Interview with the authors of the Kult RPG - 1

1. Who was the Demiurge?Whether the Demiurge was ever a ’mere’ human or not seem to us like a plot concern. If it suits the campaign of the gamemaster, then be it so. Personally, we like to set him apart from other creatures. After all, in a mytho-logical context he is God and to uphold that status he needs to be unique. For the gnostic background to work out well, we also feel that the Demiurge must take the position of absent God. The idea of a protestant (stern and very patriarchal) God in a gnostic context is much influenced by the Swedish early 19th Century poet Stagnelius. We don’t know if his work has been trans-lated into French, but he could maybe be described as a Swedish Rimbaud of the 1820’s.

2. Why did humanity fall?The Demiurge probably told himself that imprisoning humanity it was the right thing to do. Maybe because of humans becoming too dangerous. In reality the De-miurge wanted power over humans and creation, and thus created the prison. What ‘really’ happened (did the Demiurge exist before humanity? was he human? was there a conflict before imprisonment?) we choose to leave out. We feel that for the religious context of the game to work these ‘pre-historical’ happenings need be mythological, not factual.

3. Who is Astaroth now? Did he meet the Demi-urge?Astaroth ruled the Infernos where humans who felt they deserved to be punished travelled. In that sense, he was like a lictor and other guardians of humanity’s prison. But we never envisioned him as created con-sciously by the Demiurge. Rather, he is the Shadow of the Demiurge. Like a human transcending to the light unconsciously creates a dark ‘twin’, we see Astaroth as the twin of the Demiurge. He was created at the same time as the Illusion. Creating the Illusion was a ‘bad’

thing, even the Demiurge sensed that, and thus that act caused a split in his being.

Astaroth travelled to look for the Demiurge and never told anyone if he found him. As we see it, he didn’t. The Demiurge is gone and Astaroth is at a loss without him. He can’t merge with the Demiurge, since he is gone. What he can do is to become the new Demiurge, if humanity crave a God. Then he must change his ways considerably and in all effects become the new Demi-urge and loose himself. Will he do that? Can he even? We don’t know. We feel he works best as irresolute. And after all, he can stay undecided for quite a long time.

4. Where is the Demiurge?Dead and Gone! That is a basic concept for the game. He won’t be coming back, unless Astaroth takes his place, and he will be quite another Demiurge.

5. What is keeping Astaroth away from the Illusion?To take over the Illusion, Astaroth has to adhere to its rules. If he breaks too many of them, the whole prison could fall apart and humanity be freed. He doesn’t want that. He wants control over the Illusion, but is unsure as to how to achieve that. He can’t easily take command over lictors and arconts, who will fight to keep him away from what they now sense is their world. So, he is plan-ning a slow ‘infernalization’ of the world while trying to get lictors and other servants to convert to his side.

6. What about Malkuth and Tipareth?Malkuth is sponsoring magical and scientific research trying to find ways to a ‘fast awakening’ of humans. She realizes that letting everyone try to awaken by themselves would take forever. She is using Tipareths influence to get access to levels of society she would otherwise be kept away from. How long Tipareth will play along? Who knows?

Interview with the AuthorsThis is a Q&A with the original authors of Kult, Gunilla Jonsson and Michael Petersén. It is a collec-tion of questions posed by the Kult community as well as by Neko of le 7éme Cercle, who is also the one to thank for this release. It is in a very raw and unedited format to avoid losing context. NOTE: It is not recommended that players of Kult read this text. It is intended for Game Masters only. It also does contain certain elements which might ‘spoil’ your game even if you are a Game Master! You have been warned...

-Torben Rygg, www.kult-rpg.com

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7. How many awakened are there? What are they doing?Not too many. It is hellishly difficult to become awak-ened, so no more than a thousand souls would seem reasonable. Like Malkuth, they are somewhat at a loss as to what to do. Few know what would really happen if they tried to ‘crash’ the illusion. Would people die per-manently? Would they really be awakened? Or go mad? Nobody knows. Since becoming awakened is a rather time consuming thing, most are patient beings. They take their time and try to figure out a working plan. So far no one has come up with one.

8. Is Messiah the Demiurge’s son?No, we don’t think so. The Demiurge had no children. Messiah is an awakened human who can’t abide with the others wait and see attitude. He talks of himself as Son of God to lower the Demiurge to human levels, rather than elevate himself. He wants to take action, preferably now, something that tends to rush him into situations he can’t handle.

