Review Summary: Short adventures. Profound, piercing results.

Blurb from the publisher: 'Taroticum and Other Tales contains seven stand-alone scenarios for KULT: Divinity Lost. They are set in different times and locations and explore different parts of the Kult mythos. The scenarios are all designed to be quick and easy to pick up and play.

• Taroticum - Taroticum revolves around a deck of Tarot cards that has the power to manipulate the Illusion. Set in London in 1892 and in 1992, in Inferno, and close to Achlys where time has ceased to exist.

• Oakwood Heights - November 2016. We follow a group of people from the Detroit DA's office and the local Police Force partaking in a crime scene reconstruction. Soon we learn that everyone has a hidden agenda as the story unfolds.

• La Cena - Miami 1973. The Cruz family is preparing a seven course dinner for their eldest son who is returning from Cuba with the last Freedom Flight. The city trembles in the summer heat and so are the tensions and hidden frustration in the Cruz family.

• The Summit - The Monarch, a skyscraper existing in Elysium as well as in Inferno. A borderland of struggle and violence. Each floor is filled with gruesome scenes and madness and in the top floor the Architect of this mad construction awaits.

• Island of the Dead - On the 12th of June 2013, flight DY13001 leaves Bangkok, Thailand. After just over an hour it crashes into the stormy sea. A few survivors drift ashore on a remote island. They have to adapt and survive in the strange jungle and try to get away before the island will devour them.

• Laraine Estate - In the late summer of 2018, a famous youtuber and urban explorer goes missing while breaking into the Laraine Estate, an old mansion with a long history. Deep beneath the old mansion something lurks, and drives people into lust and perversions.

• The Atrocity Exhibition - At an exclusive midnight showing at the Cecil Torne Art Centre in the autumn of 2017, the complete works of Guy Vaquelines entire Triumph De La Mort collection will be displayed. What no one knows is that the paintings are infused with magic and bringing them together like this will have unexpected consequences.

Taroticum and Other Tales is meant for an adult audience. You need Kult: Divinity Lost to play.'

What you get: Your EUR 40,52 will buy you Taroticum and Other Tales, a full-colour 224-page adventure compilation in both its hardcover and pdf format for use with the Kult: Divinity Lost 4th Edition game line. The book boasts of an integrated yellow cloth bookmark.

The pdf version alone costs EUR 20,25. Oakwood Heights, one of the adventures in the compilation, was the first scenario published for Kult: Infinity Lost and can be downloaded from the publisher's website free of charge.

Spoiler warning: As much as I am not going to describe, let alone detail the adventures, parts of the scenarios might be revealed while discussing their strong and less strong points. If you intend to participate in these scenarios as a player, skip straight to the conclusion.

Contents: I will not repeat the publisher's blurb, merely expand on it. The compilation comprises seven adventures. Taroticum at 85 pages is by far the longest, and will require around ten sessions to resolve if a GM is committed into giving the adventure his undivided attention. The remaining adventures range from 14 to 30 pages. Each of those can be played in one or two sessions. The adventures are wildly different in goals, themes, and tone. Where one is the exploration of a locale with Kult elements (Laraine Estate), another is as close to alternative roleplaying and improvisational theatre (La Cena). Themes include the willingness to sacrifice everything in order to beat death, family strife, violence and suffering, love and its excesses, and many more.

The presentation of each adventure is a narrative one, without the elements of the system that supports the game imposing on the plot. These are contained in the closing sub-chapter of each adventure, along with statted NPCs and other material where needed. Indeed, Taroticum itself as four of the smaller adventures are to be played with pre-generated characters. Taroticum utilizes a Tarot deck that can be purchased separately (alternatively the imagery for the cards is included in the physical and the pdf edition of this book), while The Island of the Dead includes equipment cards to be printed and used in the game.

The book ends with a two-page index, its entries being divided by adventure.

The strong points: Kult is an admittedly hard concept to write scenarios about, and here we are with seven distinct adventures of outright personal horror. Factor in the concept of playing pre-genearted characters, and you will immediately realize how impossibly hardcore the game can be. The scenarios are mind-bendingly weird, surreal, or terrifying, without ever becoming trite. As an example, The Laraine Estate is effectively a haunted house scenario, with a layer of contemporary influences added on top. Yet, its background is a literal orgy that will culminate in howling bodies being burnt alive, and all this based on nothing but good will, desperation, and the old adage 'the road to hell is full of good intentions'. Oakwood Heights ends in a cacophony of potential evil or disastrous endings, without a single redeeming one. Idem for The Summit, an adventure exploring loss of any kind, in a setting of urban decay. This stuff is scary.

