Hello and welcome to the Weekly Scroll Podcast.
My name is Ryan. And I'm experiencing existential
dread. And joining us today on this
special episode, we have Josh Domansky of Liminal Horror.
How you doing today, Josh? Oh, just living the dream.
Aren't, aren't we fucking all right now?
The world is totally fine. Nothing's on fire and
everything's gravy, right? So, yeah.
So if if you're looking at us on the Youtubes or live right now,
you'll notice this is not a normal window because this is
not a normal episode. As I said, we're going to have
Josh de Mansion today. We're going to be talking about
Liminal Horror Deluxe Edition. We've talked about Luminal
Horror bunch, we've had Josh on a bunch for, if you haven't seen
any of the writing seminars, you should definitely go check those
out. Go check out the APS for it.
I'll make sure to at this point I should almost make a playlist
of just all the Luminal Horror stuff.
But today we're talking about the upcoming project Luminal
Horror Deluxe Edition, something that's been in the works for a
while that I've been looking forward to for a long time.
And Josh is here to chat about that a little bit.
So let's chat about it a little bit.
About it, yeah. So we, we've been working on
this while, at least in terms of the writing, I think we're going
on almost two years at this point from when we started.
We ended up having to take a break for a few months to get,
you know, the parthenogenesis of hungry hollow out.
But we've kind of been pushing this along for a while here.
So, you know, we have the backer kit page that is, you know, you
can follow along right now. Presumably by the time this hits
YouTube, it'll be a little closer to when we launch the the
actual backer kit, which is 15th I believe.
But we wanted to take the opportunity to kind of do a
little deeper dive into what this book is going to be than
what you'll end up seeing on like the page itself.
So we've got some a little bit of a breakdown of the parts
here. I brought some of the sample
layout to kind of show off just so that folks can kind of, you
know, we run through this, we chat a little bit about it, and
then we can get a pretty good idea about what you're backing
if the page itself doesn't convince you for some reason.
Awesome. I mean, I'm, I'm sold right now,
so. I was sold a long time ago, but
for those that might not not be, I'm very excited to to see this
and hear what people have to say for it so.
All right, shall we get into it? Yes, we are.
We are, we are. Look at, look at, look at this,
look at this. Yes, all right.
I have no idea what the screen looks like.
So, oh, First off, we got our new our new logos.
We've got Zach Hazard on as our primary artist and art director
for Liminal Horror going forward, fucking kicking ass at
a lot of stuff here. And these are some logos that he
came up with that's going to be the new sort of face of Liminal
Horror, at least as we push into the future.
Amazing decision. Yeah, Zach has been a part of
the horror from the start. He did the the first cover for
the original Zenia Liminal horror.
I think that may have been the first piece of tabletop RPG art
that he's ever done, but I don't know if I can verify that, at
least in an official capacity. And so Zach has kind of been a
part of, you know, everything on going forward from there to I'm
pretty sure every major release has something from him in it, if
I'm not mistaken. So, you know, I don't know, 6 to
8 months ago, we've kind of made the decision we're going to
bring him on as our director, kind of push forward, be
officially part of the team rather than just kind of like
unofficially part of the team. And he was always going to do
the art for the deluxe edition anyway.
So it just kind of ended up working out real nice.
Especially in our favor, because this shit fucking rocks.
Very much so. Let me get back into that.
All right, so getting it to what we're doing here.
The the base system for the little horror has been out a
while. I the first scene came out in
2021 to rules light survival horror RPG.
You know, we we have a website, you can get it for free.
You can get the PDF for the the scene for free and you can
currently get the the base scene at Space Penguin Inc who we
swapped to I think a couple of years ago at this point.
So from basically the very start, the idea was is always to
kind of build upon that scene. You know, Goblin Archives is the
one who wrote the original Liminal Horror.
I didn't join on the team for another 6 or so months, I think
after the original scene released.
But basically from the start, you know, as soon as I joined
on, we were, we've been talking about ways in which to elevate
the system and bring it forward. The initial way that we started
doing this was through a series of modules and scenes, you know,
get supplementary material out, get people playing it.
So you see the mall, the Bureau of the Bloom are, you know, sort
of the first three of those, those big scenes that we've put
out there. We later began the process of
upgrading to what becomes the Deluxe edition.
We had started that prior to the introduction of the The
Investigators, additional liminal horror.
This was sort of a stop gap where we had already started
working on, you know, what is now known as the deluxe edition.
We'd written basically rewritten the original scene to tidy it
up, fix a few things, but not really not really diverge from
it in any series capacity. We added wounds to it.
That's sort of the biggest deal there.
And then I think a few things were kind of clarified in the
scene. So everything in the
Investigators edition is basically what the same as what
was in the core, but it's a little better.
So we moved into the scene. We'd already begin the
transition there. So we came up the idea to do,
you know, the deluxe edition. The first thought was to sort of
follow along in the footsteps of Mothership.
You know, the folks at Tuesday Night Games have better been a
huge inspiration for us, especially on like listening in
front the module front and how they sort of build a community
and run their business and whatnot.
So it was an easy model. You know, by the time the little
part of the Mothership box set hits Kickstarter, we're kind of
like, what does our box set look like?
You know the a problem, I guess one of the things that
Mothership continues to struggle with, though, is its formatting.
Whereas I really love Mothership scenes.
I think it works for the aesthetic.
I think it works for the box and everything like that that comes
together. Mothership does a, I'm not going
to say poor job. That's a really bad way to
describe it. Because of their limited format,
they don't have a lot of space in which to explain how the game
is meant to be played. It's, you know, totally fine for
somebody who like me, who was already kind of used to that
culture of play, who comes in and plays Mothership, I
immediately know how this game is meant to be played.
But, you know, I go on Reddit every day and I see people kind
of struggling with some of the basic aspects of the system
there, especially if they're coming in from first time.
And a lot of that has to do with, you know, the constrained
space. The Warden Operation Manual for
Mothership is is one of the best RPG books I've ever owned.
It still has like 2 or 3 sections in it that I really
wish were present or sections that could be present to help
kind of better Orient people for running the game and especially
like making their own content for the game that they could
bring to their tables. So we'd seen that.
We really like that box set, but we were like, if we do the same
thing, if we copy this design, 1 is going to be a production
nightmare and two box. So yeah.
And two, we'll be limiting ourselves.
You know, we wanted to make something that was better than
the original scene for the middle horror.
So, you know, hardcover was an easy choice.
You know, we we've taken that base and we've expanded it.
The big thing here is the deluxe edition isn't a second edition.
You know, that was never the intention.
Everything that we have written so far is going to be compatible
going forward. We want to support the same core
system, whether you have the first scene for Liminal Horror,
the Investigator's Edition, the Box edition, or using the free
rules on the website or trying to maintain, you know, that
compatibility or whatever. So nothing, nothing is obsolete.
But the key here with this deluxe edition is that we wanted
to focus really heavily on getting you to the table.
You know everything. This book is designed to get
horror at your table, whether that makes it easier for you,
whether that's giving you the tools to learn how to run horror
effectively or just pitching the system in a way that's easier to
pick up. So we we've designed the book as
a toolkit. We'll kind of talk a little bit
about the sections here. I'll go through that as we we
progress, but the idea is, like I said, heavily focused.
Get the shit to the table as opposed to being a book that
sits in your collection and collects dust.
One thing, so the the Investigator's edition is now
the base edition of the game, right?
Like that is going to be like or that currently is the core now.
Yeah, yeah. So the the original Zine we
can't reproduce because of some of our contractual obligations
what we've had previously. So we'd moved to the
Investigator Edition as the base one.
Like I said, it was a clean up primarily, but it also kind of
freed us from some of those concerns.
But the key here, what I think is where you were leading the
Investigators Edition is going to be a game that you can still
take and bring to your table and run.
The way that we think about it is the deluxe edition is the
thing you read at home. You know, you have it there.
It's got all this reference that helps you build your scenarios,
that helps you learn the game. And then when you come and run
your game for your Home group, you're just snagging the scene
and running down to sitting at the table.
So you don't have this fucking tome sitting there with you.
You can just, you know, run clean from the scene.
So the idea is that this this will live on the, you know, the
investigator edition. We're going to continue to have
it in existence. It's a cheap alternative to a a
fairly expensive book, and it's again, not obsolete.
We want you to hold on to your scenes.
Perfect, because I have two of those.
