Good morning, brave Operatives!

Yesterday, we had a peek at some of the things possible with the Dark Minions your Operatives will encounter. However, they are far from the only threat.

Across the world, there are people who are slowly, dimly, beginning to figure out that there is something not quite right about the way things are going. A few of those are starting to work out that there are powers beyond this world and maybe - just maybe - those powers can be harnessed.

When they come together, these people form cults. Some are just a handful of people chanting harmless nonsense in a  basement. Some may have direct contact with a Dark Minion and either try to worship it or shackle it. There may be corporations or city councils, knowingly or otherwise, under the sway of the Dark. There are almost certainly cult leaders using social media to gather millions of clueless followers, channelling their emotions to fuel Dark rites. And what will the billionaire ruling class do with such power when they discover it?

However it happens, your Operatives will very likely run against the machinations of a cult at some point.

In the Dark Conspiracy Core Rulebook, we dive into what makes a cult, what their aims might be, and how they develop. We also 'quantify' them as a 'cult profile'. In fact, we have a full Cult Creation System!

If you are familiar with World Creation in Traveller, there will be much familiar here. Each cult can be boiled down to a 7-digit code that describes its capabilities.

Size: How many people are in the cult - from 0 (dead cult) to millions.
Resources: The material assets of the cult, from raw cash to wealth.
Influence: Soft power - how good the cult is at influencing local councils, companies and world governments.
Structure: How the cult is organised - does it have a single charismatic leader, is it answerable to an outside group... or perhaps it is even a democracy.
Suppression: How tight a grip a cult has on its sphere of influence - if your Operatives go poking around in its territory, you can use this to see if they get intercepted, and what the response might be...
Reputation: A double-edged sword. A small cult may prefer to work in the shadows. A large international one might be very, very well known... though not necessarily as a cult...
Dark Power: What the leadership of the cult actually knows about the Dark and how well they can use it. Dark Power 0 means they literally do not know what they are doing. Dark Power 10 ( or A, in the stat line) means they have attained mastery of the Dark and have actual Dark Minions bound to their will.

These numbers all build upon one another. So, for example, if you want a purely random cult, you start by rolling 2D-2 to determine its Size. Once you have that, 2D-7 + Size to determine its Resources. So, the larger the cult, the more resources it is likely to have, but there will be outliers on both sides - you can start to build the story of the cult from these figures. Just why has a cult with just 6 members have so many resources? Or why does a cult of millions have near to nothing?

Once you have a full cult profile line, you can start fleshing it out and begin doing funky things with it.

For example, Operatives can be corrupted by Dark Influence - well, so can cultists!

This is primarily based on the Dark Power score and Size of a cult, but we give the Referee a great deal of latitude, and split cults down into Casual Members (who may not even realise they are in a cult), Committed Members, the Inner Circle, and Cult Leaders - as you can imagine, Dark Influence tends to concentrate in the upper echelons, but you may find a Cult Leader with a deeply corrupted Inner Circle who has nonetheless managed to keep themselves relatively 'pure'.

We have also added Affiliate and Satellite Cults. Once a cult reaches a certain size or gains an opportunity in a long-running campaign, they may be able to expand their presence to another town, country or continent. Given time and a lack of opposition, maybe they can spread across the world with a central cult directing its satellites.

Do Dark Cults always get along? Certainly not, and we have implemented rules for Cult Wars. Using their profiles, they can actually engage in 'combat' with one another, be it through direct confrontation, political attacks, or rallying allies against them in a process that can take days, weeks, months... or years, depending on the Size of the cults involved (small cults can move quickly, big cults have the brute strength).

To round out this chapter, we have presented you with some 'sample' cults, including a few that you will be seeing as recurring foils for your Operatives in published missions (such as those in the Field Ops book).

These range from the large to the small, the playful to the macabre... and the just plain weird.

The Ambroisie based in France, for example, is a small cult that has nevertheless amassed great wealth. This might be connected to the Racleur that they have somehow managed to bind to their will, and the 'milking' they do to in in order to sell illicit substances.

At the other end of the scale is Narsil, a technology company that started small and quiet but moved into data analysis/acquisition and computer intelligence. The leader is reclusive but is known to have said that the purpose of his company is not commercial but the elevation of humanity. Stories of massive data farms being built in remote locations where crowds of people are herded into but never seen again are probably just rumours...

The system behind building a Cult Profile is designed to get a Referee's creative juices flowing and, by the end of the process, you will likely have a good idea of what your new cult looks like. However, it is always good to flesh things out on a narrative level and so in an appendix of the Dark Conspiracy Core Rulebook, we have included a D666 table of random cult beliefs. Simple one liners that describe what a cult is said to believe as its core tenets, the Referee is encouraged to roll a few times on this table to build the cult's direction - and if some of those beliefs seem to be contradictory, so much the better! Cult members are fully capable of believing in two opposing ideas at the same time.

As soon as we came up with the idea of cult wars, we knew there was a possibility of doing a supplement where players were actual cult members... but we quickly figured that would be a Bad Idea.

However, in playtests of Dark Conspiracy, we saw that Operatives almost always tried to infiltrate cults (by which I mean one or two of them was selected as expendable, and then were wired up to the eyeballs while the rest of the team monitored them outside the cult building, waiting for the 'go' order...). There is clearly a massive amount to explore in the formation and operation of cults, as well as going into a great deal of detail with some specific examples.

So, a Dark Cults book looks likely for the future of Dark Conspiracy, but we'll see how things go and how you all react to the game!


So, that is Cults as they are presented in the forthcoming Core Rulebook. We have oodles more to explore and showcase to you, and more glorious artwork is pouring in every day. Some of you have asked us to go through the 'origins' of this edition of Dark Conspiracy, and that seems like a fun idea - I'll see if we can pen something about that next week!