Kult

Kult is a contemporary fantasy horror role-playing game originally designed by Gunilla Jonsson and Michael Petersén, first published in Sweden by Target Games in 1991. The first English edition was published in 1993 by Metropolis Ltd., a now defunct American publisher

The short description of Kult would be "Call of Cthulhu: This Time You Can Win!" with bits of Gnosticism.

The fluff basically goes that humanity were once the supreme deities of creation until the Demi-Urge tricked us into forgetting our divine powers and convinced us we were basically mortals. Severe mental trauma, seeing shit that CAN'T BE REAL and so forth can knock people out of it and help them regain their divine powers - of course, odds are they'll go screaming insane on the way and just end up as demi-gods in some private little hell that's permanently collapsing on them.

The basic mechanics are D20, based on rolling lower than your various abilities, the farther you roll below a skill, the better(example: you have 15 in a stat, rolling a 5(10 below) is better than a 12(3 below).).

Combat is always deadly, magic almost always backfires, and the only way to get more powerful is to go more insane. Based around "mental balance", the overall goal is to become a demi-god; you reach god-hood at a mental balance of +500 or -500. The problem is that the average person has a mental balance of +5 to -5 and every time your mental balance changes, it becomes more difficult to change, and the further away from zero you get, the harder to play your character becomes. So one way or another, you're fucked.

The game was remade in 2018 after a successful Kickstarter campaign under the name Kult: Divinity Lost. Aside from a total change of ruleset (using Powered By the Apocalypse), it also features some lore changes and updates the setting to incorporate more contemporary elements, like the Internet, the immigration crisis, and terrorism.

Links

Kult Fan Site It's dead, Jim