08 - Influences

Chapter 8: Influences

The Higher Powers of the KULT: Divinity Lost universe are at war. Each faction in this war can be an Influence in a game, and can be mapped, representing the Higher Power’s willing and unwitting minions serving in that conflict, as well as the places, objects, and forces which contribute to furthering the Higher Power’s goals.

Influences are a tool the gamemaster (GM) can use to focus on the story’s most important themes, as well as to serve as a quick overview of the threats the player characters (PCs) are opposing. Creating an Influence is quick, and can be expanded upon to whatever degree the GM wants.

Creating Influences

The GM creates an Influence by completing the following two steps:

• Pick a Higher Power.
• Create and/or categorize Threats belonging to the Higher Power.

How many Influences the GM brings into a story depends on which Higher Powers she’d like to involve, and how many Threats she’s already created.

Higher Powers

Higher Powers represent powerful inhuman entities, ancient pacts, and great interests, whose influence reaches all the way from other dimensions into the human realm. The Higher Powers can only be defeated by extremely powerful beings, and even then it’s uncertain if they have truly met their final annihilation. They act via unwitting marionettes, devoted servants, invisible forces, magical objects, and places where the Illusion is weakened. As each Higher Power influences regions in the world, those places transform both physically and emotionally to resemble the Higher Power’s domain. For more information about the Higher Powers discussed here, see Book III: The Truth.

Archons and Death Angels strive to strengthen their primary Principles among humanity. All Archons - aside from Malkuth - intend to preserve and maintain Humanity’s prison and keep mankind ignorant of the Truth.

Metropolis: Archons

The Archons are manifestations of the Primary Principles that create humankind’s prison. These supernatural beings at the same time have their own wills and agendas and are enslaved by their own Principle. Only the Archon Malkuth has been able to change its Primary Principle.

• Kether (Primary Principle - Hierarchy): Kether’s influence manifests as hierarchical structures with masters and servants, widening class gaps, and an aristocracy with power and benefits.
• Chokmah (Primary Principle - Submission): Chokmah’s influence manifests as the submission to religious leaders, martyrdom, fanaticism, theocratic rule, and dogmatism.
• Binah (Primary Principle - Community): Binah’s influence manifests as the family’s power over the individual, mistrust of the State and other authorities outside of the family, strengthened traditions, and distrust of strangers.
• Chesed (Primary Principle - Safety): Chesed’s influence manifests as people’s longing for safety, embracing life’s familiar and mundane routines, encouraging friendly behavior, and the unwillingness to risk themselves or the community to the unknown and dangerous.
• Geburah (Primary Principle - Law): Geburah’s influence generates bureaucratic institutions, stricter laws, increased policing, and societal control over its citizenry. Those so influenced yield to increased control, out of a fear of chaos.
• Tiphareth (Primary Principle - Allure): Tiphareth’s influence incites a manic craving for beauty and affirmation, which must be fulfilled by any means necessary. Celebrities are worshipped as prophets, the mediocre waste their days imbibing the internet and television shows, and anyone who doesn’t meet the social ‘norms’ is despised and ignored.
• Netzach (Primary Principle - Victory): Netzach’s influence strengthens patriotism and nationalism, unites societies against a common enemy, and feeds the us-versus-them mentality. The righteous obliterate all that threatens them, strengthen the military, justify their violence in the name of the Greater Good, and incite people to arm themselves.
• Hod (Primary Principle - Honor): Hod’s influence conflates honor with prestige, elevates one’s status among others above all else, and sets the law aside in favor of personal vendettas. Expecting admiration for their adherence to their inflexible values, the honor-bound ruthlessly ostracise any who have brought shame upon themselves by failing to uphold their honor and fulfil the many duties it demands.
• Yesod (Primary Principle - Avarice): Yesod influences society through greed, capitalism, economics, consumer frenzy, and increased corporate power, as well as by promoting the admiration and respect of wealth as a sign of personal intelligence and ambition. It encourages contempt for the poverty-stricken, who are associated with laziness and stupidity, and supports the dismantling of social welfare institutions.
• Malkuth (Primary Principle - Awakening): Malkuth’s influence strives to free people from their prison by collapsing society, spreading insanity, shattering the Illusion to reveal other dimensions, and inspiring people to question the nature of society and the fabric of reality, such as through scientists letting their experiments run amok, the spread of conspiracy theories, and the manifestation of magic.

ANGELS

The Death Angels are the Archons’ dark shadows, who strive to strengthen their subverted Principles at the expense of the Archon they mirror.

