Last Week: Violence

Magic Part One: Magicians as Characters.

Let's start the Magic section: pages 145 to 148.

The opening bit of fiction is nice. It reminds me of one of the funny parts of Call of Cthulhu. When you have a player who is new to the game, and their character learns a Summon Monster spell, but not the corresponding Bind Monster spell, and he doesn't realize that there's a difference. So he casts the Summon Monster spell, the monster shows up, and his character goes insane and/or is eaten by the monster. However, this bit of fiction raises the question: did this guy not learn the binding spell, or did he just fail his roll?

So, obviously the first major issue is that magic is highly restricted, and the GM is discouraged from allowing PCs to have magic. But let's look at something else first, because it ties back into a chapter we've already covered.

You need the advantage Magical Intuition to cast spells. This is a 20-point advantage, and skews magical characters towards two rather distinct directions. If you want to play a character with a positive Mental Balance, you're well on your way. Of course, that's 20 points that don't give you any bonus except for magic, and 20 points you don't have to spend on art scores and spells. So, you will end up with a character who, despite his high MB, is relatively unskilled, with few benefits other than magical spells. Considering how unlikely you are to be shocked when you use those spells, it is perhaps worth the sacrifice.

The other angle is to play a character with a low Mental Balance. In this case, a magician will have even more disadvantages than other characters, to make up for that +20 boost. This is perhaps appropriate—a fucked-up person who dabbles in magic will become even more fucked up because of it, and any character with 10pts in advantages and 15pts in disadvantages will be significantly more healthy in mind than a wizard with –5 MB can be. This type of magician might have more skills than the +MB one, but is still going to have less than one who doesn't practice magic, since they cost so damn bloody much. Then again, so does an academic degree, as I noted in my discussion of skills.

This is not a flaw, per se, but it is definitely something to be aware of, if you play a game where magical characters are allowed.

And the game is pretty clear that this should be a rare occurrence, especially the Lores of Death and Passion which are "better suited to the villains." I think the real reason that magical PCs are discouraged is that the magic section gives players a big fat window into the meta-plot, the scenes beyond the illusion, and the supernatural. Much like the powers and limitations of the Children of the Night, magic gives players (note I say players, not PCs) a way to significantly influence the supernatural elements of the game, which I say is the main bailiwick of the GM. Unlike Children of the Night, though, the five lores are strongly tied to the actual nature of the Illusion, and can reveal important aspects to players too early, and not during play.

So, are magician characters appropriate for players new to Kult, with little or no experience with the game? No, of course not. A character who practices magick and occultism stuff, but doesn't have any "real" spells (Lores, the stuff in the magic section) would be fine. He'd be in for a rude awakening, of course. But he's a Kult PC, so that should go without saying. However, once somebody has been playing Kult for a while, whether they've read some of the book or just encountered various monsters and breaks in the Illusion during play, they should absolutely try playing a magician.

The two archetypes: Burnt-Out Occultist and New Age Pagan. In one sense, neither of these characters really needs actual Lores and spells. They can fit right in with all the other archetypes with the same selection of advantages and disadvantages and the normal skill list. But they also fit the two most common magical archetypes, the two that work for protagonists.

In the Burning Wheel supplement, the Magic Burner, Thor Olavsrud writes about the most common magical archetypes in myth and literature. There is The Maker, who forges a thing of power with his magic, which is usually the impetus for a quest or a series of events that creates the situation that makes the story necessary. The Demiurge is the foremost Maker character in the Kult mythos. And there is the Oracle, who is always a supporting character, because her role is to inform, guide, and advise, but not to act. This is a key trope in myth and legend: the hero needs information to guide his actions, so he consults the oracle, who has information, but cannot act on it. Of course, if the oracle could act on her knowledge, we would have no use for the hero!

But there are two more archetypes, those used to define the protagonist. These are the Adept, and the Bringer of Fire.

