After watching a few videos by Seth Skorkowsky on Kult and playing a game of it and talking to people who've played it, I bought a copy during a Black Friday sale. I also got a few supporting products such as Kult: Beyond Darkness and Madness (GM guide) and Kult: Labyrinths & Secret Chambers (100 location maps with suggested creepy setting contents).
Kult is a combination of Dark City and Hellraiser. It is definitely a hard R-rated horror game, and can venture into X-rated (due to sex, violence, subject matter). The original KS book cover for Kult 4e showed the angel's nipples dripping blood. The rivulets of blood on her armor came from her breasts as if it were mother's milk. The art got changed for general publication. The original art was more striking, but bad for marketing reasons.
What I found odd was the game of Kult I played in and description of games from friends who tried it didn't delve into the core precepts of the game.
The idea is that humans are divine souls. That Earth is a prison built to contain us with the grinding banality of everyday life. Angels and Demons are tasked with keeping us on the hamster wheel of life. If we die, our experiences are stripped from our souls, and we are reincarnated in prison. The jailers (Angels and Demons) sometimes dutifully do their jobs and sometimes act out. If you're a jailer for millennia, you get bored and act out. The jailers all look like they came out of a Hellraiser movie. PCs are humans who have finally gotten a glimpse past the illusion of everyday life and momentarily saw the Truth. The game is about the PC's journey to enlightenment through a landscape of horror.
A PC's Dark Secret is not a dump score, but something a Player wants to explore because that is the lever used to propel the PC to enlightenment. So, only pick Dark Secrets you want to see in play.
The Demiurge (God) is missing or dead, so the fallout is civil war and power struggles between various powers. The jailers have their own domains and preferences. For instance, the Archon Tiphareth's domain is beauty and affirmation. Celebrity worship, beauty products, TV shows, TikTok, YouTube, etc. are traps created by Tiphareth. Each type of excess falls into a separate Archon's domain, some overlap, some cooperate, some compete for dominion. The Archon Malkuth is tired of it all and wants to awaken all the humans.
Outside of Elysium (Earth) are the Metropolis (a combination of Amber from the Nine Princes of Amber and Heaven), Inferno (Hell), the Underworld (underground labyrinthian complexes, a subway to other places), Limbo (dream worlds), and Gaia (savage nature, Earth was created from a slice of Gaia). These other places can be visited from Elysium where the boundary is thin. All these places are vast and contain various creatures and cults.
This version of Kult 4e uses a modified version of Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA). It uses 2d10 instead of 2d6. In PbtA, a +1 or +2 is significant because in PbtA: a 6- is a failure, 7-9 partial success, 10+ complete success. On average 2d6 = 7. And PCs have up to -3 to +3 based on their stats. But in Kult, with 2d10, the average is 11. 9- is a failure, 10-14 success with complication, 15+ complete success. So, a +1 or +2 is less significant. PC stats are -2 to +3, so on average almost all Moves (when a PC does an action and rolls dice, it's a Move) are partial successes.
That said, Kult is more about a series of partial successes (which creates drama) until you succeed. If you view Kult as this type of game, versus a I-wanna-play-to-win game, then it all works out.
What I love about the books, which are well written, are the numerous suggestions for complications when a Move doesn't completely succeed. Lots of options and suggestions are planted throughout the book.
I don't know when I can find the right group who wants to try this out, but I highly recommend this for an adult audience that's not squeamish about adult content.
KULT: Beyond Darkness & Madness (GM Guide) is well written and I didn't find any advice I disagreed with. Lots of good examples. Some of the last couple of chapters started getting a bit repetitive though.
KULT: Labyrinths & Secret Chambers has 100 loose leaf maps with a clean generic layout on one side and on the other side, a version with furniture and objects, sometimes a rundown version of a location. A 64 page booklet describes each layout and what it can be used for (3 possibilities) and 4 to 6 creepy details that the GM can use as inspiration. There's also 18 pages of lists of locations, random names, and such for the GM.