So yeah, I think. I have like 6 of them at this
point. All right, let's see here.
So quick breakdown when we got inside, we don't have an exact
page count yet. We're going to be probably north
of 350 pages for this total book here.
It's going to make a lot more sense when I start talking about
what we've included because it's it's always like this is the 350
page rules like game. You know, it's a, it's a kind of
a goofy fucking thing to say. But you know what's here on the
Weekly Scroll? We love those 350 page bugs.
Yeah, no girls here. Yeah, so the the core system
again, it's we're we're, we're keeping that approachability.
We want you to be able to pick the game up and, you know, be
ready to run in like 1/2 hour with characters, you know, you
can quickly learn the rules and all that stuff.
Everything is still preserved. It's still the same as the scene
was. And then we just added a lot of
stuff onto it. So I'll talk a little bit about
the sections that we have here. But the the book is broadly
broken down into the Investigator's guide, the
Facilitator's guide, the Catalog of the Strange, the Haunted
Pacific Northwest, and a series of appendices.
So first up is the Investigator's Guide.
I don't really need to spend a whole lot of time talking about
this one because this is just the original scene.
You know, it's a most of it again is the text that we had
already had set up and ready for the Investigators edition.
You know, it's like 40 or so pages of it.
It gets you the basics, it gives you the character creation,
gives you the mechanics of the game to play.
And then we have introduced ways to kind of quickly get to the
table. The 1st is we have, you know,
the standard, the horror character generation.
Do you get a background and then you there's a whole bunch of
role tables you can get to get more details and blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah. So it's you can spend, you know,
half hour just crafting a character and making the your
best sort of, you know, horror protagonist that you desire.
We've also provided a series archetypes in the book here.
Anybody who has read our modules would already be familiar with
this. These are a little bit more
robust backgrounds. It's in a sense we give you a
couple of lines of text and some items and join those together in
a theme. So you're able to, if you need
to play in 5 minutes, roll stats, grab an archetype you can
get playing, you know, that gives you the basics to get your
character going and pushing forward into the face of the
horrors as opposed to custom crafting someone specific.
So we've got those two options to play.
We expanded the equipment list a little bit so you can spend your
character's money on stuff right at the start again, if you want
to get into the nitty gritty about the things that you have
on you. And then the big thing, though,
one of the changes is that we have reworked magic and you
know, we're now calling it rituals.
In the original release of Liminal Horror, the magic system
there was, I believe it was pulled from Maze Rats.
I don't remember off the top of my head.
It's been a little bit since I've looked at it, but it was
kind of this this free form sort of magic system here where
players could wield magic if they so desired and you kind of,
you know, rolled on some tables to generate a spell with
rituals. Well, first we we cut that from
the Investigators edition. At that time, the magic didn't
make a whole lot of sense with where the middle horror had been
going. You know, we had already done
the the first two scenes, you know, the Bureau and the mall
and Magic wasn't really fitting into that world in a, you know,
great capacity, I should say. So when we came back to do this
deluxe edition here, we'd seen people like asking for it was
one of the one of the most common questions for people who
had the original to the investigators, like where did
Magic go? And it's like, well, we didn't
really like it, so we got it. But we have we've reintroduced
it, we've kind of reorganized it again.
And it's this ritual system here where I guess it kind of follows
fault of Arns magic system. That's probably the single
biggest piece of inspiration. I guess maybe a little bit of
what Karen had been doing too. But you get a spell title, you
get a one sentence description and then you get kind of free
form from there. So we give you a little bit more
direction there as opposed to like randomly generating the
name of a spell and kind of working with it.
And then rituals are kind of dangerous where it's not like
free to cast. You are expending your head
protection effectively in order to wield these rituals.
And then you can you can try and make it a little bit more
powerful by risking more HP to do so and so on and so forth.
But again, they're probably going to be fairly rare in play,
especially the type of play that we're trying to encourage.
But you know, we did it. We added the system back in here
and you got to, I don't know, I think 50 spells or whatever.
That's rough with. I think we've played we've
played it on the stream what, like four times at this point
maybe. I don't remember ever.
I don't remember anyone ever using magic like Nope through
any of those streams at all. If I I mean I didn't I didn't
play in the shelter would in liminal horror side but I I
don't remember anyone ever using magic.
Yeah. Again, it's not really something
that we write into it because this is, it's not a fantasy
system, you know, where we're trying to do modern survival
horror. So things got to be a little
more grounded. That's also the reason that we
moved to rituals instead of magic because of the idea that
if you think if I call Cthulhu because that's, you know, that's
the elephant in the room, whatever, we're talking horror
systems. You might have an ancient cult
that has opened the book and is trying to do this ritual in
there to some of the demon or something like that.
So we wanted to make space for that option without making magic
like a thing that characters are expected to wield.
I. Mean rituals it's vibe here too
for for the liminal horror versus calling it magic.
It makes you definitely feels like the source is more like
occult and and you know, it's kind of satanic ish a little bit
more than just like arcane like yeah, pulling from the the ether
or something. So.
Yeah, yeah. So find a spell book from a
cult, maybe you get a little magic in there.
That's how you kind of wield it. Again, it works very similar to
kind of the other stuff that we've got in the system too.
So it's a little more unified mechanically the very least.
Let's see. All right, so getting me into
our second section here, our facilitator's guide.
This was my baby. You know, I've had my hands in
the entire book, but this is the one thing that was like straight
from my brain down onto the page.
This is our our G Ms. guide. You know, that sort of makes
sense here. It's broken into 3 sections
here, but the general idea is that it is a series of essays
and advice for running investigations and creating your
own, you know, kind of scenarios here for Abdominal Horror,
again, we broke it down into running an investigation,
creating a mystery, and adapting a mystery.
That's broadly the first section is, you know, getting a little
more nitty gritty into the system itself, talking about how
to best utilize it, how to use your setting, so on and so
forth. Creating a mystery is I wouldn't
call it a step by step process of creating a scenario, but if
you used it as a step by step process, I think you would be in
pretty good shape if you're trying to make your own stuff to
bring to the table and then adapting the mystery.
What we wanted to include here was one built in system
conversions. You know, you can take one of
the ones for examples. We, we have a conversion notes
for mothership where if you know, it's a quick, you know,
rough and dirty mechanical conversion here.
We ended up adding that into our appendices.
But we, we expanded on that idea a little bit for this, adapting
the mystery section where we don't want to just talk about
mechanical conversions, you know, changing the stats from
one system to the next. The section here is really about
taking any existing story and bringing it to your table,
whether that's you have like a book that you really like or a
movie that you've seen or again, you pull up a Call Cthulhu
module. So that section there is is kind
of like, you know, it's only a handful of pages.
So it's not the most robust thing in the world.
But we are talking about using these frameworks of things that
you draw inspiration from and adapting that for the middle
horror. But one of the big things that
we really wanted to focus on here was providing the support
that you do not see in most RPG books.
One of the big things here, a section that took me quite a
while to kind of figure out that I don't think I've ever seen in
any tabletop book before, is how to write clues.
Oh, that's a good one. So let me shit, I lost it.
I was, I have pulled up somewhere else.
But so it's one of these things that is kind of critical to a
lot of systems, you know, call Cthulhu, Delta Green, even like
Brindlewood Bay or you know, the car from Brindlewood systems
where they're they're heavily reliant on you following a
series of clues in some regard. But those books don't do a great
job of telling you how to write the clues.
So and they they kind of expect that the the GM is already kind
of a grossed in that, you know, culture and already has an
understanding what what makes an effective clue.
So we breakdown the various types of clues that you can
provide because it's not always, you know, the bloody handprint
or whatever. There are other things that
count as clues. And then we talked a little bit
about how to utilize them and what makes for sort of a bad
clue, at least in terms of promoting the type of gameplay
that liminal horror encourages. So a lot of our section is on
that. Stuff like that.
At least I know we've got a pretty detailed breakdown on how
to make monsters for Liminal horror.
We talked about the Doom clock. You know, it's something that we
put in a lot of our modules and adventures, and we did do a
great job of explaining it. So here's a detailed breakdown
of a Doom Clock and how to make one.
We have a bunch of random encounter generation methods.
We picked three of them that we kind of like because it's going
to vary depending on the type of scenario you want.
So we detailed and describe how to utilize those.
And again, hopefully gives people a better understanding of
some of the stuff that we put in our modules too.
