One of my fave game settings of all time is in the Swedish horror RPG "Kult":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kult

The game's base mechanics consist of your standard BRP-derived "roll under your skill", with some embellishments for quickly, deadly and extremely gruesome combat. There are rules for magic and summoning, but in the tradition of CoC, these tend to require giving up large chunks of the character's soul and/or sanity, and as such are mostly reserved for "teh evul" NPCs.

I've been itching for a ruleset to truly give the setting justice and put the focus on a personal horror experience rather than the we-pretend-to-be-investigators-but-really-we're-just-insane-heavy-weapons-specialists gameplay the stock rules tend to gravitate towards. It struck me that Sorcerer may be the game for it, complete with the central premise of "what will you do to get what you want".

Kult supplies "Archetypes" which maps nicely onto "Cover". It also forces characters to choose (often gruesome) "Dark Secrets" which might work in a roundabout way to create Kickers and Bangs. Most importantly, it has a "Mental Balance" stat, central to gameplay, which maps kind of - but not precisely - onto Humanity.

Mental Balance is a stat derived from the point totals of your Advantages and Disadvantages, and as such will be between -25 and +25 for most starting characters. The further away from 0 one gets, the less "human" the character is, with all what that entails. A high positive balance represents a saintly figure who have discarded their base desires, while with a high negative balance, you become a monstrosity ultimately driven by such desires. At +/-25, a psychiatrist would diagnose you with "mental problems requiring address". At +/-75, you're a complete basket case by "normal" standards. The game technically allows you to reach +/-500 before you are considered to have "transcended" your humanity entirely, and rewards the character with otherworldly powers at key steps along the path. The mechanics make it easier to move along your current direction than work backwards to 0, which along with the granting of superpowers tend to encourage players to let their characters descend deeper and deeper into madness.

It is easy to see how the positive scale of Mental Balance might map onto Sorcerer's Humanity score, or perhaps offset it such that Humanity 3 or 4 represents MB +/-0 with each point up or down representing 25 points or so of MB. I'm not sure that's a good solution, though - I may be missing something critical in the translation, or inadvertently causing some kind of screwed up reward loop that'll ultimately invalidate the premise of Sorcerer.

Will the Sorcerer and Soul supplement help me with this?

Any other ideas, especially from people familiar with Kult, would be greatly appreciated. Are there other parts of Kult I could emulate using Sorcerer? Are there any obviously incompatible areas? Has anyone tried something similar to this?

Actually, I think that Kult and Sorcerer are a really bad match. (Disclaimer: I have not played the game since the early 90s.)

Two reasons:

1. There is no stat in Sorcerer that is anything like Mental Balance (or Sanity in Call of Cthulhu, or Humanity in Vampire). For one thing, Humanity in Sorcerer does most certainly not work in a way that is even remotely similar. There is literally nothing that says that a Sorcerer character with a high score in Humanity is more humane (or sane or more empathic or whatever your definition of the trait is) than a character with a low Humanity. We can talk more about this if you want, but the short answer is that handling Humanity the way you propose will definitely break the game.

2. The setting in Kult is not suitable for Sorcerer play, at least not if you plan to treat the various supernatural entities of Kult as demons in Sorcerer. Functional Sorcerer play demands that demons are unnatural abominations that must not, cannot, do not exist. There is no supernatural hierarchies waiting to be uncovered. The premise of Kult, on the other hand, is quite the opposite: Demons do exist, in fact they are the real reality, while our mundane world is a lie, an illusion.

Does this help? Ask questions.

All the best,

Peter

Both of Peter's points are good, and I think they support the idea that one cannot "do Kult" with Sorcerer. However, can one "do Sorcerer" with Kult-inspired material? Absolutely, and in fact I did that very thing my own self.

The setting ideas presented in chapter 7 of the core book and developed further in chapter 1 of Sex & Sorcery were inspired in part by Kult: specifically, the "paths" of occult development. Kult has five; I ended up with three. The thematic or setting-based issues for my approach are different - in Kult, you go more and more extreme with sex, for instance, to crack open your perceptions and see things the way they truly are, risking more and more destruction as you go. In this application of Sorcerer, you find a way for this kind of transgression to yield insight rather than destruction. They're similar in content but do not quite follow identical trajectories.

In my list of references for the core book material, I forgot to include Kult, and only remembered the influence later. So I was sure to include it as a stated influence in the Sex & Sorcery chapter.

Now, all that said, you are completely right that The Sorcerer's Soul is actually the most important supplement for the issues you've raised. The material in Sex & Sorcery builds on that supplement, specifically its chapters 2 and 3, and therefore will make less sense in isolation from it.

