14 thoughts on “Nightmares in the new Kult is brutal.”

  2. Nightmares

    You have recurring nightmares that are probably connected to your dark secrets. During a scene when you sleep roll +0.

    (15+) You sleep in peace.

    (10–14) The nightmares torment you. The GM may make a move for your nightmares. For example, you may not have slept at all during the night (−1 ongoing until you sleep), something follows you back into reality, the nightmares give you insight into the Truth, or you are forced to process some trauma (Keep it Together) when you wake up.

    (−9) The nightmares take over completely. You are trapped in the dream until you find a way to wake up, and everything that happens there directly affects your sleeping body.

  7. Wowser. Harsh. Sidetrack: I think my issue with the new Kult is that while it has a lot of player-facing simplicity to it, there are a lot of bits like that which make it feel like the spotlight is going to dwell on one character at a time, leaving the rest to twiddle their thumbs.

  10. Tommy Rayburn well…I haven’t published anything, but always tinkering and playing stuff. I am on the really slow train. I may have a horror microgame available soon if I can put the finishing touches on it. It’s extremely focused survival horror.

  11. Tommy Rayburn Nightmares is the big one, but there’s also Stalker, Haunted, Wanted. I feel that there are a load of triggers built into the mechanics (which make them demand attention, if you’re playing by the rules) that can pull a party in three directions at once. While this may be thematically cool, it does divide your party and thus the GM’s focus.

  12. Toby Sennett I’m not sure the new Kult is different from most other PbtA games in how it treats party cohesion. Right there in the grandaddy game (AW), you have the narrator move of splitting the group up. A soft move. Kult also has good reason to split the group up. It comes from the traditional horror / slasher genre, which is built on splitting up and isolating it’s protagonists. I wouldn’t generally try to keep the party together DnD style.

    As far as keeping a small set of narrative tools for the GM — you do have a tool built into the scenario creation guidelines. You can limit the dark secrets, disadvantages, etc. For example, let’s say you want to run Nightmare on Elmstreet. You can force everyone to take Nightmares. That works out awesome.

  13. I get it, and I’m sure I’m making more of it than it is, but some of these moves don’t just give the GM a hard move – they cause one, specifically and directly. I’m less of a fan of that.

  14. Toby Sennett that’s totally reasonable. Nightmares in the old Kult was always known as the disadvantage you don’t take (at least in the groups I played with). It was only worth 5 points and gave the GM an excuse to screw you over. 🙂

    If anything, I’m looking more at the structure of harm in the new moves. They can lead to endless rolling if you are not careful or you have a new GM. Roll for combat. Oh, counterattack. Roll to see if you were hit. Oh, you were hit. Now roll to see what the harm does.

    You will have to roll at least twice since PC harm works that way, which I don’t really like. But we really haven’t had much combat so far. It’s all been psychological and investigation. So I haven’t had much experience with it yet.

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