Quote from: JesterRaiin;877685That being said: take alien horror, uncertainty and the possibility of your PC dying in horrible, horrible fashion from Call of Cthulhu. Add magical aspect, multilayered world and sanity from Unknown Armies. Mix it with reality of supernatural beings hiding in shadows, conspiring in a power struggle that avoids the eye of dreaming mankind, from World Of Darkness. Add spicy possibility of traveling through different layers of reality as seen in Don't Lose Your Head. Cook it, wait patiently, in the meantime watch a movie by Lynch, Cronnenberg or other similar director.

Serve.

That's KULT in a nutshell, according to your truly. ;]

This sounds awesome. I owned the original... when it came out. I didn't think it was that awesome. Was it this awesome? How did I miss this? Must re-examine...

Quote from: tenbones;878463This sounds awesome. I owned the original... when it came out. I didn't think it was that awesome. Was it this awesome? How did I miss this? Must re-examine...

Game is only as awesome as people playing it... And that's how today's episode of "The banality you find in the Net" began.

Ahem. ;]

More seriously: I think that's how pretty much everyone I know play/have been playing KULT. The testimonies of people from the Internet seem to support it too.

...Providing you tweak the ruleset, or exchange it for something less cumbersome. It's really not that well.

If you're interested, here's a campaign journal written by a fellow KULTist.

Quote from: tenbones;878463This sounds awesome. I owned the original... when it came out. I didn't think it was that awesome. Was it this awesome? How did I miss this? Must re-examine...

It was that awesome... but a bit buried under a veneer that might have suggested, on a cursory look, that it was more about guns and trenchcoats... 90s era 'edginess'.

That's kinda what I remembered about it...

Seriously, I need to give this another look. (not sure about this new system tho)... but I think I have the old one sitting in my archives somewhere...

Quote from: JesterRaiin;878095On top of that, I'm not sure why you're putting any emphasis on "Hellraiser", and use it as argument, when I'm pointing out that ideas presented by KULT challenged Christian ideas, and that wasn't very popular thing to do "back then" (once again: back then).

In many places it still isn't. And for many people it still isn't.

I think most of this way "back then" stuff has less to do with what was available, acceptable, or commonly known way back then and far more to do with what any particular speaker knew about, accepted, or found commonly discussed back then. So it is mostly an age/experiential/generational thing.

Personally I don't recall ever seeing the game Kult, but weird conspiracies have been around longer than my entire life e.g. Rozwell, UFOology, Erik von Daniken, Big Foot, the Illuminati, etc. I'm no religious scholar, but I've been aware of the Gnostic texts since at least the early 1980s. The three books of The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson were first published in 1975. The trilogy included all sorts of nutty conspiracy stuff mixed with gnostic texts and bizarre deconstructivist theory and silly jokes. As I recall, the collection was recommended to me by a good friend who was into Gnostic writings even back then. Books like Elaine Pagels' classic, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1978) were certainly available in dead tree form they just were not part of the Dan Brown pop culture. Dan Brown himself referenced the earlier 1980s international bestseller The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. It and it's 1986 sequel, The Messianic Legacy claimed that (in accord with certain Gnostic texts) the historical Jesus married Mary Magdalene, had children, those children or their descendants emigrated to southern France, intermarried with families that would become the Merovingian dynasty, whose special claim to the throne of France is championed today by a secret society called the Priory of Sion.

So while such things were not as easily available as the Internet has since made everything, all those ideas and images were around well before the 1990s. But they may or may not have been part of anyone person's consciousness then, just as they still aren't part of some people's consciousness now.

Quote from: JesterRaiin;878080Different versions of KULT treat the Illusion in different fashion. Sometimes it's really different plane of existence, a kingdom-prison erected on Malkut's skin, sort of "a cancer" with our whole universe hidden withing, and then it's matching your assumption. Then again, in other occurrences it's more like an augmented reality, superimposed on streets of Metropolis itself.

BTW, this reminds me about Interzone from Burroughs' "Naked Lunch" and the second part of "The Futurological Congress" by St. Lem, which is probably one of best explanation of how the Illusion might work.