La Cena deserves a paragraph all by itself. By far my personal favourite, it is an exploration of characters through a static environment. Take the longest scenes from Tarantino, mix them with the longest scenes from the Coen Brothers, and add a gratuitous serving of horror; that's what this adventure is about. To play it to the hilt you will need six players and a GM, in order for the GM to portray only one NPC and nothing else; make absolutely sure you are seven, the adventure deserves nothing less. Stats are overall unimportant, the adventure can be played with pretty much every system without serious modification. The scenario is as basic as they get: the characters have dinner and discuss, without much else happening. Yet, with some careful prompting and hinting, the affair will slowly turn into a harrowing experience where all the family's secrets will be spilled, violent frustrations will come out and the characters will either start a healing process or they will feed a demonic entity which thrives on misery. The scenario is so good it actually recommends three distinct playlists for its three small parts. If you are into heavy, engaged roleplaying the book is worth it for this scenario alone.

The compilation opened my eyes about how scenario-writing for Kult should be tackled. Horror must be personal, and to achieve that, the characters and the players must be well entangled to the events that will take place. Playing pre-generated characters (with a certain amount of preparation) works fantastically with Kult's setting. Don't think of these characters as disposable, even though you will be unable to do anything else in the future. Think of them as the absolute specialists; only they can fit in this situation, and nobody else. Oakwood Heights is the perfect example of such an adventure, for those who would think that La Cena diverges too much from traditional tabletop roleplaying. I am actually quite perplexed about why the remaining two scenarios didn't also have pre-generated characters, or background tips for when the players create their own characters. Clearly, this is the way to go.

The book's production values are as high as everything else in the line. That bookmark is damn useful, I tell you. The font is the same smallish one that can be found in The Black Madonna; there is a lot more material in these here pages than one would first believe. The layout is the two-column affair every Kult product uses and is very clear to the reader. At times it becomes a wall of text, more on that however later. The iconography is outright fantastic! Taroticum is based on a Tarot deck of cards à la Kult, while The Atrocity Exhibition perfectly uses images reminiscent of globally acclaimed paintings. The images can and should be extracted and printed, in case you hand out props to your players or you narrate with visual cues on board.

The pdf is well done. The bookmarks go three levels down for Taroticum and two levels down for the other adventures, which is adequate for adventures of this length. The table of contents has live links, as does the index. The images are extractable for those who wish to print them out and use them as hand-outs or props.

The weak points: If The Black Madonna had already an overly narrative presentation of the adventure. The present compilation is even more extreme, taking into account the length of the smaller scenarios and the psychological horror some of them aim for. There isn't much to do about this; prepare to the best of your capacity, and not just because the writing is more convoluted than it should have been. The smaller scenarios can shine much brighter than their page count indicates; don't let them devolve into fillers.

I don't need to warn anybody about the subject matter that Kult tackles. There are layers upon layers of terror, disturbing scenes, and painfully awkward situations. A well-prepared character is one thing, make however sure that you are a well-prepared player yourself. At times the game gives back a lot more than you might have bargained for. If you think horror is only about gruesome entities from parallel worlds that shouldn't have existed, I have two words for you: La Cena. Kult holds no bars, and if you are not ready for it (or if you have faced family dysfunctionality yourself) when it turns psychological, you might be overwhelmed.

I noticed a few typos in the compilation, yet they do not amount to much.

Conclusion: I wholeheartedly recommend Taroticum and Other Tales to every fan of horror, irrespective of whether he is invested into Kult or not. They are thought-provoking, well-crafted, and horrifying in their own different way. They turn their short length into an enormous advantage, in order to showcase fragments of Kult's disturbing world. Buy this book sight-unseen along with the rulebook. The gameline, and how to write adventures for it, suddenly makes a lot more sense.

For more info on Taroticum and Other Tales and Kult overall, visit Modiphius Entertainment at http://www.modiphius.com.

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