Best, Ron

I'm both encouraged and confused.

Ron wrote:
Both of Peter's points are good, and I think they support the idea that one cannot "do Kult" with Sorcerer. However, can one "do Sorcerer" with Kult-inspired material? Absolutely, and in fact I did that very thing my own self.

Peter wrote:
1. There is no stat in Sorcerer that is anything like Mental Balance (or Sanity in Call of Cthulhu, or Humanity in Vampire)...

2. The setting in Kult is not suitable for Sorcerer play, at least not if you plan to treat the various supernatural entities of Kult as demons in Sorcerer....

A good meaty post, indeed. However, I need time. Please be patient. Perhaps someone else will beat me to it.

lachek wrote:
For your point #1,  are you saying that the number next to Humanity on your Sorcerer sheet is not a quantitative measure at all, but some sort of abstract game token with no representation in the fiction? That is, when a Sorcerer loses Humanity by performing a heinous act, they lose a "point" of "currency" and get closer to "losing" the "game", but this doesn't necessarily reflect in the internal or external state of the Sorcerer hirself?

Yeah, humanity is binary.

The analogy that helped me is to think of it as a lightswitch; a lightswitch that requires 10 pounds of pressure to flip.

If you start with Humanity 7, that means you've already got 3 pounds of pressure on the switch.  As you lose humanity you're adding more pressure to the switch, until finally at Humanity 0, you have the needed pressure and bam, the lights go out.

But right up until that last moment...the lights were still on.  And here's the important part.  They were on just as brightly...the increasing pressure on the switch, didn't cause the lights to dim at all, until they went out altogether.

As Marshall and Ralph said. I'll just add that players must always be in control of their character's actions. You can't demand that a character must act more crazy just because his humanity is low. Humanity mustn't be an indicator of how you should roleplay a character.

Why would introducing such a rule break the game? Because, players making decisions for their characters is what the game is about. Take that away, and you are left with a very different beast. The whole point of playing sorcerer is to have players making these decisions.

All of those are good points, but I think I can also see what you're talking about, Iachek. I am basing that on actually trying to prep Kult and in doing so adapt it to my preferences, over ten years ago. To do that, I found myself driving toward two things.

1. The setting's certainty regarding the horrific, "real" world would have to be diminished. Instead of cracking the illusory reality open so the player-characters could glimpse and eventually fully enter "the truth," I'd play it more as an interface between the normal experience of life and the horror/hell/whatever that shone forth every so often.

Unfortunately, doing that means that nearly all the support material or scenarios I'd bought were made almost useless, because casting off the illusion and seeing the horror/truth is a big deal in the game concept. My limitation here is that I have no interest in metaphysics like whether God is really the Demiurge, or whatever. As I discovered with trying to prep the original Vampire, I found myself too interested in the normal people and their stories to want to go cast all that off as mere illusion.

However, if someone else were to find a better or more functional balance among these concepts than I could generate, then Kult's setting could be Sorcerer-like. It'd merely have to be about the real people and normal situations as much as the blood streaming down the concrete walls or the bloated torturers stumping along the corridors that you never realized existed in your house before. And all that God-and-such stuff would have to become supposition within the setting rather than setting-as-agreed-upon at the player level.

2. The Humanity value would have to become descriptive of the character's appearance and apparent habits, but not prescriptive for what he or she might do under stress. That's a pretty big conceptual shift, actually. It's what makes Sorcerer Humanity distinct from the feature of the same name in Cyberpunk and Vampire.

Ultimately, I realized that to do all this with Kult meant that I'd be playing my game-in-design Sorcerer anyway, and playing Kult as written was not really possible for me based on points #1-2 as well as the phenomenal GM-control implicit in every published scenario. So I went with "be inspired by Kult for cool things in Sorcerer" instead.

However, should anyone think he or she could do it, I'd be interested. The game always impressed me with its guts; it somehow managed to combine splatter horror with human interest, and (although I don't know how) avoided mere adolescent excess even when it was indeed excessive.

Best, Ron

Whoops, I mean Mental Balance, in #2 above.

Aha! I hadn't picked up on the binary nature of Humanity in Sorcerer, thanks for cluing me in.

Peter wrote:
As Marshall and Ralph said. I'll just add that players must always be in control of their character's actions. You can't demand that a character must act more crazy just because his humanity is low. Humanity mustn't be an indicator of how you should roleplay a character.

Why would introducing such a rule break the game? Because, players making decisions for their characters is what the game is about. Take that away, and you are left with a very different beast. The whole point of playing sorcerer is to have players making these decisions.

