Idea: A story like Enemy Within. One of my players is possessed by a demon. First he would kill and rape his one true hopeless love - but all my players would think that someone else is the enemy

A few notes (in case someone has some ideas I could add to it). The action take place in north England (or Scotland). This is just for the scenery. The PCs meet a group of beautiful people in a nightclub. One of them falls in love with a girl/man (I impose bisexuality to the PCs, without loss in MB). The lovers may be of the same sex or not. There's a fight in the nighclub,

the lovers are separated. The group of PCs often have some good times together: one of them owns a book on the way of dream (voyeurism). The beautiful people are some sort of lorelei (they can create other Lorelei). There will be a murder, in which the PCs will be involved through the way of dream.

I plan to use some middle-ages church music for the sad scenes (one of them take place in a church, for the funeral.

What I would like to achieve with this scenario is to lift a really small part of the illusion, just to let the plyers know there is something to know behind reality. I also want the player to feel guilty and get involved with their PC. We're playing Kult, here, not a childish game. Did I told you there will be some Archons involved, too ? Archons hate Lorelei, PC felt in love with Lorelei... well, you get the point.

The setup is as follows:

[history]

Alexander Godfrey Wicklow follows his late grandfather's tracks to the catacombs of Paris; the old man was looking for an immortality spell. There, Wicklow meets the Great Old One Eihort, who gives him the spell as a reward for injecting him with his parasitic Brood. For the immortality ritual, a focus is needed, i.e. a person with strong paranormal abilities. Back in his hometown in MA, Wicklow finds such a focus in the person of Zeke Bartlett, a young Amish with the tendency for paranoid schizophrenia often found in the parapsychologically gifted. Wicklow kidnaps Zeke and uses him to channel the forces that are to make him immortal.

But Eihort has cheated Wicklow, and the Brood hatches too soon for him to complete the ritual. He builds up a psychic bridge to Zeke's mind, to be able to return from the grave (think Asenath Waite in HPL's Thing on the Doorstep), just in time before the grub-like brood devours his body before Zeke's eyes. This drives the young man over the edge, and he seals the experiences connected with Wicklow in a separate identity. He returns from his kidnaping totally without conscious memories of what happened.

[present]

Everything looks peaceful for a few years, until Zeke starts to feel Wicklow burrowing his way into his mind. This re-awakens the sealed-off personality, and he desperately tries to find a way to fend off the intrusion. From things Wicklow uttered ("I have something in me that tells me what to do") and the sight of the sorcerer's death, he concludes that it was the Brood that gave Wicklow his powers. Only Zeke knows nothing about Eihort and his Brood, and mistakes the creatures for common maggots. In his madness, he tries to re-create the setup by abducting first pets, then humans, that he ties down, cuts open in several places and plants fly's eggs in them. As they writhe in agony while the parasites feed on their intestines, the madman tortures them asking over and over again, "What do they tell you? What forces do they give you?" Of course, his attempts are futile, and he grows more and more terrified as he feels the grip of the dead sorcerer tighten on his mind...

The players enter the game when a corpse is found that is almost totally eaten by maggots, but the date of death is set to only three days ago. (Flies do not lay their eggs in anything that isn't already rotting or festering.) There are some red herrings: Crazies theorizing about new kinds of power grubs, and the like.

This is the scenario as far as I've got it. My problems with it are: Firstly, it's obviously fairly grub-centered, at least until the players dig deeper in the plot. Graphical descriptions of feeding grubs can be horrific, of course, but as a central element they soon get old. How can I avoid let the scenario decaying (ha ha) into a maggot-fest? Secondly, what do I do to make the players realize there's more to it than just a fly-breeding madman? And, of course killing Zeke is not the (whole) goal of the scenario; it's breaking Wicklow's hold on the poor chap, and digging deeper into Wicklow's past (there's more to come there). So what do I do if the players just shoot the madman, declare their job done and walk away?

Dan Williamson

Let them. They have left the real evil behind, the Brood - whatever they are. Have some time pass peacefully then have the Brood start doing the evil things that they do. Perhaps one of the Brood manages to get into one of the characters while they are in the process of killing Zeke?

