# Kult *Created:* 2024-02-25, *Modified:* 2026-11-10 ![[Kult - Divinity Lost (4e) (cover).jpg]] **Kult** is the grand old man of contemporary horror RPGs — Swedish, explicit, and unbothered by good taste — and **Kult: Divinity Lost** is its fourth edition, a 2018 reboot that throws out the old rule-set and rebuilds the game on an **[[Apocalypse World]]** chassis while keeping the cosmology intact. The original was created by Nils Gulliksson, Gunilla Jonsson and Michael Petersén in 1991; this edition is led by Robin Liljenberg and Petter Nallo, developed and published by **Helmgast AB**, and co-published by **Modiphius Entertainment**. ## Setting The world around us is a lie. Mankind is trapped in an **Illusion**, and most of us never notice the citadels of **Metropolis** towering over the skyscrapers, the screams from the cellars that lead down to **Inferno**, or the blood on the altars of gods everyone agreed to forget. Ages ago the **Demiurge** bound humanity with ten Principles and quenched its divine fire to a dying ember, building a counterfeit world whose machinery fed on our souls when we died. His jailers, the **lictors**, kept us distracted with conflicts, commitments and desires — until, early in the twentieth century, the Demiurge weakened and vanished, and the Illusion began to tear. What is left is a world with the seams showing. **Elysium** is our known world — nations, companies, religions and algorithms — and the veil over it is thinning. Above it sit the **Archons**, each the manifestation of a Principle: Kether of Hierarchy, Chokmah of Submission, and the rest, every one of them enslaved by its own Principle except Malkuth, who learned to change. Below them are the **Death Angels**, the Archons' shadows, pushing the subverted Principles instead — Thaumiel's hunger for power, and so on. Then there is the **Underworld** beneath everything, **Limbo** where the Dream Princes pull sleepers into shared dreams, and **Gaia**, the living earth trying to tear civilisation down. You play people who have been pulled into events tied to their own pasts. Past sins catch up, childhood fears take physical shape, and the terrors you meet are shaped by what is inside you — every character carries **Dark Secrets** and a personal purgatory, and the story is usually about discovering that the life you built was the lie. Those who survive are changed; a few glimpse the Truth and begin to **Awaken**, which is not a promotion so much as a different kind of danger. ## Mechanics ### The Roll Roll **2d10** and add the relevant Attribute. **15 or more** is a complete success — the action happens exactly as intended. **10–14** is success with complications: you get it, but with a cost, a hard choice, or a worse outcome than you hoped. **9 or less** is failure, and the GM makes a Move. Every move has a trigger written into its text, and the GM adjudicates whether the fiction meets it; the dice decide only once the trigger is satisfied. ### Attributes and Moves There are ten Attributes, and each carries a move. At creation you spread points across two groups: **+2, +1, 0** across the passive three, and **+3, +2, +1, +1, 0, −1, −2** across the active seven. - **Passive** — resist the world: - **Fortitude** — *Endure Injury* - **Willpower** — *Keep it Together* - **Reflexes** — *Avoid Harm* - **Active** — act on it: - **Reason** — *Investigate* - **Intuition** — *Read a Person* - **Perception** — *Observe a Situation* - **Coolness** — *Act Under Pressure* - **Violence** — *Engage in Combat* - **Charisma** — *Influence Other* - **Soul** — *See Through the Illusion* Those ten moves are the whole of the game's procedure. Combat is one among them, not a subsystem, and it is deliberately as dangerous as the rest. ### Stability Mental state is a track running from **Composed** through **Uneasy**, **Shaken**, **Distressed** and **Irrational** to **Broken**. Each band stacks penalties on Disadvantage rolls and on Keep it Together, and at Distressed the character also gets +1 to See Through the Illusion — the mind coming apart is also the mind beginning to see. At **Broken** the GM makes a Move: a Disadvantage's failure effect fires, the Illusion crumbles, the character shifts in time or space, a Dark Secret manifests, or she turns self-destructive. Recovery is possible, but it costs something. ### Harm and Wounds Damage is a **Harm** value subtracted from the Endure Injury roll; armour adds its rating back. A complete success leaves no serious injury, a 10–14 leaves the character unbalanced, short of something, or holding a **Serious Wound**, and a failure means knocked out, a **Critical Wound**, or death. A character can carry four Serious Wounds; the fifth is Critical, and Critical Wounds do not heal on their own. Non-stabilised Serious or Critical Wounds impose **−1 ongoing** (−2 for both), so a fight that goes badly keeps going badly. ### Characters Creation is Archetype-first. The book carries twenty-one — Academic, Agent, Artist, Avenger, Broken, Careerist, Criminal, Cursed, Deceiver, Descendant, Detective, Doll, Drifter, Fixer, Occultist, Prophet, Ronin, Scientist, Seeker, Veteran and Sleeper — and