5 Million Worlds Rokaner Report #16, Liminal Horror Interview & Setting
RR#16, Gnaw Bone, April 2025
Hello cosmic wanderers,
April was an intense month writing and editing.
Working with Ryan Creedon on Straight Arrows has been a very rewarding process, her writing is some of the most incredibly human I’ve seen in Mothership. I built on MeatCastle GameWare’s Twisting Unseen development notes and turned that over to Will Jobst (phew!). Last Friday, I received Marx Shepherd’s final editing notes for Not Enough Scoundrels, and layout crunch begins NOW. I’ve felt immensely grateful this month to work with such talented folk, and they’ve all kept me very busy!
This month’s 5MW Rokaner Report brings us through the veil of reality to an Earth twisted by the cosmic terrors of Liminal Horror, an investigative horror ttrpg by Goblin Archives, Josh Domanski and Zach Hazard Vaupen! The team is running a Horrors of the Americas Game Jam (this month’s freebie is my submission!), and their 350+ page book, Liminal Horror Deluxe Edition went live on BackerKit two weeks ago!
I’m five sessions in to a Sunday night game of Liminal Horror, putting my players through a Shadow-altered version of The Bloom, and the game’s Deluxe Edition is my most anticipated project this year. I was eager to talk to Josh Domanski about this chonky book, so let’s get to it!
Interview with Josh Domanski
Chris: Heya Josh, thanks for coming on for 2025’s first interview! This newsletter focuses more on the Sci-Fi side of SFFH, so in case folks don’t know, could you tell us about Liminal Horror, you and the team, and what this new Deluxe Edition is all about?
Josh: Liminal Horror is a rules-lite survival horror RPG about normal characters and their fight against horrors in a contemporary time period. It’s a descendant of Cairn and Into the Odd, with crucial tweaks to make it sing for running scenarios that feel like your favorite horror movie or TV show. It’s a game about surviving mysteries rather than definitively solving them, with a big focus on how the horrors tangibly change your characters.
Goblin Archives wrote the original Liminal Horror zine, released in 2021. I joined the team in early 2022 as a co-writer and main designer for most of our projects since, though that’s a role we often trade back and forth. We expanded our team in 2024 to include Zach Hazard Vaupen as the official art director, though Zach made the cover for the initial zine release, so he’s been working closely with the system even longer than I have.
The Deluxe Edition takes that original 40ish page zine and blows it out to include additional player options, advice on running and creating horror, and a whole slew of new tools for getting your horror to the table. The end result is looking like it’s going to be over 350 pages once we wrap up the layout.
Chris: One big reason I’m stoked for the Deluxe Edition is to dive into those tools to build new Liminal Horror investigations. We’ve worked together on a couple of Mothership projects, and you have an incredible critical eye for what a GM needs at the table. Could you talk about what experiences helped you develop this skill, and how you approached this work for the Facilitator’s Guide in the Deluxe Edition?
Josh: This sounds glaringly obvious, but one of the most important things for me as a writer is that I run games. After Covid hit, I started weekly online open-table sessions. I was running a different one shot with a different system every single week, and that same server is still going to this day. While I favor rules-lite games, I run a mix of neo-trad, OSR, and storygames, so I’ve gotten a feel for a bunch of cultures of play. I believe I’ve run or played in north of 100 systems at this point if you also count hacks. When you have very little time to prepare and you run this many new things back to back, you start to get a feel for the type of material in games and published modules that actually matters to the experience at the table.
In the Deluxe Edition, the Facilitator’s Guide is my baby. When I got into horror RPGs, it took about a dozen sessions before I felt like I truly nailed the right tone and tension. Running effective horror is quite a bit different than running standard fantasy or sci-fi. For the Facilitator’s Guide, I’ve distilled years worth of lessons into 70-ish pages, with a focus on learning to run the game better and actually get your ideas to the table. We’ve also included sections often missing from similar systems like how to write good clues, make good monsters, and adapt your favorite horror stories or modules to Liminal Horror. The major focus of the book is to support play, so this section is a key part of that.
