Dealing from the Taroticum: Christmas 1994

21/4/2025

Taroticum: session report 2

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.

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Welcome to 1994

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.

Are you feeling it? Let the horror commence!

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.

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If you don't own the Tarotica deck, the Character Generator explains how you can use dice or a normal deck of cards to replicate it. If you want to get hold of your own Tarotica deck, Zatu is a pretty good retailer.

Mike Batton is played by Karl McMichael. Mike is a prison chaplain with a troubled past. Growing up poor, he fell under the shadow of his older brother, a charismatic gangster. To settle an old score, Mike lured a rival gangster to his home, where his brother tortured the victim. As accessory to this, Mike served a prison sentence, lost his marriage, and lost access to his son. He found consolation in religion, and has become a prison chaplain, offering guidance to troubled souls in the justice system. He still visuts a therapist himself.

Mike is a rough character, accustomed to violence, but trying to forge a better path. He begins play with a positive Mental Balance.

Sir Phillip Wroth is played by Alex Tomlinson. Sir Phillip is a disgraced Conservative MP from a minor noble family with a crumbling estate in Cumbria. He lost his position in the Conservative Government after a scandal involving trafficking young women to mysterious private events, some of whom have never come back. Although still a MP, Sir Phillip expects to be de-selected in the new year. He has a first rate education (Eton and Cambridge) and contacts in the Government, as well as in the underworld of human trafficking and cocaine smuggling.

Sir Phillip is a heartless egotist. He starts play with a negative Mental Balance.

Samson ("Sam") Jones is a paramedic and former soldier, a veteran of the Gulf War (1990-91). It was in the Gulf War that he lost his comrades in a SCUD missile attack; his life was saved, but he bears horrific burns and scarring down his left side.

A massive man, he is nonetheless gentle, drawn to care for others, a calming presence. Nonetheless, he is troubled by nightmares of his war experiences.

Sam is a character that could go either way. He starts play with a mildly positive Mental Balance, but his trauma could tip him over into degeneration and destructiveness if he does not restrain himself.

The Nightmares Begin

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.

Mike meets with an ambitious journalist named Tabitha Kreel, who interviews him about his vocation. She lets slip that she discovered Mike was a patient at Sandburn Asylum. Mike is angry and dumbfounded: he has no recollection of such a place, or being a mental patient anywhere: he insists he was studying for the ministry at that time in his life.

Nonetheless, he reconciles with Tabitha, studies some of her more unusual news clippings (like the one below), and asks her to investigate Sandburn for him.

Tabitha is a new NPC introduced in Taroticum Unbound, to allow PCs to focus on the story while someone else does research.

Exploring Sandburn

The PCs converge on Sandburn. Mike and Sam meet in a nearby pub, The Hourglass, where they speak to some hospital staff coming off shift. They learn that a patient, a young woman, has gone missing, but that she's probably still on site, since large parts of the former Victorian prison are abandoned.

Sir Phillip goes straight to reception and butts up against the stifling bureaucracy of Sandburn, which has an inane form for everything. When the three PCs meet in hospital reception, they are struck by profound déjà vu: the sense that they know each other well.

It's a contrivance to get PCs who are strangers to each other to cooperate, but in this case, since they are literally the reincarnations of the guards they played earlier, it works pretty well.

The PCs gain a brief interview with Dr Naismith, learning that a patient, Mary Langsbury, is at large on the site, and that staff are searching for her in the abandoned wings of the former-prison.

Mike gets to examine some patient files that seem to confirm he was a patient here when he remembers studying for the ministry.

The random weirdness tables in Taroticum Unbound create an interesting development. Outside Naismith's office, the PCs find a lift that wasn't there before. It only goes to the 'lower basement.' Exiting in the basement, the PCs find the lift has disappeared. They discover a claustrophobic staircase going down to a locked door they cannot open. They discover a room full of rusty torture devices and human skeletons. The entire basement is freezing cold.

Unnerved, they climb the stairs to escape and find themselves in in the hall of the Old Gaol: a place they recognise from their nightmares. Following a woman's footprints in the dust, they discover the old governor's office, the governor's keys and handgun used to shoot Barkley, a faded photograph from a century ago of Barkley and a friend (which Mike recognises as the ageless Rupert Faraday), and, crouched in the corner, Mary, with the Taroticum.

Mary has been waiting for the PCs. She is hearing vices from the cards. They tell her that the mysterious being that impregnated her was an angel, that her baby will save everyone from horror, and that 'he' is returning to the world after a thousand years in Hell.

The PCs, whose memories of their past life are returning in fragments, figure that Barkley must be returning. They smuggle Mary out of the Hospital.

But first, Sir Phillip takes the key from the desk and uses it to enter the lower basement room. He meets the imprisoned Goddess and recalls his past life, where he and the other PCs helped Barkley bind her and steal the Taroticum.

From her he learns of her plan to free herself by destroying the power of the Taroticum by creating a new card, card 0 'Anthropos.' The Child of Magick, the embodiment of this card, has been conceived in Mary, but it needs a New Soul, not a reincarnated soul: it must be a brand new Human Being, the first to be born in two thousand years.

She directs the PCs to seek out the "mad fools of the Isle of Dogs" to advise them how this can be done.

Barkley Returns

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.

Sam and Mike have been guarding Mary, but find themselves under psychic compulsion. Unable to resist, they drag the terrified Mary back to Sandburn. There, awaiting them, is Barkley, adopting the form of the hospital director, and a hideous old woman named Carver. In Dr Naismith's surgery, Sam and Mike are compelled to hold Mary down while Carver opens up her womb with a sacrificial blade. Mary dies screaming while Barkley extracts the foetus and stores it, magically preserved, in a glass jar.

Barkley commands Mike and Sam to go and fetch the Taroticum. He promises to reward them. Unresisting, they leave.

However, upon meeting Sir Phillip and in the presence of the Taroticum itself, Barkley's hold over them melts away. They realise that Barkley cannot compel them to bring the Taroticum to him - though he could doubtless compel them to harm themselves or, worse, harm those they care for.

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.

Find out what the players chose to do in the next blog!

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