Website revamp, previews, and lead up to the Deluxe Editon
Where we look at some cool new tools and see what's in store for the next 26 days!
Hey everybody!
We have a bunch of exciting things on the horizon as we gear up for Liminal Horror Month (Deluxe Edition is launching on April 15th).
The focus of this newsletter is to highlight two recent additions to the website (Adventures/Conversions and Actual Plays), but also will drip feed you information in order to get you primed and ready for the next 26 days!
Contained within:
Liminal Horror Projects to keep your eye on (for the upcoming newsletters I’ll include this section at the conclusion)
New Addition to the Website: Liminal Horror Conversion Guides and Adventures to Convert
New Addition to the Website: Actual Play Page
Previewing the next 6 newsletters in lead up to launch of the Deluxe Edition
Where we are at in the Development Process
Pull out your reading spectacles and strap in, the next month is going to be an exciting one as we get ready for launch. And if you want to hear me chat about all things LH, you can catch me on the most recent episode of the Vintage RPG podcast.
Liminal Horror Projects to keep your eye on
The Liminal Horror Month Projects: While not an official fest, we are excited to have a few killer products launching at the same time (both official and 3rd Party).
Liminal Horror Deluxe Edition (of course): If you haven’t already, hop over and give our backerkit a follow! That way you’ll be in the know for when it launches and any backerkit specific sneak peaks!
Liminal Grimoire by M. Allen Hall: This project is an exciting one (and gets to hold the title of the first Liminal Horror box set). M. Allen has been making some really cool LH projects for quite a while (here they are listed on the Liminal Horror Library), and he’s putting out a cool box set of pamphlets that will go perfectly with your newly ordered Deluxe Edition. Some of those pamphlets include (a backrooms adventure, a haunted cornmaze, a fetid butchery, a doomed priory, a extra dimensional photo room, and solo tools).
I Don’t Belong Here by Adam Stations: This horror spark book draws inspiration from Radiohead to create a dynamic supplement for your Liminal Horror games that includes a massive amount of tables, bestiary, Resonant Artifacts, fallouts, and a new solo adventure). This will also include an amazing lineup of guest artist that are creating tarot sized encounter cards.
New Releases:
Playthings by Seth Ian is a new third party Liminal Horror adventure that has come to print over at Space Penguin. Investigators are trapped in a Resonant Artifact that has created a demi-plane of plastic where the laws of toys supersedes physics and conventional logic. Can your players escape this plastic prison?
Website Revamp
Riding a wave of inspiration, I decided to revamp the structure of the main website: https://liminalhorrorrpg.com/
I wanted to organize it in such a way as to help make it more usable (especially alongside the updates that will be coming as a result of the Deluxe Edition being released). My hope is that these changes make it easy to use and navigate. If you have any ideas or wonderings don’t hesitate to hop in the discord and send me a ping!
We’ve created some new clusters of pages to help make the hierarchy flow better. The new sections are:
Rules Reference: these include the text for Investigators, Legacy Editions, and the current and former iterations of the SRD).
Adventures: easy to find pages highlighting the different adventures that are available, and adventures that would be cool to see being converted).
Adventure Writing Resources: Collecting the different tools, resources, and supports for making your own Liminal Horror content.
The next three section highlight some new additions to the website. Our goal, as always, is to lower the barrier of entry for players and facilitators and remove as many obstacles for you all when approaching this system!
Liminal Horror Conversion Guides and Adventures to Convert!
One of the exciting sections we included in the Deluxe Edition is advice on how to convert adventures for different systems and settings to be run in the modern framing of Liminal Horror. With thousands of adventures for sci-fi, fantasy, and other ttrpg genres, we wanted to include guidance on how you can harvest them for parts in your modern horror sessions.
As with most things, I wanted to find a way to include it for everyone (not just those who buy the Deluxe Edition). So I decided to create a section on the website to host the advice. Please note that the guidance is still in the editing phase, so it will get updates later, but it includes tips and tricks for taking things from any genre or system and making it playable in a horror framing.
Conversion Guide: Adapting a Mystery
This conversion guide includes:
General guidelines for converting.
How to select scenarios to adapt.
Genre shifting, setting considerations and framing.
Transition to saves when there are specific ability checks.
Stat blocks including some Liminal Horror specific Basic Horror Templates (Gunt, Brute, Ghoul, Tyrant)
Special Abilities & Magic
Sanity
Fallout
One of the cool additions from the text are the Basic Horror Templates. These four basic stat blocks that represent common types of horrors the Investigators may encounter. Use them as a template to aid in getting started and for the purpose of comparison, then expand upon them to make your creatures unique. Alternatively, find a creature in the Catalog of the Strange (p.x) to use as a basis and tweak as needed.
