Introducing The Roaring Age: a Liminal Horror Hack! The audience is me.

My next big project is one that nobody wants or asked for, and it's due by August at the latest. LET'S GO!!!

It’s a big dream, and I’m feeling a season of creativity and productivity come on, so let’s take on a big undertaking. Introducing, for the ongoing Liminal Horror Twisted Classics Jam…

The Goal: The Roaring Age will be the go-to resource for running 1920’s Lovecraftian Horror scenarios in Liminal Horror – a classic tradition in RPGs with a New School makeover.

I’ve mentioned this before, and now that there’s a jam that’s giving me the opportunity. I love classic Call of Cthulhu scenarios and enjoy the prospect of running them, but think they are often written very poorly as game material, and the mechanics of Basic Roleplay (BRP) are repellent to me, with all respect to my elders and those who paved the way.

To be clear, this is a project that nobody wants. 

Even in the Jam rules, the folks running it are lightly nudging people away from Lovecraft. Ah well.

If I had to generalize, most Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition players are a little too married to their anachronisms to go seeking new systems, and most of the community around Liminal Horror is allergic to 1920’s horror roleplaying and the Lovecraft Mythos generally, for a swathe of reasons. Folks have expressed that this is the precise sort of thing they do not care about. So the audience is one: Myself. And possibly also my fiancé, or some friends I might run this for. I think

Joseph Krausz

said he might like it. That’ll do for me.

There is something in 1920’s horror gaming that I think that I think deserves rescue

One of Chaosium’s great achievements with Call of Cthulhu is that it developed its own genre distinct from Lovecraft’s own fiction. Much the way that Dungeon & Dragons isn’t quite Tolkienesque, but rather its own symbolic palette, Call of Cthulhu isn’t really that “Lovecraftian” at all. Some of the consequences of this are wonderful – the genre has expanded to seamlessly incorporate Yog-Sothoth right alongside classic religious horror, zombie–style monster horror, and bind it all up in historical tropes Lovecraft never spent much time on, like prohibition-era gangsters. Other developments are less desirable, like the total aestheticization of an era of history that often deals poorly, or not at all, with that era’s greatest contradictions and atrocities.

I think we all recognize that ^this isn’t what Howard Phillips had in mind, but is still pretty f&^%ing awesome.

So, more than a way to run one game’s fiction on another game’s skeleton, I hope The Roaring Age will be an opportunity to look at 1920’s horror with fresh eyes and great intention. 

The 1920’s was a time of incredible musical innovation, scientific wonders, cultural tensions, the re-drawing of identity lines, of prohibition and religious fervor. The 1920’s was also a proper age of horrors. It was the USA’s primary historical laboratory of racist ideology and state-sponsored terrorism against its own citizens, a time when we incarcerated and tortured the sick or even the inconvenient. Chris Spivey showed in Harlem Unbound 2nd Edition, that much of this can be dealt with triumphantly when dealt with directly, where it’s otherwise been dealt with tastelessly.

The 1920’s are a great period for horror games. What would it look like to enter horror stories in a time of cultural turmoil, law enforcement impunity, societal obsession with purity, a time when it looked like scientific advancement was about to crack the universe open like an egg? Surely something new can happen.

What I will include:

• New character creation, backgrounds, equipment lists – As proper, adapting some backgrounds and equipment for both the time period and the genre.

• Custom fallout – Guidance for using fallout in classic historical horror, with new examples (leaving the core rules mostly untouched), with adjustments for long-term play and campaign-level consequences

• Converting scenario structure from classic modules to slick, usable, fun NSR form and format.

• “Roaring Age Horror: How to horrify in the age of prohibition, jazz, moralizing, and scientific wonder” – guidance on the genre.

• Lite rules for dealing with archival research, Mythos tomes, cars, and other tropes from CoC-style gameplay.

• Factions/Threats - A section on fleshing out, honing, and using various threats to make the game feel dynamic.

• One-Page Oracle - Over on YouTube I’ve been showing how to use oracles to improve GMing, I’ll design one custom, probably close to what Black Sword Hack provides. Might actually flavor this as “Channeling the Old Masters” to give it that theosophical 1920’s flair.

• Conversions and Bestiary - Much of the guidance on stat conversion is already written by the Liminal Horror team. I might provide a small bestiary including classics like the Mi-Go or Night-gaunts.

• Scenarios - Part of me wants to convert something classic like The Haunting or Amidst the Ancient Trees or Crimson Letters or None More Black to this system, but the legality of doing so is dodgy, so I will have to look elsewhere I think, or put together something new.

