Survivin’
It is the kind of thing people around here might say when you ask them how they are getting on, “Survivin’.” It is the sort of bleak answer to an innocuous question that is probably played for laughs. At least, if it isn’t, you laugh anyway, because, otherwise, you are likely to get drawn into a conversation.
But you know what it means, even if they are being facetious. They are probably struggling in some way. Maybe they are just tired, maybe they have a hang-over, but maybe, the world has been having its way with them. Perhaps their car broke down and they don’t have the money to get it repaired right now. Maybe they were on the way to the hospital to visit their sick mother when they broke down and they missed the visiting hours. And their phone died before they could call someone to collect them and they had to walk for miles along the hard-shoulder. They caught a terrible cold and now they can’t breathe right and sleeping is impossible and they can’t enjoy anything because merely existing has become uncomfortable. All they’re doing is survivin’.
So wouldn’t it be fun to play a game where that’s the only aim? Surprisingly enough, I think it might.
Of course, survival horror is nothing new. It is a major video game genre. People love Silent Hill! The last game I wrote about on this very blog was a survival horror TTRPG, even though it was wrapped in a cosmic horror disguise. But the game I want to write about today feels a little different. Not totally, you understand. It sticks to the same themes of helplessness, despair and terror in the face of an indifferent or downright hostile environment (part of the reason I wanted to discuss it at this time.) But it has a few indiosyncrasies that help it to stand out.
Liminal_
Pretty sure that’s pronounced “Liminal Space.” The name does make it uniquely difficult to google but that is maybe why the book is called Liminal_Survival Guide. I picked it up from Iglootree here. The creative team is Alexei Vella and Neonrot/Willow Jay. The illustrations are fun/disturbing and are all done with ASCII characters by Alexei Vella.
There are elements of the layout and graphic design (also done by Vella) that remind me of the recently released Death Match Island. The liberal use of redaction with the suggestion that parts of this “survival guide” are from some sort of real world manual, written for the employees of some institution or shadowy company is the main through line.
This survival guide is for the eyes of _ personnel only.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Alexei Vella has also contributed to a new island for that game!
Anyway, back to Liminal_. It is a map-making game at its core. You are probably going to be the GM (or Architect) if you own the book. You’ll need at least two other players and a large piece of graph paper. On it, the players (known as the Disoriented in this game) will be drawing rooms as you roll for them. There are lots of rooms to roll from. More than half the book is made up of room prompts!
The basics of the game go like this. The Disoriented start in a square room with a door in each wall. They roll off for initiative and the first one to go decides which door to choose. They can move into it at the cost of Fatigue, their only stat. The first one to enter a room is likely to take more Fatigue than those who follow, but every time anyone takes any kind of action, they are going to incur a Fatigue cost. Once they get 100 Fatigue, they’re screwed, they get Absorbed by these Back Rooms they have found themselves inhabiting.
There are rooms of different shapes and sizes, there are rooms that have items in them. Carrying items adds to Fatigue but they might help the PCs in some way. They might help them get away from Entities that occupy some of the rooms. Like Cthulhu Dark, you can’t fight them, all you can do is run. There is no fighting in this game. The Disoriented make a Fatigue Test to evade them by escaping from the room. They roll a d100 and if they get equal to or higher than their current Fatigue they succeed. If they fail, they take more Fatigue. They might also garner Injuries. Injuries cause a continuous rise in Fatigue and may have other adverse effects.
Sometimes, depending on the room prompt, a room vanishes and you better hope you are not trapped in there when that happens. Other times, you might enter a Dead Room, which is just a room with only one door, i.e. the one you came in. There are, luckily, Rest Rooms to allow the PCs to recover some of their Fatigue. And there are Escape Rooms. If you are lucky enough to keep your Fatigue low enough through your harrowing journey through the Rooms, and you avoid being Absorbed by what must surely be a sentient labyrinth, you might just escape! Seems unlikely…
The entity prompts and room prompts are well-thought out, appropriate and fun in the most despicable way possible. Here are a couple of examples:
Entity prompt: A mass of mulch, organic green material and mosses rapidly grows into a human man, a skeleton briefly visible inside it. The creatures eyes are blood red as it reaches for players, roaring.
Room prompt: Players enter a short, dimly-lit hallway. Yellowing wallpaper covers the walls, and rotting, off-white carpet covers the floor. There are several missing persons posters covering the walls. Some of them bear the faces of the players.
I do not want to give too much away here since I want to play this game and my players read this blog, but, honestly, there are so many good prompts in this book! I imagine a bloody good time rolling up these rooms and horrors.
And, on top of all those, there are even more than a hundred “Guestroom Prompts” written up by such RPG luminaries as Grant Howitt (Spire, Heart etc.), Tim Hutchings (Thousand Year Old Vampire), Tim Denee (Death Match Island) and Chris McDowall (Electric Bastionland, Into the Odd).
One of the more interesting things about the game is the lack of any kind of character creation rules or processes in it. After all, no-one has any particular defining stats. In the Roleplay section, the authors suggest that the players might just play themselves. Now, I have done this before in a Call of Cthulhu game and, while it was an interesting experience, it was, perhaps, just not for me. I immediately considered having my players use the character generation tables in Death Match Island instead. These are specifically designed to come up with contemporary sorts of characters plonked into a desperate, life-or-death situation that they have to escape from. I also considered using at least parts of the methods described in Between the Skies. Finally, maybe the Cthulhu Dark option is the best, just give the poor bastards a name and an occupation and release them into the Liminal_.
Conclusion
This feels like the ideal one-shot to me. It’s rules-lite, with a simple premise and no real character creation to speak of. There is no prep and you only need a few items like graph paper and pencils to play it. Its procedurally generated nature and its absolute mountain of prompts are likely to ensure that you never have the same room twice. My only worry is that it might be a little too one-note, that the singular motivation for the characters to survive might not be enough to keep them interested the whole time. I guess I’ll find out when I get it to the table!
What about you dear reader, do you like the idea of this Back-Roomy, SCP-like game? Have you played it? Let me know in the comments!
The Dice Pool 