The Black Madonna - Review
I asked ddavison to start making a blog on here two days ago, and nothing has happened, so instead I'm making my personal statement known here, under the risk that it'll just blow up into a shitstorm.
For the sake of backstory: I generally don't like roleplaying - not in the form that it's currently in. I could go on and on about that, but that's another topic.
As for Kult, I like the setting, but I don't think Kult is that well-made in a very cruicial regard: It's an extremely slow burn. The setting is literally behind a veil, of which the players know nothing, and the GM knows everything. This means that from the GM's perspective, the setting is so cool, because to him it's all monsters waging war on eachother, and there's magical spells and other fantastical stuff, but to the players, it's mostly going to be human organisations being corrupt and criminal, with the occational spooky stuff. A 500 lbs monster can literally walk up to you and speak with you, and you'll just percieve it as a human that might perhaps look a little strange at most.
...and this isn't exciting. I'm right now listening to a podcast of The Black Madonna campaign. I'm 12 hours in, which is only a third of the way in, and so far the little the players have encountered of "The Truth" is mundane: [spoiler]Bad dreams, worms, black magic rituals, and a few giant insects.[/spoiler] The rest is just criminal activity, resolved by the usual burglary that I both hate and am sick of.
Compare this to the 1988 movie They Live, where a guy gets a pair of shades which makes him able to immediately switch between The Truth and The Lie at will. That would make Kult exciting for the players as well.
You won't put up with a movie where nothing happens for two hours, so why put up with twelve or more? Yes, plenty of stressful things happen, but not the actual Kult horror.
I'm going to go suffer through the rest of the podcast now. I expect to be done in a couple of days. It has great roleplaying and GMing - it's just the setting that sucks.