Anti-Liminal Law Enforcement

First, we're making some very nice site design updates! I’ll talk more about those in the next few days, but for now, I’ve got an interesting look at how one game tries to break away from horror TTRPG tropes.

Breaking away from the horror tropes of playing as law enforcement requires a unique creativity that games like Liminal Horror by Space Penguin Ink are striving to capture.

When it comes to horror TTRPGs, it’s a classic trope for a police officer, a detective or a journalist to investigate whatever monstrosities might be exiting the ether to torment this realm. Whether you’re a hardboiled noir detective in Call of Cthulhu or a well-trained FBI agent in Delta Green, this is a standard character approach that someone can have. But that trope may run into some social barriers as more of the public and those with politically left-leaning propensities who’ve grown more critical of American law enforcement in the wake of the George Floyd riots and Black Lives Matter.

It’s undoubtedly an intentional decision for Nick Erickson, one of the authors behind Liminal Horror, an indie horror RPG that is funding its deluxe edition on Backerkit currently. A police investigation is “the easiest setup you can have,” Erickson told TTRPG Insider. But “it’s much more interesting to think about how my characters can engage with this world when they are not having that inherent power differential of being a law enforcement or government agent. How do I engage with the weird, the horrific, the strange when I'm a normal person?”

That normal differentiator is perhaps one of the more interesting elements of Liminal Horror, whose base rules give characters basic story roles like volunteer firefighter or bus driver as part of character creation. 

That’s not to say Erickson thinks Liminal Horror players should avoid law enforcement characters. The rules are flexible and real enough for a storyteller to do so if they wish. But being a police officer or special agent means that players hold a specific power dynamic that places them within the governmental structure that may seek to restrain, manipulate, and abuse the power presented by the “weird”, Erickson’s term for monsters in the game. 

Liminal Horror was initially written in 2021, so the decision to keep law enforcement out of the standard rules was informed both by Erickson’s pro-BLM politics and by this story quandary. But that means that Erickson still had a particular problem to face; incentivizing investigation.

How to Spark Interest in Investigations

One of the biggest struggles facing a GM and a writer in a horror investigation is the ‘hook’ of why the players pursue a particular goal. For example, why would the 20-something store clerk investigate further into the strange chanting in the warehouse? If it were me, I would run and seek out help from the police. Erickson attempts to address this in two ways:

Story Incentives

Giving players a reason to care is the most common and easiest tool in a storyteller’s arsenal. The monster may track a player’s sibling and want to devour their heart. Maybe the ghost is haunting your patron who has paid you handsomely to get rid of it. Or maybe your younger sibling ran off into the woods while there’s reports of people disappearing there. It’s a set of evergreen tools that can be applied within Liminal Horror and outside of it. “Look at some of your favorite horror media or even just any media in general, about what the incentives are for those characters to stay in the plot,” Erickson noted. “There is no harm in ripping off tropes, and there's no harm in taking setups from different things.”

Fallout aka Corruption

 Fallout is Liminal Horror’s replacement for the sanity function in Call of Cthulhu, where a player’s exposure to the Weird means they are changed. Perhaps there’s a black mold now crawling up your limbs, or maybe you suddenly have memories that are not your own. It’s a much stranger and possibly more interesting take on the short-term and long-term insanities that CoC inflicts on its players while avoiding the psychological tropes the genre has embraced without an appropriate understanding of mental health. But it also gives the player more reason to investigate. After all, they’re plagued with weirdness. Surely they’ll want to understand it more, or maybe even stop it?

When I was told about this new game, I assumed that the “liminal” referred to liminal horror, a genre of ideas online that inspired The Backrooms and its many successors. Liminal often describes either transitional periods or standing upon the threshold of some significant threshold. Erickson does admit that the ideas of liminal horror influenced him, but the game is now about “liminal people,” not liminal spaces.

“Your character will always be different and changed by the end. From fallout, wounds, and just the choices they made, the people they chose to save. Rarely in a horror scenario do you get out unscathed or get to be the hero,” Erickson emphasized. “Instead, you have to choose whether to survive, whether to save or whether to solve the mystery. You can’t do all three. So those choices will form who you are and who you will become in the future.”

The new expanded edition of Liminal Horror includes several resources about how to run horror games alongside the standard rules. It is currently available on Backerkit to be funded, and the game’s rules are currently available online. 

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