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Liminal
There’s more to the world than most of us know. Academic wizards and gutter mages, vampires and werewolves, Men in Black working for a secret religious order and a police division investigating Fortean crimes. The cities and the very landscape encompass haunted places and lost bubbles of history, faerie courts and places of power.
But you know. You’re at the edge of the Hidden World. Maybe you’ve seen it and can’t ignore it. Maybe you’re from the Hidden World, but with ties to humanity.
Liminal is a self-contained tabletop roleplaying game about those on the boundary between the modern day United Kingdom and the Hidden World- the world of secret societies of magicians, a police division investigating Fortean crimes, fae courts, werewolf gangs, and haunted places where the walls between worlds are thin.
The players portray Liminals - those who stand between the mortal and magical realms, with ties to each. Examples of Liminals include:
A magician who acts as a warden to protect unaware mortals from supernatural menaces;
Someone of mysterious birth who is perhaps half Fae. In any case they are caught up in Faerie politics whether they like it or not;
A burglar who steals supernatural relics;
A werewolf who still has many ties to ordinary people;
A dhampir, striving to do good despite their vampiric infection;
A mortal detective who knows some of the real strangeness out there.
The magical world has a basis in British and Irish folklore and legends, along with ghost stories and modern day popular takes on the supernatural in fiction. Inspirations from fiction include the "real world" fantasy novels of Ben Aaranovitch, Jim Butcher, Emma Bull, Susanna Clarke, Harry Connolly, Charles de Lint, Neil Gaiman, Benedict Jacka, and Helene Wecker.
But you know. You’re at the edge of the Hidden World. Maybe you’ve seen it and can’t ignore it. Maybe you’re from the Hidden World, but with ties to humanity.
Liminal is a self-contained tabletop roleplaying game about those on the boundary between the modern day United Kingdom and the Hidden World- the world of secret societies of magicians, a police division investigating Fortean crimes, fae courts, werewolf gangs, and haunted places where the walls between worlds are thin.
The players portray Liminals - those who stand between the mortal and magical realms, with ties to each. Examples of Liminals include:
A magician who acts as a warden to protect unaware mortals from supernatural menaces;
Someone of mysterious birth who is perhaps half Fae. In any case they are caught up in Faerie politics whether they like it or not;
A burglar who steals supernatural relics;
A werewolf who still has many ties to ordinary people;
A dhampir, striving to do good despite their vampiric infection;
A mortal detective who knows some of the real strangeness out there.
The magical world has a basis in British and Irish folklore and legends, along with ghost stories and modern day popular takes on the supernatural in fiction. Inspirations from fiction include the "real world" fantasy novels of Ben Aaranovitch, Jim Butcher, Emma Bull, Susanna Clarke, Harry Connolly, Charles de Lint, Neil Gaiman, Benedict Jacka, and Helene Wecker.
286 pages, Hardcover
Published March 20, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 30, 2023
2.5, rounded down.
Liminal is a bit of a frustrating problem, for me.
I find the lore and background content to be intriguing, well-researched, and enticing for play. However, I find the game system underneath to be sadly underdeveloped and hollow.
This is a case for me where the game simply shouldn’t have its own system, because the mechanics drag the well-crafted lore down. It reads like a World of Darkness setting with a weaker system, but it could also be really well translated into Year Zero Engine, PBTA, or Cortex with minimal effort and any of those would breathe more life into the gameplay.
My other issue with the book is the layout and editing. There are places where text goes over images of the same colour, where headers are the wrong class, where rules are referred to by what must be an earlier name and not the final—where a rule’s placement is referenced as being “below” several times before finally appearing several pages later.
The art itself is lovely and contributes to the mood of the book, but the layout doesn’t compliment it and drags it down.
Overall, the creative side of the game is great, but the technical side leaves much to be desired.
Liminal is a bit of a frustrating problem, for me.
I find the lore and background content to be intriguing, well-researched, and enticing for play. However, I find the game system underneath to be sadly underdeveloped and hollow.
This is a case for me where the game simply shouldn’t have its own system, because the mechanics drag the well-crafted lore down. It reads like a World of Darkness setting with a weaker system, but it could also be really well translated into Year Zero Engine, PBTA, or Cortex with minimal effort and any of those would breathe more life into the gameplay.
My other issue with the book is the layout and editing. There are places where text goes over images of the same colour, where headers are the wrong class, where rules are referred to by what must be an earlier name and not the final—where a rule’s placement is referenced as being “below” several times before finally appearing several pages later.
The art itself is lovely and contributes to the mood of the book, but the layout doesn’t compliment it and drags it down.
Overall, the creative side of the game is great, but the technical side leaves much to be desired.
