Quote from: JesterRaiin;878104as in, "world", because I can't comment how things were locally

Yeah, missed that needle in the haystack...
If you can't comment on 'locally' for everyone how can you comment on the 'world' for everyone?

Quoteso let's just stop here, shall we?

Agreed!

Quote from: Simlasa;878109Yeah, missed that needle in the haystack...
If you can't comment on 'locally' for everyone how can you comment on the 'world' for everyone?

Agreed!

Don't worry about it. We're just poor dumb 'mhuricans trying to speak on things out simple minds just can't comphrend. So arrogant of us, to have different notions than our innate betters! :rolleyes:

Quote from: Simlasa;878102I wouldn't even be arguing with him if he'd started out with "Well, where I'm from..." rather than some sweeping statement about the revelations of the internet and Dan Brown.

But you're right.
It's particularly silly since we obviously both like the game.

Personally, I understand him, I got the first edition of KULT in swedish less than a year after it came out.
Hellraiser had been out a while, sure, but I was never into those kinds of movies, especially not back then.
The rpg KULT, on the other hand .... was massively intriguing.
And even though there were movies and such of that kind around, it was more for the thrill than for actually questioning christianity and such, while KULT was including the idea of actually exploring what was beyond Death itself.
Not merely dying, but exploring nightmarish realms beyond death.

And then there was the thing about the lost Demiurge, the seeming equivalence of "God" being ... gone?
It offered a way to discuss christianity under the guise of fiction, a kind of haven, free from any feeling of risking damnation, it easily made those who encountered it questioning, despite being fiction.
It made us think.

The factoid blurb on the Kult Facebook page states:

QuoteTriva of the week:
 - The pope actually banned Kult when it was released in Italy.

- In Sweden, Kult was seen as so shocking that toy stores stopped selling role playing games alltogether.

Oh and they'll be releasing two different covers for the new edition. One with tits out.

Quote from: Warthur;878106To be fair, as I understand it the setting of Kult is explicitly dysfunctional; the Qlippoth are plotting against each other, the Sephiroth are too, and when it kicks off everything is going to come crashing down horribly because the thing which imposed order and co-operation on entities which would much rather just fight is gone. So you could almost see that as a feature, not a bug.

The Qlippoth in Kult is more understandable, as in that world they indeed are split up, and so is even the Sephira, as they have proven to choose sides for and against "The Lie".
It is still a mess though, a superficial gathering of entities that do not even share a similar origin, but that is claimed to be the same in some way anyway.

Quote from: Simlasa;878102I wouldn't even be arguing with him if he'd started out with "Well, where I'm from..." rather than some sweeping statement about the revelations of the internet and Dan Brown.

But you're right.
It's particularly silly since we obviously both like the game.

The irony is his eye rolling about "'mhurican arrogance" while making a sweeping statement about such sweeping statements. I admit its a pretty typicsl 'tude to encounter online and hypocritical as Hell (especially when mixed with bitching about "American Exceptionalism. "The USA doesn't equate to the world but (usually western) Europe does!" ) and the unspoken support for it is one of the things that drove me nuts about Tang.

Quote from: Nexus;878103It wasn't something like Faces of Death or Kids at Play" that you had to hunt up in backrooms, weird arthouse cinemas and get from a "friend of a friend".

Faces of Death was pretty common in the video stores here but I've never heard of 'Kids at Play'... do you mean that Troma thing, 'Beware: Children at Play'?

Quote from: Catelf;878111Personally, I understand him, I got the first edition of KULT in swedish less than a year after it came out.

I'm sure for a lot of people it was something new. Not so much for a lot of others... and I've certainly got no clue what was going on in Sweden at the time, though the exchange students I met here all seemed well-adjusted and healthy.

Quote from: Catelf;878111Hellraiser had been out a while, sure, but I was never into those kinds of movies, especially not back then.
The rpg KULT, on the other hand .... was massively intriguing.

I always felt the link that some gamers made between Kult and Hellraiser was overstated. Some of the imagery was lifted from the movie in the supporting art, but then so were movies like Silence of the Lambs and Twin Peaks (and later Se7en). However, Hellraiser didn't make any Judeo-Christian references in it's backstory, and in my view could easily be a Call of Cthulhu scenario with the S&M motif dialled up.

Kult's backstory has more depth in my view as it explored our relationship to the Judeo-Christian myth in relation to a dark and sadistic, postmodern world. The very notion of saying "Judeo-Christian myth" largely covers why it was controversial, of course.

Quote from: Simlasa;878116Faces of Death was pretty common in the video stores here but I've never heard of 'Kids at Play'... do you mean that Troma thing, 'Beware: Children at Play'?

We were a little behind there and "Faces of Death" was voluntarily pulled from shelves in some stores or at you had to specifically ask for it for awhile.

Was the Troma picture that splatterfest movie with kids getting murdered in bizarre over the top ways? I've only seen clips and that was a few decades ago.

Like I said bible belt and all. But I think it goes to show your point since even here Last Temptation of Christ wasn't such a huge deal. Neither was Kult for that matter but it was so far below most people's radar around here that's not surprising (though back in the 80s we had a few small protest marches outside of some local game stores).

