Session 4: Let Loose, Have Fun

This is a session recap for a Kult: Divinity Lost roleplaying campaign. Jessy Button is played by my wife, who also does the art, and I am the game master.

This post contains blood, gore, violence and sex.

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Friday morning, Jessy decides that she needs to talk to someone about all that’s happened to her. She doesn’t want to seem crazy to Tan, her friends wouldn’t understand, and she’s already putting so much on Carl. Luckily, she has another option. Jessy has for the past two years been tricking miss Agatha Dupont, a lady in her nineties who suffers from alzheimer’s, that Jessy is her granddaughter. The staff at the elderly care like Jessy, she visits once every month or two. As Agatha can’t remember conversations, Jessy feels safe confiding in her.

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Session 3: Descent

This is a session recap for a Kult: Divinity Lost roleplaying campaign. Jessy Button is played by my wife, who also does the art, and I am the game master.

This post contains violence and dead bodies.

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On Tuesday, Jessy goes for a coffee date with Andi to discuss her ring and collaboration ideas. Andi admits that she’s been doing her own research about these Granger Fine Jewelry rings, because seeing one in real life made her a little too excited. Jessy allows her a closer examination, and she decides that it was likely made in the late 1970s, before all the legal trouble started for the company. Andi shows Jessy old pictures that one of her friends managed to dig up – similar rings to the one Jessy has, on the fingers of Henry Ford II and Saddam Hussein. She doesn’t know what became of them. She again questions, in her friendly tone, why Jessy would have the ring. She may be rich, but she’s not Henry Ford.

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Check out my artist’s website!

Larissa Darrah is a very talented freelance illustrator. She does cool digital art and is, in general, a pretty swell person. I wouldn’t marry someone who wasn’t swell. She’s also one of my favorite people to play roleplaying games with, and makes every session of Jessy’s Story matter to me.

You can find her everywhere that’s relevant here. Linking her social media and Twitch information is the least I can do to give back for the art she’s making for me. Check her out! She’s open for commissions, if you also enjoy having art.

The Kult Take: Friend Request

For this recurring segment of Beyond Elysium, I will step away from the nepharites and have a Kult-inspired look at other horror media. Welcome to The Kult Take.

Friend Request is a 2016 horror movie in which Laura, a popular college girl with an active social media presence, tries to befriend the friendless freak Marina and gets punished for it. It has problems: it loses steam about one third through the movie but just keeps plodding on, the scares are lazy, and the message is, like, wow, mean spirited. BUT! Marina, presented in the film as a new age witch who sacrifices herself to curse Laura, is a delightful look at how Sathariel corrupts the miserable and lonely.

SPOILERS AHEAD

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Session 2: A Hotel Stay

This is a session recap for a Kult: Divinity Lost roleplaying campaign. Jessy Button is played by my wife, who also does the art, and I am the game master.

This post contains abduction.

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Jessy spends a long while cleaning herself off, finding blood under her nails and vicious scratches on her arms. She tosses the mask in the garbage, turning it so she doesn’t have to deal with the enormous goat eyes staring at her. In her heap of new Instagram messages, she finds one of a hand holding a whole bundle of hundred dollar bills. This immediately piques her interest. The person who sent it to her, an empty account with a garbage name, asks immediately about Tan. Where did Jessy go with him? Who was there? A thousand dollars are offered for the information. Jessy tells the person that she’ll tell them next time she sees Tan. After hitting up some of her followers for easy money, selling personal photos to them, she gets ready to head outside.

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Discoveries in the Minor Arcana

A while back (the post may be buried by the time I post this), a post in the Facebook group Kult RPG Fans started a discussion on what humans can even eat if they’re stuck in Metropolis. There was interesting discussion to be had, but what I am writing about here is based on some banter between myself and another poster on there, Alex. He suggested the “refreshingly exciting” option of hunting down a cairath and peeling off a rat or a dog or something less tasteful from its body. I found this hilarious, and responded with the joke that the cairath can’t hunt you, if you’re hunting it.

The interaction got me thinking about the taroticum (as many things in Kult tend to do). The suits in the minor arcana all carry a meaning, some metaphorical or physical transition that moves from the start of the suit until the end. I realized, after some contemplation, that the same applies to smaller sequences of cards. There may be millions of story elements and insights into the Kult world that we can glean from the way the tarot cards are sequenced.

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Session 1: The My Gems Party

This is a session recap for a Kult: Divinity Lost roleplaying campaign. Jessy Button is played by my wife, who also does the art, and I am the game master.

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Jessy Button enters the large lobby of a nameless skyscraper in downtown Toronto. On the top floor, she knows, a party for influencers and sponsors of the newly launched app My Gems is taking place. On the guest list is Andi, a fine jewelry blogger and socialite that Jessy wants to get into contact with. Jessy herself, however, is not on that guest list.

Sharing the elevator with a few people, all but one get off on the top floor. Where the gray-suited gentleman who stayed behind is headed, none can say. Jessy expertly lies her way past the doorman and My Gems’ marketing specialist Shrey, allowing her into the party. Several large rooms with tables, couches, a TV showing the hockey game make up the scene. A DJ is playing music loud enough to make every conversation a bit strained, and a wide variety of finely dressed men and women get to know each other.

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Character Profile: Jessy Button

This character profile was written by my player, my wife, my immortal enemy: Larissa Kratz. She also provided the art.

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Jessy Button, 22 years old

Jessy Button was born as Jessica Buckle to Victor Buckle and Marie Ericson-Buckle in rural Saskatchewan. She is the eldest of three daughters that Victor and Marie went on to have. Jessica’s early years were filled with a loving, connected family, at least on her father’s side. They spent plenty time with their cousin, Memphis, who was the only son of Victor’s brother, Stephen, and his wife, Jennifer. Jessica and Memphis, being born around the same time,were fast friends, her sisters going only when their parents needed a cheap babysitter. Jessica hung out with Memphis and his stay-at-home dad almost every weekend. Stephen loved having Jessica around, and treated her like his own until the summer she turned eight, when her parents left her and her sisters with their uncle to go on an anniversary vacation.

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The Kult Take: Pet Sematary

When I read the Kult core book, I am again and again struck by the same feeling: The Kult universe is dark, and it is expansive. Every possible avenue is left open for you, nothing is absolute nor set in stone. While we know about the cairath and nachtschreck and azghouls, there are a million other horrors the book never explores. We learn about the Swap Dealer and Death Angel Incarnates, but there are thousands other gods and manifestations of them we might as well be dealing with.

What lies beyond the Illusion, and how it affects those that gaze through it, is entirely up to us. We can tie it to the book’s presented beings and conflicts as much or as little as we want. If we accept that, then Kult is so much more than a game about discovering lictors and zeloths and the Demiurge. Kult becomes a game where nearly any horror story can be told, and thanks to the game world’s malleability, we can seamlessly integrate it to any desired level we want for our story.

For this (hopefully frequently) recurring segment of Beyond Elysium, I will step away from the nepharites and have a Kult-inspired look at other horror media. Welcome to The Kult Take.

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