Fear & Loathing in Kult (Halo 1)

Kult 1st Edition

This entry started out as a scathing review of the Kult comic Dark Horse published late last year. I was also going to include some of my memories as a Kult gamemaster as an addendum. When I finished my first draft, I realized that I'm more interested in talking about my Kult campaign than I am about the comic. I'll concentrate on my campaign, rather than the awful comic book.

Back in '01 and '02 I was all about Role Playing Games being an artform. RPGs had become my primary creative outlet. My stories were more than just dungeon-crawls and action adventure ordeals, they were interactive character driven dramas. Kult came to the forefront during those couple of years as the game that was closest both in tone and in themes to what I was trying to do within the role playing medium. Kult isn't a game about fighting monsters, it is about much, much more. It made for truly bleak (some of my players would say nihilistic) stories. I remember thinking that Kult should have been a metaphysical novel or comic, instead of a role playing game.

Unfortunately it didn't make for very fun sessions. The Kult in my mind was too dark and too layered for the role play medium. While I almost innately knew how to use the complicated setting to convey a compelling horror story, I never quite figured out how to present them to my players in an interesting manner. Thus my Kult campaign didn't really live up to the standard I had set up.

The Damned


My Kult campaign was named after one of its primary inspirations: The Damned by Joris-Karl Huysmans. The game revolved around the Solomon brothers; Three very rich and powerful tortured souls. We only managed to play 3 times, so I can only recall glimpses of the story. I'll share what I do remember in the hopes that it may draw a more interesting picture of the game than a bunch of bad gaming prose.

• An ancestral curse played a strong role in the game.
• The game dealt almost exclusively with Inferno. (I ignored the other parts of Kult's complication cosmology.)
• Most of the action took place in NYC and its environs.
• One of the characters was a closeted cannibal.
• Another one of the characters got a momentary glimpse of Metropolis, the original city, within the first couple of minutes of the game.
• The other Solomon's daughter was possessed by a demon. (Who was one of the campaign's primary antagonists.)
• I played a playlist of Nine Inch Nail's remixes in an endless loop during each session.  
• Other inspirational sources were Clive Barker's The Damnation Game, Nine Inch Nail's The Downward Spiral, and The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty. 

I still think the game's elements (PCs, environment, and supernatural conspiracy) were pretty solid. My problem was that I didn't know how to present them to the players. The subdued horror and the non-existent action made for an underwhelming experience for my players and I. I was never able to connect all the seemingly disparate elements into a cohesive story, so we abandoned the game after the third session.

My Kult books are in the same box I put them 7 or 8 years ago when I gave up on this campaign. I still love the game despite all its flaws. I'd gladly run it for a group of people who "get it." But in these more complicated times filled with responsibilities,  it is hard to find gamers who are willing to give an esoteric game with a clunky system a chance; even when that clunky RPG is the best horror game the world has ever seen.