My Latest Obsession (Part 1)

What's that in the middle? You'll have to check out Part 2 of this blog for a discussion of The Damnation Chain

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!"

Yeah, it does look pretty good, doesn't it?

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.

So How Is The Occult Hack Different?

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.

Meanwhile, the Templars, ported in from Nephilim, are building their own God, called BAPHOMET, with which they hope to rule everything. The Templars are always fun antagonists. There's some of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials in the treatment of God, and the Fanum, which is the organisation through which he keeps Humanity imprisoned.

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

What Am I Going To Do With It?

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.

Ah! Memories! See 'Kult' on the front of Issue 1? That's my scenario. I can't tell you how proud that made me!