Loose ends: a Liminal mini-campaign (and some thoughts on Liminal)

I didn’t mean to run a Liminal mini-campaign. My original plan was to run Prodigal Son and The Haunting, to a) try running someone else’s adventure, and b) to try my hand at Liminal.

But the players were enjoying their characters and had questions about their backstories and I didn’t want to run more one-shots without exploring that. I also wanted to draw it all to a close (because I don’t like extended campaigns).

So this is what I did. (Click here if you’d like to see the Trello board we used. I’ve moved some of the GM-facing bits over that the players didn’t see—I originally had them on a separate board and only copied them over when I needed to.)

Loose ends

We had a fair number of loose ends after Prodigal Son and The Haunting. These included:

• What was Charles Gardner up to?
• What was Ariadne doing with the knife?
• Where was Mark Northcott?
• What was going to happen with Sir Tatton Northcott’s library?

And that’s not including the questions in the character backstories:

• Who were Ygraine’s parents?
• What had Naomi’s mentor done? And where was he?
• Who had destroyed Stephen’s pack in the Lake District?

Focussing on the characters

So rather than give the characters cases to solve, I created problems for the characters to deal with while I worked out a narrative that linked their backgrounds together. Here’s what I decided:

• Naomi: Naomi’s mentor (Dr Belnap) was secretly a member of the Shrivelled Rose (mentioned in passing on Liminal p.210), seeking their own twisted vision of human perfection.
• Ygraine: Ygraine’s parents were a high-ranking politician’s wife and a Fae of Queen of Hyde Park’s Court. However, her mother had actually been taken by the Winter King and was trapped in his realm.
• Stephen: Stephen’s pack had been killed by Dr Belnap (assisted by Charles Gardner and a crazy vampire called Suzy Shrike) and then experimented on as part of the Shrivelled Rose’s plans.
• Aaron: The vampire that set Aaron on his dark journey and into the Liminal world was Suzy Shrike (Charles Gardner’s associate).

Problems problems

Some of the problems the players faced:

• The ambitious vampire Ariadne (from Prodigal Son) approached Stephen with information about the murder of his pack. In exchange, Ariadne wanted Stephen to show her how the knife of Lethe works…
• Sir Tatton Northcott left his library (and a peculiar cabinet) to Naomi in his will. However, the Council of Merlin approached Naomi and suggested that it would be good for her if she gave them the library instead. But the players don’t trust the council…
• Having experienced two ghost realms (in Prodigal Son and The Haunting), the Crew decide to hide the library in another ghost realm in Leeds. They find a potential realm near the City Varieties music hall, but how to get into it?
•  Becoming trapped in a ghost realm at Hardknott Fort and rescuing innocent bystanders from the winged horrors hidden within. (I wrote this up as an encounter here.)

My preparation for each session was to create a list of events and moments that I thought might happen, or that I might introduce to complicate things. I tracked these using a checklist in Trello (on my GM board), which I found worked really well. (At the end of each session I asked the players what they might want to follow up on, which gave me something to plan.)

At the end of one session the players asked if I knew what they would do. I told them I had no idea—but that I had created a situation (populated with people, things and events), and then I simply reacted to their actions. While I had an overall direction in mind for the things I knew they were interested in, I had no sense what they would do from scene to scene.

Colourful characters and unpleasant artefacts

I created numerous NPCs for the PCs to interact with. These included:

• Holly Greenwood—Fae owner of a crystal shop opposite City Varieties in the centre of Leeds.
• Tiberius—an immortal Roman legionary (“I don’t know why I’m so old; I just haven’t died yet.”) and living in the Lake District.
• Karen White—fearless reporter on the trail of our heroes.
• Jurgen Heim—dark wizard, er I mean evil wizard of the Shrivelled Rose.
• Ethel Beardsley—the nun with a gun.
• Hannah Smith—PhD student who took a shine to one of our heroes.
• Suzy Shrike—the crazy vampire who sleeps in a coffin of dirt.
• Dr Cartilage—Edinburgh’s ineffectual Council of Merlin representative.
• Creepy kids—in the fae world (these had no stats or anything—just a photo of the Midwich Cuckoos and the description “creepy kids” on their Trello card).
• A lazy, video-game-playing and junk-food eating (and ensorcelled) fae lord.

Not all of my NPCs entered play, but that’s okay as I’m sure they will appear in another game one day.

I’ve been creating weird and unpleasant artefacts for Tales of Terror for years, so it was inevitable that some would find their way into Liminal.

