# Things You'll Never See Elsewhere - Kult 1st Edition with Kult 4th Edition tags: #thoughts #game/rpg/kult ![[Kult 1st and Kult 4th.png]] This is a thing that you will almost never see, largely because nobody else is going to be able to show it to you. Recently I had the perverse urge to pick up the latest edition of **[[Kult]]** (4th), in part because I was assured that the latest version completely throughout the abomination that was 2nd edition and partly because **Kult** was one of my first great loves in RPGs. While most people got their start with fantasy, particularly **[[Dungeons and Dragons|D&D]]**, that wasn't what got me into RPGs. For me, part of the kickoff was **[[Call of Cthulhu]]**, with its abominable reflection of the original stories, it's refusal to shy away from some of the less savory parts (sadly slowly cut away in subsequent editions), and its focus on creating visceral scenes. That spoke directly to my young heart, conveying a greater love of the hobby than anything else might. Well, except for giant robots. We can talk about **[[Robotech]]** and **[[Mekton]]** at some other point. **Kult** came along in 1993 for the first US printing and you better believe it made its way into my pocket at warp speed. I was thrilled and I was hooked. The setting was fascinating. The mechanics shockingly sensible after the mess that BRP is. It was a game I could fully immerse in, fully enjoy, fully play – it was just almost impossible to find people who would also be interested in it. That was a bit of a problem because I was absolutely, no question going to pick up all the content I could for **Kult** – and I did. ![[Shelves with Kult and Elric.png]] Yes, that is a shot from my active access rack of shelves, and yes – pretty much all the books you can see are well loved and well worn. And they've well-earned it. (Kind of a shame that no one has done a better approach to **Elric** in terms of fantasy RPGs but – I have a dozen systems I could do it in without the license.[^elric] But I digress.) The new edition of **Kult** looks *beautiful* in person. It's not just color, they use metallic gold highlights for some of the headers and decorators. Frankly, it almost looks too good to play with – which is fine because I don't use physical books anymore than I have to these days; PDFs are far more convenient and much lighter. These books are going on my display table which is starting to get a little too heavy and I really need to seriously start thinking about building another 40 feet of shelving in the den for board games and display games. People forget how hard it was to get in touch with RPG companies back in the day. Websites were really just starting to come into their own and most everything lived in a walled garden. This caught my eye as I was flipping through the first few pages of **Kult** 1st edition; it's something I hadn't thought of in many, many years: ![[How to Contact Metropolis.png]] America Online keywords. Jesus fucking Christ. Back in the day when you had a constricted and constrained interface to go looking around for forums, chat rooms, and the predecessor of websites… AOL, probably only thought of by kids these days for [an ancient DM system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_(software)) and maybe not even that. I'm feeling my age. Don't mind me. Am I likely to actually get to play the new edition of **Kult**? Probably not, for exactly the same reasons as I didn't get to play the original edition of **Kult** very much. It demands a specific kind of player to get the most out of it. It doesn't matter the mechanics; it's the setting that's the thing. But I'm glad to have these two books in my possession because they are gorgeous and possessing them, reading them, enjoying them, gives me pleasure. [^elric]: It's **[[Sorcerer]]**. I'd run **Elric** in Sorcerer without a moment's hesitation.