The Adept is a great wizard, a prodigy, who has committed a grave error in his youth. Through pride or hubris, he has overstepped himself, and brought some evil into the world. The main thread of the Adept's story is how he goes about fixing this mistake, and making good. Ged of Earthsea, Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, and John Constantine are all examples of the Adept, as is the Burnt-Out Occultist archetype. In many respects, this story also represents non-magical Kult characters. Look at those dark secrets, Guilty of Crime, Pact with Dark Powers, and Responsible for Medical Experiments, in particular. In some cases, the story is different only because the mistake was not committed by the character, but by others, and the character is the one who suffers for it. However, since reincarnation is true in Kult, that youthful mistake could have been committed by the character in a past life, or even before the captivity of man, and so what seems like a character victimized by others is in fact only suffering the repercussions of his own past mistake. The player doesn't even have to decide on using this archetype during character creation. The GM can use this as part of a reveal.

The New Age Pagan, on the other hand, looks a bit flaky at first glance, maybe a bit too hippy for this horror game. What does it say under Personality, though? "You are a seeker, fundamentally convinced that ultimate truth is something we can only find within ourselves." What lies within? A great darkness, as we've already seen. There is the alien darkness, the foreign terrors that penetrate into our reality from somewhere else, but it is only the darkness and terror in our own souls that gives them agency to do so. The New Age Pagan's readiness to search within makes her the Bringer of Fire—the one who travels into the darkness, outside the safety of normal human limits and society, and like Prometheus, brings back fire. Fire is advantage, technology, progress... magic. It is also knowledge. The story of the Bringer of Fire is also the detective story.

And so is Kult.


Next week: The Lores, Part 1

So hey, if any of you have ever played magician characters, or run games with magician PCs or memorable magician NPCs in them, tell us about it!

What worked, what didn't?

Have you ever had characters who started without magic, but gained it during play?

If you had magician NPCs, did you run the magic right out of the book, or did you use the spell entries as inspiration only? Have you had lictors and razides cast spells in your games?

No PC Magic in my Kult/FATE game yet.
Ill give them a few more Sessions before I allow any PC Magic.

Some chars startet without magic but in the course of any campaign we ended up using it...just increases your survivability (and is really comfortable in the case of space and time...you save a lot of time and can not be shot from the sky when using a portal instead of a plane).
The lores...usually every player got another one and tried to become really good in it, we used the spells from the books but once you get somehow high values or spend hero points to induce the "1" (and reach above 21 with the +10) we pretty much altered them, especially about casting time...there are situations (plane crashes) where the portal has to be up within some seconds, and we made that possible. Otherwise it is too rare anyway to be of much use.

We also partly introduced new spells (healing as well as resurrecting of angels are spells of the lore of death now...if Togarini knew that ) and a new lore, New Age. Actually this goes back to a misunderstanding of the first GM, but it was pretty cool so we kept it. It's stone magic where you transfer energy (whatever energy can be) or especially souls/skills/memories into stones and out of stones...pretty usefull if you know they will get you soon and you just erase your memory so they will never get anything from you...or to ban e.g. Razides.

In general we heavily used magic in any campaign, least used would be passion, then dreams, though dreams can be really fun but exhausting for the GM. Funny situation is giving a PC a really high skill value in dreaming but no spell at all...means he can probably even twist the dreams of low-level casters but never leave or enter or do anything by himself. Madness and death are pretty much equally used, though madness is hard to keep under control. All time favorite is of course space/time, just for faster travelling

We actually never really used magic to summon anything, most of the time just the portals into different parts of realiy/illusion.

I love the idea of characters believing they have magic skills who don't really have them. The one's who don't have Magical Intuition but do suffer from some sort of delusion (maybe even Faith?). As I mentioned in the thread Hiding the magic world from characters relying on magic I used to play a wiccan witch called Abigail Dawn, an ecomaniac who believed she had magic powers...

After I played her for about a year or so, she actually aquired Magical Intuition and learned some basic lore of Passion spells. Never got to use them in game, though.


Yet again, thanks for a nice read, johnstone.

Yeah, I think the main significance of the Lores is that they actually work.

New PCs can come from pretty much any world-view, as long as it's a Lie. A billionaire corporate CEO, a psychic detective, an occult magician, whatever. I mean you can start playing D&D and then drop the Kult into it, and the PCs discover that the racial differences between elves and dwarves are just lies, and that even 7th level wizard spells don't affect Lictors. The party cleric is especially screwed.