• 

  The card for the creepy tooth egg

  Gideon Stem’s cabinet of homunculi
• A ghost bottle (created just for the game)
• Dr John Dee’s skull signet ring
• An egg made of human teeth, with a heartbeat. (This was a fae court, magically imprisoned by the Shrivelled Rose. Maybe I should write a Tale of Terror about that.)

I did these with cards on the Trello board, with a description and a photo. The players had access to the Trello, and they also added details or photos, which was great.

The players seemed to enjoy running around the “real” world. We used Google Maps when scouting locations, including City Varieties in Leeds, Hardknott Roman Fort, Holyrood Park in Edinburgh. That’s one of the things I like about a modern-day game—the detail is limitless.

Wrapping it up

The mini-campaign ended up in a fae domain that the Shrivelled Rose had corrupted. The main access was in the garage of an industrial unit, which the Crew sneaked into (excellent usage of the False Face glamour trait—Liminal’s version of Polyjuice potion).

The domain itself I modelled on Cragside, the National Trust property in Rothwell. The house was occupied by the fae lord of the realm (a lazy chap corrupted by the dark wizards from the Shrivelled Rose), while the stable block contained the laboratories—and a nursery away in the woods.

Final encounters

With their base in the fae realm exposed by the Crew, the Shrivelled Rose decided to make a hasty retreat. The Crew released the fae lord from his ensorcellment, freed his court from their tooth-egg prison, and stopped the Shrivelled Rose from escaping.

We satisfyingly conclude most of the character arcs:

• Stephen avenged the death of his pack by killing both Dr Belnap and Charles Gardner.
• Naomi cleared her name with the Council of Merlin by exposing her mentor’s crimes.
• Aaron faced Suzy Shrike and is accepted into P Division.

And Ygraine? Ygraine learned that her mother was one of the Winter King’s brides, and set off in search of answers…

About Liminal

As for Liminal itself, I never found myself completely comfortable with the rules and too often I wished that I was using Fate Accelerated instead. Often I made something up whenever we hit a grey area, and we seemed to hit those regularly. It’s not that Liminal is complicated, but it is just complex enough that we spent more time consulting the rules than I prefer.

I still prefer a looser ruleset that I can handwave, and when it came to creating winged horrors that attacked the PCs in a ghost realm at Hardknott Fort, I ignored traits and abilities and simply decided on the effects I wanted.

Liminal’s core concept

There’s something that bugs me about Liminal’s core concept though. In Liminal the PCs investigate mysteries. The difference between Liminal and other investigative roleplaying games is that the player characters are “liminals”, someone between both the Hidden World and the real world. (Liminal’s core concept is not explained until page 63 which describes what the PCs do in the game.)

Liminal comes with a good selection of character concepts (gutter mage, eldritch scholar, changeling, and so on) and the four pregenerated characters described above.

However.

All the pregens are misfits, fitting neither in the ordinary nor the Hidden World. They all have different reasons for that and they encapsulate the concept of being “liminal”. But many of the character concepts feel like they’re all firmly part of the Hidden World: Warden, Dhampir, Face, and Man in Black.

So what are the differences between those in the Hidden World, those in the modern world and the liminals in between? And should there be consequences for going too far one way or the other?

Suggestions for Liminal’s second edition

I know it’s early to be thinking about a second edition, but these are the things I would like to see in Liminal 2.0.

Core concept: Put the core concept at the front of the book! Liminal is a British urban fantasy rpg in which the players solve mysteries—this needs to be one of the first things you read (and not on page 63). I would also like to understand what the differences are between the modern world, the Hidden World, and those in between.

Character generation: Currently, Liminal character generation is mostly mechanical: focus, skills, traits. I would like to see links and bonds between the characters. Even the bare minimum of how did you learn about the Hidden World? and how did you join the Crew? would be a start. But I’d go further and include questions that bond the Crew together.

Crews: Crews are important in Liminal, and although we followed the process, we struggled with our Crew’s goal and purpose. The process system should spit out well-designed crews with compelling goals and purpose, so I think it needs looking at. And maybe a section on downtime would be worth including.

Factions: I would like to see each faction having goals and objectives (or maybe just rumours of these) to give them direction and bring them into conflict with each other. At the moment, they’re fairly static. How do they feel about the other factions?