• Thaumiel (Primary Principle - Power): Thaumiel’s influence manifests as a hunger for power, corruption, dictatorship, fascism, intrigue, insurrection, oppression, ruthlessness and totalitarian rule - a breakdown of solidarity and trust.
• Chagidiel (Primary Principle - Abuse): Chagidiel’s influence takes shape in the violation of children, the perversion of adult love and care, forgotten and lost children, homeless street kids, and the degradation and ruination of school systems.
• Sathariel (Primary Principle - Exclusion): Sathariel’s influence incites self-loathing, loneliness, hopelessness, contempt for ‘normals,’ self-destruction, anxiety, depression, suicide, school shootings and massacres, and communities of outsiders inspiring each other to commit destructive actions.
• Gamichicoth (Primary Principle - Fear): Gamichicoth’s influence awakens fear of ‘the Other’ by escalating distrust and blaming various ethnic groups, religions, or political dissidents for society’s problems. False narratives are created and distributed through news media, rumors, and manipulated visual evidence, while heralds whisper how all our concerns would dissipate if only ‘the Others’ were punished or disappeared.
• Golab (Primary Principle - Torment): Golab’s influence increases societal sadism, giving people pleasure from inflicting pain on others or by being subjected to torment themselves. Criminals are tortured in public, people carry out their most sadistic ideas unto both willing and unwilling subjects in obscure safe houses, while murderers leave trails of mutilated bodies.
• Togarini (Primary Principle - Compulsion): Togarini’s influence increases the manic creativity that distorts reality, tearing beauty asunder. Insane artwork opens portals to Inferno, magicians experiment at the border of life and death, and death itself acts erratically - souls binding themselves into rotting corpses, or haunting the living as distorted spectres.
• Hareb-Serap (Primary Principle - Conflict): Hareb-Serap’s influence propagates uncontrollable rage, bloodlust, and senseless violence. Gangs have shootouts in public places, police beat suspects to death, hooligans storm arenas, lynch mobs tear their targets to pieces, harmless conflicts escalate into bloody fistfights, and ‘normal’ people teeter on the brink of explosive outbursts at all times.
• Samael (Primary Principle - Vengeance): Samael’s influence strengthens paranoia, vindictiveness, and obsession with injustices, while perpetrators take brutal revenge for nonexistent affronts, jealous partners murder their loved ones for imagined betrayals, and terrorists exact gory retribution upon their foes.
• Gamaliel (Primary Principle - Lust): Gamaliel influences society towards hypersexualization and objectification, where crowds commit gang rape, people are forced into prostitution, pornography becomes increasingly hardcore and perverted, and people gather in clubs and secret societies for macabre orgies, embracing mindless desires with no consideration of the consequences of their actions.
• Nahemoth (Primary Principle - Discord): Nahemoth’s influence deforms the natural world, turning it dangerous and threatening, expressed as forest fires, oil spills, poisoned streams and groundwater, misshapen animal life, violent storms, cold snaps, heat waves, torrential rains, earthquakes, tsunamis, cannibal tribes, disfigured fetuses, and baleful eclipses.

The Underworld

• The Children of the Underworld (Goal: Liberation): Their influence manifests as people suddenly disappear without a trace, children and madmen witness strange figures, odd artifacts and mystical knowledge emerge, people experience repressed memories of apocalyptic, crumbling worlds in their dreams, and grotesque characters influence societal institutions.
• She Who Waits Below (Goal: The cessation of everything): She Who Waits Below influences humanity to dream of the Labyrinth. People are subconsciously attracted to tunnels and sewers, urged to seek the deep subterranean dark. In turn, zeloths and cairath expand their hunting grounds closer to the surface to prevent humans from reaching deeper, and the Guardians of the Labyrinth contact those who have been chosen by its deity.

Limbo

• The Dream Princes (Goal: Populate their dream realm): The Dream Princes consciously (or subconsciously) pull people into their dream realms. When a sufficient numher of people are bound to the same dream realm, it might start affecting the waking world. The borders to Limbo weaken and people’s subconsciouses begin altering reality to become more like the dream realm.

Gaia

• Gaia the Living Earth (Goal: Breakdown civilization): Gaia’s influence seeks to tear civilization apart. Wild animals enter settled areas, communication lines break down and isolation sets in, the rule of law is rejected, machinery malfunctions, societal collapse becomes imminent, overgrowth creeps everywhere and engulfs human construction, people turn savage, and feral gods bargain over what cultural artifacts remain.

Threats

Threats are locations, events, objects, organizations, and opponents which oppose or otherwise threaten the characters in the story.

Examples:

• An old factory bordering Metropolis (place).
• A magical ritual impregnating a woman with an inhuman being (event).
• A camera that takes photos of other dimensions (object).
• A ruthless corporation trying to silence the player characters (organization).
• A suspicious police officer looking for a wanted player character (leader).
• A monstrous creature predating the sewers (monster).

