Third Party Links

A collection of blogs, essays, and resources for ttrpgs. This is a non-comprehensive list that also is a working document. Many of these have inspired the dev team in our approach to Liminal Horror, while other entries are things we thing would be helpful to inspire Facilitators when writing their own LH content. Use this to mine for inspiration and harvest for parts when you are creating your own things! There is an unlisted way these are presented, but half of the fun is trying to figure out why they are clustered together.

appendix Liminal Horror Deluxe Edition Appendices Illustration © Zach Hazard Vaupen (2025)

Useful Links

Survive, Solve, or Save: Pick Two by Sean McCoy: “horror games should put to you a choice in any given situation, which is that you can either survive the terror, solve the mystery, or save the day…But you should only be able to do 1 to 1.5 of those things.”
D&D Doesn’t Understand What Monsters Are by Throne of Salt: “A monster is a symptom that somewhere, somehow, the world has gotten fucked up.”
Violent Encounters by Sean McCoy: “rethink these scenarios, to reframe the imaginary space they inhabit so that no matter where you fall on the rules-lite to rules-might spectrum, your encounters have real stakes.”
The ICI Doctrine: Information, Choice, Impact by Chris McDowell: A way to run a game that emphasizes player agency.
Difficulty in Bastionland by Chris McDowell: “There are other ways to make vaulting over a garden fence feel different to scaling a brick wall crowned with barbed wire.”
Foreground Growth by Chris McDowell: How to explore character change without explicit progression mechanics.
Casing the Join: A Framework by Dice Goblin: “The party is planning to infiltrate a semi-public location – partially open to the public, but with secrets laying inside. Time for a stakeout!”
Time, Gear & Skill: A Different Approach To Skill Checks by Dice Goblin: “Performing actions involves time, gear, and skill.”
Ransacking the Room by Mindstorm Press: “A way to break down searching into three choices with informed outcomes for each.”
Interesting Social Situations by Rise Up Comus: “how to make social encounters more interesting and give more space for player choice.”
Running a Game by Luke Gearing: A system for how to prepare for a game.
Techniques to Writing Adventures by Luke Gearing: A great place to start.
Writing Rooms In Pairs by Sean McCoy: “You can think of these rooms as sequels and prequels to the rooms you’ve already come up with. Setups and punch lines.”
Pointcrawls & Emergent Play by Yochai Gal: A look at how pointcrawls can inspire creation and emergent play at the table.
Encounter Checklist by Prismatic Wasteland: “A checklist you can use to improve your TTRPG encounters.”
Tension Cheatsheet by Mindstorm Press: “Ways to add more tension to situations in RPGs.”
Landmark, Hidden, Secret by DIY & Dragons: “Information can be landmark, or hidden, or it can be secret. This division can apply to locations on an overland maps, objects within dungeon rooms, and even to details about locations and objects that the players encounter.”
16 HP Dragon by Sage LaTorra: “You don’t need 2500 hp to make a fight scary or hard.”
Derelictcrawl Procedure by emmy verte: “A turn based system for your sessions that increases risk and elevates the Warden’s tasks.”
Overloading the Encounter Die by Necropraxis: Where the overloaded encounter die began… “Almost every turn result means something.”
Exploding the Encounter Die by Prismatic Wasteland: “I use an exploding, overloaded encounter die (the Alarm Die) to simulate the dungeon reacting against the player-characters’ intrusion and to provide a risk vs. reward tradeoff.”
Overloading the Random Encounter Table by Prismatic Wasteland: “A all-in-one roll for random encounters, reaction, surprise, and distance.”
THE UNDERCLOCK: Fixing the Random Encounter by Goblin Punch: “The Underworld is not just a basement or a cave. The Underworld is a place that hates you. It is hostile architecture. It hates you in a way that only the blind tonnage of stone and cold air can have. It hates your lively blood. It hates the sunshine warmth still lingering on your skin.”
Writing NPCs by Luke Gearing: “When writing NPCs, you can communicate 2 or 3 things, or 4 related things.”
False Hydra by Goblin Punch: “Common wisdom holds that false hydras come from the ground. They spontaneously originate as undifferentiated masses of flesh. Potatoes that sprout from no seed. Supposedly, they germinate in response to lies, and that each falsehood causes a false hydra to swell larger.”
Doppelgänger Dos & Don’ts by Prismatic Wasteland: “advice and best practices for running doppelgängers.”
Welcome to Gulch! by Mindstorm: “Welcome to Gulch! A modern day starter town for RPGs.”
Excerpts from the Lighthouse Field Guide, Part 1 by Throne of Salt: A collection of lore and anti-cannon for a modern horror setting that is perfect for a Liminal Horror game.
Excerpts from the Lighthouse Field Guide, Part 2 by Throne of Salt: A collection of lore and anti-cannon for a modern horror setting that is perfect for a Liminal Horror game.
Excerpts from the Lighthouse Field Guide, Part 3 by Throne of Salt: A collection of lore and anti-cannon for a modern horror setting that is perfect for a Liminal Horror game.
Excerpts from the Lighthouse Field Guide, Part 4 by Throne of Salt: A collection of lore and anti-cannon for a modern horror setting that is perfect for a Liminal Horror game.