Layout: While Liminal’s art is stupendous, the other elements of graphic design aren’t as powerful. The font is a little small and the lines are too long—which means it’s not easy to read (particularly for someone like myself in their fifties). Either have a gap between paragraphs or a first-line indent, not both. And the tables on page 33 and 41 could be more appealing. And I’ve mentioned stat blocks previously.

Skills and examples: More examples of things like social challenges (for example, intimidating and persuading) would help. We found that Lore was, without doubt, the most important skill—because it’s used both for casting magic and for general knowledge about the Hidden World, it gave the magic-using characters too much spotlight. Perhaps Lore needs splitting in two: Lore (knowing about the Hidden World) and Magic (using magic)?

A more thorough proofread: I found quite a few typos and inconsistencies. Is it Melee or Melee Combat? Hidden World or hidden world? Liminal could do with a more thorough proofread.

Enough Liminal for now

And that’s probably it for Liminal from me for a while. It’s been a fun thirteen sessions, but time to give something else a try.

 

The Lightless Beacon

As part of my plan to run other people’s RPG adventures, I thought I’d give Call of Cthulhu’s The Lightless Beacon a spin. It’s free on Roll20, which also means I get to practice my Roll20 GMing skills. And because I don’t have a copy of the Call of Cthulhu rules, I used Cthulhu Dark.

Spoilers ahoy!

The Lightless Beacon

The Lightless Beacon is an introductory adventure written by Leigh Carr with Lynne Hardy: the ship the investigators are travelling on is wrecked and the investigators must make their way to the nearest island (and lighthouse), which has its own difficulties (mainly deep ones).

The game is likely to end up with a furious battle at the top of the lighthouse, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing in most games, but less than ideal for Cthulhu Dark.

Timings for The Lightless Beacon suggest that it will be over in an hour, with four players. While it’s extremely short, I suspect my players will drag it out longer than that. But we’ll see.

Cthulhu Dark

Cthulhu Dark is Graham Walmsley’s excellent rules-light Cthulhu system. The rules cover two sides of A4, and I have the gorgeous hardback that Graham produced. I’ve written about it previously, and I find it simpler to use than traditional Call of Cthulhu. There are some complications in using Cthulhu Dark, though, that means I can’t quite run The Lightless Beacon exactly as written.

Doomed: In Cthulhu Dark, the investigators are doomed. They’re not expected to triumph. So this will not end well for my investigators—so I can ignore any temptation to have the investigators win.

No combat: Cthulhu Dark has no combat rules. If the investigators fight a supernatural menace, they lose. They can flee, or hide. But they can’t fight. So that rules out a climactic battle at the top of the lighthouse.

Final horror: In the scenario construction section, Cthulhu Dark talks about the final horror, that moment at the end of the adventure when the investigators finally understand the full ghastliness of what’s going on.

However, The Lightless Beacon doesn’t have a final horror—it’s just some monsters trying to recover their gold. So I changed the scenario slightly, and corrupted the deep one gold, making the gold itself evil. The deep ones turn their gold into jewellery and sell it to hapless victims who, upon buying it, become corrupted themselves (and maybe even prompting ‘the change’). I’m writing this before we play, and with luck the adventure will end with the investigators barricaded at the top of the lighthouse, monsters pounding at the door, and with one of them looking at her wedding ring, not knowing if it is tainted or not. Fade to black.

You can download the basic Cthulhu Dark rules for free here.

My thoughts on reading The Lightless Beacon

Roll20 doesn’t make it easy to use pre-written adventures. The text is contained in Roll20’s handouts, which I copied into Word for easy reading. I didn’t copy everything, and I still ended up with 6000 words of text…

So my first sense of The Lightless Beacon, a one-hour adventure is that it’s overwritten. By a long way. I appreciate that it’s aimed at newcomers to Call of Cthulhu, but I’m sure even newcomers would appreciate clear, concise writing.

Hard to use in play: This makes The Lightless Beacon hard to run in play—unless you’ve internalised everything (and why would you for a one-hour game?). Worse, the text doesn’t include the map cross-referencing, making it harder to use.

(I am sure you could present The Lightless Beacon as little more than annotated maps. It’s just a one-page dungeon, it doesn’t need all that extraneous material.)

Everything is hidden behind a dice roll: I was surprised at how much was hidden by a dice roll, including the handouts. Luckily, with Cthulhu Dark, investigators always find the clues so I don’t have to worry about that. But it does seem very old-fashioned and I had thought that 7th edition Call of Cthulhu, given GUMSHOE’s presence, had moved beyond that. (And maybe it does, maybe there’s something in the rules about that.)

