How I started a Tabletop RPG Cult 

Everyone else: "I'm going to start a new rpg game, where to begin..." Jeremy: "Get in loser we're starting a CULT"

Mel Brooks saw your video thumbnail, and he wants you back on set for Young Frankenstein.

This channel is slowly becoming an Indie Horror short-film channel with a bit of crafting on the side. I’m up for it.

That was arguably my favorite Squarespace ad I've ever seen, Fantastic work

Love the yellow robes. They look amazing.

Idea: Cult of the Amalgamed Guardian - The things within the void require a physical form to exist within Tenebris. Long ago they tried corpses, but those proved short lasting. The alters themselves, given enough sacrifices will become the body of part of their god. A twisted form of flesh, bone, stone (and anything else built to make the alter) fueled by the beating hearts of their victims. (could make for some cool kit bashing opportunity) These creatures guard the cultists and their villages from other dangers in Tenebris, as long as they are loyal and work towards creating more alters, more pieces of their god's body until finally all shards of its being are in Tenebris and the alters form together in the great unity to complete the body of the Amalgamed Guardian.

Your square space spots are wonderful

First and foremost I'd like to offer to send you some materials for Savage Worlds. I think you will find the system is a nice fit for grim dark fantasy without the theme being "baked in" giving you the ability to run anything with it if you enjoy it. With that said, I love the idea of cultists. In fact my primary "starter" adventure I've run for decades with new groups is actually one I ended up publishing that features a Kobold Cult worshiping a Juvenile dragon that lives beneath a ruined manor house. As for suggestions for a good cult, remembering that they aren't "evil incarnate" means they have to be seeing some "positive" effect. The best villian I can think of is Dr. Doom. The people of his nation adore him, not because they are mind controlled or forced but because he legitimately is improving their lives. So perhaps the cult is in a neighboring town, that protects them but is also unaware of the human sacrifice element of the cult's activities. This gives the players a ton of roleplay challenges to try to convince the town to turn against the cult or even just trying to avoid the town acting as "unofficial guards".

Definitely Shadowdark, the foundation is solid and you can easily modify as needed. Cult idea: Time, what evil being can warp time? They want to go back to when their lives meant something, when the world was simpler. They want to go back to when they had families, loved ones, community - but something took that from them and now they seek to reverse time itself. It's a great setup for Yog-Sothoth, but any entity that controls Time.. or says they can.. would work.

Great stuff as always Jeremy! Glad to see our Cultist Miniatures make an appearance - Hope they bring some ample terror to the campaign!

Awesome paint scheme! Excited to see how the world shapes up, things can evolve and change so quickly!

3:17 Couldn't help but notice a creepy evil giant AF cultist tower in the back left of this shot..... Good shit guy. P.S. I have FINALLY started crafting ruins, first project ever, inspired mostly by you. So thanks for that, it's a ton of fun and very satisfying seeing my 1" thick construction foam turn into abandoned giant stonework ruins. It's even got an arch with a key stone!

I offer myself to the BMC eldritch cult. I shall follow thee throughout each episode as we descend into the dark arts. Behold the thumbnail as our leader gazes into the depths of our souls. May your whispers and videos guide us into the abyss. 🖤

great stuff, jeremy - cant wait to see what you turn out as you fall (further) down the grimdark rabbithole!

Your Squarespace ads are hilarious! Honestly, they're the only ads on RU-vid that I'm not tempted to skip through - and I tend to hate ads with the burning passion of a thousand suns.

This is by and far the best thumbnail that has graced youtube since it's inception

Abbi something. Abbi Normal. You gave me an abnormal brain?!

I LOVE IT!!!!!! A few years ago I did a 100+ blob of cultists!!!! I'm a batch painter to! I did them all in black robes to keep them generic. But the skin tone is a little yellowish because I want them to be (possibly) considered leapers. I'm planing on adding cavalry and some other aspects. Love where this is going Buddy!!!

