Episode: 2121
Title: HPR2121: Dark Cults Tabletop Game
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2121/hpr2121.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 14:35:30

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This is HPR episode 2,121 entitled Dark Cult Tabletop Game.
It is hosted by Klaatu and is about 30 minutes long.
The summary is Klaatu discusses the LL Tabletop Game Dark Cult.
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You are listening to Acropolis Radio. My name is Klaatu.
Today we're going to talk about some Tabletop gaming.
I've been getting into Tabletop gaming lately because it's
I guess because video games started coming to Linux,
I feel like that's a passe subject now.
It's like oh video games, yeah we got those now.
So now I'm really kind of fascinated by this whole thing about analog games,
things that don't require electricity, things that concentrate
necessarily on the gaming mechanic rather than the Glitz and Glamour of the latest graphics card.
So yeah I've been getting into it lately and one of them that I want just to talk about
is called Dark Colts. So a long time ago, way long time ago, back in 1983,
there was a little card game called Dark Colts and it was released by an independent game publisher.
And I guess it was successful enough to warrant an extension pack that came out two years later,
but mostly today it's an obscure product of the 80s with a slight legacy that it managed
to leave behind and it's from that legacy that I actually discovered it in the first place
because I was researching games intended for specifically two players because that's
what I have access to, two players, reliably, two players.
And I kept coming across this one game called Gloom GLO-O-M, which I felt, yeah that sounds
pretty good, Gloom, that sounds about my speed. And the Gloom game, which I should talk about
sometime maybe in a later episode, Gloom very often got referenced in relation to this older
game called Dark Colts. And so I was really getting curious about what this Dark Colts game was
because it sounded intriguing and apparently it had made an impact on someone because it keeps
getting referenced here with Gloom. So I did some research and ended up digging up some
information about it. Now I don't know what your childhood was like, but mine was filled with,
well, imagination. I wasn't really encouraged to watch a whole lot of TV, so a lot of what I did
was as a kid was make up my own stories using pretty much anything I could get my hands on,
didn't really care if it was LEGO sets or cardboard cutouts, it doesn't really matter. I could
imagine myself into a story with pretty much anything. And they weren't necessarily good stories,
you know, like good quote unquote good. But at the same time they were like utterly engrossing to me,
so I mean good enough, right? And I found out later in life that that's kind of what makes a story
good is that as long as it interests me, then I'll call it good, or if it interests you, you'll
call it good. So I kind of got sort of trained early on that it was okay to make up stories.
In my third year in primary school, I think it was my teacher had this box of story starters,
which she would use pretty much as busy work, but I loved them. Like I would do my work just so I
could get to the busy work at the end of the class, and she would give you a story starter card,
and then you would have to write out a story from that prompt. And there were other game-like prompts
that I could discovered later, you know, at the local bookstore as a kid. And then I sort of
rediscovered at some point later on as an adult RPG gaming and fell in love with the once-for-bidden
pastime that I'd flirted with as a sixth grader, but my parents generally did not let me get
anywhere near Dungeons and Dragons, and for whatever reason I was obedient, I'm not sure what that
was all about, but, you know, I kind of I was around that kind of that kind of gaming as a kid
and story starters and things that required a lot of imagination. I never really got to experience
it a whole lot as a proper game, but I was kind of all around that area. So when I came across dark
cults, it really, really caught my my attention, because it actually it was it's kind of a combination
of perfect combination of those past experiences. So RPG like game, not super RPG, it has the obligatory
dark theme that I tend to to gravitate towards, and it's strongly reliant upon imagination,
and it's designed conveniently anywhere from one to four players, actually maybe one to five.
Originally it was designed specifically for two players, like exactly two players,
but in the 1985 expansion pack it provided a single player and either four or five on the on the max,
I think I think four, but they're like you could probably fake it with five. So it's like this
perfect game for me, you know, I'm just like, oh, this is perfect. The only problem was
dark cults has been out of print for about, geez, now 30, 20, 20, 30 years, so not convenient.
So I really wanted to play dark cults, and I'll talk about exactly what dark cult is in a moment,
but I really wanted to play it, and luckily I found a few other people online who want
wanted to play the game as well. A few of them had this idea of recreating the entire game with
new art, specifically Edward Gory version of the cards. So instead of the original illustrations,
just use Edward Gory illustrations and come up with this new deck. And it's around that time that
I kind of started to realize that there was this thing called print and play, and a print and play
game is a game that someone posts, you know, like PDFs of their card designs online. You download
them, you print them, and then you play them. It's like this whole revolution in analog gaming,
you know, it's like you, you just, you don't, there is no printer. You're the printer. There
is no distributor. You are the distributor. Amazing, amazing, amazing, really, really exciting.