• And more…

My design challenges:

Of course, there are two different gaming styles that are tough to reconcile. Besides certain mechanical considerations like translating CoC’s “Sanity” mechanics toward LH’s “Fallout” – something I very much I look forward to – there are a few major hurdles that jump out at me…

The Problem of Archetype

Call of Cthulhu is a game genre that makes great use of background and niche. You might have a group of characters that include a biology student, a flapper, and a boxing champ, and then the game system gives you skills or bonuses that help you solve skills in your special archetypical way.

Liminal Horror does no such thing, at least not with classes or skills, and its a goal worth reaching for in a way that is as compelling as can be with as little crunch as possible. I’m no serious game designer, but I’m fairly sure this is what ya’ll mean when you say “niche protection”?

What I might try…

• Kits and inventory: In many NSR games in Liminal Horror’s family, inventory is how you express background professions  – the gravedigger is a gravedigger because has a shovel and keys to the cemetery. This might be all that is needed, combined with good GM guidance.

• Bonds/Responsibilities: It could be really fun to tie each background to a sort of motivation or need for investigation, and then mechanically rewarding it. For example, the background of Antiquarian might come with “to feed wealthy benefactors with a diet of new curiosities" or a Student might have “to procure new subjects of research for your department." As I’ll mention again, this solves other problems. (Liminal Horror’s Josh D asked me to look at Orbital Blues for further ideas and inspiration.)

The Open World

Liminal Horror is based on Cairn, a game that thrives in dungeons and hex crawls. The Liminal Horror scenarios that help make the game notorious – The Mall, The Bureau, The Bloom – are all fairly bounded environments, with time crunches and no way out. However, the genre we want to play in often puts entire cities at your feet, and gives investigators plenty of time. What can we do for Liminal Horror to reintroduce tension and drama without such clear scarcity, boundary, and urgency? And how do we manage a big ol’ open world?

What I might try…

• Factions: I’m going to have strong guidance on how to easily translate the threats in a scenario into a small collection of active influences on the fiction. I won’t say too much here, but when done elegantly, this can be key to putting living pressures on your players. The newer Liminal Horror book has some faction guidance, but I’ve got my own style.

• Timekeeping: I’m playing here with a little bit of a timekeeping worksheet. Again, the newest Liminal Horror book has good procedures, but I’m considering how I can weave it together comprehensively. I’ve always loved Mausritter’s turn tracker, though there’s no need to be quite SO granular.

• Bonds/Responsibilities: The scheme mentioned above could play an essential role in keeping players focused on sticking to task. If their background provides a bond, and the bond gives them a mechanical pressure to investigate the paranormal, I think this could go a long way.

Long term play

There’s this old trope that goes something like this: Call of Cthulhu is a game wherein your characters are more likely to die or “go crazy” than save the day. This is silly, and comes from another time in our hobby’s history. Mostly, it does not survive contact with reality — most of my CoC one-shots end with the characters making it out all alive and ready for a second mystery. That said, we do want to preserve a tension between spiraling into the abyss, and giving players a way to stave off utter annihilation and hold onto their characters for a longer haul.

What I might try…

• Who knows? I will have to figure out how to make adventuring sustainable for characters on a sort of NSR horror death-spiral, to make it so that characters can accumulate Fallout, yes, but perhaps manage it. If I can tie this to things I’m already building around, like my Backgrounds, so much the better. Delta Green and Cthulhu Deep Green are instructive here in their attempts using “anchors.”

What I’m drawing from

I won’t list a full bibliography, but some of my gaming touchstones are fairly obvious:

• Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition

• Delta Green

• Cthulhu Dark

• Trophy Dark

• Brindlewood Bay

• Mothership

• Silent Legions

There are authors and films and shows and musical influences that are important to me, but I won’t get into them all now. Josh D gave me some homework, telling me to go read Stealing Cthulhu by Graham Walmsley.

Some other related project ideas for the future:

South Street Seaport - The actual setting dream is The Roaring Age, but set 30-40 years earlier in Gilded Age NYC (think: The Alienist, or Gangs of New York) in NYC’s historic South Street Seaport. I have a lot of thoughts here, but if people like The Roaring Age, this could be a sequel.

Mountains of Madness - I think Lovecraft’s classic At the Mountains of Madness needs a serious modern refresh. An arctic horror adventure that borrows not just from Poe and Lovecraft but The Thing, from True Detective: Night Country, from books like Anna Kavan’s Ice and Simmons’ The Terror and films like The Abyss and Underwater.  Maybe a point-crawl megadungeon in the genre of Research Horror? This is probably what I actually should have done for this jam, but The Roaring Age is taking up too much space in my brain.

Looks ya’ll, I’m open to any input and recommendations and guidance here, so hop into the comments or wherever you find me, and give me those ideas!