But again, this is, yeah, just incredibly thorough series of
tips and advice about how to run, you know, horror games in
general. To be honest, we wanted to
extend just beyond or beyond just luminal horror itself.
All right, so moving right along here, all of them examples of
stuff that were put in the book a little later here.
Those are the two sections. We're kind of quick, but so our
third section here is the catalog of the strange.
This is our, our, you know, toolkit of ideas to kind of RIP
and steal for your own adventures.
Here. It's, you know, variety of weird
and horrific entities. You get a bunch of objects and
organizations and whatnot. And a lot of them are kind of
intentionally interconnected through our setting, the Honda
Pacific Northwest. But the idea is that, again,
these are very modular, so they're not anchored to the
setting by any means. So we have this broken down into
roughly 5 sections here. There's factions, cults,
horrors, resonant artifacts and allies and adversaries.
The factions are, I'm just big organizations that will have
tangible impact on the environment.
You know, folks who have read our stuff previously might
recognize, you know, the Bureau or the Church of Celestial
Science. So big movers in the scene,
organizations that are inherently connected to the
horrors in some manner, with the idea being that these are sort
of the secondary antagonists that you bring into your
scenarios where the horrors are obviously going to be the main
focus. And then you grab one of these
factions, you added me and and things just kind of like get
more chaotic with our cults. The cults are serving a similar
role, but the idea is is that the factions are setting wide.
The cults are like location specific, sort of smaller
organizations that again, can have a big impact, but they're
kind of like focused on one specific thing compared to like
the many focuses of affection. The horrors are just what we're
calling are monsters because they're a variety of things that
are necessarily like physical monsters, resident artifacts.
We introduced to these in the Bureau.
They're basically magic items, but they have a little bit of
lore connected to them that makes them feel a little bit
more grounded in our setting. And then the allies and
adversaries are the, it's a group of crafted and PCs that
you can grab and take and place into your games, either again,
to serve as an ally for your investigators or some
antagonistic force. So these are people with like
inventory motivations and a little bit more than just like a
name and description. Nice.
Well, Sam and Dean Winchester in there somewhere, you know, for
your. Cross.
Country. There there are a number of
references hidden throughout this book that someone might
pick up on. I really like how you guys are
sectioning this book off into like all of this stuff could be
kind of like sprinkled throughout.
But like, I think one of the criticisms that we talk about a
lot on the show is like a lack of like delineation between
sections like that, where you'll just find a bunch of stuff in
one area, then a bunch of stuff in another area.
And it's not really easy to parse.
So having like all of the kind of like extra stuff that you can
like build adventures and build campaigns and stuff with like
separated into its own like catalog of this range and stuff
like that is a really great way to do it.
Because I like like if I want the rules, I just want the
rules. And if I want the GM stuff, I
just want the GM stuff. So it's it's really nice.
You guys are doing like hard separations between between
these sections. Yeah.
And again, I talked about it at the top.
Our focus is a toolkit. We want this to be as easy to
use as possible so that we thought a lot and reorganized a
lot about how this structure is set up so that it's, you know,
digestible. I do want to show off some of
the whoops here. We got a few of them, I think.
Yeah, I got 3 in the section here.
These might be tweaked a little bit by the time we get to it,
but it's a pretty good look at what our layout is going to look
like at the end. This is specifically how we're
setting up our our monster kind of step blocks, so to speak.
And so I've got a few different examples here about the
different ways that we're kind of approaching that again to try
and make it easier to use. We did intentionally choose to
use a very straightforward style of layout, and you'll see it in
all these samples here. I could have spent a year just
pounding away at the layout to make it look like this X-Files
book with all this, you know, shit all over the place.
Those books are great. I really love it when companies
kind of do that, but you have to kind of do it well enough where
it's hitting our other goals of being readable and easy to use.
So there's a little bit of a balancing act there.
Well, it's it's interesting because like, I don't know if
you have you seen like the Alien RPG?
Yeah, yeah. So have you seen like the
spreads for like the new Alien RPG?
Yeah, so the they brought in Johan Nor to do the new one and
it's like they're doing exactly this, you know?
Yes, so it's funny 'cause I love like the black space background
in the first one because it's very vibe, but I guess a lot of
people didn't. So they're like, all right,
we're just going to make it like a white background and more
readable now, which is, which is an interesting direction to go
in. But I I like that.
I think if you're doing like a Zine, having like a super vibe
thing or even like Mark Borg, which is not a very big book,
it's like what like 70 pages or something like that, it makes
sense. But for like a 350 page book to
try to like make it vibes the whole way through is crazy.
It's crazy. I think task.
Yeah, I think readability and usability, especially with that
being like one of the primary directives that you guys have
for this entire project. First of all, the layout looks
great. Anyway, this is kind of the same
layout you've been you've been doing for a while.
But I, if I'm reading that many pages with my, the stimulation
in my brain like I'm good with with, you know, pretty
straightforward. I think that's a really, really
great choice. Yeah, and when it comes to, you
know, basically what you're saying there, you know, like we
take the balloon for example. I love this, this module.
I love everything we did with it.
It took fucking forever to do the layout for because they went
in and knew, you know, we did the the little custom graphics
and all that shit in there. When it came to doing the Zine
here, we wanted to do, you know, sandbox setting in 40 pages.
We needed that extra stuff to do what our writing could not do
because we didn't have the pages for it.
So we we can establish the vibe by making this look like a like
a notebook you found on the ground.
I just filled with the full RPG thing and that feels into the
gaps. We can't write.
We have in the deluxe edition unlimited space for all intents
and purposes. So we don't need to do all that
extra stuff. And, you know, you look at like
Delta Green Delta Green actually like the layout in that book
quite a lot. They did the government files
thing there, I think a really smart way where they're only
using that sparingly throughout the book and it's not like the
whole thing. They also have a lot more time
and money than we do. So yeah, we could have copied
it, but whatever. I, you know, again, a very
intentional choice to make this as easy to read and use as
possible here. I still think it looks nice.
I'm really happy with how what we're doing on the the layout
here. So it's it's a good, good middle
ground that I think we found. Yeah, absolutely.
Hey. Real quick, are you doing A5 or
A4 for this? It is AUS trade which is a 6 by
9. Gotcha.
So like American A5, it's not so 300.
That's a thick little book. 350 page, like the six by nine.
Yeah. We made this choice because this
is my favorite format and I'm insistent, but if you have
Hungry Hollow, it's the the same dimensions as as that book.
In theory, all of our hardcover books are gonna be that size
going forward. We'll see how much we commit to
that. I mean it's it's an ideal size
like the 6 by 9 or the A5 or whatever.
Like that size of book and Zine in general is just perfect.
Yeah, it's I really dislike the full letter A4 hardcover books.
It's not that they aren't great product in the end, it is that
they become a hindrance to use the larger the book gets.
It's it's one of those things where me specifically, I have a
square foot of desk space when I'm running games at my desk
here and it's like I can't open those fucking books, keep it to
the page and just use the stuff on my desk.
So, you know, going with a smaller format is to appease me
specifically. But also I think it's just
easier to use. Again, we focus, get the book to
the table, use everything in here.
And the easier we can make it, the smaller the format that's
going to help us out. But we do have a few choices
that we could play around with there.
You know, we could use the half letter at the A5 or like B5.
I think it was the other option. I think the B5 is like the
biggest I am ever willing to go on a book that I designed.
But even that's still a little like obnoxious of a size.
If you've got Academies of the Arcane and Andrew Kolb's books
are in that size format. We could have done that.
That would have given us a little more space.
But again, it's just on the edge of irritating.
So I was like 6 by 9, like perfect.
Me and Ryan both looking back for Academy there Academy's the
arcane. Yeah, it's just out of arm's
reach here. I'd grab it, but I've got a
stack of shits that next week. I think Ryan's down in both.
Directions. A similar size.
Oh yeah, they're B5, Yeah. I don't think Spipers is
actually B5. I think it's something a little
different, but it's close. You know, at least that's that's
approximately what it's going to look like.
You know what that size would look like in comparison, But for
I think if you guys own Best of Bury Deeper, that's probably a
good idea of what the end book will look like in terms of both
the size and the page count. That's I think that's closer to
500 pages. So it's a little skinnier, but
still, yeah, it's going to be a beefy boy.
