gaol and things, quite literally, go to Hell as a result.

The players select pre-generated characters from a set of six; I ask that at least one of them plays a guard.

Barkley promotes Dorsleigh and Brown to guard captains and has Dorsleigh clean out the Lower Basement, where poor 'Dash' has been left in sensory-deprived solitary confinement for months. He is now quite mad. The next day, the prisoner is dead, and Dorsleigh and Brown must take the corpse to the Reverend for burial: Wilson notices that the prisoner died of being drained of blood through knife wounds, before being impaled in the heart.

When the three PCs take no action, Barkley knows they are his men for the next task: a midnight ritual to summon and bind a hideous goddess and steal from her the set of occult cards, the Taroticum.

The PCs are now resolved to act. Rev. Wilson, who has been haunted by dreams of the imprisoned Goddess, steals a key to get into the Lower Basement and learns from the Goddess that Barkley is learning to use the Taroticum to master reality itself; to empower himself to do this, he has moved the entire Gaol to Inferno. Wilson learns how to overcome Barkley: first, weaken his authority over the Gaol, then bind the master card, named Demiurgos, to a powerless person, by shedding their blood on it.

Brown makes a deal with prisoner Baines to trigger a wholesale revolt during supper by leaving the cells unlocked. Dorsleigh sneaks past the Razides to free poor Superintendent Clarke from his cell: the man is a tattered mannequin of blood and scars, but Dorsleigh helps him upstairs to the Governor's Office where the Taroticum is laid out, hoping this powerless wretch's blood can steal the Taroticum's power away from Barkley.

The revolt is triggered. The unstoppable Barkley tears through the mass of prisoners opposing him, but the PCs manage to get Clarke to the Taroticum and he bleeds on the Demiurgos card.

Barkley smashes down the door, but the PCs notice he is bleeding from a cut: he is no longer invulnerable. Dorsleigh shoots him with Superintendent Clarke's old handgun. The walls of the Gaol collapse to reveal the Inferno. Hideous Nepharites arrive to claim Barkley's soul, but also the souls of the PCs, who must be punished in Purgatory for the ghastly things they have done.

It's 3pm and we pause to take stock - and to introduce the new characters for the main storyline, which occurs a century later.

A big criticism of the Taroticum Prologue is that certain events have to happen and the players have to respond to them in defined ways, otherwise the story can't even get started. The Refereeing & Reflection blog puts it like this:

If you read through the Prologue, it can strike you as precariously railroaded. In actual play, it didn't feel that way at all. The players know they are taking part in a prologue, so they are constructively looking for the prompts and hooks that move the story on. Plus, the things they are expected to do are the things any sane person would want to do: find out what the hell is going on (and the Goddess is your only possible source here), then find a way to destroy Barkley (and the Goddess tells you how).

I was more worried that the Prologue would be an immensely passive experience: that the players are just listening to a story I'm telling them, that there are few occasions for them to make choices or be autonomous. The new event tables in Taroticum Unbound provided situations that afforded them choices (like the flogging scene), but the real issue was always 'How do you feel about what's just happened? How do you justify what you've just been a part of?"

The climax was certainly cathartic - and left everyone excited to bring on their 'proper' characters for Chapter 1, set at Christmas time in 1994.

​But to read about that, you'll have to wait for the next blog.

​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.

​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.

​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.

​​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

​​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: 

​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.

​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.

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.
​
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:

​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.

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.