I only run Shadowdark and I love it. When I first started being a DM I used 5E but all my players were new as well and I’m a bit more of a simplistic person so I ended up trimming a lot of fat off of the 5E rules and cutting corners anyway, and then shadow dark came out and it was so similar to what I was already doing that I adopted it and it made my games way better.

Hey Jeremy! Glad to hear you're leaning towards Shadowdark! Hell yea. Also those cultists look great with such a simple paint scheme. Cheers!

Random Idea, the higher up you get in the cult the more of yourself you must sacrifice. Leader of some rabble? Offer a finger to the void. The Hidden Master? Just a withered head and spinal column that hovers ominously in the air, animated by the raw power of the void.

One of the reasons why I love this channel is I feel like our aesthetic tastes and game style preferences are almost totally in sync. Cults are usually my go-to for low level baddies. Also looking to start Shadowdark soon. "Great minds" and all that!

My god I love your painting style. Yours, John Blanche, a creator who now goes by Sian, (that's vague but trust, her grim dark is just... *chefs kiss*). Thing is I think yours out performs those others as they stay loose and painterly, wherad you pull cosmos from chaos. It's like an organic growth that you tease into unholy antilife

please continue this "series" very excited for this !

Your sponsor "read" once again crushes it!

Thanks for having my dice box in your shelf.

So as others have said. The ad was awesome. Also love seeing the tower in the background. As for the cult idea. Depending on what you want to do. They can be a cult for money. So they steal organs. But they don’t actively sacrifice them. They do a ritual that they believe destroys the part and the sacrifice makes the cult stronger. But in actuality the organs are teleported to a holding jar that keeps them in stasis and then they are sold in the black market for either spell components or other things. In the end the whole thing becomes a money making scheme. Anyway. Love the vids.

I remember starting a cult in a 3.5 dnd game many years ago. I was a librarian with minor magical powers, eventually growing into an adventuring wizard and later finding a religion that favoured undeath. I fled the empire and eventually knew I wanted a cult and decided on starting an academy in the swampy wastelands of the southern area of the continent. I found a good location and used undead and living slaves to build my school and underground library, taking the leadership feat to gain a following, and my cult grew. Unrestricted* access to all magic was the focus, and the empire didn’t have a school of necromancy for obvious reasons, so I became the headmaster of the continent’s infamous academy of death. Through the course of the campaign I became a demilich with a modified telekinesis spell to control my old body as if it had never detached, but I can do so at will which allows me to physically use some of my weapons and armour on my torso while my head flies around. The end of the campaign lead to my evil companions and some actually good heroes we didn’t like to slay The weaver of fate and ecome minor deities ourselves, so my necromancer became a minor god in service to a major god.

I LOVE the simple color scheme for the minis! I wish there were more videos on this and how to do variations of 2 color schemes.

a monster of all the body parts they have collected. fun thing to kitbash and paint

Speaking of cults,.. welcome to the cult of Shadowdark, brother. ..and even if only darkling curious, its gratifying to see more and more respected creators giving a signal boost to any and all of the Indi RPGS you have mentioned in your recent videos. Much love^^

That creepy, limited palette on the cultists is very effective. Is the footage of cultists in the Square Space Ad stock-footage or shot for this video?

That intro was epic!

love the new direction!

I'm creating my own setting and am also working on a cult! This was serendipitous!

The cult has to harvest so many of the townsfolk to “unlock” a god or creature back into their world. The more they unlock, the harder the levels as both the cultists and the creature increase in power. The end game comes when a huge deity is unlocked and the adventurers have to fight it in an arena. Or similar :)

best Squarespace ad, ever.

Dude, Jeremy, your command of color in this video is on point! Very cool.

Two classic adventures spring to mind: The Village of Hommlet and Against the Cult of the Reptile God. Both modules could be mined for your campaign.

perfect video. love the theme, nicely build-in add, lovely pained mini :*****

Excited to see what you come up with! I've been running games for my friends for 6 years now and planning our third campaign together. Mine is a more a Victorian/Industrial era using the books Bloodpunk and Steinhardt's Guide to the Eldritch Hunt for some horror goodness. It's a low magic setting so I know my cults would probably be unhappy with the lack of magic in the world and probably believe things are worse off for it. It's time to summon some outer gods bring back that sweet sweet magic even if it may cost your sanity.