May 6, 2020
A great read. Nice easy to use system with a load of ideas flowing from the pages. Just got to write something and run it now.
Maybe I will, over the next few weeks try to run an on-line game.
Thanks Dr. Mitch et al. Fantastic book.
Maybe I will, over the next few weeks try to run an on-line game.
Thanks Dr. Mitch et al. Fantastic book.
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December 2, 2021Liminal
Did I ever announce publicly that I wouldn’t buy any other Bundles until I reviewed all the ones I have previously bought? I hope not, because I’ve probably bought 3-4 since I’ve started this review process in earnest.
Anyway, this was a cheaper bundle — usually the Bundles of Holding have a base price and then a level-up price to get more books, but this was just a fixed price (around $10) for nine books:
1. The Liminal core book
2. Pax Londinium, a sourcebook for London
3. 7 adventures: Prodigal Son, The Haunting House, Beneath the Stones, Ghosts of Glencoe, The Repairer of Reputations, Shadow to the Light, and The Oak and the Amulet
The core idea here is that you play a crew of British folks with one foot in the mundane world and one foot in the hidden world of magic. This is, explicitly, inspired by Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series, and until Chaosium publishes that RPG, this is the closest you will get to playing in this world of secret magicians, fairies amok, werewolf gangs, ghosts, and a police division that gets called when things are weird.
This is not exactly a minimalist game, but it is very story-forward, with characters defined by drives and focuses (which are determined, tough, and magic? Basically these are just buckets of potentially special powers to buy), with combat that can damage your body or your mind.
Seems solid, though the case files are a mixed bag; and the London sourcebook feels maybe overstuffed but also thin, if that makes sense. Like it introduces a bunch of new magical secret societies, but I feel like I need more info on them to make them really pop. (The other big danger with a sourcebook like this is that it makes London seem wholly magical. I wonder if you could present a sourcebook more in the style of the Space 1889 books, which used an adventure to get the players interacting with some new part of the world.)
But I think… I don’t know, I’m trying to put my finger on why I don’t love this, and one thing that jumps out at me — both as a reason and as a microcosm for the bigger issue — is the art. There’s basically two styles of art here: one looks like photographs that have been run through a “line-drawing” filter in Photoshop (and I really think they might be). These are all pictures of people in completely ordinary settings and poses, like, say, an old man in an armchair, placed near the description of the Council of Merlin. This feels like a cheap way to illustrate something that doesn’t entirely need illustrating: because there’s nothing unusual or interesting about the subject, all I’m left with is that question of whether it was done on Photoshop or not.
The other art style are these really nice (digital?) paintings that are all fine — they’re all done by the same guy (Jason Behnke) so you can look up his portfolio and see them yourself. But many of them are pretty generic, like “hooded occultist holding censor” or “wolf” — which are fine, but don’t really set this game apart from any others.
(One thing to note: the game is very inclusive and the art if pretty reflective of that — I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a PC depicted with vitiligo before. Also: the game notes that as the seat of an empire, Britain may have all sorts of world mythological figures and monsters. That’s not really depicted in the adventures I think, but it definitely gives scope to the enterprising GM.)
To be clear, there are some pictures in here that definitely seem like they couldn’t be in another RPG book (except maybe Changeling), like a fairy woman asleep on a carp; but most of the paintings, however nice, don’t really give much flavor to this. Like, if I said, “it’s a world where the magical and the mundane sometimes uncomfortably meet,” you could probably come up with a bunch of things that this game does. That’s not a bad thing, as I’ve noted: there’s a place for genre ideas that are generic, as in, belonging to that genre and presented without twist. People like some familiarity (and that might even be more true for most gamers, for whom most of the game takes place in the imagination).
And yet, I keep thinking about ways to make this general premise more exciting and less middle-of-the-genre. For instance, what would a game like this be like if the fairy world was governed not just by courts but by a mind-bogging bureaucracy a la Brazil. (I mean, I’ve never quite seen fairies as dystopian bureaucracy before, but there’s a big overlap between the two, considering they are both founded on rules that everyone but you seems to know.) Or what if there were a Fables-style dictatorship in Fairy and your job wasn’t as the cops trying to keep the two worlds separate, but as social workers trying to find place for displaced people? (Note also: these two versions aren’t ex nihilo, I’m just remixing existing properties to try to find something that has some difference or even maybe a POV.)
Did I ever announce publicly that I wouldn’t buy any other Bundles until I reviewed all the ones I have previously bought? I hope not, because I’ve probably bought 3-4 since I’ve started this review process in earnest.
