You wanna see something *really* scary?
A coming attraction of unspeakable horror to the Gnostic Wisdom Network's Twitch stream
Iāve been wanting to do this for quite some time and now I finally get to! I, Frater Pera, will be GMing an ongoing actual-play of the horror RPG, Kult: Divinity Lost over at the Gnostic Wisdom Networkās Twitch stream. Come by at 8pm, every first and third Wednesday of the month and watch me subject my players to the darkest shit that my imagination can conjure. And believe me, people. I can imagine some heinous shit.
Hollywood Babalon
Our ongoing campaign will be titled: Hollywood Babalon and takes place in 1940ās Los Angeles during the production of a horror matinee movie called House of Satan, starring Boris Karloff and Rondo Hatton.
Questions will be asked: Why is this movie being directed by French art film director and protege of Jean Cocteau, Francois du Feu? What really happened at the premier of his film La Fin Absolue du Monde at Cannes? Who is the so-called Lust Killer that is leaving a trail of artfully posed and badly mangled bodies around Los Angeles? Who are The Unencumbered Sisterhood of the Chain? Why can no one remember Tobin Ames, executive producer at Hollywoodās most-daring and successful production studio, Perihelion Pictures?
All these questions and more will be answered in Kult: Hollywood Babalon, as portrayed by the players of the Gnostic Wisdom Network! There will also be:
Abrupt and shocking violence!
Provocative imagery that will haunt your dreams!
Wild historical inaccuracies!
Death is only the beginning
Iāve written in the past about roleplaying games as a step on the path to enlightenment by expressing my unbridled enthusiasm for Mage: The Ascension.
But just as all things are hermetic, Mageās soaring optimism has a dark reflection in the nihilistic Swedish roleplaying game, Kult.
Back in the 1990ās rumors swirled about a horror game that pushed the limits of good taste. Horror gaming mostly began and ended with Call of Cthulhu in the 1980ās. There were a few minor league horror titles but the hobby was still in its infancy and was largely combat simulations in alternating flavors of fantasy and science fiction. Games of storytelling and investigation still had yet to come fully to life. Vampire: The Masquerade was a massive success in the early 90ās and a major move forward toward alternatives in gaming for people (like this guy) who just werenāt all that interested in endless combat encounters. Kult was the next logical step. Vampire cornered the market for people looking to sink themselves into the Anne Rice fantasy but what if you wanted to go real dark? What if youāre more of a Clive Barker guy than an Anne Rice guy? What if youāre writing in the third person about yourself?
The first edition of Kult was like nothing else out there. It was also pretty hard to come by. It was translated into English from Swedish and published in the States by a tiny outfit. I managed to nab one at my local comic shop and then failed to interest any of my regular crew in it. Itās ruleset was still very much of its time, being that a good chunk of the book focused on combat and weapons statistics and playing the game involved a bit of crunch (being a game thatās very numbers-heavy). It felt very AD&D but the theme and flavor was fucking nasty. It was the original splatterpunk game with heavy emphasis on the ugliest shit you could think of and its setting was truly unique. The aesthetic was appropriately Swedish, too, seeing as how the country probably produced more death metal, per capita, than any other nation on Earth. Think nails and barbed wire. A few more editions came around that Iām mostly unfamiliar with but Iāve been told the further editions progressively sanded the edges off until not much of the original edition was left. But then a company called Helmgast Kickstarted the system as a hack of the wildly popular Powered By The Apocalypse ruleset and the original item roared back to life, original themes and setting intact with a ridiculously fluffy ruleset that discourages combat encounters in favor of players simply yes-anding one another into blood-soaked nightmares with the greatest of ease. The current edition inspires the goriest, most perverted games of improv theater youāve ever seen.
Kult is relevant to readers of Codex A and people interested in gnosticism because its entire setting hinges on the most nihilistic interpretation of gnosticism and Kabbalah imaginable.
In the days before the fall, mankind was divine. We were one among a kaleidoscope of strange beings that occupied an endless city bordering on an endless wilderness upon infinity. But mankind was also literally the worst. We were decadent and cruel, which is saying something because the other beings we coexisted with are fucked. up. bro. Our creator had to do something about it and so, The Demiurge blinded us to our nature and built a tremendous prison that was like the world we fell from, but all the good stuff was kept out of sight. The world we were sentenced to was mundane and nowhere near as wondrous as the one we fell from. To keep us asleep, The Demiurge created ten archons, each one representing mankindās worst impulses, mapped to their place on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. In order to keep us distracted and fighting with one another, they put distractions in our way, created servants of their principles that would manipulate us here in this false world. We went to sleep and the world beyond the illusion was psyched because man, we really sucked.
