FACILITATOR PRINCIPLES

Principles are your basic guidelines for running Liminal Horror. Return here when you’re looking to challenge your Investigators or whenever you are indecisive about how to push a scenario further.

INFORMATION

• Information should never be hidden behind rolls.
• Provide information readily and freely to facilitate critical thinking and clever play.
• Elicit questions from players and give them direct answers.

SECRETS

• Leverage the themes of dread, forbidden knowledge, and mutability of human flesh.
• Provide information on the physical and tangible reality to players, but keep the true nature of things just out of reach.
• Give Investigators opportunities to pull at threads, drawing them deeper into the tangled web of the weird.
• You do not always need to know all the answers, especially if Investigators could not reasonably obtain them. Sometimes things are purely a mystery.

PREPARATION

• Make the world alive, allow it to change and grow because of players’ actions.
• Be flexible in your preparation. Create situations and possibilities.
• Plot and story should emerge organically and not be predefined.
• Give NPCs and factions motivations, flaws, and drives. Have NPCs react accordingly to their principles, on and off screen. NPCs should always have a drive to survive.
• Play to find out what happens.

DIFFICULTY

• Realism and fictional positioning are a good starting place for defining difficulty.
• Choices should have consequences, and all failure should be interesting.
• Saves cover various instances of uncertainty and risk. If there is neither, do not call for a roll.
• Reward cleverness and ingenuity.

DANGER

• Characters change as a result of play, either from the choices they make, the Wounds they suffer, or the Fallout that warps them.
• Present the potential of danger clearly to players, and give them the opportunity to react.
• Increasing the amount of Stress increases the rate Investigators are enveloped by the corruption of Fallout and the weird.
• Characters die.

CHOICE

• Offer tough choices.
• All situations should have multiple outcomes.
• Clarify player intent before dice are rolled to make sure players have all information that would be obvious to their Investigators.
• Every action leaves an impact on the world in some way.

FAILURE

• Failure should push the story forward.
• Foster an atmosphere where success and failure are equally exciting.
• Elicit complications or twists from players.