Problem, of course, here is, again, that we don't have rights to Edward Gory's art,
and, and no one, again, the card game dark cult itself has not been released as a print and play,
you know, it's, it doesn't, it's out of print. No one remembers it. So I, I, I found a bunch
of resources online with some guy who had owned dark cults and had managed to scan every
single card and all the rules in to his computer, and he posted all the stuff online. So it is
out there, like you can, you can see it, you can, you can experience it digitally. The problem is
that the scans aren't terribly good, they're not very high res. I think most of them are color cards,
so you would, you know, if you tried to print that directly, you would be printing a lot of color,
like just the color background. Maybe that was just the rulebook. I could be misremembering parts of
this, but either way, it just wasn't a super convenient, great sort of way to get a hold of this game.
But all of these ideas started sort of coming together in my head, and I thought, well,
why don't I just use Creative Commons clip art and make a deck that would be friends and play and
post that online, and then I can play it. So I went to open source, I mean openclipart.org,
which is a place where I sometimes post things and use clip art from a lot. It's a CC zero,
so there's no attribution, no restrictions whatsoever. It is basically public domain,
but with the Creative Commons explicit license, like, hey, there are no requirements here,
you can just use this art for yourself. And there are a couple of guys over, or I should say
contributors, I don't know if they're guys, but there are a couple of contributors over at openclipart.org,
who do a lot of scanning of vintage illustrations, and then they vectorize them and post them on
on openclipart.org. So there's this whole sort of sub collection of vintage artwork from
various sources. I mean, there are some like comic book type styles, there are some,
I guess, probably kids books, you know, there's fiction books, mystery books, so all kinds of
interesting vintage clip art on this site. So I sat down with a list, I went to the one place
online that did actually have a complete deck of dark cults, transcribed all the rules, the
the man you the rulebook, and I made a list of all the cards that were included in the deck,
and I just sat down and recreated them using clip art from openclipart.org. I did all that
in Inkscape, of course, and just kind of just winged it really, just went crazy for a couple of days,
and banged out a complete deck of essentially dark cults. You can find this deck at getlab.com,
slash not clattu slash dark occult, that is dark occult, so that's to differentiate it from
dark cults. So d-a-r-k-o-c-c-u-l-t, getlab.com slash not clattu slash dark occult.
Okay, so that's that's how you can play this game. That's what that was all about.
Now let's talk a little bit about the game itself and why it's so amazing. So the gameplay is,
you can imagine an RPG without a DM or GM, whatever you, the dungeon master, the game master,
whatever you call that person. So you can imagine it sort of as an RPG without the structure really.
That's the general feel of it anyway. You don't have any dice, like I say, it's totally unstructured.
So that's different, but the feel itself is similar. It's got a similar sort of,
it satisfies the same urge, if you will. So the rules in a nutshell are that you play life
and your opponent, if you're playing the two-player or whatever, your opponent is playing death.
Now your job is to keep the protagonist of the story alive as he or she goes on an ill-advised
stroll in the middle of the night. Most everything outside of this character's apartment is
pretty much trying to kill him. So the odds aren't necessarily good. The role of your opponent,
who's playing death, their job is to try to kill the protagonist. So the actual gameplay goes
something like this. The story begins with a start card at which point the protagonist decides
to go out for a midnight stroll. That's always the story starter. As new cards are drawn,
you play them in the middle of the table. You line up the cards into a storyline, essentially.
And as the protagonist goes through the different encounters that each card represents,
and these encounters can be innocuous, they can be just a new location,
or they could be something that adds to the atmosphere, like Omnis Fog, or Erie Sounds,
or spooky symbols etched into the wall, or whatever. They could be unsettling,
like a derelict drunkard, a sobbing woman, an overheard violent argument, or they can be
outright dangerous, like an escape lunatic, an evil apparition, or a witch, escaped convict,
lots of different threats, direct threats. So as the cards are played, each player narrates
that segment of the tale. So the story builds on itself as you play each card, and you narrate,
you know, the segment of the story. So it's a bit of a, what do they call it, exotic
corpse, or something, or whatever that's called, where you kind of build on the thing that
the previous person laid down. So you're building off of each other's story based on whatever
the cards are kind of dictating. And at some point, because of the way that cards are drawn,
at some point, out some outcome is forced, at which point either the protagonist dies,
like they get attacked, and they aren't able to escape, or the protagonist manages to escape,
and then you start a new storyline where the protagonist goes out on the following night,
which I don't know if my neighborhood was this dangerous, I would just not go outside at night,
but this protagonist always goes out at night. So each card type has different points for life,
or for death, or for both sometimes. So it's, it is to your advantage game, in terms of game
mechanic, it's to your advantage to draw the story out, to make it long, to the length in it.