FuzzyLogic fuzzylogic@LEGO.MCIT.MED.UMICH.EDU

I think your plot line is keen. Maggots are good. I find common symbols to be nifty in a game, because if the characters start out from different points, its nice to have a theme that draws them all together. In an experimental game I run, centipedes kept showing up. I decided to run with it, and made a tribal religion around them.

Putting your players through dead, maggot-ridden bodies over and over could get repetitive. Is there the possibility of one being alive? If Zeke is interrogating people, the last thing he'd want the maggots to be eating is the voice box and tongue. Eventually, the maggots will get there, and Zeke might even employ means to try and dissuade the maggots from reaching those spots (I'm not sure what can be done to dissuade maggots -- gasoline? Is there a maggot expert in the house?)

Then, you have a partially alive person. Zeke might be getting so desperate that he wasn't thorough. The people would be hopelessly mad, and would be repeating all sorts of interesting things, such as repeating the questions Zeke asks them over and over. Room for much fly-infested fun.

In my interpretation of Kult, where the illusion is made up of bits of reality, the maggots could be related to the brood. One of Zeke's victims could be slightly psychic. So maybe the maggots can talk to the person who is being devoured (given the right circumstances) What do maggots say? "Mmm yummy. Rotten meat." Maybe the brood can communicate through the maggots. Do they have anything to say? Maybe they give the half-devoured victim visions of Wicklow, Eihort and the Brood (Is that a band name in the making?)

From: WickedWalt

I'd concentrate on the other horrific elements inherent to the characters and plot. NPC's are what make a story great in any event, and here the central character is Zeke. Concentrate on the horrific elements of Zeke's wounded/disturbed/damaged psyche. This works best if the player characters already have a personal connection and/or care about the central character (Zeke), which would, incidentally, take care of your "what if they just blow him away" question. The PCs aren't likely to (immediately) blow away a friend in need (well, in SLA they might, but not in KULT).

Make Zeke's madness a central element, and have the characters help Zeke seek (or have them provide) treatment. In the course of such treatment, they can discover the deeper elements of the plot.

Construct some pre-existing tie between Zeke an the Pcs. You might want to run a few adventures prior to the one you've described in which you introduce Zeke, and in which, despite displaying a few personality quirks which can foreshadow future development of his madness, Zeke seems like a bright, perceptive, and personable (or at least endearing) guy.

DL dreamlord@CRYOGEN.COM

1) Well, maybe Zeke soon will discover that maggot eggs will not work, and could even try a religion or mystical explanation (in the ritual, Godfrey has draw magical symbols, like pentagrams, or something like that?). And, that follows to the second point...

2) If he drops the maggot thing, maybe Godfrey find a way to get hold of the boy's mind, and, they probably, will step out from this scene (area, etc), but, what if, Zeke (before Godfrey controls the situation), in his dreams, get glimpses and memories from Godfrey? What if, sleeping...he writes some "interesting" stuff in some kind of journal?

3) If Godfrey, takes hold of the boy, and escapes, but is still letting out clues of his nature, they can be close enough the mystery to simple shot him, and, Godfrey could even be a major antagonist in a long campaign.

Suverkropp B.P." basjanni@WORLDONLINE.NL

I'm an entomologist (though not specialized in maggots or flies, my field is mainly parasitic wasps, which can also give you many KULTish ideas). As far as I know, maggots in dead bodies (the larvae of carrion flies) only eat dead tissue. Actually, up to the first world war maggots were used in medicine. Sterile maggots were placed in serious wounds and would eat the body tissue that had died off, thus preventing gangrene, if in a pretty grisly way. Thus, just making a wound in somebodies body and infecting it with fly eggs will not work. The way to do it would probably be to make body parts die off (for example by blocking the blood flow to one of the limbs) and then infecting them. In this case, gangrene may still kill the victim.

The easiest way to dissuade maggots from entering a certain body part would be to kill all those who got close by hand (this takes a certain burrowing around in the victims body). Chemical repellents might also work. Actually, I think it would be very difficult to cause somebody to be eaten alive by maggots. There are some fly species in the tropics of which the maggots eat living flesh, and this is also true for screwworms, which only attack livestock. These will only cause local wounds though. However, these observations may be due to the illusion, while REAL maggots are much worse.