As long as your character has an orderly and defined conception of reality, it doesn't actually matter what it is. Because the GM will smash it, and the PC will have to deal with the Truth on the same level as everyone else.


Also: It's a bit strange, that spells which bend time and space have fixed casting times, isn't it?

Actually, let me unpack this further.

When you start a new campaign, you have characters who know nothing, but also players who know nothing. The GM has a bunch of ideas, and some of them make it into the game, and some of them don't. But gradually, the players and their characters begin to find out more and more. The whole group builds this story, complete with a setting, with characters who have histories, and all these situations that happened. And this story is different from every other Kult game ever played.

And then, you finish. Either you're done with all the characters at the same time, or one character comes to the end of his arc, and is retired. Then what do you do? Well, you can never play Kult again, but I'm not going to consider those people. Let's talk about playing Kult again.

If all the characters are done, you can start again from nothing. In this case, you need to create a whole different cosmology for the players, because if you use anything that's already familiar to them, it will create dissonance in their minds, and it won't feel like a whole new game. They will have to "play dumb" when confronted by familiar elements and it will make role-playing more difficult.

Or, you use the cosmology and the story you've already built up. You have to do this if only one player is switching to a new character. And so it makes more sense to start them off at roughly the same level of knowledge as the other PCs. If the characters have had a lot of dealings with a Death Magician, and have started to get a good grasp on what can and can't be done, it makes sense to allow a player to switch to a Death Mage PC.

That's where magical characters work best.

Of course, the GM can always pull a bait & switch on whatever knowledge the PCs have, but you also don't want to simply invalidate the story you've been telling over the course of dozens and dozens of sessions.

Cosmology-switcharoo, eh? I like it! I think you just made some excellent points which I need to bring into my original group to freshen up the game a little.

Lets begin from the top:
The spell he casts in the intro story could very well be a summon nepharite spell which is designed so that any protective circles used will fail (as described in Purgatory).

Magic in games:
I allowed a passion mage with low lore ratings, and little possibilities to increase this in the game. We set it so that advancement in LR was on my discretion only as I needed to contol it.

Once one of the players used one of the passion spells to wreck a police station (in a different adventure). It was the mass arousal spell if I recall. This was not what the GM had expected.

I started to play the game with the 2nd swedish edition, which does not have any magic at all (not even the Magical intuition advantage). So my view on magic in Kult is probably a bit based on this.

Magic is more or less superfluous and should be replaced entirely with the Dark Art. This is knowledge of how to twist reality according to your will.

With a deeper description on what can be done with the dark art this could easily replace the magic alltogehter.

The magic problem has been discussed in threads here and it is true that magic is too powerful to be weilded against the players (especially if the npcs have 30+ lore ratings and skill scores as often is the case) or by the players since it is so entirely off balance.

kinda off-topic to cosmology-switching:

I do not think you have to switch everything, just use mainly other powers to influence reality, it will give a completely new game.
And, most funny thing, make them switch sides. So maybe in one game the PC have support of Geburah's people and learn to like law. Then start one where Geburah is after them and make them clear that 1. it is the same guy and 2. they are not allowed to use former knowledge. It is easy to recognize if they do, and i trust any KULT player to separate that anyway. You do not change the cosmology, just the main spots, and in the end you show your players additional parts of the KULT world they did not know yet...

I like to add additional pieces, or even explanations for former stuff, in other campaigns (players view)

Uh, what's this Burning Wheel supplement? Never heard of it.

Also, I just started reading your threads last week and, I don't know how many have said this already but I would like to point out; Many parts in Kult, especially the lore-parts, is written in a slightly fancy, almost theatrical style. I thought this would be a bit tricky to translate and after reading the english version I'd say I was right. "Vansinnesmördare"/"Insane Killer" is just one of the things that sounds a bit tame in the english version :/

The Magic Burner.


Unfortunately, I can't comment on the Swedish versions.

Oh, it's not Kult-related as such?

Well no I didn't mean that you should comment I just read the english version and occasionaly thought "Well, that sounded dumb..."

So I thought I should point that out. Seeing as these thread that has a bit of a review-feeling to them.

No, not Kult-related at all.