Ron wrote: The Humanity value would have to become descriptive of the character's appearance and apparent habits, but not prescriptive for what he or she might do under stress.

Ron wrote:
The setting's certainty regarding the horrific, "real" world would have to be diminished. Instead of cracking the illusory reality open so the player-characters could glimpse and eventually fully enter "the truth," I'd play it more as an interface between the normal experience of life and the horror/hell/whatever that shone forth every so often.

Hi,

I think I can help with everything you wrote starting with "What about Lore" with a pretty basic idea: that Lore, in Sorcerer, is never certain at the metaphysical level. Even if the demon is bright red, has a pointy-tipped tail, speaks Hebrew or Coptic or something, reminisces about Solomon, and seems obsessed with the character's immortal soul, that doesn't mean all the occult and Biblical references from which this stuff is drawn are established as true in the game setting. In this game, nothing can be so established, as far as Lore (and sorcery, and demons) is concerned.

Nor does the character's certainty about any of it mean a damn thing either - in fact, the descriptor Belief System was chosen in order to characterize such certainty and to emphasize that it's a feature of personality rather than a key or window into what's "really out there." That's also why there is no Lore descriptor called True Knowledge; the closest thing to it is Mad, and I hope that makes my point about that.

I will discuss how this concept applies to fighter-jet-AI-spaceships and similar 'solid' things later. Right now we will stick with Kult.

So to "do Kult" with Sorcerer concepts firing, the whole setting notion has to change. Instead of reality being an illusion, and Lore being access to truth, reality is real, these awful/horror things may also be real, and Lore is a way to cope with the contradictions and questions at the interface of the two. So any of the paths of magic or the skills that apply to such things are all means of coping with and manipulating that interface.

Does that help, or make sense?

Best, Ron

Ron wrote:
Does that help, or make sense?

Iachek,

I hope this doesn't come off as a smackdown. It's certainly not meant as one. But as someone who came to Sorcerer after playing a number of World of Darkness games and similar things, I think I have some...well, some insight into this.

There are a lot of "hidden reality" games out there: Kult, Mage and the other World of Darkness games, Call of Cthulhu, and more. In these games, there is a hidden, occult truth to the world, and the people who can access it go mad or get great power (or both). Sorcerer is not one of these games. Sorcerer is about arrogant people who willingly risk their very humanity and enter into a dysfunctional relationship to get more power. The demons in Sorcerer are absolutely not part of an occult reality. They are UNreality; they are literally from nowhere and they should not exist in our world at all.

I think of Sorcerer as one of the great existentialist RPGs (The Shadow of Yesterday and Dogs in the Vineyard are two others, by the way). Reality ultimately has no meaning, and the PCs make their own meaning in the world. Not in the Mage sense of bending reality through their enlightened powers, but in the real world way all of us make our own meaning: by living life and ascribing meaning to our actions and the actions around us. In Sorcerer, a lot of that takes "real" form as demons, but the demons aren't there to signify occult truth or enlightenment. They're there as a dramatic convention to show the lengths people will go to gain power in the world. In Mage, the ultimate truth is that mages (and sleepers to a lesser extent) shape reality. In Sorcerer, the ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth, and any occult revelations or enlightened truths a Sorcerer discovers will be personal and in no way universal.

Does that make sense? Does that help at all?

Okay, I must admit, the nature of reality seems to be the major hang-up here and its emphasis continues to puzzle me.

Ron says that for a Sorcerer/Kult hybrid to work, both Illusion and Reality must be real. Joshua explains it by naming Existentialism a major part of what makes Sorcerer work - there mustn't be any reality that is "truer", or any underlying purpose to reality and life for that matter, since that would rob players of their ability to truly make choices and creating meaning for their characters (man, talk about a "Fruitful Void").

So, hey, without pulling in preconceived notions of Kult or Mage or Cyberpunk or whatever, can we talk about why the philosophical basis for Existentialism wouldn't work if you're placed in a new, cold, hostile world equally - if not more so - devoid of meaning than the one you thought you came from? Yeah, in a twisted way, Kult does point the characters in a certain direction. There is a degree of hope in Kult that doesn't exist in, say, Call of Cthulhu - humans are secretly divine and possess the ability to escape their imprisonment and fight back. I fully intend to rob a potential Sorcerer/Kult hybrid of this glimmer of hope, since it would seriously fuck with Sorcerer's premise.

Robbed of this external hope, I can't see that Kult's concept of Reality would screw with Existentialist ideas. Screw Nietzche's God is dead - in Kult's Reality, not only is He either dead, missing or completely uncaring, He's not even God. His lieutenants, the Archons, are fighting amongst themselves and are no more benevolent towards humanity than their malevolent reflections, the Death Angels, are. The ironic thing about Kult's Reality is that the world beyond the veil offers absolutely no answers and demands nothing less than complete personal responsibility or total annihilation.

