Liminal Hacking 01: Surviving horrors
There is going to be a lot of loud thinking about Cairn and Liminal Horror on this blog. These systems haunt me, and I’m going to either exorcise this spectre or catch it in one of those silly Ghostbusters traps, so I can analyse it´s ectoplasm. But first...the proton beam!
After I came into contact with Liminal Horror, I ran a couple of sessions that felt very inspiring and got great feedback. Being a huge horror nerd, I connected immediately with the core ethos of the system and had no problem evoking the highly specific (sub) genre tropes that fuel it´s setting and adversaries. So no issues there.
My concerns were more with the “missing” elements of the thin rule system. It is presented as a very light OSR (or -adjacent) set, but it definitely has some story game DNA in there as well. So compared directly to a classic old-school system, the creators made some strong choices that look like a decisive departure away from old school adventuring into modern world settings, while keeping things fast and streamlined on the procedural side of things.
Much to my surprise, Liminal Horror ran very close to a classic dungeon crawl. This, of course, is due to the fact that early iterations of D&D can feel a lot like survival horror themselves. There are truly horrific monsters lurking in the dark, resources are scarce, and on lower levels players feel vulnerable and weak. Exploration is thrilling and dangerous, and inventory management is key. So losing the statistical safety of roll-to-hit mechanics and adding stress and fallout to Liminal Horror’s investigators - who, by the way, are just regular Janes - really pushed the crawl into a very exciting experience full of high stakes and permanent consequences.
This got me thinking. A lot!
About the things that I felt were missing or lacking in Liminal Horror. Or, to be more precise, about whether I could enjoy this ruleset without them - and if not, how one would go about hacking them into the system without breaking it. These things are...
- Level progression
- Tactical combat
- Overland travel procedures for a modern setting
- Some issues I have with doomclocks in LH adventures
- Exploration and space in LH adventure design
I will write about the ideas for overland travel procedures in a modern world setting first, as this seems to be the easier part due to the modular, complementary character of travel stuff.
Thinking about Liminal Horror and hex crawls had the creative side effect of a little setting called “The Signals” that - except for some basic notes - only exists in my head at this point. It involves concepts of dimensional invasion, VHS, cosmic and possession horror, and some changing time period shenanigans.
Here’s the cover, which, oddly enough, was the first thing that came into existence.
Tobias Heidemann