But then something happened and no one in the great beyond can explain it. The Demiurge disappeared. Vanished. Poof! Gone. And with it went the careful balance and unison that all the other beings served. Why? Thatās up to you. The core book has a rich cosmology of toys to play with but keeps the canon quite loose so that you can make this game your own. A lot of publishers make their money with lore-expanding supplemental books and players feel obliged to stick to the canon. World of Darkness is notorious for this. But Helmgast keeps it deliberately vague to benefit gamers. For instance, I have ideas already about what happened to The Demiurge. Weāll see if my players get there with their sanity intact but my conclusion about the Archons and the Death Angels will be just as valid as someone who keeps a tight interpretation of the core bookās lore. Being that Iām GMing a gnostic horror game on a gnostic twitch stream, I plan to address some of the missing pieces of the gameās cosmology. Namely, that there seems to be nothing beyond The Demiurge. Thereās a realm in the game which suggests an abyss but the core book makes no mention of passing through the abyss and finding the truly divine unity beyond it. For the sake of theme, Kult seems to keep the game hopeless and bleak with mankindās ultimate destiny being a return to a state of profoundly divine shittyness.
But back to the loreā¦
With no great power to keep everyone else in line, the forces beyond the illusion turned on each other like hungry dogs. The veil over our eyes begins to thin. Cracks begin to show in the illusion and if you were unlucky enough to be a human where that crack was, you could peer through and see the truly maddening shit show which lies beyond. Youād see all the actors from the other side working on our side to keep us asleep. Youād see them as they truly are: monstrous beings of disease and cruelty. Glorious angelic beasts with boobs and a huge boner. With the biggest prison guard of them all gone, they gave in to their worst urges. Angels fought angels. Luminous beings of beauty became corrupted animals of lust and murder. And if things werenāt bad enough already, the Demiurge and its Archons had a dark sibling in the Qliphotic Astaroth and his Death Angels, perversions of the Archons with their worst qualities dimed out. And man alive, have they been waiting for this opportunity to do their thing. With the window open, mankind begins to reach through the illusion. Some of us come to realize the truth. Enlightenment comes to those of us who stare through the illusion and not tear ourselves limb from limb from the sheer madness that the vision inspires. Enlightenment gives us a bit of control over the eldritch forces that control the illusion but we need to power that magic through sex or death. The further into the illusion we go, the more twisted we become, or do we become untangled? Itās really all in how you look at it. Becoming fully awakened is the goal, to regain your lost divinity and the closer you get to that, the less human you become.
Fun, right?
Kult was inspired by the fiction of Clive Barker and even going back to its first edition, itās very clear that it was trying to mine the world of Hellraiser for a game that managed to be more than gimmick, quite playable, and also true to its tone. Anyone who has ever done any sort of gaming will tell you that every session, no matter the game, has moments of player levity. Genre is agnostic. Shit always gets a little silly. But Kult is likely the only game Iāve ever seen where cracking a joke in the middle of the proceedings is a lot like ripping a loud fart at a funeral. Itās not exactly a joyless game. No one would play it if it was a bummer from start to finish. Itās just that itās a horror game that intends to lean into the horror. Even Call of Cthulhu can elicit some laughter since that gameās setting is inspired by pulp fiction that is Lovecraft adjacent. You can do a purely Lovecraft inspired game where erudite men of academia follow their obsessions a step too far but thereās also a lot of rules in the book for car chases and tommy gun battles with gangsters. The only game out there on the market now that comes close to Kultās unpleasantness is the extraordinary Delta Green which pits bad guys against even worse guys.
I finally get to run this game. After years of poring over the rulebooks and taking in the lore, I finally get to taste this forbidden fruit and see if I have what it takes to be really unpleasant. And I plan to take full advantage of the setting. My players have characters built and fleshed out in a way that aids the story. Iāve built plot seeds around their characters and created NPCs based on actual personalities from around LA at that time. Is Howard Hughes up to no good? Probably. Do the Hollywood studio executives serve the diabolical forces of the Inferno. Oh, absolutely they do. Just how much about the illusion does Jack Parsons know? Couldnāt be that much if heās hanging out with L. Ron Hubbard.
Join me for a game thatās heavy on character and saturated with dread and gore. I am hereby fully committed to being a bit much.