each one supplies an occupation, suggested **Disadvantages** (pick two), **Advantages**, a **Dark Secret**, and questions that tie the character to the others through **Relations**. **Dramatic Hooks** give the GM handles, and experience buys improvements rather than levels. ### The Horror Contract The game asks the table to agree to be frightened: the players consent to help build the dread, and the GM is trusted to pace it. The book is unusually direct that this is a **contract**, not a licence — know your players, hold the horror back between beats rather than spending it all at once, suggest rather than show, and let the unexplained do the work. It is the core book's statement of table consent — an agreement between adults rather than a rules subsystem. ## Editions - **Kult** (1991, Swedish) — the original boxed set from Äventyrsspel (later Target Games): three booklets — *Sanningen* (The Truth), *Lögnen* (The Lie) and *Vansinnet* (The Madness) — with a d20 and character sheets. - **Kult** (1993, English first edition) — Metropolis Ltd's translation, with a new US background and revised editing; sold under the tagline *"Death is only the beginning"*. - **Kult** (1994, Swedish second edition) — the box dropped; the whole game bound into one A4 hardback. Never translated. - **Kult** (1996–97, English second edition) — Metropolis Ltd again, and unrelated to the Swedish second edition: the two lines numbered independently. Its tagline was *"Reality is a lie"*. - **Kult: Beyond the Veil** (2001–04, English third edition) — 7th Circle under licence from Paradox: the player's handbook *Kult Rumours* (2001) and the core *Beyond the Veil* (2004). - **Kult: Divinity Lost** (2018, English fourth edition) — a complete reboot: a new rule-set and the setting updated to the present day. Developed and published by Helmgast AB, co-published by Modiphius Entertainment. *Held* as the 392-page core. The edition number counts the English line, which is why the Swedish second edition never gets one. ## Supplements ### Divinity Lost - **Gamemaster's Guide** (2021, 304 pp) — the GM-facing companion: the theatre of the fearful mind and the spiral of horror, the foundations of dread (the Intrigue Map, events, bombs, dramatic hooks, downtime, themes, writing campaigns), flesh and soul (a pantheon of mortals, personality types, Relations, legions of darkness), the pillars of the false heaven (environmental storytelling, location archetypes, Metropolis's shadow), arcana and apparitions, and fears unknown. *In the library.* - **Oakwood Heights** (quickplay scenario) — Detroit: the district attorney's office and the police walk the accused Franklin Mills through his crime scenes, and everyone has a hidden agenda. Given away free by Helmgast, and one of the seven scenarios in *Taroticum and Other Tales*. *In the library* (23 pp). - **Taroticum and Other Tales** (2018, 222 pp) — seven stand-alone scenarios: Taroticum, Oakwood Heights, La Cena, The Summit, Island of the Dead, Laraine Estate and The Atrocity Exhibition. - **Gamemaster Screen** (2018) — four panels of GM Moves, Unique Moves, NPC generation and the harm rules, with a clean skyline facing the players. - **Reference Deck** (2018) — 55 cards covering weaponry, gear and the basic moves, in multiple copies, for table reference. - **Tarot Deck** (2018) — 68 cards for readings that build plots, antagonists, locations and allies; recommended alongside *Taroticum*. - **Archetype Bundle** (2018) — reference sheets for the core's archetypes, plus the basic player-move sheets and blank character sheets. ### Kult (1991) **Swedish original (Äventyrsspel/Target):** - *Den svarta madonnan* (1991) — adventure/campaign: the curse, the siege of Leningrad, and the hunt east. - *Fallna änglar* (1991) — adventure, later published in English as *Fallen Angels*. - *Mörkrets legioner* (1992) — campaign module: the Illusion, its jailers and its cults. - *Tarotikum* (1992) — the tarot-driven adventure/campaign. **English translation (Metropolis Ltd):** - *Legions of Darkness* (1993) — sourcebook; the first supplement in English. - *Kult GM Screen* (1994) — with the adventure *Unto Death*. - *Fallen Angels* (1994) — three linked adventures. - *Taroticum* (1994) — adventure/campaign. - *Metropolis* (1995) — campaign sourcebook on the City. - *Purgatory* (1996) — campaign module. - *Player's Companion* (1996) — player's handbook. - *Beyond the Boundaries* (1996) — magic expansion. - *Heart, Mind and Soul* (1996) — magic expansion. - *The Judas Grail* (1996) — adventure. ## References - [Kult: Divinity Lost — official site](https://helmgast.se/kult/) - [Kult — products](https://helmgast.se/kult/products/) - [Kult — free resources: quickplay scenarios, sheets, tarot rules](https://helmgast.se/kult/resources/) - [Kult: Divinity Lost Core Rules (PDF) — Modiphius](https://modiphius.net/en-us/products/kult-divinity-lost-4th-edition-of-kult-core-rules-pdf) - [Kult — Helmgast webshop](https://webshop.helmgast.se/kult/) - [Uncommonly adult: Kult Divinity Lost — Geek Native](https://www.geeknative.com/62413/uncommonly-adult-rpg-kult-divinity-lost/) - [Helmgast AB](https://helmgast.se/)