Deserves a like for the thumbnail alone!

I like dark creepy cult with benign names, like 'Disciples of Bobby', or 'Friends with Benedict'. Also, that's a great ad, 'if you have not extorted enough funds from your cult members yet, that's ok, you can sign up for squarespace for free'.

Film that campaign!

Great setting, inspiring for terrain making. Might be my next project after my Mordheim inspired terrain.

Greatest ad placement ever. I watched the whole thing.

This ad is one of the best you did ahah ! Maybe find some lore in ICO and Shadow of the colossus, hyper light drifter too. It also speaks about forgotten lands, ancient magic, cults and evil gods that wanna rise again !

Love it! Great minis too!

Best video you've made all year!

man that's quite the Marty Feldman Igor (Eyegore) impression in your thumbnail!

Great concept... Scratches that Mordheim Itch.

Nice minis.

Create a mechanic that works sort of like the phenomenon known as "Call of the Void". When the players are around a major cult artifact they must make some sort of save or be forced into some sort of penalty while their mind grapples with the horrors of the void that the cult are trying to return to the world. If I were doing it in D&D I might make them stunned or make them lose their primary action for a turn, something like that. Your thumbnail, I love it. lol

Minis are looking great! It’s hard to beat a good cult, both for worldbuilding and setting up fun challenges. Sometimes it’s fun to also think up an anti-cult at the same time, like another group that is opposed to the cult but maybe has an equally bad method of their own. See if the players will choose the lesser of evils or go to war with both.

For lowbies I use cultists, bandits, Goblins, Skeletons, Zombies. And for one homebrew module I made weak ghost-like undead called Drowned Spirits and other ones called Grasping Shadows. :)

The original AD&D Dungeon Master Guide literally said in it's preface that "this is a religion, go out and spread the gospel." (My 1983 Copy) I looked for it again years later and it was removed from later copies. Could be a joke someone added, but others said the content fits the dark joke. Either way, I remember that.

For your cult, I might play into the dismemberment theme, and have them repurpose such severed body parts using magic. Eyes plucked out can can set in tree hollows, stone cracks, bird nests, or the eye sockets of statues, allowing the cult's sorcerers to spy on those locations. Severed hands can be reanimated into scuttling servants. Perhaps you can take inspiration from Elden Ring, and have the cult graft large quantities of limbs together into shambling horrors, as guard beasts or as potential vessels for their god. Even a heart could be planted in the home or keep of an enemy, under floorboards or in the walls, driving the cult's enemies mad with the beating whose source cannot be found.

How about, in later advatures, a cult group manages to creat some sort of flesh golem (made out of sacrefied blood and bodyparts), right out of luck or with the favor of the void/ancient evil? And also make in an unterspicies cult where also goblins and other creepy things are part on, just to make the party get them fall back on their feet, when they think it is just a human thing.

I would definitely recommend looking at Shadowdark's Curse Scroll 1: Diablerie. It outlines a small campaign setting called The Gloaming, an ancient and cursed forest, it sounds pretty spot on for the kind of setting you're looking to play in.

I hope you're going to make a video series with this new RPG? Oh I really hope you do make a few episodes from the game!

Cool video, love the thumbnail. Those minis remind me of Bloodborne... excellent!

Funny kobold story. I was exhausted (honestly, unsafe to be driving at all) and driving home from a LARP. I was coming to a light-controlled intersection and had to shout, "Kobold means stop!" as I slammed on the brakes in time to avoid a gnarly accident.

So much fun!

Since they worship the void and use body sacrifices, perhaps the higher tier members of The cult could have sacrificed one or more of their limbs and replaced them with a shadowy void version that does weird stuff. Another thought could be that maybe the high-tier members of The cult due to their devotion have been blessed with animated shadows that they can use as weapons or assistance in their endeavors.

