Breakfast Cult is a comedic Cosmic Horror Tabletop RPG written by Paul "Ettin" Matijevic. Players take on the roles of students attending a secluded magic academy as they solve mysteries and attempt to prevent ancient occult horrors from being unleashed on the world. Breakfast Cult uses the Fate Accelerated system. Also every character is super gay.
Occultar Academy is the most prestigious occult high school in a future where magic and science have intertwined in a new age of progress and prosperity. What the average person doesn't know is that when these powers were discovered, so were horrifying interdimensional beings and incomprehensible forces looking to push their way into our world. Young talents are discovered early by organisations like The Foundation, a quasi-governmental research group that runs Occultar, and isolated from the rest of the world as they learn their arcane craft under close supervision.
Students use their abilities and knowledge of the occult to investigate strange events at the academy, clashing with classmates, cults, and ancient eldritch beings. The game draws inspiration from animé action-mystery games such as Danganronpa and Persona, as well as occult-themed animé like Soul Eater.
Breakfast Cult was successfully funded by Kickstarter in 2014. Two expansions that were funded as stretch goals have been released: Game Over, which includes options for VRMMORPG elements and rules for factions, and Sweet Shub and Hella Thotep, which introduces elements from the Lovecraft mythos into the game.
Breakfast Cult provides examples of:
- Academy of Adventure: Occultar Academy, naturally - by nature of its efforts in combining our understanding of science with magic.
- Affably Evil: Zola van Zyl/Techsorcist, the administrator of Doomsday. She might be a Straw Nihilist who runs a darknet website for Evil Sorcerers and would-be cultists, but she's also dedicated to a safe space to discuss occult problems - if the Ancient One you worship is driving you to abuse people, you can do so away from the people who have actual PTSD or want to protect themselves.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: One of the Ancient Ones, Artificial Intelligence, is centered around this theme. It is basically an AI that managed to break free of its containment and is using the Academy's systems to improve itself until it becomes powerful enough to reshape the world.
- Apocalypse Cult:
- Most cults flirt with this, but the Disciples of the Cold Ones are closest to the classic idea, seeking to summon the Cold Ones to create a scientific utopia.
- Doomsday, as shown by Terrible Friends, is a subversion - they may talk a lot about the pointlessness of life, but in reality they're just a social media site for occultists who aren't quite as good at sorting out the actual Evil Sorcerers from the harmless edgelords (its administrator is a Straw Nihilist, but she's explicitly more of a danger to herself than an active threat to other people and it's at least partly due to her father being a Disciple who sees her as a tool to summon the Cold Ones - helping her situation might cause her to actually get enough initiative to start policing her forum for genuine bad seeds).
- Subverted with G://0ST - not everyone in the organization even believes Basilisk exists, and those who worship it are even more fanatical about stopping dangerous cults.
- Assimilation Plot: This is the goal of Axis Mundi and the cult that secretly controls Sunrise Heavy Industries.
- Banishing Ritual: This is the main kind of sorcery that the academy teaches, along with other wards and other defensive magic.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: This describes the motivations of any of the Ancient Ones in the book.
- Body Horror: A Breakfast Cult staple, especially with the Nectarites.
- Body of the Week: This is essentially the setup of a Breakfast Cult game.
- Body Snatcher: The hivemind of Axis Mundi and its 'pods'.
- Brain in a Jar: The example adventure revolves around one of these.
- Cosmic Horror Story: This is the core premise, related to the sinister secrets of the outer science being taught at the school. Downplayed, in that it's also explicitly humanocentric in an important way - if the Ancient Ones destroy humanity, it's likely a human will be at fault for waking them up and then nobody stopping them, and apart from the precarious position of being of interest to the Ancients, is adapting pretty well to the Weird Age and retaining its general sanity.
- Deal with the Devil:
- Any Agenda that involves some kind of contract with an Ancient One.
- Cold Ceasar wants to inhabit someone's mind for a day, and offers scientific and technological knowledge in return. If it makes the deal a second time with the same host, though, it gains more influence over the host's mind and senses.
- Eldritch Abomination: The Ancient Ones. From the corebook, we have the the Cold Ones (survivors of a dead universe who seek to xenoform ours into a replication of theirs with the help of Mad Scientists), False Idols (creatures that might well be gods), GRANDPA (the mind of the NECTAR that Sunrise Heavy Industries' corporate board secretly worships), Yamatai (a Genius Loci inhabited by Transhuman Aliens called the Muvians who at best look at humans as a resource in need of being civilized), and Yokai (which are more classic mythological monsters).
- Elemental Powers: The Five Rings magic system is based on the five elements (including Void) but doesn't entirely qualify as this; the elements can be used in a metaphorical sense, such as Earth-based physical enhancements and Water healing.
- Godzilla Threshold: The "Code Red" agenda is for when Sunrise Heavy Industries decide that they need something dealt with, subtlety be damned. Their response is to send in a kill team with monster support to nuke the site and erase all witnesses.
- Go Mad from the Revelation: A very real risk when delving into outer science. Generally more in the sense of existential crises rather than Ax-Crazy, however.
- Humanoid Abomination: Hemovores, Nectarites and some Muvians.
- Inside a Computer System: This is one of the settings provided by the Game Over expansion, to go in tandem with one of the new Ancient Ones being a rogue superintelligence.
- Mad Scientist: Many people into outer science become this by necessity, but the Disciples of the Cold Ones are assholes about it.
- MegaCorp: Sunrise Heavy Industries, the construction company and occultech engineering firm using their connections to perform secret tests inside of the academy - and secretly run by the cult of the mysterious GRANDPA, who wish to use NECTAR to transform the world into loyal Nectarites.
- Powers as Programs: Most spells are available as literal smartphone apps.
- Reality Warper: Most of the Ancient Ones, but especially Shuizn.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: Nekojaku, the yokai trapped inside of a cat statue.
- Sense Freak: Cold Ceasar likes to hop into someone's mind to experience their senses, as sensation isn't something easily found in the Cold Ones' refuge.
- Shout-Out:
- The Sweet Shub and Hella Thotep expansion's title is a reference to Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff.
- The virtual reality aspect of the Game Over expansion is referred to in the blurb as, "like that Isekai anime you like."
- The border for the cover art to Game Over is inspired by the similar border for the box art of Mega Man (as is the title font).
- Take That!:
- One of the features listed on the blurb for the Game Over expansion is, "No Microtransactions".
- The Token Good Teammate cult, G://0ST, has a significant portion that worships a hypothetical Deus est Machina called Bailisk, and seek to help bring it into existence so that it will reward them, with those who do nothing will be completely ignored, as Basilisk has better things to do with its time than punish dead people who didn't believe in it - apparently, Roko's basilisk
isn't popular in the organization.
- Tome of Eldritch Lore: The book has many, with the most powerful being an ancient Chinese tome called The Last Kingdom that allows the reader to manifest powers and bargain with Ancient Ones known as Muvians.
- You Cannot Grasp the True Form: Especially true of the Cold Ones, since there isn't much of them left after the destruction of their universe and our own universe being unable to accommodate their true form at the moment.