But other times it might be better for you to go in for the kill if you're death, or retreat
in utter fear if you're alive, because after all you don't want to, if you're death, you want
the protagonist to die, or if you're life, you don't want to die. So you do have to hedge your bets,
you know, before you draw that next card, you have to kind of think, well,
should I draw this card? Or should I run? Because I'm, you know, I've just encountered,
and each card I should say, so the tricky thing about this is not just a one deck that you're
drawing from. So each card has a certain type of card that you're allowed to draw after it.
So if you draw, well, death could not, for instance, draw or play two evil characters in a row,
because every, if an evil character card is drawn, or it is played, I should say,
then it only allows an end card. And an end card is either an escape card, where the protagonist
escapes, or death, where the death character dies. So similarly, a danger card demands either an
end or a save. So that means that the protagonist basically loses his nerve and just goes back home,
or it was all a dream, or however you want to spin it, really. So there's like this sort of
ebb and flow imposed on the story based on which kind of card is being played, and what is allowed
to then be played after it. So, you know, the typical cards that you're playing are like the location
and the atmosphere cards. Old crumbling cathedral, you know, so the protagonist goes,
is walking near the, an old crumbling cathedral and turns and notices a glimmer inside.
She's, for some reason, drawn to go inside. And then after that location card, you have to draw,
let's say, an atmosphere card. That could be, that could be, or it might be like an atmosphere
card and or a threat card. So, you know, you kind of have a choice. So if you're death and you can
play a threat card, maybe you want to go ahead and play that, because that could introduce a danger
coming up for the protagonist. So there are certain types of cards that you're allowed to play
at certain times, and that's all dictated by the cards themselves. What that means, I guess,
on a technical level is that there's a perfect story arc built into each round of the game.
Atmospheres created, paranoia is faced head on, everything's a potential threat, every action is
suspicious, possibly aggressive, every sound is a harbinger, and and every encounter is a brush
with death. It's basically any given episode of Twilight Zone or Night Gallery or Tales from
the Crypt. It's always going to go wrong. It's just a matter of when and how bad it will be.
As I've said, there are single-player and other mods. I've not played with any more than,
I've only played single-player. So in 1985, an expansion pack was added, and it brought a
couple of new cards, including a completely new card type, the object card. So it added some cards,
and it also came out with, and so object cards are played after location cards. So you're in a
location or your character goes to a location, and if you have an object card, then you can play
that so that they can find an object and start carrying that around with them. Then in addition to
that, it came out with a new, you know, a couple of mod rule mods that you can play if you want to.
So the single-player mode, death is basically relegated to luck of the draw, although there are
ways to mitigate that notably with a save card. So again, you can push your luck, but if you start
feeling too nervous and you feel like your character is going to get killed, you can chicken out
still. So the deck in a single-player mode gets split into different categories, and the gameplay
revolves around the main story deck, which sets up the atmosphere in the locations and objects,
and a couple, just a small percentage of possible threats. The cards themselves dictate which
deck to draw from next, because again, remember the cards each tell you what you're allowed to play
after that card has been played, which is why the main story deck has a few threat cards sprinkled
into it, because that way you never go through a whole game without anything threatening ever happening.
You know, it kind of forces that. The first time I played was with a short test printout that I'd
done for my own deck, and I was bored, and I was waiting for like a car repair to be done, so I was in
like the waiting lobby of a garage, and I happened to bring my little test deck along, and it was just,
I mean, it wasn't even a full deck, I'm talking about like this was the test print, so it was like
one A4 sheet of paper cut into I think nine cards. So I dealt them out one by one, just kind of as
story prompts pretty much, and I started narrating in my head as I went along, and I have to say I was
I surprised myself at how atmospheric the experience was, you know, like how emotionally sort of
caught up in the story I was getting, as I followed this little, you know, made up protagonist
along his night stroll. So to keep myself from reinventing the same character over and over,
I decided to give myself prompts for those as well, so I printed out some character build sheets
from OpenD6, which if you look online for OpenD6 system, you should be able to find the OpenD6
books, which are it's sort of this open game license RPG system based obviously around a
D6 meaning six-sided die, so a lot of RPG systems kind of expect you to have like 21-sided die
and stuff like that, so this is like very specific like oh you will you know this RPG system will work
with a D6, so look for that and it has really nothing to do with this except that in one of their
books they had some printouts or they had some character build starters, and so there are like
10 maybe 12 different characters, and so I just printed those sheets out kind of as prompts
and made myself some cards with those characters on them, and that kind of gives you an idea of
like oh here's some, here's a character that I'm going to play, and this is a bodyguard, so the
character is going to be pretty, pretty tough, you know, pretty, pretty capable, and in fact
that was the first time I tried this, you know, I shuffled the character deck, drew the bodyguard,
and he was a bodyguard for a nightclub owner, so I figured you know he was pretty tough, he'd be
able to defend himself pretty well, turns out the very first round I played, he went outside of his
apartment, there was I think some fog, and then there was like some ooze, some tar like ooze,
and then the next, and that was a threat card I think if I recall, and if I recall correctly,
and the next card was this group of people who I had raising out of the tar ooze and totally
killing him, because that's how the draw went, and I didn't have my character chicken out
soon enough, you know, I thought I'll be able to take threats, well not how this one played out.