Does that sound like a suitable backdrop for Existentialist play? Or, Ron and others, are there reasons for ensuring "reality" is "true" other than not focusing play around the elimination or manipulation of external forces?

Now, on the issue of the reality of demons. How important is it that demons be "from nowhere and should not exist at all"? This has been repeated multiple times in different ways, and I'm still not understanding why that it - other than as a reflection of the above, to ensure players take responsibility for their actions by negating the existence of higher truths.

I'm not sure removing "humans are divine and can escape and fight back" robs Sorcerer of its premise at all. "What would you do to escape and fight back?" seems eminently plausible as a riff on the basic Sorcerer premise.

I think, perhaps, you're overfocusing on some beyond-the-pale idea of Existentialism, which is just "individuals create the meaning and essence of their lives, as opposed to deities or authorities creating it for them" (via Wikipedia). To put it in terms of literature: "Every story means something different to each person. The author does not decide the meaning of the work, the reader does." That is, it doesn't matter IF God exists, because even if he does, what a man does with his life and what he makes of that life are his own responsibility, not God's.

In gaming terms: there is no railroad. There is no, "Let's have a story about honor and death, and you'll all die to prove you are honorable." No, instead, honor can either come via death or via not dying, and so can dishonor -- which end is which is wholly up to each individual player and his or her choices. There's no one true answer. This is why I say this is over-thinking what is really a very simple thing: the player makes their choices and lives with them without the GM shoving a theme or label down their throat ("Ah-ha! You did this nasty thing and said it was good, therefore I must make sure to teach you a lesson to show you it wasn't good!" Who knows? Maybe it WAS good. Let things play out naturally and find out.)

That's what Josh means when he says "ascribing meaning to our actions"...in Sorcerer, the players do that via play, not the GM via notions of alignment, metaphysical truths of the setting, or Humanity scales of 1-10. Each player says "this action means this" or rather decides afterwards "this action means this", just like real life.

As to demons and being real. Think about them narratively: they're dramatic metaphors. The horrid demon in any non-fantasy story would be a gun or alcoholism or anger (etc), that both give power to the individual and demand things from him in turn, with its presence/use often destroying things he loves. In this game, the place of those same things just happens to be filled by supernatural beings bristling with fangs and teeth and occult power. But they're still just guns and anger and bottles of alcohol.

Can the cop put down his gun? Can the alcoholic writer go into rehab? Can the angry kid become a Buddhist? Except...the question isn't "can"...it's SHOULD. And the GM isn't allowed to answer*. That's the extent and the purpose of the Existentialism in the game. * I should also say: "...and neither are the setting or the rules."

Should the cop put down his gun? NO! There's vicious perps out there, he must defend himself and others. YES! He doesn't need the gun to enforce the law and it's too tempting to just shoot the bastards.

Does the alcoholic writer go into rehab? Hell NO! He's got to finish that Great American Novel and be somebody and he can't write worth crap when he's sober. YES! His wife is leaving him and he keeps beating up his kid and he can't remember half of what he does at night and it's going to kill him.

Does the angry kid become a Buddhist? NEVER! His anger is power, and people will just push him and others around if he lets them, he can't be weak. OHM! Fighting, fighting, fighting is getting him and the world nowhere, he's going to have a heart attack before he's twenty or hurt the wrong person because he can't see straight anymore.

And you twist that dichotomy. And all the while the demons sit there and remind you why you use them...why you NEED them, even when you COULD walk away from them and the power they have to let you get what you want. If it is worth it.

Raven, I think you're right - I'm definitely over-thinking it. Existentialism works as a metaphor for what I was trying to say, but it's counterproductive to use a complex philosophical system as a metaphor for something as simple as "free will".

I don't detect anything in your post that's necessarily contradicting my goals, though (?). I'm not trying to fit Sorcerer's rules into a setting that demands railroading and GM-enforced morality - I'm trying to use Sorcerer's rules, instead of Kult's, to create the Existentialism I think Kult's setting begs for but fails to deliver. Like I mentioned before, Kult's setting encourages players to fight back against the horrors behind the scenes, which as you rightly point out is a perfectly valid Sorcerer hook. But Kult's rule set makes it trivial for players to make their choices - the quickest way to power is also the quickest way to awakening, and all you have to cope with along the way is "insanity". Start the game as an escaped psychiatric patient, acquire the biggest gun you can get your hands on, and start unloading on everything with a meat hook as a prominent facial feature - pretty soon you'll be kicking ass and taking names all over Reality. In my experience with the game, to swim against the flow of this reward cycle is like declining to level in D&D.