Younglings: The monsters in The Lightless Beacon are embarrassing. They’re called ‘younglings’ a word that I’ve only ever heard in association with Revenge of the Sith. I’m not sure why they don’t have a more sinister name—sea horrors, or larvae. Anything but younglings.

Sea horrors (I’m not calling them younglings) have poisonous dorsal spines they can fire at prey. That means they have to turn their backs to attack anything! I’m trying not to laugh at how ridiculous that sounds, so I will give them breakable poisonous teeth instead.

Firearms: Games are scarier when the characters are powerless, and removing guns helps to remove that power. As far as I can see, The Lightless Beacon has three guns: two on the island, and one that starts with the characters. I removed (or broke) two, leaving the one gun for the investigators to find in the innards of a dead NPC. (Guns aren’t any help in Cthulhu Dark anyway.)

Dynamic lighting - bah

Roll20 integration: The Lightless Beacon is the first Roll20-sourced adventure I’ve run, and while it integrates with Roll20, I’m not sure it makes the best of Roll20. Some thoughts:

• Dynamic lighting: The plan of the lighthouse has dynamic lighting enabled, which is nice but I found it irritating in play. Once the players had visited a room I wanted that room to remain visible, but with dynamic lighting once we moved the token away the room went dark. (So I prefer the old-fashioned “fog of war” approach.) My lack of familiarity with Roll20 probably didn’t help here—I’m sure there’s a simple way to sort this.
• GM layer: The maps all have a GM layer with a few notes, but not enough. There’s a bloody stain on the GM layer in the kitchen—I’m not sure why that isn’t on the background as the investigators see it. And I would have liked more notes on the GM layer to make it easy to run.
• Scenario text: As a I said before, the scenario text is all in handouts. A quick reference guide would have been very helpful (or just better annotated maps).
• Roll 20’s Jukebox: I thought I’d try out Roll20’s jukebox feature. I used the Dark and Stormy track for outside scenes, and Existential Dread for inside scenes. (Both are by Tabletop Audio and I found them by exploring the jukebox.)

Actual play

Rotate the map?

So I ran the adventure with my regular players, Jon and Terry. They took the antiques dealer and marine biologist. Once they were on the island, they immediately sought shelter from the rain and went into the lighthouse cottage, ignoring my suggestion to explore outside. (In hindsight, I wonder if rotating the map so the investigators encounter the outbuildings first would have been better.)

They made a perfunctory scout of the cottage (ignoring everything interesting), before climbing the lighthouse itself to see if they could fix the light and prevent more ships from foundering on the rocks. 

So of course they encountered the grisly scene long before I had hoped they would.

They replaced the lighthouse lamp, but then I had the power go out. So they went out into the dark where they found the dead body there, and a generator that had shorted out. By this point they were aware of strange fish-horrors and shapes in the night, and didn’t want to hang around trying to fix the generator. So they holed themselves up in the windowless pantry, barring the door against Things Outside banging and scratching to get in.

By daylight the things had gone, and we ended the game with post-credit scenes for each character. The antiques dealer took the gold coins and was later murdered for them, while the marine biologist took the fish-thing specimen back but was discredited and became a laughing stock. So happy endings all around!

Both Jon and Terry enjoyed the simplicity and bleakness of Cthulhu Dark. They ended up with 3 and 4 Insight respectively, and I think the rule that a fight always ends in the Investigator’s death worked in the games favour. They were hiding from the creatures not trying to fight them.

We took about an hour and 45 minutes to play—so a good time (and as I suspected, longer than the hour advertised).

So what have I learned?

Roll20’s Jukebox: There’s not that much about Roll20 that I can’t get elsewhere, but I did like the jukebox. I’m not sure if the players enjoyed it as much as I did, but it worked for me.

Roll20’s GM layer: The Lightless Beacon introduced me to the GM layer, it’s not something I used before (I’m a Roll20 newbie). I can see me using that in future. (And as I said, I think The Lightless Beacon could be run from a good annotated map.)

Cthulhu Dark: Cthulhu Dark was just right. While I didn’t get the final horror I had hoped for, we had no stumbling over clues or missing anything because of a failed roll. And when they rolled 6, I enjoyed the challenge of finding a supernatural insight for them.

Other people’s adventures: I’m enjoying running other people’s adventures more than I thought I would. I still have yet to find one that really works—a compelling adventure properly laid out and concisely written so I don’t have to do so much homework to run it.

So all in all, a success.