Liminal Blues: The Trouble(’s) With Fallout

Today we’re going to be talking about Fallout in Liminal Horror arguably THE mechanic that makes the game what it is. For those not in the know Liminal Horror is a horror tabletop RPG based on the wide wonderful ruleset of Cairn which is also based on the NSR Ur-Text Into The Odd. It’s light but with enough tricks up its sleeve to make it both fun and spooky enough for The Thing in a Mall or Control: The Megadungeon. I’ve been running Liminal Horror for years now through campaigns, one-shots, dungeon crawls, and city wide investigations. I’ve run every one of the official adventures at least twice and just wrapped up the Parthogenesis of Hungry Hollow so you could say I’m a bit of a fan. What keeps me coming back to Liminal Horror over Call of Cthulhu, Kult Divinity Lost or World of Darkness which I have immensely enjoyed in the past is the game’s defining feature, Fallout.

Fallout is how the game dodges problematic tropes of “mental illness bad” found in the games above by drawing instead on the liminality of the characters. To love is to be changed especially when that love is at the ends of a vampire’s fangs or the last demonically possessed tome in the cultists’ library. You get Fallout by taking too much Stress which is a form of damage instead of a different meter entirely like Sanity or the Stress in Mothership. Getting scared or stabbed both reducing your HP does a lot to add to the tension of every errant footfall whether exploring a mansion or a haunted forest. Each Fallout takes a precious inventory slot and does things like giving you a halo of black flame or causing mycelial cords to wrap around your nerves making you stronger at a cost. But rather than a introducing a mechanical cost for becoming weird Fallout generally grants beneficial or strange abilities with the cost being more how your character learns to live with them than something like losing your sanity. Every single entry rather than becoming a list of debuffs for participating in the horrors the game asks you to rush headlong in to becomes another avenue of injecting the weird into the characters and more often than not encouraging players to delve deeper than they would have otherwise. Why shouldn’t they? Sure they could get sacrificed on the altar of the river god but they could just as easily get crocodile teeth and start chomping the cultists that kidnapped their friends. With Fallout instead of reaching some madness end state which may as well be death in other games the character’s simply become more interesting. All in all it’s a great scaffold with which frame your character’s journey into horror but I wanted to take it a step further. Could Fallout not just be a consequence but the reason for their sojourn into the darkness to begin with? If Fallout is horror consequence as progression could we make you want to have it just as much as a +1 Sword?

I’m currently running a campaign in Liminal Horror inspired by survival horror video games both classic and modern. A megadungeon crawl through a mysterious facility constructed inside of a nightmare to halt the machinations of an evil corporation on an unsuspecting populace while dealing with their own unrequited darkness. Is that Resident Evil enough? I hope so. To facilitate this I’ve been adding bits to Liminal Horror like ammunition, rules for safe rooms, backtracking, as well as management of light and even a version of the Underclock which has been introduced as the Tension Clock in the Liminal Horror Deluxe Edition. More impactful than all of that has been the introduction of a new type of Fallout; Shadows. Shadows came about from a question posited during the Liminal Horror writers seminar in which a viewer asked the authors whether there was any mechanic they’d be willing to drastically alter Liminal Horror to accommodate and the answer was Troubles from the wonderful lo-fi sci-fi western RPG Orbital Blues. Trouble’s are character defining traumas, creeds, and drama generators which power our sad cowboys through the frontier galaxy. Your character in Orbital Blues begins with at least one and they look like this: Taken from my own Troubles here.

A Trouble contains questions for you the player to ask about your character gaining a resource called Blues. After playing for some time you can accrue more Blues when stressors or other problems arise related to your Trouble until you gain enough Blues to have the mother of all crashouts in a Trouble’s Brewin’ Scene. At the end of your scene if your not spaced you can choose to get even further entangled by gaining a whole new Trouble which asks even more about your character. Gaining more Trouble’s also has the effect of allowing access to more abilities in the form of gambits. Now, why the hell am I still talking about this? Go play orbital blues. Come back and we can talk about how Fallouts and Troubles aren’t so different after all.

Like Fallout a Trouble gets the characters involved in the world. Where they differ I think is in agency. The context of the critical Stress determines the how’s and why’s of the Fallout received whereas the Trouble is colored by interrogation of the character during play. You are rewarded by answering those questions with more Blues which in turn grants you more Trouble. I was fascinated by this mechanism so when I decided to create a similar engine to fuel adventure in a megadungeon environment I decided to fuse the concepts together with another called Glimpses taken from the Mindstorm blog link here. To keep this short, though you should read the blogpost it’s excellent, Glimpses are essentially collaborative worldbuilding questions that the players get to introduce into the story instead of the GM. Now I know the narrative game alarm bells just went off but before we go to war about incentives and storytelling and systems that may or may not matter let’s introduce those caveats. A Glimpse is created beforehand, not just any freely made up bit, but something the GM is inviting the players to tinker with. Just like Troubles these are questions not dictated by the campaign or the story of the location but by the players interacting with it. Glimpses reward curiosity about the world just as the Trouble questions reward curiosity about the characters that the players inhabit.