Anyway, this was a cheaper bundle — usually the Bundles of Holding have a base price and then a level-up price to get more books, but this was just a fixed price (around $10) for nine books:
1. The Liminal core book
2. Pax Londinium, a sourcebook for London
3. 7 adventures: Prodigal Son, The Haunting House, Beneath the Stones, Ghosts of Glencoe, The Repairer of Reputations, Shadow to the Light, and The Oak and the Amulet
The core idea here is that you play a crew of British folks with one foot in the mundane world and one foot in the hidden world of magic. This is, explicitly, inspired by Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series, and until Chaosium publishes that RPG, this is the closest you will get to playing in this world of secret magicians, fairies amok, werewolf gangs, ghosts, and a police division that gets called when things are weird.
This is not exactly a minimalist game, but it is very story-forward, with characters defined by drives and focuses (which are determined, tough, and magic? Basically these are just buckets of potentially special powers to buy), with combat that can damage your body or your mind.
Seems solid, though the case files are a mixed bag; and the London sourcebook feels maybe overstuffed but also thin, if that makes sense. Like it introduces a bunch of new magical secret societies, but I feel like I need more info on them to make them really pop. (The other big danger with a sourcebook like this is that it makes London seem wholly magical. I wonder if you could present a sourcebook more in the style of the Space 1889 books, which used an adventure to get the players interacting with some new part of the world.)
But I think… I don’t know, I’m trying to put my finger on why I don’t love this, and one thing that jumps out at me — both as a reason and as a microcosm for the bigger issue — is the art. There’s basically two styles of art here: one looks like photographs that have been run through a “line-drawing” filter in Photoshop (and I really think they might be). These are all pictures of people in completely ordinary settings and poses, like, say, an old man in an armchair, placed near the description of the Council of Merlin. This feels like a cheap way to illustrate something that doesn’t entirely need illustrating: because there’s nothing unusual or interesting about the subject, all I’m left with is that question of whether it was done on Photoshop or not.
The other art style are these really nice (digital?) paintings that are all fine — they’re all done by the same guy (Jason Behnke) so you can look up his portfolio and see them yourself. But many of them are pretty generic, like “hooded occultist holding censor” or “wolf” — which are fine, but don’t really set this game apart from any others.
(One thing to note: the game is very inclusive and the art if pretty reflective of that — I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a PC depicted with vitiligo before. Also: the game notes that as the seat of an empire, Britain may have all sorts of world mythological figures and monsters. That’s not really depicted in the adventures I think, but it definitely gives scope to the enterprising GM.)
To be clear, there are some pictures in here that definitely seem like they couldn’t be in another RPG book (except maybe Changeling), like a fairy woman asleep on a carp; but most of the paintings, however nice, don’t really give much flavor to this. Like, if I said, “it’s a world where the magical and the mundane sometimes uncomfortably meet,” you could probably come up with a bunch of things that this game does. That’s not a bad thing, as I’ve noted: there’s a place for genre ideas that are generic, as in, belonging to that genre and presented without twist. People like some familiarity (and that might even be more true for most gamers, for whom most of the game takes place in the imagination).
And yet, I keep thinking about ways to make this general premise more exciting and less middle-of-the-genre. For instance, what would a game like this be like if the fairy world was governed not just by courts but by a mind-bogging bureaucracy a la Brazil. (I mean, I’ve never quite seen fairies as dystopian bureaucracy before, but there’s a big overlap between the two, considering they are both founded on rules that everyone but you seems to know.) Or what if there were a Fables-style dictatorship in Fairy and your job wasn’t as the cops trying to keep the two worlds separate, but as social workers trying to find place for displaced people? (Note also: these two versions aren’t ex nihilo, I’m just remixing existing properties to try to find something that has some difference or even maybe a POV.)
September 12, 2024
This book really succeeds in getting the reader to want to start playing the RPG as soon as possible. From the relatively rules-light system - quick to learn and interiorize -, to the character creation - filled with really compelling character concepts -, passing through the complex faction tapestry and its associated mechanics and the two included pre-written adventures, everything is set up in a way to allow you to get the game to the table as soon as possible. The writing and the art drips with evocative Liminal Britain flavour, even to non-locals. The book itself is very well laid-out.
June 22, 2024
Gorgeous artwork and a fine but unremarkable system (the classic 2d6 vs difficulty number). The problem I have with this is that it is very tied to its setting, which is pretty standard urban fantasy, and urban fantasy has to do something really spectacular to impress me (which this didn't).
It's obvious that a lot of thought was put into the setting, though, to the point where I feel like the author just threw the system in just to have something to hang their setting on.
It's obvious that a lot of thought was put into the setting, though, to the point where I feel like the author just threw the system in just to have something to hang their setting on.
January 17, 2020
A fantastic British Urban Fantasy, folklore RPG. Simple and evocative. Echoes of Neverwhere and Rivers of London. Top stuff!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews