In 2018 current licensor Helmgast released the fourth edition, Kult: Divinity Lost, created by Robin Liljenberg and Petter Nallo.
The fourth edition was well received by critics and fans and won two Ennies for Best Writing and Best Cover 2019,[2] and was also nominated for Best Interior Art.
Players take the roles of contemporary protagonists from across genres, such as private investigators, femmes fatales, vigilantes, drug dealers, artists, journalists, secret agents, and mad scientists.
The Mutant Chronicles universe (created by Nils Gulliksson and Michael Stenmark) and its spin-offs share creatures such as Nepharites and Razides which appear in Kult.
[6] Kult: Divinity Lost also has a system where the Gamemaster builds the campaign around the player characters and aims to evoke personal horror.
The magic rules in Kult are loosely inspired by real-world occult practices, such as Hermeticism, in order to heighten the setting's realism.
Characters with an extremely high or low Mental Balance can transcend the Illusion and regain their lost divine status through Awakening.
A character's mental balance can move in a positive or negative direction due to trauma, influence from creatures or places, or by advantages and disadvantages from talents or traits, such as (on the positive side) animal friendship, artistic talent, body awareness, a code of honor, or (on the negative side) social ineptitude, addiction, paranoia, or a mystic curse.
Kult was originally published in Swedish by Target Games in 1991, and was later translated into German, English, Italian, Spanish, Polish and French.
Terry K. Amthor left Iron Crown Enterprises in 1992 to co-found Metropolis Ltd., specifically to produce the English-language version of the game.
Even for those players who dislike being immersed in depressing, hopeless worlds, the background has enough tidbits of bleak imagery and morsels of horrific scenery that it's worth the cover price just to browse through the Metropolis.
"[13] Writing for Gizmodo, Ed Grabianowski described shopping for Kult as a teenager: " 'It's banned in Sweden,' is pretty much the best possible sales pitch you can make to a couple of 14-year-old boys.
Like me, you may not be interested in dealing with those kinds of issues during a gaming session, but to its credit, Kult made it clear that rape had serious and terrible consequences for both the victim and the perpetrator."
"[14] In his 2023 book Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground, RPG historian Stu Horvath said, "The characters all harbor sordid secrets that range from enduring supernatural curses to being the subject of medical experimentation to being possessed by a demon.
Writer Didi Örnstedt and painter Björn Sjöstedt wrote a book, De Övergivnas Armé (Army of the Abandoned), where they warn against the role-playing game hobby, with a particular focus on Kult.
They are both set in the Kult universe called Döden är bara början (Death Is Only the Beginning, 2018) and De levande döda (The Living Dead, 2020)[22]