Quote from: Nexus;878115The irony is his eye rolling about "'mhurican arrogance" while making a sweeping statement about such sweeping statements.

I didn't even get that he wasn't from the U.S. till he mentioned something about language.
From my own experience people from outside the U.S. generally have a MUCH better knowledge of what's going on in our country than we do about theirs... often a better understanding of our government and history than many 'mhuricans' do. Despite being a 'world power' we ARE commonly (ashamedly) unaware of the rest of the world.

Quote from: Nexus;878118Was the Troma picture that splatterfest movie with kids getting murdered in bizarre over the top ways?

Yeah, that's the one.

Quote from: Simlasa;878121Yeah, that's the one.

Then that would be the one. You couldn't find a copy to save your life for a long time around here and got funny looks for asking.

Quote from: TrippyHippy;878117I always felt the link that some gamers made between Kult and Hellraiser was overstated.

Yeah, I'm not one of those claiming it's 'Hellraiser: The RPG'... just that Hellraiser WAS an influence and it was a widely seen, popular movie. Hellraiser 2 might have been a bigger influence, with characters crossing over into 'Hell' and back.

QuoteHowever, Hellraiser didn't make any Judeo-Christian references in it's backstory, and in my view could easily be a Call of Cthulhu scenario with the S&M motif dialled up.

Well, the term 'cenobite'... references to 'Hell' and 'soul'... and the moral layout of the villains (a sexual explorer and an adultress) were more in the Christian mold than a Lovecraftian one... though definitely of some cosmology that wasn't expressed in the bible. Humans and their souls seemed to be fairly important in Hellraiser's setting.

QuoteKult's backstory has more depth in my view

The Hellraiser movies were never very deep... the comic series got a lot more involved/interesting though. Still nowhere near Kult though.

Hopefully the designers will consider the primary themes they want to address and then create mechanics which force players to consider those themes when taking actions.

Quote from: JesterRaiin;877496As for AW engine, I have a bad feeling about it. After all, to my knowledge there's no successful *.world based game that deals with horror of KULT's level.

The original system didn't really deal with it either though.

Quote from: JesterRaiin;877496Sure, there are some hacks or horror-themed playbooks, there's "Tremulus", yet, neither seem to gain much recognition as "AW-driven scary game", which the newest edition of KULT is supposed to be.

Tremulus failed in play for reasons having nothing to do with the AW engine.

Quote from: Warthur;877523In my experience of *World hacks "moves" are extremely broad - much broader than the term implies.

Most @world moves are nothing more than a lexical identification of what players and GMs have been doing all along. Seems that once you give it a name it becomes work and telling you what to do

Quote from: JesterRaiin;877685It is crucial to go back in time to truly understand KULT. When it was released times were different, people thought in different ways, RPGs were less mainstream than they are now, things we're accustomed to now were prohibited and so on and so forth.

Quote from: JesterRaiin;877685So, no wonder that nowadays KULT isn't as blasphemous as it was back then. Were you to read it, you would probably miss 50% of stuff that made us react with "whoa" upon reading it in years predating y2k.

Quote from: JesterRaiin;878080That's well and good, thumbs up for living in tolerant parts of the world, but this doesn't change the way things were back then.

Sadly the only thing that's really changed are the sides. People are just as intolerant of the same shit as they ever were, only now it's liberal gamers instead of conservative evangelicals. In fact, in many ways it's worse now because it's originating from the 'inside'.

Quote from: Warthur;877692Another thing the original Kult did that you couldn't get away with now - plagiarise art. Somewhere in one of my 1E English books is a bit of art which blatantly steals from the poster for the Reanimator movie.

Source (as I kinda collect instances like this)?

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.

I was just going to mention Blades.

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, monsters roaming slums, pretending to be "merely" violent gang members and so on and so forth. It's possible to hide before such beings from beyond, because to them we're all alike: just filthy, blind and drugged entities focused on totally irrelevant matters, worshiping pieces of trash.

...but they might miss a lot of other details. They don't see what is written on our t-shirts, they don't perceive pictures transmitted via tv, and once you cover yourself with rags, cease to act "differently", you're just another piece of the Illusion. They could've been standing next to their prey unable to recognize it as long as it behaves properly.

This is how I ran Mage: The Ascension.

Hopefully the new system actually does something to invoke this mechanically.

Quote from: Simlasa;878125Yeah, I'm not one of those claiming it's 'Hellraiser: The RPG'... just that Hellraiser WAS an influence and it was a widely seen, popular movie. Hellraiser 2 might have been a bigger influence, with characters crossing over into 'Hell' and back.

Well, the term 'cenobite'... references to 'Hell' and 'soul'... and the moral layout of the villains (a sexual explorer and an adultress) were more in the Christian mold than a Lovecraftian one... though definitely of some cosmology that wasn't expressed in the bible. Humans and their souls seemed to be fairly important in Hellraiser's setting.

Leviathan (an Old Testament reference) was also part of Hellraiser storyline.