Jason Thompson jason@SONIC.NET

I think this is a very good idea for an adventure (maggots -- always fun), but I think it'd be a pretty tough job to make Zeke sympathetic. I mean, possessed or not, this guy's been feeding people to maggots! I could barely stop my players from shooting Elizabeth Seymor in FALLEN ANGELS! Perhaps Zeke has some information the players need, so they can't kill him outright, or perhaps they're hired to bring Zeke back alive for some reason. Alternately, he could always be presented as an insanity-riddled shell of a once-friendly and decent person. Still, I find it hard to keep RPGers from shooting first and asking questions later, especially in a horror game.

Jason Morton m0rpheus@OZEMAIL.COM.AU

There was a place in wales where they company manager was being mind-controlled by a computer and was dumping toxic waste in mineshafts causing maggots to mutate and grow big.

This story was the green death which was a Jon Pertwee Dr. Who story....Hmmh Dr Who in a kult universe, how is the tardis powered.....and where do the old companions REALLY GO???

FuzzyLogic fuzzylogic@LEGO.MCIT.MED.UMICH.EDU

(an interview with Zeke's neighbor)"Zeke was such a good boy. a little trouble but..." (drawing flamethrower) "Commie mutant scum sympathizer! Prepare to die!" I guess one way to combat this is something like: Commander/Boss/Person in charge: "Jameson and his men went in armed to the teeth." Player: "What happened to them." C/B/PiC: "Well, they killed all the reliable witnesses, and were still captured by an unknown assailant, tortured, forced to eat each other's entrails, and killed. That's why were sending you in."

In the states, the holiday season is a nightmare. This got me thinking about a KULT Christmas special (why not, it seems everyone in the states does one, yak)

The elements are right, because if high concentrations of humanity cause ripples in the illusion, than a yuletide shopping trip might very well be a ticket to Metropolis wrapped in human skin. I like to start small, and make little things wrong, and build up until things are just a terrible mess.

Am I suggesting sending the characters holiday shopping? Why sure! Its a great way to get characters together, and everyone has to brave the shopping throng once (those characters that insist they do all their shopping by mail should receive a letter bomb from your favorite Luddite)

Characters could also win a shopping spree too. Stores also have ways of making sure they pack in the most people in the least amount of time. Malls would be great for this, since window shopping could give tiny hints that something is amiss...

"Oh look, its that statuette of those Greek wrestlers! It looks different though...my God, they're not wrestling..."

And of course, lets not forget the shoppers that wind up fighting over a present or just being too close to each other. They bang their carts together, start swearing, throwing things -- the children are crying -- people are getting pressed together in a throng. One of them pulls out a gun...bam, you've got a panicked throng of people, and the characters can either be squashed together and pushed by the tide of people or pulled apart, depending on what they do and wha the GM wants.

I like using mob panic as a cross to Metropolis, because characters can either be swept into Metropolis, or, if they are not, they have the mystery of these people disappearing to contend with, which is fun because at first, many people might realize a group has disappeared. Slowly, this number diminishes as Razides and such do damage control. It lets the players do this in many different ways.

But there are just opportunities for wonderful imagery, and not just from a gore standpoint. All those clothing shops with those huge windows, that could display normal clothing, then sexy lingerie, then the master slave outfits, leather masks with zippers, piercing accessories. If you have more bulk shopping images, please let me know.

How many people do you think have wanted to beat the snot out of the Salvation Army people outside the store (the bells! the BELLS!). When two or three people come up, pin the guy down and start clubbing the ringer with their own bell, might be a sign you're not shopping at Elysium any more.

I could go on and on (and HAVE). Crowds are a great thing. Not just for Christmas shopping, but rock concerts, traffic jams, sporting events, and orgies. The important thing is for a LOT of people, and the inability to get from point A to point B quickly. People see dead loved ones, dead hated ones, dead people in general -- which is really wacked. People they're hunting, people hunting them, lots of opportunities, and the player is confined in the crowd.

So, don't forget the gift of Metropolis this Christmas. Its the gift they're never forget

I have recently been thinking about this scenario of mine, where the players play orphanage children which have been the victims of Astaroth's experiments, have been deeply disturbed and thus can walk freely between Elysium and a purgatory in Inferno. They have never been outside the home long enough to learn any other world than the orphanage, and the teachers, nurses and psychologists all partake in the experiments. Now the PCs finds themselves in dreams of a children's hospital in Rwanda, where the remnants of the war dwells, undernourished and deeply disturbed.


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