We’ve also included Specific System Notes that have conversions for:
Mark of the Odd
B/X Descendents
Mörk Bog
Call of Cthulhu
Delta Green
Monster of the Week
Mothership 1e
Triangle Agency
Adventures to Convert
The new Adventures to Convert page aims to present different adventures we think would be great to convert to Liminal Horror. This is inspired by the work that Yochai Gal has done over on Cairn, that includes them posting different conversions to the site, many of which were created by the community. We wanted to keep that option open (so if you write a conversion, send it our way).
Adventures to Convert
Cairn Examples along with Cairn’s framework for conversions
I went through and include the adventures, along with a blurb and what system they are for. But for ease of reference (and because that can make it quite long), I also created a high level list of adventures that is the title (linked to the adventure) and author!
Actual Play Page
Over the weekend I had the pleasure of watching a new Liminal Horror Actual Play from the Mystery Quest. In the first session they were playing Zach Hazard Vaupen’s The Chair. Watching this I was spurred to revamp the media section of the website, splitting off a page specifically to list the various Actual Plays (both with original and published adventures). To date we have 13 different series of varying lengths, with a total of 31 episodes and counting.
One of the projects the dev team is planning down the line is creating an easy to access resource for people that includes assets, images, quick references, and other tools to help people who are looking to make video/audio content for Liminal Horror. Evil Hat and SoulMuppet showcase a few ways that publishers can offer support for other formats, and as we wrap up the Deluxe Edition we will explore ways that we can lower the barrier of entry for others!
Previewing the next 6 newsletters in lead up to launch!
With less that 26 days left until launch, we wanted to plan a regular stream of updates that give readers a look at what is contained within (it also helps as we’ve wrapped the manuscript and sent it off to edits, but more on that in the next section). My current plan is to send out a series of newsletter update (about one ever 4 ish days), with each one focusing on a different section of the Deluxe Edition.
Currently we have 6 newsletters planned, highlighting:
Chapter 1: Investigators Guide (the core rules and character creation section of the book). While these are fully compatible with Legacy and Investigators editors, we were able to use the extra room to elaborate on rules and provide supports as well as put in some alternate bits and bobs.
Chapter 2: Facilitator’s Guide (essays on how to run and create horror at the table). A plethora of advice and tools for anyone interested in running Liminal Horror or really any type of tarp.
Chapter 3: Catalog of the Strange (our take on a bestiary). A collection of all the weird, strange, and horrifying NPCs, monsters, factions, and haunted items.
Chapter 4: The Haunted PNW (our take on a setting guide). Tying the setting of the Pacific Northwest together, connecting published adventures and including frameworks to help create memorable campaigns.
Chapter 5: Appendices (tools and supplements for your games). This ending section includes all the extra tools, toys, and things to help supplement and enrich play.
Bonus Round: Looking at the included adventure and hinting at the stretch goal adventures we are writing for the Deluxe Edition.
Where we are at in the Development Process
We’re ripping and roaring through it! Currently Josh and I have finished the manuscript. The only piece of the text left to finish are the adventures (which are currently in draft form but still have a little ways to go).
Next week after Gary con we are handing the text over to Jert for editing. While he’s editing those we will finish the adventures (in order to trade them to him when he finishes the edits).
Zach is hard away making art as Josh and I live in google docs land.
After we get the stuff back from Jert, it is on to integrating the edits and going into the layout phase (we have templates ready made and tested so layout will be quite quick).
Then it is another round of edits (focusing on copy/line since we’ll have the laid out text).
Then it is hyperlinking and annotating while Josh works on some of the design elements (primarily the maps for the generic maps).
Afterwards it will be a final pass and then all is ready! It both seems like there is a lot to do, but also we can see the light at the end of this exciting tunnel.
We’re excited for you to see the finished product. It really is something special and will be well worth your time and patience as we got ready for the final phase. We wanted to have the manuscript completed by launch time and everything is aligning for us to meet that internal goal.
Horrors of the Americas Jam
There is still time to submit your entires to this jam.
The Horrors of the Americas is a game jam for Liminal Horror. The system's official releases have focused in on Pacific Northwest, but as we all know, the weird things that go bump in the night are not bound to a single region. The goal of this jam is to widen the scope, and bring in different horrors, weird occurrences, and legends from featured locations all across North and South America.
While entries are encouraged to be in all shapes and sizes, this jam is focusing in on short form usable content that’s easy for Facilitators to snag and bring to the table as needed. This might be plot hooks, Resonant Artifacts, creatures, detailed locations, short adventures, noteworthy NPCs, factions, or anything you think is useful that can fit on a couple of pages. As this is the Horrors of the Americas jam, each of these entries should be intrinsically linked to a specific location in some manner that can easily be plotted onto a map. The jam itself will act as a catalog the weird, strange, and horrifying across North and South America.
To help with this, Josh Domanski created a fantastic template for making short form Liminal Horror content and used them to create some exemplar Case Files. We will also be launching the jam with another writing seminar on The Weekly Scroll (October 6th, 10am PST).
Talk to you soon!
- Goblin Archives
Can't wait! Going to ad a Lost Bay conversion guide?
Zach is doing spectacular things with the art!!! can't wait to see what you all have planned!!!!