This is 327 pages. Oh shit, OK, it's going to look
a lot like that. It's got to look a very similar
to to this little beefy boy right here, which is a great
book. I love this book.
So that's a nice size. Yeah, it's.
Very book sized, you know. But to kind of talk a little bit
about our layout here, when we went to designer creatures or
horrors, you know that one of them we're looking at right
here. Again, we wanted usability.
The stat blocks for the middle horror are nothing.
You know, it's a line of text. You've got, you know, strength,
text, control, HP, armor. If they have a weapon attack and
if they have a little special ability, great.
So we can do 600 thousand of those if we really wanted to and
for pack them into this book. But again, we wanted to focus on
something that is easy to digest and easy to use, easy to bring
it to the table. So we've been looking at a lot
of other best series. The Monster Overhaul is one of
the big ones that we've had constantly open as we were
working on this and writing it. We've also had the folklore best
theory for the Mary Mushman. It was another one that I really
liked of that I think goes a little bit above and beyond your
your standard best theory. So we took a lot of this
inspiration as we're writing it and we're like, how do we best
support our monsters in a way that they can be taken and
easily used at the table. And then we came up with this
kind of format here where this one in particular is a little
atypical. Let me go to the next page here.
That'll kind of give us a little better idea of what the standard
block will look like. Where you get your creature, you
get your stats, you get that's any ability says have a basic
description of the creature that you could read verbatim at the
table if you really wanted. And then we've got ways in which
they can be leveraged in different ways.
We look at the warped here. We've got variants, you know, if
you're, let's say, solo role-playing or don't really
feel like making choices or just kind of randomly generating some
stuff for an adventure, pull up the warped, you know, looks like
this is a base creature. But then you get some other
stuff that you can utilize in a different manner.
You know, with those variants here, you know, we can have
extra limbs. It can be a fused with metal and
bone. It could have a tail which it
uses to, you know, cling to the pipes above you in the abandoned
factory. So again, we're taking our core
monster. We can get a little bit of
versatility by introducing these variants here and then we get a
little bit of narrative edition where how were they warped is
one of the the secondary table we have for this creature where
depending on what you choose, that might shape how you're
using them in the scenario. If the warped is created through
a corporations toxic chemicals, that's going to play into how
your investigation is set up here as opposed to like resonant
energies or cosmic radiation. You're dealing with very
different things narratively, even if it is the same base
creature. And then when you look at the,
we kind of flop back and forth depending on which monster it is
and how we thought it'd be best to apply them.
So when you look at like the dissonant artifacts here,
dissonant artifacts are just like haunted objects
effectively. Evil fridge.
Evil Fridge yeah. So we give you a table, you know
that we get 12 different variants.
But again, it doesn't matter if it can be anything.
It's just whenever you want to put like a poltergeist in the
air game. And then so we talked a little
bit about what they are. They are related to the resident
artifacts in some manner. So we give the base description
about how you might use them. We talked a little bit about
like, narratively, how they might act, you know, We talked
about how a distant artifact has some simulacrum of life, which
means it can be mad at you. Angry evil fridge, Yeah.
So then that gives you right there one sentence, distant
artifacts possess some form of simulacrum of life that gives
you your role play aid. Or it's like, OK, this thing is
going to wreak vengeance upon you for fucking with it.
And then we talked about manifestation where you can find
a distant artifact. And that's really just anywhere
that the horrors are because they are possessed.
The type of energies that kind of create the horrors.
But again, one page you get a little bit of arch, you get your
stat block, and then you get ways in which you can kind of
utilize them at the table. All in theory in this way that's
kind of easy to digest and understand.
If we flip back to the shadow real quick, the shadow is we're
calling, you know, we have lesser and greater horrors.
That's two of our kind of breakdowns here.
Lesser horrors are just like, you know, basically these things
here, standard monsters that you might fight.
The the greater horrors are like existential threats.
And so the shadow is like, if this starts manifesting in your
world, doomsday is going to come sooner rather than later unless
the investigators do something about it.
So we talked about the shadow and more of an abstract sense,
first detailing what it is, how it spreads, and then we've got
on, you know, secondary page. Once the shadow takes hold and
starts converting people to its wills, it primarily manifests in
two forms. So we have, you know, column
stat blocks for your two forms again.
So, you know, you just using these two pages with a few extra
little bits and bobs, you can make a campaign just out of 2
pages in theory. You know, we did make a campaign
out of 2 pages because the Shadow is one of the primary
antagonistic forces in the Bureau.
So we took this core concept, smashed it with a building, and
you've got, you know what, 7 to 10 session arc that you can play
out. And then we get into our
resident artifacts here. I don't think I need to talk
about this a whole lot. These are just kind of like the
weird items and stuff that you can find, things that are kind
of infested with resonant energies, not quite as
destructive as the distant artifacts we just talked about a
second ago. But these are more things that
the investigators can find that can be used in the utilitarian
sense, but are also kind of strange and mysterious.
I really. Do love the like the progression
of the layout from the previous versions to this.
It feels cleaner and I just like how it looks on the page.
Well, I like how it looks too, yeah.
A compliment, Josh. And so this is pretty much a
guide for the rest of the book too.
So a lot of it's going to look very similar to this as we push
forward. But getting on to the next
section here, the haunted Pacific Northwest, we want.
OK, so all of the luminal horror stuff to be right, you know,
official stuff is set in the Pacific Northwest in some
manner. It's primarily like a personal
preference for one, you know, Goblin Archives and I, we both
live in the region, so it's just kind of fun to do stuff that's
in our backyard. Two.
Yeah, 2. I it made a little bit more
sense to keep things kind of constrained so that we could
control them. So you've got, you know,
Washington, Oregon, and we don't really talk about it in the
book, but the Pacific request extends up into Canada a little
bit too. So you've got this region you
can play with. There's plenty of shit that's
going on here. We talked a little bit about why
things are getting so bad just in this region and that kind of
gives you some ideas to extrapolate outward from that.
You know, things might get bad elsewhere too.
So we're facing, you know, we want to create the setting here.
We also don't want to lock anybody in to anything in terms
of like lore or what not. So we've taking some very
intentional steps here to make this setting like anti cannon
where we give you all of these details and if you want to
ignore every single one of them, it's not going to affect
anything, at least in a strong manner.
So we we've been calling this a framework setting where we're
giving you the pieces to build upon to then make it your
setting. This is done through, you know,
we give a little bit of an overview.
We talked about why things are so bad here or why things are
getting worse here. And then we detailed 8 primary
locations that are kind of spread throughout the Pacific
Northwest. We got a couple of cities, you
know, we talked about Seattle and Portland with over cold
water, which I'll show a little bit more of in a second.
And then we got a couple of outlying places kind of
scattered throughout the rest of the region.
Within those primary locations, we have included points of
interest, NBCS to interact with and crucially, investigation
threads, if you can pursue while you're at these places.
Afterwards, after we talked about those, we talked about how
you can integrate the existing modules that we have written
already. And then we have detailed some
ways in which you can create a campaign based upon the stuff in
the book and the modules that we have produced.
So we set you up, we give you some advice, but ultimately it's
going to be you pulling all the stuff together and making your
setting here. I love that I also, you know, as
someone who also lives in the Pacific Northwest, I can speak
to how unbelievably creepy it can be for no reason all of the
time. All right, so I do have This is
a old bit of layout that I was working with.
I think they did this and December, so it's a little
outdated here, but I got 2 slides here that kind of give
you an idea of what that looks like in practice.
Where sounds like a lot. But again, we're trying to be
easy to digest and easy to use. So this is cold water.
You might recognize cold water from the bloom.
This is one of our favorite settings working because it's
just, you know, it's a sleepy Pacific Northwest town that is
trapped in the past almost literally.
So cold water, we have our little bit of an introduction
talks a little bit about what cold water is.
Again, these are kind of written in such a way where you already
know what cold water is, like reading 2 paragraphs because
it's very stereotypical on this by design.
We are going to do a map of the regions.
We're going to do a map of all of them in some capacity to give
you a little bit something more to grab on to.
We haven't done that yet. That's coming.
Then you've got your points of interests here, where we kind of
wanted to spread this between things that are noteworthy that
the investigators will be doing while they're at these places.
And then like the spooky locations where cold water is a
good example. That's because it's a pretty
good spread. You have the Cold Water Cafe in
the Lakeview Resort that gives you the place you're going to
eat when you come to town. That gives you the place you're
going to sleep when you come to town.