So what is a Shadow and how does it attempt to fuse the authorial agency of glimpses with the inspiration and mechanical benefit of Troubles? Shadows are meant to be taken during character creation when choosing an investigator kit. This one is an example from my adventure Sleep Study, the aforementioned nightmare facility megadungeon.

Missing Person

They’re gone and with them the part of you that was made together. At least, that’s what you remember. But now you see signs of them everywhere. Their voice echoing in the walls. Their scent lingering in the air. They can’t possibly be here, can they?

When you run out of ammo, batteries, or Hit Protection, you can make a Luck Save. On a successful save, you find what you need at your feet or in your hands when it wasn’t there before along with some sign that you were helped from whom you are searching for. Mixed successes place what you need just out of reach. Failure causes their “help” to manifest as a trap making things worse.

Whenever you reveal one of these Echoes during play you gain 1 Pneuma.

Echoes of the Missing Person

• You recognize a discarded piece of clothing or accessory belonging to your missing person. What is it and why would they leave it behind?

• You start to see them everywhere even in the creatures haunting this place. Where do you see them most? When you see them what do you want to say to them that you couldn’t before they were gone?

• You just missed them again. What sign of their passing is obvious to you and no-one else? What mistake do they make time and time again you were always there to correct?

• This room reminds you of one of the last times you were ever together before they were gone. What was the last thing you did together? What clue remains in the room to what ruined it?

• You feel their presence nearby. What makes you hesitate turning the corner and seeing them again?

Each Shadow comes with a feature as a fallout would and five Echoes which are my version of Glimpses. Answering an Echo during play grants you a resource called Pneuma since I’m on my Jungian spiel. I’m still working out the economy of it but without a stress caused blues check like in Orbital Blues I’ve settled on having Echoes show up during play as well when asking my players paint the scene questions while exploring the dungeon. When you gain enough Pneuma you can use it to improve the Shadow, grant yourself an ability called a persona, or even cure unwanted Fallout which for the purposes of my project allows you to cleanse hauntings in your Safe Room. Improving the Shadow amounts to what I called Integration which grants you additional Echoes to answer and a new ability but makes you even weirder in the process just as Fallouts already do. Example here.

Integration:

You gain an Associate who bears an uncanny resemblance to your missing person but is slightly off. They have stats and equipment as befitting the person you are looking for and they will help you in the Dream without question. When your near them gain Advantage on Saves within their area of expertise and in combat they will attack when you do. If they should die take D10 Stress and they reappear nearby the next time you rest in a safe place completely unscathed with no knowledge of how they got there or the events that led to their death.

• They use a phrase or slang that was an inside joke with your missing person. How do they say it wrong?

• They carry a memento that belonged to your missing person. What is it and how do they wear it better than yours ever did?

• They have a strange tick or mannerism that betrays a horrific truth beneath the surface. In what way are they like a creature you have seen here in the Dream?

• Looking at them reminds you of the way your missing person betrayed your trust. Why do you blame them regardless?

• In many ways they are the opposite of your missing person. What is one trait of theirs’ that you wish they had?

The intent is not to replace Fallouts but to reinforce on to them using Shadows to get players on board with adding layers to their characters and the world. I’m also noodling around with a final level of Actualization taking cues from His Majesty The Worm and Heart: The City Beneath in allowing you to choose to retire your character but allowing you to leave a tangible mark on the game world for those who come after but that is far more suited for the megadungeon environment I’m designing in. Shadows and Echoes themed allow me to torment in the manner of Silent Hill without drawing from a heavily convoluted backstory and hours of prep allowing us instead to figure it out together which feeds back into the tension creating a survival horror story rewarding the players who help make the rope with which to hang themselves.

I hope this all made sense in some way. Thanks for reading. If you have any thoughts on the systems presented so be sure to reach out here or on Twitter or discord as I am in the LH discord but as a lurker. Expect more on Sleep Study and another iteration on Safe Room downtime soonish.

Special shoutout to Under Ashen Skies a Silent Hill themed solo survival horror sandbox game that inspired the entire idea. Though I didn't personally vibe with much of the system or fiction presented the intent and deconstruction of survival horror tropes and gameplay within is spot on. You can find it here, not associated. It's an excellent game even if its not perfect for me.