Ok, this was unexpected... My coffee came through my nose when I saw the thumbnail 🤣

Evil cultists is the trope that is quickly becoming my favorite "bad guy" over orcs and goblins.

😂 I'm loving your ads, lately.

Cults are among my favorite RPG antagonists. They're both well suited to various levels of play (depending on how far they've gotten in accumulating power), but also highly versatile. You could drop a random cult inside most dungeons (sometimes just worshiping a random monster inhabiting it). Or make them a militant sect that's marauding across the land, with armies of crazed followers, mercenaries, evil humanoid tribes, or otherworldly minions. Or they could be deeply entrenched in local society, turning the game into one of paranoia and intrigue. Moreover, because the only uniting theme for cultists is fanatical loyalty to their cause (itself a useful tool for antagonists in an RPG campaign), the particular beliefs and methods and aesthetics of a cult can be varied and idiosyncratic. No two cults look quite alike. And because they're already willing to accept extreme, possibly wrong beliefs in complete contravention to Reality or Good Sense, they can be REALLY weird. Examples: -Wicker Man style agricultural cult that wreathe themselves in flowers, dance and sing around a maypole, and sacrifice victims to ensure good harvests. Their members run around covered in flowers and straw dollies, and their elite warriors wear big collars styled as flower petals, wielding weapons grown whole from secret gardens. -A Gnoll cult of Frost & Fire, who venerate Grandfather Winter and wield a mix of ice and flame. Wanting to burn the world, in hopes it will convince their god that ending the last Ice Age (when it was said Gnolls were more successful) was a mistake that needs to be corrected. -A cult of Trypophiliacs, who secretly dig great holes, where earth's pores ought to suffice. Wear head wrappings that leave a single large hole to see through, or else masks/helmets with many small holes. Cast sacrifices down pits, to appease not merely the _things_ they believe/know to be down in the earth, but the spirit of the void itself.

that thumbnail made me laugh like a kid, now let me watch the video :D

Love the Marty Feldman look

The best villains are the ones who think they're 'saving everyone'. But yeah, I think this cults pretty good as is right down to the whole 'it's a sacrifice but one I'm willing to have you make.' mentality. Maybe they make flesh golems out of the unused bits and use them as sentries. Or maybe the victims come back as some kind of ghoul that roams the area removing the parts of it's victims to replace what the cult took from it? This could be a great omen/sign post of the cult's presence in the area.

If Shadowdark becomes your system of choice, sign me up - I’m all in!

I only came here for the Squarespace ad.

These guys look like an updated version of the Frostgrave cultists from a few years back, though the design is more ambiguous, so these cultists look like they could be from an even more varied setting, including modern-ish times. The robes make me think that they worship something equivalent to the King in Yellow.

Iconic thumbnail

Love the paint job! As far as game system goes - they are guidelines, so it doesn't matter that much what system you use as you can sort of "bend" it to your will. Shadowdrak is a bit more deadly for players than Dungeons & Dragons. In my experience, most players really get to like their specific characters, I prefer D&D, because that system have more mechanics for survivability for the players. Then again, as a DM I can shape the game to whatever I like. My campaigns are low on magic and high on fear ,of death.

The cultists aren’t just taking the party’s friends. A few of them ARE their friends. The friends disappeared because people were catching onto them meeting with other cultists and had to leave

Leaving this before I finish watching, I had to do a double take on the thumbnail, thought I'd seen a word of power

I painted the same minis all as cultists to my worlds "King in Yellow"

I always found cult based horror more horrifying when the cultists seem innocuous enough that they can recruit the main character. It’s only from within that the MC can finally see that they are in over their head as they withdraw the cult knife from the body of the detective best friend in self defense that they see the chain of decisions leading to this first unholy sacrifice. Then they must decide, do they rebuke the cult having to fight their way out? Or do they grip the knife tighter accepting the revelation the fell gods have shown them, and knowing which non-believers (party members) to visit next. So maybe some of the lower level cultists aren’t the serial killer zealots in appearance, but very appealing, highly charismatic, “average”, people. Attractive to the PCs and furthering the PCs goals.

