KULT WITHOUT MONSTERS

Dixon Aidan (adixon@RVC.AC.UK)

Nicolas Stampf (stampf@NETSURF.ORG)

Albert Bergquist (alb@SORMAN.SE)

Jonathan P. Freeman (J.P.Freeman@EXETER.AC.UK)

Colin Neilson (cneilson@GPU.SRV.UALBERTA.CA)

Has anyone actually ran a complete Kult story that didnt feature nasty monsters ?

Depends what you mean by monsters really. The first scenario I ran was based on a Chill scenario published in the British RPG mag The Last Province (now sadly defunct), which was in turn based on the movie "The Hitcher". Only one monster, but a purely human one. I suppose a serial killer is probably too Millenium for you, but transposed from America to the all-too-familiar environs of the M1 motorway between London and Birmingham it worked quite well. The unfamiliar--and uncontrollable--intruding into our everyday lives is just one of many horrors that don't need to involve things with claws and fangs.

Another scenario was set largely in the nightmares of an abused child. Supernatural elements yes, but no monsters; just people and the things we do to each other. You don't have to use monsters in Kult if you don't want to. They're only metaphors after all. Figure out what the monsters in your scenario are a metaphor for, and substitute the reality instead.

I'm about to run a game for PC with positive mental balance (or not too low). I gave each PC the bisexuality (or homosexuality, player's choice) disadvantage, without any loss in mental balance (I consider that they (the PC:) fully live their condition. I'll tell you more on the game when it has been run. I can just tell you that it's a love story.

Oh, yes. Those has actually been the best ones. Both were one-timers and not part of a campaign.

In one we all were connected to a girl named Alice. We were all family or her boyfriend. Recently she had become strange (Astaroth tried to make her a new demiurge so he wouldn't have to take both roles, and thus she had BIG internal struggles when this started to arise in her conscience). She drugged herself with a strange drug just before we could get into her locked room. When we arrived she walked through the wall and we had to use the drugs also to be able to follow (after a long discussion and attempts to walk through the wall without the drug *ouch*). We tried to convince her that we loved her and that it didn't have to be this way. We succeeded. I think it was more of Twin Peaks-feeling over the game, and the same goes for the other one.

The gaming party was once again in the same family, and I was the father. The families dominating mother ('my wife') had decided that we should have this nice weekend with the caravan. While driving a deer ran up on the road and I hit it. Pieces of the deer hang from the wild-life fences we have in this country to prevent these things from happening. Some time later the police stopped and harassed us. After that we needed to fuel up and stopped at a restaurant. 'My son' (about 19 and body-building) had his first sexual experience with a waitress. After that it all repeated one or two degrees worse. We hit a pregnant Elk-cow and the kid flew through the wind-shield into the backseat of the car when the belly bursted. It lived for about 5-10 minutes looking at us, making different sounds. The police stopped us again and raped my daughter and ran a stick up my a**... Somehow I didn't fit behind the wheel and had to back my seat up. My son had become stronger and filled almost half of the back-seat. When we needed a new fuel refill it was this real disgusting gas station with a gross disgusting and fat person behind the counter who tried to get my daughter to the back room. She resisted and tried to give him a hard kick in the balls, but hit his fat hanging belly instead and he only laughed and shook it of. My son drew knife, and the other person drew a bigger one. The gross one were much better at using knife and stabbed my son bad. We tried to help him out. I (who couldn't fight at all) shook and opened a Coke aimed at his face to distract him just after my daughter hit his head with a hard, well-placed kick, which made him sink to the floor. Unfortunately the Coke woke him up instead, and we ran for our lives to the car and drove of. The third lap around should be even worse, but we didn't have time to finish it of (it was during a convention). What we never understood was that it all were my wife's purgatory!!! The fact explains things afterwards, and didn't take anything from the feeling of the game, which definitely was Twin Peaks and MORE.

And all the monsters were human, yet unhuman.

This would be very interesting indeed, I much prefer monster-lite, and this will be the approach that I will use when I actually finally start my Kult game. I think that conspiracies are great fun for gaming, more so than schlock horror, controversially perhaps, I would argue that terror is better engendered by subtle atmosphere build-ups rather than gore and gross-out. Conspiracy is great for building paranoia and fear. Check out the wealth of ideas and devious suggestions in GURPS Illuminati source book.

Actually, My first Kult game revolved around being trapped in someone else's nightmares, and featured one monster that lasted all of about fifteen seconds. The real fear came from the fact that people had no clue what was going on, whether they were asleep or awake, and why odd things kept happening to them.


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