So your two kind of key bits of investigator like needs when
once you get there. And then the rest of it is kind
of just like the weird shit that's happening around town or
at least connected to it. Where came cold water?
Has some camper stuff gone missing?
The bloom itself is kind of focused around that, at least
for the onset. A cold water lake is just the
caldera lake that sits on the edge of the town.
You know, it's a key part of the narrative aspect of it, but
there's not a whole ton of interesting stuff going on
there. And then we got the Pikmin Lodge
in the Heinz Farm. The Pikmin Lodge is where the
Bureau intersects with the setting.
So can, we've already talked about the Bureau in a previous
section here. We can see, OK, now the Bureau
has a presence in cold water. And then Heinz Farm is where
shit went down previously. And it might be one of the
things you're investigating when you get to Cold Water.
So again, you've got your introduction, you've got your
locations here, you've got a little bit of map that puts them
all into context with each other.
So you can, you can use these to run in your sessions.
And then, you know, Cold Water is only two more pages where we
have our key NPCS and our investigation threads where
these are all people that we pulled from the bloom.
You know, we've kind of reworked them, not really reworked them,
but rewritten them to be more applicable to this general
setting compared to the specific happenings there.
So you have the mayor, the sheriff, the the person who runs
the diner, the two Bureau agents, the minister for the
Church of Celestial Science, adding in another one of our
factions here, again, using the space to play upon something
we've previously written. And then you have the park
Ranger for Camp Coldwater. So we got some putting somebody
in the location we just detailed.
Each of these people have their own, you know, fun things going
on. They have their desires and
their secrets. Where it's a role play aid,
where it's the thing that they want to do, the thing that
they're going to be engaged in, and then the little secret thing
that the investigators might find out about, talking about.
You know, Angela and Brett, for the Bureau agents, you know, it
is a secret that they are agents of the Bureau because they're
undercover. But if you start looking into
them, it won't be that hard to find out what the actual secret
is, is that they both infected been infected by the shadow,
which we just talked about a minute ago.
And they're going to make things worse in cold water if they're
not managed. So again, using the space we
have limited things easy to use calling back to other stuff in a
book, a constant series of references here to build what I
like to call the web of information.
And then we get into our investigation threads where we
knew we were getting into a huge book here.
We already going to have scenarios.
We didn't want to like write a scenario for cold water
completely, you know, front to back, even though we do have a
scenario for cold water in the book.
I'll talk about that later. So with our investigation
threads, we wanted to again, leverage our web of information,
give you 2 things that you can build your adventure out of in
each of these locations. So for cold water, we have the
cold water lake incident and what we're calling a creeping
terror. The cold water lake incident is
if you want to go into the shadow, this is giving you a
place to go do that. Cold water has already been
fucked up by this and it's going to happen again, at least
according to this investigation thread.
So we give you the basic details.
This is what's going on. This is how you get your
investigators involved. We provide a series of clues
that they can follow. Again, this is not really
prescriptive. It's just things to keep in mind
as they're pushing into the setting we've just detailed and
then we're linking additional resources that you can then pull
from the rest of the book to build out the scenario into a
proper scenario. We look at the creeping terror
or creeping terror really just like sets up the bloom.
You know, we, we wrote it out in a little more of a generic way,
but it's, you know, we're talking about the bloom there.
But so all of our major locations are going to have this
same kind of set up here. You know, we give the details,
we get the points of interest, we give the MPCS, we give
investigation threads. All the stuff connects to what
we have previously written. So you in 30 minutes can make 5
sessions worth of content. Just take your investigation
thread, take your town, take your PCs.
I look how usable this is and I really appreciate how much
you've folded in like the Bloom and like the Bureau and like
references to other things that then someone like I who has
those things can like extrapolate on.
But you don't necessarily need those things to like appreciate
this like little setup. Yeah, that was again a pretty
big focus here where it's like we're we are setting up the
bloom in this investigation thread, but you don't need to
own the scene to do it. Like you could make up the
scenario we put everything that's in the bloom is in this
book just in the sections. So you you could rebuild that
scenario without us having to do it.
But if you do have the bloom, here's some additional
background, here's some more things that you can do to make
this better. OK, then we're getting into our
appendices here. There's a couple things I want
to talk about in regards to these guys.
So dependencies is just like everything else, you know, for
the system, the stuff that we thought was going to be useful,
but it didn't make much sense to kind of like inject it into the
other chapters. These are supposed to be easier
stuff to reference. One of the big ones is that we
have a new series of optional mechanics that we are
introducing. Instead of modifying liminal
horror to make it more mechanically interesting, we've
written these supplementary sections where you can use them
if you want. The two big ones that we have, I
think we have more than this, but the ones that are in my mind
is we have, we're calling the survival horror mechanics and
the tactical combat mechanics. Survival horror is, you know,
we're already calling the moral horror survival horror PG.
But these additional mechanics are really focusing in on
basically just like the resource management aspect of survival
horror where we give stuff for tracking weapon ammunition.
You know, it's not a, it's not really a part of the basic of
the horror because we don't really care about it in the
simplicity of the system. But if you do care about it,
here's some mechanics. We talked a little bit about it,
like crafting resources. You know, you can go pick up
shit on the ground and like tape it to your bat and now your bat
does a little more damage just like stuff like that.
But again, we're trying to keep these easy, simple to use and
cohesive with what liminal horror already is.
So powering through a couple of like small little things, here's
how you make a little bit more robust If you want to focus on
the stuff, but you don't have to.
Then we've got the tactical combat mechanics are what I
think is pretty interesting and I'm probably going to use them
going forward myself. We're it's just breaking combat
down into something a little bit more mechanized.
It's probably the wrong way to describe it, but it's giving you
a little bit more. You know, combat in liminal
horror is pretty one note because the idea is, is that
you're trying to do everything you can not to get into combat.
Makes sense. So when the time combat comes,
it's just bang, bang, bang, you're dead, you know, so you're
you're using every dirty tricky and available in order to kind
of avoid it. But what if you don't want to
avoid it? What if you want your Resident
Evil 4 experience where you're going and you're given fucking
suplexes to zombies? Here you go.
We got a little bit of maneuvers.
We got a little bit of, we break down combat into a new
initiative system based around fast and slow actions, where if
you want to act before the adversaries, you do a fast
action, but it's just like one thing.
And if you want to, if you want to do more within your combat
round, you get a slow action unless you kind of do like two
things, stuff like that. The play test worked out like
really well and I'm actually pretty excited about it.
But again, it it doesn't drag it down, which is the big thing.
It's all just adding a little bit more complexity without
slowing down the pace of the combat and without feeling like
it's something different than the middle horror.
I love roles like tactical combat, like just having like a
couple more options just opens up so much and that sounds
awesome. Yeah, it's like The thing is,
all of these options are already present in the middle horror.
It's just they're not obvious. You know, like you can grapple
in the middle, horror you can, you know, you can suplex, you
can do all this stuff. It's just not in a way that is
mechanically digestible because it's all following the same set
of rules of the game is built upon.
So when somebody's approaching this and they're expecting
combat to be broken down in a little more traditional manner,
they won't necessarily know that those options are there.
But if you go read this book, hey, here's all these options
that are just written out now in a way that you can use if they
are useful to you. We also added character funnels
in as part of optional mechanics.
You know, I got my start writing zenes for funnels for OSE, so I
thought that would be fun inclusion.
But again, we ran a play test of that.
It went fucking spectacular. It's really just like you could
run a funnel with a little horror characters.
They're already dead simple. We're making them a little more
simple so that you can make it a little easier.
And then beyond that, our appendices have expanded
resources. We've got new fallout, we've got
a bunch of new archetypes, a bunch of shit load of NPCS we
put into here, just like a bunch of shit that you can supplement
your existing stuff. And primarily we put them here
so it keeps the rest of the sections clear because, you
know, we can go for pages and pages for NPCS, but it didn't
make much sense to put them in the other section.
And we've broken down Fallout here in a couple of interesting
ways, where at the front of the book in the investigator
section, you're going to have a list of, I think 12 Fallout that
we have there that you can use. But they're, they're really kind
of random. You know, fall load is always
tied to the horrors in some manner.
You know, it is the horrors trying to corrupt you.