Creating New Threats

Create Threats Based on the Intrigue Map

When the GM sets up the story or scenario, she should have created an Intrigue Map using the instructions found in 06 - Setting up a Story. If so, she can just take those Events, Places, Objects, Leaders, Monsters, Groups, and Organizations she’s noted on the Intrigue Map and write them up as Threats under a fitting Higher Power’s heading.

Choose Higher Powers

When tying threats to a Higher Power, it can be useful to consider what you intend for the threat to achieve during the story, and how it’s connected to the Higher Power’s Principle and/or goals. If the GM maintains too many story elements influenced by several Higher Powers, it can become confusing, so sometimes it’s worthwhile making some changes to a threat’s original concept to make it fit under one of those Higher Powers with currently active threats.

For example, if a PC is Haunted by a spirit entity and the GM notes down the spirit as an influence of the Higher Power Sathariel, the entity’s actions in the story should be based on its primary Principle, Exclusion - either the exclusion of the PC or those in her vicinity. The entity might be the spirit of a human influenced by Sathariel into taking their own life, and now serves the Death Angel by haunting the PC.

In another example, a PC inherits (Heir) a strange, sealed book bound in some sort of blue, leathery material, and the GM draws a connection between the book and the Children of the Underworld; the book possesses the knowledge and properties to further this Higher Power’s Principle, Liberation.

Create Threats Based on the Higher Powers

Once you have established an Influence connected to a particular Higher Power, you can invent new threats based on it. For example, if the story focuses on the Higher Power, Sathariel, you can develop additional threats connected to that Death Angel. For example, as Sathariel is connected to society’s outcasts, we might create an emo singer who secretly serves the Death Angel. We give him a name - Alex Rojas - and decide he is a Leader-type threat with the goal of luring teenagers into worship of Sathariel. It was Alex who convinced the spirit entity now haunting the PC into committing suicide (see above). As the story progresses, the spirit might drop hints about this connection by leaving behind messages, such as snippets from Alex’s song lyrics.

Example Influence with Higher Power and Threat

Higher Power: Yesod (Primary Principle - Greed) Threats:

• Curse (Event): A pact between The Careerist and Yesod promising the PC wealth in return for running the Archon’s errands.
• Harold Knight (Leader): A lictor serving Yesod, CEO of the company Knight & Alderton, hunts The Seeker who knows Knight is looking for the virgin.
• The Equitable Building (Place): Knight & Aldertons’ offices, Harold Knight’s penthouse, influenced by Yesod.
• The Union Club (Group): Businessmen who secretly serve and worship Yesod, and under Knight’s thumb.
• The virgin birth (Event): A ritual to cause the rebirth of Yesod’s Incarnation in Elysium.

The GM can also start the story with her selected Higher Power absent, and slowly introduce that Power and its Principle into the game through escalating threats. As the game progresses, new threats will naturally spring up as a result of the PCs’ actions. The GM should note down any new threats on the Intrigue Map during the game session, and connect them to Higher Powers between sessions.

Developing Threats

Once the GM has figured out a few threats with tie-ins to Higher Powers, she should write a short paragraph describing each threat. In particular, the GM has to decide how the threat is connected to both the Higher Power and to the PCs.

A few other subjects worthwhile detailing include:

• What are the threat’s goals? What does it want to achieve during the story?
• What are its motivations? Why does it want to achieve its goals?
• What are its methods? How does it plan on achieving its goals?
• What are its resources? What people, objects, and places does it have at its disposal?
• What are its weaknesses? What can the PCs use against the threat?

Unique Moves

The GM can also give her threats unique Moves to use during the story. These Moves should be based on the threat’s concept and its Higher Power’s Principle. For example, a lictor serving Yesod might have a Move called “Buy Silence,” allowing it to influence people through bribery.

Unique Moves for Higher Powers and Planes of Existence

In Part III - The Truth, you will find Moves for the Higher Powers and the influence of several planes of existence. These Moves are also available to the GM, in addition to the standard ones.

Categorizing Threats

To make it easier to manage the story’s various threats, the GM should categorize them into the following types:

• Leader: A powerful individual with sizeable resources and followers.
• Monster: A human whose humanity has been compromised, or a creature from another dimension.
• Group: A team of creatures or individuals taking action together.
• Organization: A large collection of individuals, each performing a specific function.
• Place: A location with particular meaning or supernatural properties.
• Object: An item with mystical powers or important information.
• Event: A major occurrence affecting the PCs and the story.

By categorizing her threats, the GM can quickly determine what sort of Moves are appropriate for each one. For example, a Leader-type threat might have Moves related to influence and resources, while a Monster-type threat might have Moves related to violence and terror.