Sorcerer, on the other hand, offers you this power but only in exchange for your Humanity. As you rightly point out, there is no built-in or imposed morality there - no stern paternal GM looking down upon you and shaking his head sadly with every demon you summon. As in Kult, sorcerers have priorities that beg to be met and dangerous tools by which to meet them. I'm hoping that by using Sorcerer's rules, Kult's reward system will be exchanged for one which fosters individual choice and is more likely to anchor characters in concerns within Illusion than push for excursions into Reality.

Apologies if I sound like a broken record. I'm verbalizing and revising ideas which apparently started mostly as intuitions.

With regards to the reality of demons - is the consensus that by not stressing the UNreality of demons, but instead establishing them as "real" by revealing a definite model reality which they inhabit within the fiction, you make it harder for players to see them as dramatic allegories? If so, surely it is just a matter of decreased accessibility to such conclusions, and not an impossibility? Claiming impossibility would appear to also discredit the allegorical impact of all manners of literary works, such as the Narnia Chronicles, where the world of allegory was presented as "real".

In one sense, Kult's setting provides a one-to-one shortcut for allegory, by making the Archons and Death Angels representative of specific concepts such as Dictatorship, Child Abuse, Uncaring Justice, War, etc. That is, not by absolving humanity from responsibility for such things, but by personifying human attributes and behaviours.

lachek,

This has been a good thread. You have asked some really good questions, and you have recieved a whole bunch of answers. However, I think it's time for you to step back from the specualation and get your hands dirty. Play the game. You are ready.

And the great thing is that you can post about it right here in this forum, and I know that you'll get lots of help and encouragement. Then we would be talking about problems that appear in real, actual play, instead of just some vague speculations and discussions about game design choices.

Do some preparations for a Sorcerer game, answering the basic questions outlined in the rulesbook. What is humanity? What are demons? Stuff like that. (Sorcerer's Soul has some great advice in this regard, and I can't recommend it enough.) Then post it to The Forge, and we'll talk about it! Then you get two or three friends to come over for character generation, and again, post about it. We would love to help you out should you have any troubles. Then you would play with your friends, and again, we could talk about it here. Then we would have a discussion based on actual experiences. Wouldn't that be great!?

Iachek,

I see your experiences with Kult are similar to mine. I do see where you're going with this, and I think it looks good. Like Peter says, now's a good time to stop pondering and start acting on it: do a one-page write-up to sell people on your game. Ask what Humanity is--but don't make the definition too rigid, laying out what will raise or lower Humanity, setting up Humanity parameters. That's what play is for. All of the players have a say in interpreting Humanity. Also, ask what demons are, suggest what they'll probably look like and how they'll generally behave, but again, don't make it too rigid. Demons may all say they're Archons from the Truth behind the Illusion--but that doesn't mean they really are, or that there is any Truth behind the Illusion. (Who says what demons tell you is the truth? They're demons!) And ask what sorcery is, what kinds of rituals you might typically do, what sorcerous effects may look like, but once again, don't make it too rigid. Basically, the point isn't to set everything in stone but to share your vision and get the other players excited about it.

And I agree with Raven, don't overthink this stuff. Raven explained what I meant by referencing existentialism (see also Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly, especially the quote, "If there's no bigger meaning, then the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world."), so I'll drop that. But going back to your question about the unreality of demons...again, don't overthink it. Demons don't come from some occult truth, they aren't from some special "demon dimension," they're from outside of all reality, they should not exist--because that's what the game Sorcerer is. That's it. Sorcerer involves sorcerers summoning demons, but that's not what the game is about. You don't have to dig into any deeper meanings, your game play doesn't have to be all scratching your chin and discussing what everything symbolizes. It can easily just be asskicking sorcerer heroes and their wicked cool demons, with thrill-a-minute fight scenes and cliffhanger escapades. But I do think it's important to remember that Sorcerer deals with people who summon and bind demons, but the game is about the question "How far are you willing to go for power?", and in the end, the "reality" of demons isn't crucial. They're here, they offer you power, they extract a price--so what are you going to do?

lachek wrote: I don't detect anything in your post that's necessarily contradicting my goals, though (?). I'm not trying to fit Sorcerer's rules into a setting that demands railroading and GM-enforced morality -

I'm hoping that by using Sorcerer's rules, Kult's reward system will be exchanged for one which fosters individual choice and is more likely to anchor characters in concerns within Illusion than push for excursions into Reality.