OOOOOO.....I just recently picked up Shadowdark RPG, its like 1e and 5e D&D had a hybrid child.

Im exactly at the point you are on starting a new campaign

I love that thumbnail

I really thought the title was referring to the army of tabletop crafters inspired by this channel

I’m ready to join a cult

Your cultists are giving off “king in yellow” vibes sandy petersen’s cthulhu mythos book has stat blocks for the king in yellow and good adventure building bits in it too. Hope that helps.

On Kobolds: Those little buggers are actually particularly tricky to explain because they WEREN'T originally little dumb cowardly mini-dragons... they were originally possibly diminutive dog-people with maybe some reptilian features. If you've ever watched Lodis Wars - that's where THAT came from (& for that matter, the dog-people conception of kobolds is still the one that gets used in Japanese fantasy). But even that isn't the original conception of kobolds... which was actually pretty much just German goblins who like to hang out in mines. So if you're having a 1st game with anime otakus... they are gonna be potentially confused by the dragon-midgets. If you're having a 1st game with folklore geeks... they're gonna be confused by the dragon-midgets. Heck, if you're playing a 1st game with fans of Neil Gaiman... they're gonna be confused by the dragon-midgets (American Gods featured a particularly prominent kobold in the vein of 'old dark Pagan Germanic deity appeased by human sacrifice'). And possibly - they will all be disappointed LOL.

Nice to see a photo of you without the filters on.😜😜😜😲😃

The mini with the cage around his chest, or book cage..? He's VERY interesting and should definitely have a little story dump on him. Taking folks body parts to create maybe... a golem of human meat... that is a representation of one of the Void gods? Or a vessel of? Also, if you haven't seen it The Void is an excellent indie horror film.

Would it be too much to ask for "battle reports" if and when you start this adventure? No need film anything, just tell the story whenever a new session is finished and add some footage of miniatures arranged in the setting to add flourish to the story. I understand that you may not have the time for this, but I absolutely love the direction you're going and would enjoy hearing about how it plays out.

Shadow dark... I love arcane library

Your GMing style is very much my own - have an idea of the different factions and influences involved and what they want, then have them react to what the PCs do - or act as their desires and power permits if not interfered with by the PCs. Why would cultists bring back the old gods? -They beleive that the death or departure of the old gods is what has led this world into its dark present, and only the light of the old gods can lift up the peoples again -They're performing rituals to draw magical power (perhaps to improve their lives or the lives of others, probably out of greed and desire for power) and don't neccessarily know this is bringing the old gods closer -Revenge on a hateful world. All deserve to suffer as the Cultist has. -A final peace for all. Suffering ends in Annihilation. Oblivion is a gift they will grant to the dying world. Global euthenasia. -The Old Gods will return. Helping them means the cult may be their favoured pets instead of chattel. -Tradition, a return to old ways, they have always kept the faith and will continue to. -Defiance. to spit in the eye of the reigning god(s) or religion, for slights and abuses real or imagined. Different cult members or factions can have different reasons for their worship. There may be their doctrine told to followers, while the leaders think they know a deeper truth, but are probably still wrong.

Personally I think you should take a page from your own book and craft a small sacrificing area that’s common enough you could use multiple times for them? And instead of just cultists maybe they have lesser creatures that assist them, like dog/birds/monkeys cause those are often used in war times?

Whatever Squarespace pays you, it should be double! Also, nice grimdark batch job! Any chance we can get a recipe?

I’m already subbed to the channel but as soon as I saw the beastarium mini silhouettes in the thumbnail I had to click

Cork Borg should be the system you use. (yes, it is 100% made up) I saw that when you were putting the minis onto the corks, your board was aptly named 'cork board' only in a split second all the camera showed us was 'cord bo' so my mind automatically went to 'borg' to fill in the last few letters. So.. there you go.. cork borg.

King in yellow cult 🤘🏻

The servants of The King In Yellow, the Sworn of Carcosa.

Cult of the Millipede, many hands make light work...

Huh... I seem to have found the setting for a character that I wasn't planning on doing with anytime soon