Chris: That’s a metric fuckton of experience to share. I feel like Liminal Horror games have a greater effect on me, as a Facilitator and player, than standard Lovecraft mythos games because the horrors are new. The Deluxe Edition contains a whole bestiary of new horrors. Can you talk about you and Gobin Archives’ process for writing the Catalog of the Strange?
Josh: The basic stat blocks for Liminal Horror take up all of about two lines of text, easy to generate. For the Catalog, we focus on that core principle of supporting play. So we read a bunch of bestiaries, like Monster Overhaul from Skerples and theMerry Mushmen’s Folklore Bestiary, and pulled out common, interesting elements. Along with stats, you get an explanation of these creatures to help figure out how to use them, a list of creature variants, and additional elements like monster-specific Fallout. Most are set to roll tables, so you can just grab some dice and let fate decide.
The Catalog of the Strange is the single largest section in the book. We wanted to make sure we had three things: enough distinct creature types to cover a wide range of scenarios, classic creatures and fantasy analogs for quick conversion, and truly unique entries. Beyond those goals, what makes for a good range of creatures? Annoying minions, tough creatures, incredibly intimidating “bosses,” and because this is Liminal Horror, strange cosmic horrors. We’ve broken that down into Lesser Horrors, Greater Horrors, Resonant Horrors, and Ritual Users, and this expands further into Factions, Cults, and Dead Gods.
These categories provide the basic roles for the creatures, making it easy to focus on the horror aspects. A big focus of Liminal Horror is corruption, so many of these creatures were once human, while others have leaked into our reality from strange dimensions. Then we have a little fun with the entries, like the Opportunistic Radioactive Cannibals (ORCs). My favorite entry is the Creepers, a play on the Fresno Nightcrawler. That’s one for the true cryptid freaks out there. I can almost guarantee someone is going to read a little bit of text in there and immediately know they need to inject the Creepers into an upcoming session.
Chris: Haha, that’s not the first time you’ve teased the Creepers, looking forward to reading about them. At the time of writing, the Deluxe Edition has unlocked five Stretch Goals, including the new physical zine Case Files 001. From the name, I feel like you have more planned, eh? What’s in Case Files 001, and what other Stretch Goals have you excited?
Josh: The Case Files format comes from stuff like Thoughts & Prayers from Stockholm Kartell and Carcass Crawler for OSE, a collection of small things that wouldn’t get printed alone. We’re reviving slashed pieces of the Deluxe Edition for Case Files along with a few short scenarios. This is the first issue in what we’re planning on at least doing annually to get new scenarios and ideas out to folks. They’ll be solid interstitial releases while we work on pulling bigger projects on our plate together.
One stretch goal I’m excited about, but not quite sure we’ll ultimately hit is The Bureau: Remastered. The 2022 module is a fan favorite that has temporarily fallen out of print. We’re using the reprint opportunity to tweak the module a bit, add a new encounter system, toss in a bonus floor, and make some quality of life improvements. Hitting that stretch goal is going to ensure our attention is focused on wrapping that first in lieu of some of the other projects we’re working on.
Chris: Gotta say, I would also love to see The Bureau: Remastered come to fruition quicker! But also other projects, 👀, haha. Thanks for sharing your process and work, Josh, really looking forward to this big beautiful book. I highly recommend folk check out the Liminal Horror Deluxe Edition, on BackerKit now.
Horrors of the Americas Jam
The setting for Liminal Horror focuses on the Pacific Northwest, and the Horrors of the Americas Jam invites designers to include their own regional horrors, settings, weird folk and locations from anywhere in North and South America. What’s wonderful too is that the Liminal Horror team have provided free design templates, with the goal of including the 25+ entries into a Horrors of the Americas POD book.
I’ve lived in France for 15+ years, but I grew up in southern Indiana. My entry focuses on fictionalized flea markets, operators, and Resonant Artifacts of Gnaw Bone, IN. Grab it for free on itch! If I have the time before the end of the Jam, I would love to build out the Flea Market NPCs, Resonant Artifacts, and Wares tables with another spread. This micro-setting also connects to the Liminal Horror module I’ve been tinkering with for over a year now. I wonder if any southern Hoosiers will notice what event I’m aiming to create a module around…
Signing off,
Chris Airiau
Great interview. Definitely more informed about Liminal Horror.