9. What is Lore of Reality?To magically influence things beyond the illusion. Awakened could learn to do that, as could some other powerful creatures and maybe, maybe som very special non-awakened humans. A plot devise, not to be used too often.

10. What was the world like before the fall?Much of that which was before is left in Metropolis, Gaia and other places outside the illusion. We like to think of it as ‘modern’, not a fantasy setting like Mel-nibonë.

11. Who are the humans in Metropolis?Inprisoned humans who have escaped our world, but not awakened. They are just as lost as the rest of us.

12. Who are the gods, like Shiva?They are independent creatures, some created before the Illusion. Most are unique, like the Demiurge or the Arconts. They seldom belong to a species, like human-ity. Some are created by humans or other creatures, like the Demiurge created Arconts.

13. Why the gnostic background?We wanted a mythological background for the game, to be able to incorporate characters like Messiah, Astaroth and different gods. Kult is basically a horror game so

we felt that the game characters should be small and vulnerable in a large and nasty world. The gnostic back-ground gave all that. The gnosticism also took away the name God from God. We didn’t want to offend chris-tian people by playing around too obviously with their religion (some got offended anyway, but most took it well).

14. Why did we stop writing for Kult?The game got out of print in Sweden and no more material was needed. For a while we made convention scenarios, but for now, we just write for private play.

KULT answers part 21. Q: Are the missing Archons dead or disappeared? What happened to them?A: They are gone. Their disappearance is part of what made the illusions crumble. The remaining ones are aware that their existence is part of what is keeping the illusion together, so they will try to keep each other alive. We have never specified exactly what happened to the missing ones. They were somehow destroyed in the infighting that took place after the disappearance of the Demiurge. Some may even have chosen destruction rather than further existence when the Demiurge was gone.

2.Q: Will Archons survive the awakening of hu-manity? If not, why is Malkuth trying to awaken people?A: Nobody, not even the Archons themselves, knows whether they would survive the destruction of the illu-sion. Malkuth probably hopes that awakening humanity will free her as well, maybe changing her and turning her into something new. But such an event could just as well destroy the Archons. From a storytelling per-spective we find it most rewarding to let those Archons capable of change survive, while the least flexible would rather choose to be destroyed.

3. Q: How do you see ancient everyday life of humans before the fall?A: We envision it a bit like the existence of “The Danc-ers at the End of Time” from Michael Moorcock’s sto-ries – more like what sci-fi authors call “post-human” than a religiously inspired heavenly life. But we haven’t elaborated on it, rather leaving it open to fill in the gaps when needed for the story.

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4. Q: What is the vision of an Awakened? Could he or she live a normal life?A: Each Awakened in our stories is made up specifically for a plot purpose. We like to make them at bit larger than life without loosing all feeling of normality. For us it works out best when we create an ordinary (in a psychological sense) character and then put him or her in the abnormal situation of being immortal, bestowed with more knowledge than he or she has asked for and often burdened with a sense of responsibility that some will readily take on, others try to get rid of. In that way, we get different responses from the characters, depend-ing on their personality. Some will retire from the world, some will take rash action to change things, others will take upon themselves to be the teachers of their more ignorant fellow humans. Many of our ideas about how people would react to immortality or strange powers were inspired by science fiction stories.

Surely an Awakened can fall in love with non-awakened and live a normal life. They don’t necessarily like each other better than the non-awakened humans. We have envisioned the Awakened as a rather strange lot. They are often more individualistic, and sometimes egotistic, than most people. Some of them will take advantage of the situation and exploit their blinded comrades. But they will never regard the imprisoned humans as “ani-mals” or “lowly creatures”. The very nature of awak-ening implies that they perceive all things as they are. They see the blindness of ordinary people as something temporary, and in a sense inconsequential.

5. Q: There is a rumour for the Demiurge walking among us having forgotten who he was. Is it impos-sible?A: We left the background of the game open to let peo-ple create their own stories. So nothing’s definitely im-possible. But it won’t happen in any of our campaigns. The Demiurge’s disappearance is an important “base fact” that makes the world of KULT what it is.