So it's not always great to have a random list of fallouts
because they might not be like narratively cohesive with the
scenario you're running. So we've got that generic
section up at the front. So we've done with the
appendices here as we've, we've introduced a bunch more, we've
broken them down into I think it's 66 tables, something like
that. We're I think we're still
tweaking that a little bit too. But so you've got thematically
linked fallout now, whether you're like getting infected by
something specific or let's say your resonance artifact is
keeping you fall out. So we've got these different
sections here that you can kind of pull that are a little easier
to use for what you need them to be rather than being random
list. I'm going to talk a little bit
about this in a second here because I've got examples of it.
But one of our big things is the generic locations.
And again, I'll talk about that in a minute here.
And then are you in our final section for the appendices is
just a reference A it's just a few pages in the back.
It's like, here's the one page sheet to, you know, look at the
rules. Here's how to quickly create a
character. You know, like little little
stuff like that. The best thing to have at the
end of the book. I love it.
Let's see, Yeah. And then I think I've got two,
yeah, two slides here for our generic locations.
This was one of the things we wanted to do most with the Menor
this deluxe edition where again, focused, getting horror to the
table. How do you do it?
How do you build your scenarios? How do you quickly make a
session? You know, you have 1/2 hour to
prep? How do you get that to the
table? You take a generic location.
You had a monster, you had a reason that monsters at that
location. You have an adventure, you have
a session to play. So the generic locations, we've
done the boring work for you. We make it a little map, give
you some general descriptions. Then you take that, you add the
horror and you have a session. So we're going to have like, I
think like 30 of these. I don't remember that the list
off the top of my head, but they're all sort of thematically
broken down into various categories where, you know, this
is the city, this is the countryside, this is, you know,
the sewers beneath the city, you know, stuff like that.
Where again, the idea is modularity, you know, take these
things. These are really common horror
locations. You know, we're here that we're
showing on the page of your apartment complex and the
apartment itself. So if you wanted to run Evil
Dead Rise, let's say, you know, like copy what happens in the
movie, you get trapped in the floor of an apartment, but the
monsters in your apartment with you and you need to deal with
that. You do this 2 pages.
You have your apartment that you can kind of fuck around with.
You have the apartment complex floor.
You can take some NPCS, use the cues that we give, add a couple
of other interesting characters there.
Then grab a monster, put that in one of the apartments and then,
you know, find some reason that the floor is taking off.
So again, you have these the set up here.
You just need the ideas. Take the other stuff of the
book. Do it.
You got, you know, I guess that 30 minutes worth of work and
you've got 4 hours worth of play at, you know, 30 minutes at
most. I love this.
This is by far maybe one of the most useful tools I've ever seen
because I cannot tell you how often I need like I mean generic
locations. You need them for almost every
single game, but to have them already pre set up for you in
the back? That's amazing actually.
I love this. I.
Understand why you wanted to get this in the book, because this
is unbelievably immediately useful.
Yeah. And this is the kind of stuff
that I like to run. Like I don't often run like
published adventures. I like to have NPCS with
motivations and I like to have locations and the adventures
just kind of like what the players do.
So having this in the book where that's literally what you can do
and like all the pieces you've already talked about being able
to like maybe have a thread, have some locations, have some
people rolled it all up, have this like right in front of you
and just go is exactly how I would use it.
So that's it's awesome. One of the fun things too, is
that we are we do have some practical applications of this
in the book. Or at least that's the plan.
We'll talk about stretch goals in a little bit, but I do want
to kind of talk about one of them right now where our stretch
goals are adding scenarios into the book.
One of them Silent Street Station.
It's kind of high on our stretch goals here.
So we'll see if we get to it. But what that is going to do is
take, we built the subway in our generic locations, take the
subway and at a horror, you know, we took a horror from the
book. We smashed it together with the
subway. And you've got a session to play
just out of those elements there.
And we're kind of showing the application of it through one of
the scenarios that, you know, was included as a stretch goal.
But what we also did in that scenario is we're writing ways
in which you can expand it. And one of that those expansions
is taking what we have in our generic locations and adding it
to it. So Silent Street Station is set
in a subway. If you want two or three
sessions out of it instead of one or two sessions, hey, that
train leaves the station. It's something's going to happen
to that train. And now you're stuck in the
tunnels. Go ahead and grab that sewer
that we built for generic location.
You've got a map, you have the rest of your adventure.
You know you can search the sewer as you're trying to find a
way to escape back up to the Main St.
So there there's two or three sessions worth content, just
again using the base scenario, pulling the generic location and
adding in these extra little bits and bobs from the rest of
the book. I will show off again.
We got a couple more. This is the only other two ones
we're showing off at the moment, but a medical facility and a
school. Again, pretty not standard, but
pretty common places to have whores.
If you want to have your little Resident Evil type situation
here with an evil scientist doing something spooky, grab
your medical facility, grab a NPC that's, you know, might be
the scientist doing it and put a couple monsters in that in that
medical facility. Schools are pretty common place.
You know, there's let's say there's a serial killer that's
out there praying upon people at one of the schools.
Now you got your school, go ahead.
We built a slasher, you know, a generic monster that is supposed
to be the 70s and 80s horror killer.
Grab your slasher, put them in the school, grab some NPCS,
whatever. You got that basic set up here
again with these, with these generic locations.
These are actually two really good examples of it too.
We don't want to give you everything because we're trying
to keep them all down to one page, you know, quick, easy to
use references. So we give you the big, the main
stuff. You know, in your medical
facility, you know, lobby, the reception area, we detail a
couple of the other rooms in there, you know, radiology, the
operating suite, records room and so on and so forth that are
kind of spread throughout. You can probably assume what's
in the rest of these locations here just by some of the details
were given on the map. So you've got all of your
patient rooms there. You've got what's clearly a
meeting room in the top right corner and so on and so forth.
So you can kind of extrapolate from the little bit of
information that we do provide in the school set up.
In the same way, you got to imagine a school is mostly going
to be classrooms. So we talk about the things that
aren't classrooms and then you can, you know, figure out the
rest. It's not going to be that hard
for you. Yeah, this is great.
I'm so stoked about that, actually.
Yeah, like that seems to be the thing that people are most
excited for pretty much across the board when a real.
Idea, you know. All right, so we're getting
toward the end of the what I've got here.
Yeah, two more things to talk about.
I think you guys are going to like this one, the digital
package. So this is going to probably
kill us, but the deluxe edition is going to be as accessible as,
you know, 2 1/2 or 3 1/2 person team can make it.
So the one thing is hyperlinking the everlifting shit out of this
book. We we'll see it.
We've already built in Page references in our manuscript
what the stuff that needs to be referenced.
And we're going to have to go through that incredibly
painstaking process laying out the pages and hyperlinking
everything in here so it's easy to use.
Again, we're building that web of information.
We have to support it now, so everything is clickable in
theory when you get the PDFs, so you'll be able to kind of zoom
throughout the book whenever you need to pull stuff together
quickly. We're also planning on doing
what we're calling modular play aids, but all that really means
is taking the book and exporting specific sections of it that are
going to be most useful to you. So we might have APDF of just
the scenarios, you know that you can pull out.
So you don't need to open the whole book to you just quickly,
I need to run this tonight. Here you go, I'm going to pull
that out. Or it might be the modular
mechanics from the the appendices.
We're kind of an export of just those.
So if you don't want to use both survival horror and tactical
combat, quickly grab the PDF for survival horror.
You know you're already using the rest of the book.
You've got it there, easy to reference as part of the digital
package. We're going to take all those
maps that we've made and give them like individual files, you
know, clear backgrounds or transparent backgrounds so that
you can either just paste them into a Word doc and print them
out or drag them into your VTT, you know, easy to use.
Again, we don't really have, you know, like strict movement and
tracking and all that bullshit. But sometimes you might want the
map viewable to the player. So those, those all be, you
know, exported. It's going to kill us because
that sucks. They're all built into the
template. We will appreciate it.
Yeah. And then we're also planning on
including solo play aids. We're not.
We're not really going to be including solo mechanics in the
system, so to speak. There are a lot of really great
like generators and ways to do solo play that already kind of
exist. And to be honest, it's not
really our Forte as a team. I believe somebody's currently
working on like a third party set of solo rules for the middle
horror. So we don't, we don't need to
necessarily make built in solo rules for the game, but we want
to help support people that are doing solo play.
