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Nowadays, magazines full of RPG-related reviews, scenarios, and house rules, have been utterly superseded by the Internet, for better or worse.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.