Anyway, in the latter approach, there's no "beyond", only different perceptions. Different beings are adjusted to perceive different ranges of reality only, so when hunters "see through the Lie", it means that they see things as they really are - celebrities with clown masks covering their faces, people whose "smartphones" are some sort of parasites, piercing their skulls with small tentacles and sucking dry their souls,

Dollar bills that read "THIS IS YOUR GOD".

JG

Quote from: James Gillen;878545Dollar bills that read "THIS IS YOUR GOD".

JG

Quote from: Simlasa;878149Yeah, Supernatural has the whole 'God has left the building and the angels are monsters' thing going on. If they want to drum up an uproar they'd have to go deep Carcosa or else start in on the sacred cows of the SJW crowd.

There's some directions they could go but most of them seem pretty fraught with peril. For instance while most are pretty numbed to violence by exposure (Hell you can see bloody murders and gruesome autopsies on TV during prime time now) sex is still a pretty verboten topic to explore too deeply but you risk being labeled prurient or juvenile if you go to far in that direction.

It feels like generally people are allot more thin skinned in gamer culture than when Kult was released and less willing to play What if?" with some topics (some of this is probably personal nostalgia) and poking at too many Sacred Cows (particular "SJW" ones) is good way to get trashed before you start.

Its a minefield, that's for sure.

Quote from: Nexus;879069There's some directions they could go but most of them seem pretty fraught with peril. For instance while most are pretty numbed to violence by exposure (Hell you can see bloody murders and gruesome autopsies on TV during prime time now) sex is still a pretty verboten topic to explore too deeply but you risk being labeled prurient or juvenile if you go to far in that direction.

It feels like generally people are allot more thin skinned in gamer culture than when Kult was released and less willing to play What if?" with some topics (some of this is probably personal nostalgia) and poking at too many Sacred Cows (particular "SJW" ones) is good way to get trashed before you start.

Its a minefield, that's for sure.

It's not that much more of a minefield than it was back then - on one hand, you will get both barrels as conservatives and SJWs might tear you a new one. On the other, there are probably less Christians on the prowl about RPGs nowadays as well - and remember Dogma and Da Vinci Code boycotts?

Kult was never a game for the religiously conservative any way. It's meant to be controversial, and unless the people making them are completely retarded, they know what horse they've saddled.

As for the actual "will it be at all controversial nowadays, will it manage to push buttons?" - the devil is in the detail. You only need to compare SJG's version of In Nomine to the French one to see how literally same topic, 2 different approaches, can provide a radically different game. With the renaissance of gore/splatterporn in early 2000s, I think it's safe to say the game'll provide.

Quote from: Future Villain Band;877715I'm interested.  The AW port doesn't bother me, because games like Blades in the Dark show how far and deep that can diverge and still produce a great game.

Yep, Blades in the Dark is a nice example. Take a look at Mutant Year Zero, for another *world inspired game.

Quote from: Itachi;879090Take a look at Mutant Year Zero, for another *world inspired game.

I'm sorry, are you SURE you're talking about the correct game? Way I see it, it's nowhere similar to *.world engine running ones.

AW is an interesting system. Even if I were not to like it, it might still be a good thing for the setting to be implemented with PBTA, given its relative popularity. If the hack is popular enough, maybe the original could be brought back.

Quote from: JesterRaiin;879093I'm sorry, are you SURE you're talking about the correct game? Way I see it, it's nowhere similar to *.world engine running ones.

Don't have the time now but I can find the interview where the designers say so. Also, if you take a look at it, notice how the classes look a lot like playbooks, with focus on relationships, special abilities that resemble moves, etc. And just reminded another great *world inspired game: Beyond the Wall. This one a neat fusion of OSR and PbtA.

*Edit* hey, that facebook page is really nice, huh ? Judging by the concept art over there the book will be gorgeous.

Quote from: Itachi;879102Don't have the time now but I can find the interview where the designers say so.

Please do. I see no direct influence, and I'd like to learn about it. :]

JesterRaiin, take a look..

 http://obskures.de/2015/mutant-year-zero-interview-tomas-haerenstam/

Though to be frank this was not the one I'd seen before. Perhaps it was a thread on RPGnet with the author, can't remember now.

Anyway, I'm getting tired of *world hacks, because I think the rules possibilities are getting exhausted at this point. What I like to see is exactly these games which take just some cues from it and move on to create their own thing. That's why the new Kult got me so excited.