So the solo play aids are really just going to be like lists of
tables and stuff. Whether we break those into the
actual like tables broken out or just provide lists of where to
find the tables is a little up in the air 'cause we're still
figuring this one out. But the idea being is that we
want to give the people that are playing in this way something
that will make their life at least a little easier compared
to flipping through a 300 page book.
When we get into the future, there are a few things that we
want to do to kind of elevate the digital aspect of this game
as well. One is to create a, a system
reference document or something kind of like a Creative Commons
document. We're still figuring out what
this is going to look like, but we are pretty committed to doing
it in the future. The idea being that we've we've
written all the stuff for the book.
We want people to use it. The big example is like we want
to take the Bureau and put the Bureau into Creative Commons.
The Bureau is a stand in, you know, evil government
organization. So they're already kind of
generic, even if we have given them some kind of neat specific
details. But if you want to use the
Bureau in your games, I want you to use the Bureau in the games.
There's nothing you're going to do with them that I particularly
would take offense to unless, you know, you're doing like
normal offensive stuff because the Bureau is written as a stand
in. So we don't need to be like
protective of that because if they're supposed to be generic.
So we're going to give you the Bureau, some of the other stuff
we were talking about putting monsters in there.
We might do another faction. I think the Church of Celestial
Science might end up in there, a little collection there as well.
I want to put the town of cold water in there because that's
another one of those things where it's like, you know, cold
water is intentionally supposed to be this generic, you know,
mountainside town. Again, it has all these details.
But if you want to set your adventures in cold water, I
would love to see what somebody else's cold water looks like.
So we'll, we'll figure this out. This is a post book problem, but
the intention is to open things up a little bit so that we can
kind of engage a little bit more directly with the community and
then people can create things that feel cohesive with what
we're already working on. And then we also want to do a
template in that same vein where we have created a liminal horror
template in Affinity for the Horse of the Americas game jam
that's currently going on right now where it's set up.
So you take your text, you can put it in there, you export it.
You know, it's a super basic 2 column layout, but it looks
nice. I picked some pretty cool
typefaces for it. So if you've never done anything
like that before, as long as you get the program, Bing BA boom.
So we want to take that and make it a little more robust, give it
some different size options, make it like a proper template.
It was really just like a weekend project for me to get
something that was usable. So let's make it something
that's a little more than usable.
But again, this is future stuff. I don't know what I'm going to
do it. It is in the works though.
And then we can talk quickly about stretch goals.
So we've just been lining up here.
The the ones that were going to be easiest for us, we're going
to be the scenarios. We've already got a little bit
of a start on them. We know what we want them to
look like. So we're going to problem up for
you. You know, 40K we're talking, I
think 30 is our funding goal right now.
And some of these numbers might change as we get a little closer
to the 15th because we're, we're still tweaking things behind the
scenes, especially when it comes to tariffs that might completely
screw this whole project over. So our current plan right now as
it's set out is to kind of split this up into this this pretty
tier structure here where adding in the scenarios into the book
give you guys a little bit more something direct to play with as
opposed to, you know, the tool kit that we've got here.
The first is the Cam Coldwater scenario.
We played the proto version of that on this very channel a year
and such ago. I think it's been a minute when?
Was that actually? Let's see.
Been a while, but so Cam Coldwater, we took the notes
that I had that I'd put together for that adventure, and we're
making that into like a real thing.
We got a little bit of a preview right here.
Cult classic. So King Cold Water is like a one
session thing. It's your starter adventure.
You can use it as an intro to the bloom if you want.
You can run it as a con. You know, we could also give you
some options for taking a little bit further.
Cult classic is more of a slow burn investigation type of deal.
You're going to. So an actress has disappeared.
It might be involved with the Church of Celestial Science and
you're going to go to the House of this director who's hosting a
party that this actress is supposed to be present at.
So you're going out there, you're interacting with a bunch
of people, big social sort of mystery thing that turns weird
towards the end, but I don't want to spoil why.
And then our third one here for at least for the scenarios is
Silent Street Station. I talked a little bit about that
before. Silent Street Station is it?
It's designed to be a funnel scenario to kind of support
those funnel rules that we have, but it's takes the some of our
generic locations, adds a monster into it and sets you up
so you get a session worth of play.
And again, I already talked about it, but you have
additional options to expand that beyond that first session
that are kind of written into the scenario itself.
So we'll see how we do. When it comes to these stretch
goals. We're pretty optimistic based on
some of the buzz that we're we're currently getting here,
but some of that might be a little depressed given the state
of the world. But you know, let's say that we
we get, you know, well beyond this point and it meets our
wildest dreams. You know, we're already, you
know, stretching, probably saying 100,000, but let's say it
does spectacular. We've got some other stuff in
mind, like our pie in the sky ideas, basically just like more
scenarios and more like cool things that we can add on here
too. But so there's more that we
have, you know, kind of like toiling in the background
waiting for us to reach the point where we need to make it.
Let's stay on October 20th, 2023.
Oh, I had it. I was waiting for a pause so.
Oh, I wasn't. I just jumped in.
Yeah. So I think that is the one we're
embedding on the backer kit page.
So folks will be able to kind of quickly go see it.
But yeah, yeah, if you're watching this right now and you
want a good example about what we want to be including in this
book, go watch that actual play because the scenario as it's
written is sticks pretty close to those original notes.
So I think it's a good example. I lost my train of thought.
You're welcome. So that's about it for me.
I'm so excited for this. I really am.
I think this is a really great evolution of Limb Lahore and I'm
looking forward to the book. And I really like, like I run a
lot of my games from my iPad while we're playing.
So I really love like the modular aspect to the digital
editions where I can just pull up the section that I need at
the time without having to have the whole book open on my iPad.
The fact that I can hand out my like 3 copies of the
Investigator edition and use that at my table as like the
base rules, I really appreciate that because I have those and
I'd like to keep using. But again, that that's something
that again, we we very intentionally trying to support
as well. We have one of our one of our
tiers for the backer kit is to you get a copy of the hardcover
and you get, I think it's 3 or 4 copies of the investigators
edition. So I think here's your
hardcover, here's your players books, you get your all in one
package. I really like that this is a a
deluxe edition, not like a second edition, like, you know,
everything's backwards compatible and it's really
adding a bunch of tools, but also like collating a bunch of
tools back into it and making it like super accessible.
And, and like you said, when the prime directors being like
playable and getting it to the table.
So it's really great that it's, it's, it's more of an expansion
and and reorganization than anything that's going to be
super new. But it's still like a lot of
stuff, you know? Yeah, I mean, it's liminal
horror is a, is a simple system. Like we didn't need a second
edition. You know, we, we could tweak
things, you know, we, we like how fallout and wounds work.
Wounds is technically in addition for the Investigators
edition that wasn't in the base game.
So it's like we could we could do a little bit of modularity
with it, but it's like, you know, this is pulled from into
the odd and into the autos like a really elegantly designed
system. So what could we do to it, you
know, beyond adding in some modularity stuff?
It didn't. It didn't.
It didn't seem necessary, but we felt we could do something that
elevated it beyond just the scene.
Somebody asked which section of the book is the biggest section.
At the moment it's the Catalog of the Strange.
That's because, you know, let me pull up this.
So Catalog of the Strange has 12345 6 factions, I think 7
cults, and we have lesser horrors, which we have about 10
or 12 of those. We have greater horrors, which I
think we've eight of those resident horrors, which I think
we got another 8. And we're calling ritual users.
But this is a small section talking about like, you know,
witches and warlocks and stuff like that, and trying to find a
little bit of ways to interact, interject that magic into it
that we talked about earlier. Then we got 4 of what we're
calling Dead Gods, which are sort of just like our cosmic
horrors. But beyond that, there is those
resin artifacts we talked about in the Alleys and Adversaries.
The resin artifacts, I think we got like 40 or 50 of them.
They're quite a lot. And the alleys and adversaries,
we have 20 of those. So that section, the, the
manuscript draft of that is like 140 pages I think right now.
But that's going to be condensed down a little bit when we get it
into layout because we got that, that format that's going to like
make our tables kind of shrink up a little bit.
So the catalog is strange, will probably be 100 pages or
something in layout. So it'll be it'll be a good 4th
book. Say that's like 1/4 to 1/3 of
the book. I mean, it makes sense that
that's the toolkit section for like building out like all of
the stuff you need for adventures and things.
So it makes sense that that's kind of a big section.
