Liminal Roleplaying Game

Product Information

Ghost Realms only appear, or are only accessible, at certain times. Once inside, you can interact with ghosts as though they were physical. (And they can interact with you, so, be polite!) Edinburgh itself isn’t the Liminal’s Gazette of exciting locations, but plenty of other British and Irish places are. I don’t think you need anything beyond a TV understanding of the countries involved to enjoy Liminal, but it certainly feels helpful to have so many towns and cities detailed. The RPG has info on the Hidden World in Belfast, Caernarfon, Dartmoor, Durham, the Giant’s Causeway, Glasgow, Glastonbury, Glen Coe, Hadrian’s Wall, Highley, Liverpool, Loch Lomond, London, Manchester, Mussenden Temple, The New Forest, Oxford, Portmeirion, Saltaire, Stonehenge, Mount Snowdown, Winchester, York, Canewsdon, Hinton St. Mary, The Forest of Dean, Peebles and Tamworth. I’ve no idea what the criteria for making the cut was, some of these towns are an odd choice, but if we have got an RPG based off spooky places Paul Mitchener has been on holiday then so be it. The Sample Characters are a crew of four Liminals called The South Yorkshire Irregulars. A changeling, a werewolf, a former police detective, and a rogue magician. They all have relationships with supernatural beings or factions (mainly antagonistic ones), and a reason to get involved in the Hidden World. Linnamäki, Jori. 2020. “An Approach to Board Game Design that Centres Allyship and Empowers Trans People.” Paper presented at FROG: Future and Reality of Gaming 2020, Vienna, Austria.

What you seek must be known by more than 13 people. There is a reason secret cabals have a maximum size when it comes to their inner circles.” Tough characters get extra Endurance (Health Points), and access to handful of Tough Talents. Determined Characters get extra Will (mental endurance), and access to a handful of Determined Talents. Magicians get no immediate bonuses, but gain access to Traits relating to the various styles of magic. Then there’s Glastonbury—home of haunted ruins and the alleged final resting place of King Arthur. It is the entrance to Gwyn Ap Nudd’s realm of Summer. And invisible Fae and long dead musicians play there in the off season. Skills start at zero, one point increases them by one rank, up to a maximum of four. Two points in a Skill represents a professional level of competence. Three or more allows you to buy a Speciality in that Skill which grants a further bonus in specific circumstances. Baird, Josephine. 2021. “The Mislead of The Missing: A Queer Videogame Narrative through Misdirection of Gameplay, Player Presumption and Storytelling.” Paper presented at International Conference on Games and Narrative, University of Waterloo, U.K., June 11 - 16, 2021.Doubles matter; if the dice pops up something like 33, 55 or 77, then it could be a double success or a double failure. The advantage and disadvantage system lets you swap the dice around so that a 19 becomes a 91, but as you can see, a 99 is still a 99.

Fae courts are also locations which can be accessed through hidden paths, though only if one passes a challenge such as answering a riddle or defeating a monster. Includes the previously released Cases: Prodigal Son, The Haunting House, Ghosts of Glencoe, The Repairer of Reputations, Shadow to the Light, Beneath the Stones, The Oak and the Amulet, One Boggart’s Rubbish, and The Eyes Have It. Fae are divided into different courts. The ruler of a court is very powerful and has complete free will. Lesser Fae seem to have less free will and a limited sense of self and may simply be extensions of their ruler. Powerful ghosts can build themselves physical bodies out of dust. These bodies can be destroyed, although the ghost remains active, unless banished or otherwise dealt with. Very powerful ghosts can inhabit dead bodies and rise as revenants.

Games & Society Lab

I’ve got urban horror RPGs that take the anti-hero path (hello World of Darkness) and those that take the hero path (so many; Liminal, Beyond the Supernatural, even the recently released Flames of Freedom with its historic America setting). But both, by design and not a sourcebook, with a system designed with that in mind. That’s rarer than might opening assumptions give credit. It’s a very simple system, with very few numbers to crunch, but lots of flexibility. In fact, you could fit a Liminal character sheet onto a post card. Or perhaps half a side of A4 if you included descriptions of their Traits. And the flexibility offered by Traits and Limitations makes building supernatural characters rather more interesting. You can make your dhampir (part vampire) allergic to garlic or cause your werewolf to suffer from terrible rages, but you don’t have to.