No number. Q: What are your thoughts of playing Awakened?A: As mentioned above, we mainly constructed the Awakened as plot devices. Our own stories have all been based in (more or less) realistic settings. While using mentally very unbalanced characters for some shorter stories, we always found them somewhat im-practical in longer story arcs. We have never used Awak-

ened as player characters, so our advice isn’t any more “expert like” than anyone elses. But we can try to give some thoughts on the subject:

The rules of the game won’t really hold for that kind of characters. One would have to play “free form”, with-out rules. We have done that rather often as it is. They game works out pretty well as a free form RPG. As you mentioned in your question, there would then be a risk of “power gaming”, with players failing to capture the special qualities that make the Awakened unique and thereby compromising the logic of the game world. The hardest part, we think, is to get that “sense of enlightenment” into the characters. They are supposed to see the world as it is, without prejudice and with a self-knowledge denied most people. To be convincing Awakened they have to have a god-like feeling to them. With a non-player character you can deliberately leave large parts out of the picture, thereby creating a feeling that there is more knowledge or depth to the character than you see. That’s harder to do in casual dialogue be-tween players characters. But it’s all up to the players to pull it off, of course. If they think they can make it work, then they should try.

For the game master, the problem is to create stories working for characters who can freely use all the magic available in the game and see into Metropolis, Gaia or whatever place lies beyond the illusion. The stories that come to our minds are scenarios based in a realistic setting, but with carefully tailor-made places “beyond the veil” that carries enough symbolism to give the plot several layers – religious, psychological, maybe political. The standard settings described in the game probably won’t do. It will have to be settings more di-rectly connected to the player characters. We think such stories need to have a strong “human connection”. In the end it has to be about ordinary people. They are, after all, the gods that the all the powerful creatures of the universe (among them the Awakened) go to great pains to keep locked up or to release. They have to be at the centre of it all. Letting Awakened characters play out petty intrigue against each other or start crusades against Astaroth will turn into a fantasy game. Nothing wrong with that, but we don’t think that’s the strength of KULT. This sounds kind of fuzzy, we know, but hopefully it makes some sense.

Reality magic will have to be totally story dependent, with incantations created for specific events to occur (like the magic created by the black messiah to start Ar-mageddon in one of the convention scenarios). We like to let the game master always have a last say in what is

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possible and what is not, in a magical sense.

6. Q: What do you call “forgotten gods”? Are they similar in powers to ancient humans?A: We use the term for unique beings, most of them created before the fall of humanity. They can be very different from each other and from Awakened humans. It’s basically just a term for powerful creatures that are somehow independent from the power structure of the illusion and hell.

8. Q: Who is the conjurer in “Inferno” who took the place of a dead Death angel?A: We’re not sure. We didn’t write that supplement (or if we did, we have totally forgotten about it!) and can’t seem to find it among our books (editors note: it was writ-ten by Richard Dakan). In principle, a human shouldn’t be able to take the place of a Death Angel. Possibly a human could be destroyed (very uncommon) to restore the principle upheld by the Death Angel. If we used it in a story, it would have to be a voluntary act of self destruction.

9. Q: The rumours about being able to break the illu-sion with the seven occult lores, is it true?A: Yes, it is true. Magic is a tool constructed partly to tear down the illusion.

10. Q: Have we hade favourite scenarios or charac-ters?A: We liked the campaign published (somewhat short-ened) as “Taroticum” a lot. We felt that it captured the spirit of the game in a good way, and had much fun playing it.

11. Q: Some awakened seem to have awakened pretty fast. Like da Vinci and Messiah. Is violent sacrifice the clue?A: Did we really make Leonardo da Vinci into an awak-ened? If so, it seems like a mistake in retrospect ? If he really is awakened it must have taken some hundred years to achieve. As for Messiah, he is a special case. We happily admit we can’t explain his Awakening in game terms. The game is after all based on Christian myths, so he should have a special place in the story. We owe him that. (The painful death had nothing to do with it.)

Reproduction on www.Kult-RPG.com kindly granted by Neko / 7eme Cercle October 2005.

Questions, Management: NekoCopy-N-Paste Editor: torb Brushes: Annika von Holdt

This is an unofficial product. We have been given permis-sion to release this by courtesy of Neko at 7éme Cercle,

October 2005.

Kult is copyright Paradox Entertainment, and is currently licensed to 7th Circle - for official information, please visit

www.7emecercle.com.