It's it's also primarily the reason why we handed the draft
into editing like 2 weeks ago compared to January.
It's we, like I said, we've been working on this forever and it
just never felt complete for our goal.
You know, we wanted to create the ultimate horror toolkit or
whatever. So we took a lot of like work to
kind of figure out what that meant and what that ended up
becoming. So part of that was scope creep.
You know, we keep adding horrors to it, but we wanted to make
horrors that covered a wide array to give you more options
for what you want to bring to the table.
So I'll just talk a little bit about the lesser horrors right
now because I think that gives a good example of what I mean
here. Where we've got we are
reanimated dead, which are they're zombies, but they are
the same way that we set up those sample slides.
Let me just go back to that real quick so we can kind of get a
better idea what I'm talking about here.
Reanimated dead are, you know, they are set up as zombies, but
we've got like 8 different types that you can bring in.
So they're not just, they're not just zombies.
Then we got ghosts. We got, I think they're
pronounced Go lock, but I've never said that word out loud.
But Go Lock are skeletons where we put these in here to make it
easier to convert. There's actually a lot of stuff
like that too, where we we've talked about how to take fantasy
adventures and make them for a little horror.
So now we have a bunch of these creatures that fit within modern
horror, but they are effectively stand insurance for these
fantasy creatures. So like I said, zombies are
pretty typical across the board, but ghosts and our skeleton
stand insurance, we've talked about the warped is right up on
the screen here. We put in dogs, you know, like
spooky dogs that we're calling hounds that can be, you know, we
got a couple of varieties of them too.
There's a couple of fun ones in here.
I wrote the Creepers. The the Creeper was A to play on
the Fresno Nightcrawler where it's like the Fresno
Nightcrawlers. This people that are like stupid
into cryptids would know what this thing is, but it's like a
ghostly pair of pants that there's like 3 or 4 different
videos of things that look like this and it's just like it looks
like a pair of pants with a head on it that's walking across like
a like a field or something. It's the stupidest fucking thing
I've ever seen. But people really like them on
the Internet. So I'm like, we're making one of
these things for a little horror, and it's probably my
favorite creature that I wrote for this book.
Hasn't hasn't what art has been like Oliver blue sky was in
right was Zach and goblin archives drop in that.
Yeah, that's one of the ones that Zach put up recently.
It's the, it's a little spindly leg with a head on top of it.
But so he took it in a little different direction compared to
what like the, the quote UN quote real creature is.
But we we wanted that. But it's, it's our version of
that that we've got, we could be putting gremlins.
Gremlins are are goblins effectively, but we we change
them to be a little bit more towards like what a gremlin
actually is. But if you got a fantasy
scenario and you've got goblins, you grab these creatures and put
them in there. We wrote what is another one of
my favorites. We wrote, we put orcs in this
book, but they are opportunistic radioactive cannibals like
ORC's. And then we've got, you know, we
got these mannequin like things here.
We got a living flame. We've got there'll be a two page
spread. It's a colony and a swarm.
So this is the general version of what you find in a hungry
Hollow where it's like vermin or insects have overtaken someone's
body and they're running around, but they can also pop out of the
body and be a swarm of themselves.
We have these things are called rot worms, which are, you know,
parasitic little worms that kind of get into you and fuck you up.
And then our last two for the lesser horrors are the carrion
crier and the scaffiopod where the carrion crier is just like a
a fleshy pterodactyl type thing. We knew we needed some kind of
flying horror in there because we're kind of lacking on it.
So we added this in there. And then the scaffiopods are,
they're kind of our take, unlike the Deep Ones where we like that
trope, you know, these things created by eldritch beings, or
at least influenced them by some sense.
We know that people like those things too.
So we made the scaffold pods pulling from all the way back in
the original release of limited horror, though the legacy scene,
the plague of frogs scenario that was written in there like a
little framework that Galvin Archives had written for that.
So we're we're calling back on to that where our scaffold pods
being, you know, frog people instead of fish people.
And so, you know, that's just one of our sections.
That's the lesser horror. So like I said, we really wanted
a good spread of creatures so that you aren't forced into what
we think is cool, even if we do think all this is kind of cool.
So, so when when is this actually coming to it's backer
kit for this one, right? Yep, we'll be on backer kit
April 15th unless things change, which I as of this stream is
next Tuesday. So right around the corner,
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you said the goal, the
initial funding goal currently quote UN quote is like 30K.
Yeah, that's what we're talking about.
Again, don't quote me on any of the money stuff because it is
all in flux. We're trying to figure out how
the tariff situation and everything else is going to
completely screw us. So any of that stuff is in flux
and it's being frustrating. But the idea is, you know, our
original plan was to have that as our base funding goal that
gives us enough to to get the cost of manufacturing down to
help with some of the the the handling woes.
And we had a little bit of I guess subcontract help that we
need to cover too. So.
Yeah. So I mean, I think that's kind
of Liminal Horde deluxe. Like is there any, any final
words you want to give on it or pitch to make sure people back
it? But otherwise, I think I think
that's that's us. No, I think we've had dye sugars
on to help us out with our our backer cap page and he's done
that like a fucking fantastic job.
So I think that page is going to sell a lot of folk, but if
anybody's watching this and there's any concerns or any
questions or whatnot, just come on to the Limit Horror Discord
server. We got links of it everywhere.
You can find them on the Limit Horror website.
We got a little channel there to talk about the Docs edition
itself. Any questions, comments,
thoughts, concerns, ideas, we'd love to hear them.
You know I'm on that pretty much 24/7 because I have Discord
notification setups. Awesome.
So someone in chat just asked about jams going on right now,
and I'm going to link that right now, the Horrors of the America
Jam is the horror of the America's Jam is still going on,
right for like another month. Yeah, yeah, we keep shooting the
Deadline pack. So for those who are watching
this that are unfamiliar with it, we've been running the
Horrors of America jam for like 6 months now.
It's been a while. We, we potentially made it a
long due date because the last jam we ran, people didn't have
enough time to finish their entries.
So the horrors of the Americas is we are trying to do a little
community drive to make things that are not in the Pacific
Northwest. With the idea being that in the
end we will have this one big collection with which you can
use to run like a supernatural style horror road trip type
campaign, you know, pinging parts around.
It's primarily going to be the United States, but we encourage
folks to deal with the entire Americas, you know, North and
South America and what we'll see what we get in the end.
The goal of this GM one is for people to make cool stuff, but
we also would love folk to do a separate submission to our
collection. I just talked about where at the
the end we're going to take all the entries that we have been
submitted directly to us, at least bind them together into a
book and then make it print on demand about as close to that
cost as we can. Looking at Lulu right now, we'll
kind of see where that ends up. But to have this nice little
campaign book made of community, the entries that is, you know,
cheap and easy to access. Probably free version for the
PDFI think, But yeah, so that we've been bumping the deadline
back, one, because I'm going to need time to do the layout on
that. And two, we wanted to make sure
it was like, well, out of our way of the deluxe edition.
So you got until the end of the Deluxe editions crowdfunding
campaign, I think to get your entries submitted in about a
month from the point of this video is being recorded.
But super simple stuff. We're talking like 2 page, 10
page type of entries mostly. Just like, here's a location,
here's some spooky stuff, here's how your investigators can get
involved with that. Come try it out.
You know, we intentionally want people who haven't written RPG
stuff at all to give it a try. You know, we set up templates.
It shouldn't be terribly difficult.
You know, it doesn't have to look fancy.
Just get your ideas down to paper, put it in the jam, and
come talk to us about it here. We go, so that's definitely go.
Check out the horror, the Americas Jam, definitely go.
The link is been on the bottom of the page the entire time, but
I'll make sure it's below Luminal Horror rpg.com/deluxe.
We'll take you right to the backer kit page so that you can
pre follow that so you can be reminded on the 15th to go and
go buy it, go back it, give them your money so we can have a fun,
big cool game with lots of stuff in it.
Josh, always a pleasure to have you on.
Always a pleasure to talk about liminal horror at some point.
I'm sure we will run the game again here and we'll definitely
be talking about the deluxe edition whenever it gets in our
hand. But thank you so much for coming
on. We we always appreciate it.
Thank you for the time, this was great.
Great to see ya. This is fine.
I'm looking forward to this. Yeah, absolutely.
So we will that'll be that'll be us for today.
Once again, thank you. Thank you for everyone that was
in chat and everyone have a good day.
Bye.