Now my second time, the second protagonist I had, I drew, was a correspondent and a news
correspondent, and she had this pinchant for sort of pushing her luck, and so I had her
traveling around the city, and she ran into this forbidden tomb, this book, and she picked it up,
and then people were following her, and she thought they were following her because she had this
forbidden book, and at one point I mean these aren't, this isn't really a short game, like especially
if you, if you, if you're really enjoying it, like you draw the story out, you know, because
it's up to you, you're writing the story in your head as you play these cards, so with this,
the second character that I was playing, I had to play it across two evenings, because it just
went on too long, and I'm not exaggerating a bit when I say that I literally lost sleep that
night over the anticipation of what was going to happen to this protagonist, like it's that good,
it's that atmospheric if you, if you bet it'd be, and so to that end I want to give you a couple
of tips that I've kind of discovered for myself, so depending on who you're playing with,
it might help to impose a loosely judged minimum limit of sentences for each story card,
with myself, I was finding, before I figured out, you know, this trick, I was finding,
I would put the card down, and it would just be like, okay, broken down cathedral, or a crumbling
cathedral, okay, my character goes in and is walking and comes across a crumbling cathedral,
okay, next card, you know, and it just be, it's like, no, that's not going to build a story,
like if I just take whatever the card says and make it into a complete sentence, that's not,
a story that that does not make, so it's probably better to end on the card
instead of opening with the card, you know, so if you play a card and it's a log cabin,
then instead of saying the character approaches a log cabin, say the character goes, you know,
decides to walk through the woods along the side of the town, he turns and starts down the path,
some of the branches are knocking eerily above him in the wind, he continues through the moonlight
and sees off in the distance what he thinks are glowing lights and maybe some smoke,
a campfire, he continues through the path until he reaches a log cabin, it seems someone's inside,
he knocks, and that already took like, you know, three or four sentences instead of like one sentence,
so in other words make a card, make each card a punctuation mark rather than the opener,
force yourself to do that, and then secondly impose a limit, you know, like if you've said one
sentence, then you can't draw another turn yet, you have to, or you can't draw another card yet,
you have to do at least three or you know at least five sentences or whatever you want to make it,
and that kind of forces you to be a little bit more imaginative because on the surface,
like the story prompt is obvious, it's like log cabin, okay your character's going to be in a log
cabin, like that's it, well no, you have to get the character there first, so you know it forces
you to be a little bit more verbose, so do that, do those two things, impose a sentence minimum
on yourself, and I find it helpful to end on the card rather than open on the card,
and that also helps you actually in your, in your construction of the story because it is,
it's easier to lead up to something if you know where you're going rather than like if you just
open up, oh they get to a log cabin, well then what do you do from there, like what happens then,
like okay they're at a log cabin, then what, well you don't know, you have to, now you're panicking,
you're like oh my gosh, I have no clue, they, I don't know, is the cabin inhabited or is it empty,
I'm not sure, you know, well if you know where you're going, you know that the character's going
to a log cabin, now your brain has to think of all the details up to that log cabin, and you sort
of, you start inventing new stuff, so in conclusion, dark cults, it's a really fun game,
it has been re-implemented by yours truly, not class two, on getlab.com slash not
class two slash dark occult occult occult, dark occult, it is print and play, you can print these
things out, I just went to the local New Zealand version of staples, which is called the warehouse
stationery, got a big pack of cards stock, threw that in a printer, printed them out, cut the cards
out, I wasn't even too worried about being even in terms of the cut, you know, like they're more
or less the same size, but I didn't, I wasn't scientific about it, I printed a sort of a crosshatch
pattern on the back just so you couldn't see through the cards, but it's, you know, it doesn't have
to be complex, I just print them, cut them out, and then start playing, it's a lot of fun,
if you enjoy RPG, you want a little bit of a less structured outlet than a proper RPG,
because maybe you can't get an RPG group together, maybe, maybe you just want something light
and quick, although this doesn't really end up being quick, but you know, it's less to coordinate
than a proper RPG game, then this really might be ideal for you, it's a lot of fun,
darker cult, print it, play it, and have a good time, and in fact actually print and play it
at night, and play it by candlelight, that's really atmospheric, yeah, lots of fun, darker cult.
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