Kuf: Negadungeons, the Maelstrom and Regret

I have decided to put Arcadian Sunset on a bit of a back burner, since I discovered the game Kuf. The reason being that Kuf is to a large part what I set out to create (It is basically a mashup of Kult and Knave) and
1) even if it isn't 100% what I wanted, it is here now and it is tested (to some degree).
2) Honestly I probably should have a bit more experience with playing OSR games before creating one of my own.

Kuf describes itself as an Old School style game of Contemporary Gnostic Horror. This genre is perhaps the most Swedish of all roleplaying genres. Pioneered by Kult, it has as its basic premise that the world we see is an illusion meant to keep humans from reaching their true potential. Behind the illusion is the real world, that undoubtedly is much more horrifying than the illusion. In some sense it is similar to Lovecraftian horror but with the big difference that instead of humans being insignificant, we are in fact the most significant beings of all. I would argue that this makes Kult and its descendant's more fitting for roleplaying. The gnostic horror have a built in process for characters growing in power and breaking free from their chains. But there is one aspect of Kuf that I find bothersome, and that is what I want to write about today.

Regret

There is much talk in the OSR world about player agency, but it seems mostly focus on making the pc's victory feel real. I believe making the failures feel real is just as important.

I think a large aspect of horror is regret. To make a choice, realize that it was the wrong choice, but not being able to take it back, is much more horrific than to have bad stuff forced upon you. To be able to feel regret you have to be able to make a meaningful and unforced choice. To make the choice meaningful you have to give the players some information to go on when making their decisions. For the choice to be unforced, we must make the alternatives socially acceptable.

Also for maximum angst, the regret should come on gradually. It should be a dawning realization that you have done wrong. That you should have known better. That there was a time where you could have fixed your mistake, but that is now long gone. Muhahahah!!

Negadungeons

If you aren't aware, a negadungeon is a dungeon filled bad stuff, but no or very little treasure. In some sense it is just a long extended trap. The primary player skill involved in a negadungeon is to realize that you are in a negadungeon and get out of their. You will realize that it was a mistake to go there. It was another mistake to press on and go further inside. You will regret these decisions and feel horror over what you have done.

But that only works if it was your choice to go to the negadungeon in the first place. If the GM announces one day, that this session we are going to play Negadungueon X, the social contract won't allow the players to have their characters to look at the entrance and say "nah, lets sit this one out". They are going to go inside the negadungeon and suffer horribly. They will press on fully knowing that it is a bad idea, and in the end they will not feel regret over having their character enter into the negadungeon. They will only feel betrayed by the GM.

The Maelstrom

The premises of Kuf is that the player characters have been drawn into a maelstrom of supernatural incidents. They have somehow got some hint about the truth beyond the illusion, and now they can't let it go, or rather the universe won't let them. It drags them into deeper mysteries with even mightier and more dangerous beings.

The game is supposed to be played in a cycle of three steps. Investigation, confrontation and recovery. These in my reading basically correspond to solving investigative horror mysteries, dungeon crawls, and downtime book keeping respectively. In the recovery phase you roll to see how long time you get to recover before you are dragged into the maelstrom again.

This is the part I have a bit of a problem with. On the one hand, it is very fitting for the setting, that you can't resist the maelstrom. You can't just sit and take an infinite number of downtime actions, avoiding all risks. You will be dragged into action.

But on the other hand, if you are dragged into action, if it isn't the players and their characters choice to enter the danger, what is there to regret? And if the pc's can decline the call of the maelstrom, how is it supposed to be threatening.

The example of play included in the book have the pc's find a group conducting a dark ritual, but there isn't really anything other than extradiegetic social pressure, that presses them to intervene in it.

The Fix?

I'm thinking that instead of rolling for the maelstrom during each recovery phase, to just have some kind of long term doom clock that keeps ticking down, and causes problems for the players if they haven't already dealt with them, but I haven't really thought out how that would work.