Revising Liminal Void, 2024 Edition

February 11, 2024

Liminal Void's quickstart has been around a little more than a year now. It's the first Total//Effect thing I put out and it's...fine. It's fine. Total//Effect is a strong backbone, the vibe carries it pretty far in my opinion, and again in my humble opinion, my two quickstart scenarios are decent. (Read it yourself and see if you agree. It's free. Click that little liminal void tag at the bottom if you want to see me everything I've written about it here, which is quite a lot.)

But as a game to go further and do more with, it's not good enough for my standards yet. As I've been working on Valiant Horizon, Celestial Bodies, and EXPLOIT (a minimalist jam project that ended up getting scrapped, RIP) I've been thinking about it a lot. Especially with EXPLOIT, because I started dev on that by using Liminal Void's mechanics (the initial concept was Total//Effect + LOOT) and went from there. So let's dive in on what I've got in mind.

The biggest things that don't feel right to me are PC options. Both professions/backgrounds AND the equipment that defines them more feel less focused than what I was going for.

Professions and Backgrounds

There are 6 Professions in the Liminal Void quickstart, and I wrote 6 more into the (current) playtest document. I wrote about them here about 9 months ago, but to recap, these are an answer to "what did you do before you were an off-the-grid lowlife with a ship". They give starting equipment, a passive trait, some starting recover/reload/recharge dice, and a skillset that gives you an Asset to do various things within its purview. If you're a level 0 character, this is all you've got to work with. Breaking that down:

• Starting equipment and the passive trait are fine.
• Skillsets in Liminal Void are boring. They used to work this way in Valiant Horizon too and there's a few reasons they don't, but a big one is that they were also boring there. Very much a holdover from like, LUMEN 1.0 and especially 36th Way stuff. (Also people always asked if you could use them to give advantage to all of your rolls in combat as such and like, no because that'd be kind of boring mechanically/would overwhelmingly make ones that make sense in combat dominant, but also I didn't have a good answer.)
• Recover/Reload/Recharge dice are a holdover from a pre-Liminal-Void Total//Effect prototype. I don't think they're terribly interesting in this context and they can probably just get dropped.

Stealing from the dearly departed EXPLOIT, I think the play is to replace Skillsets with Attributes. Something like the LUMEN Force/Flow/Focus or Celestial Bodies' Nerve/Flash/Precision/Force:

• Brawn: Physical strength, endurance, forcefulness.
• Reflexes: Reflexes, mobility, quick reactions.
• Focus: Concentration, planning, deliberate actions.

(Might add in a 4th attribute if it needs it, but that's probably a good starting point.)

In EXPLOIT these were going to be used in a kind of LUMEN 2.0 sense where they were used like a resource rather than a dicepool: unlike LUMEN (or Celestial Bodies, for that matter), this isn't an auto-success, it's just Advantage or a step-up. This takes the place of the broad Skillset: you've got X points to spend which come back when you've got extended rest time, or you can restore some with an item.

So let's say we start at 1/2/2 or 1/1/3 and map combinations to those 6 quickstart professions:

• Laborer: 2 Brawn, 2 Reflexes, 1 Focus.
• Driller: 3 Brawn, 1 Reflexes, 1 Focus.
• Pilot: 1 Brawn, 3 Reflexes, 1 Focus.
• Technician: 1 Brawn, 2 Reflexes, 2 Focus.
• Engineer: 1 Brawn, 1 Reflexes, 3 Focus.
• Foreman: 2 Brawn, 1 Reflexes, 2 Focus.

Feels like a good start. For the "funnel" option, you could just subtract 1 from all of those.

This also makes it way easier to map to Liminal Void's escalation tech:

• Combat rolls and rolls that would be associated with Brawn add Escalation.
• Rolls that would be associated with Focus subtract Escalation.

It already kind of works this way, where Escalation adds to combat rolls/rolls to do physical things and subtracted from thinky things (which rules and makes a good "shit is ambiently kind of fucked" meter) but the attribute-focus makes it way more clear which one applies where. Reflexes being neither also leaves open design space for certain ideas, like I might make the Pilot trait "add Escalation to Reflex stuff" instead of its current thing, or specifically negate positive/add again to negative for certain ailments.

So what does your Background (which you get the same way, either in play at non-funnel level 0 or at level 1) do now? Let's say it gives +2 to one attribute of your choice and +1 to another, which puts you at 8 or so and lets you cap out something at 5 if you really go all-in on something. (And that's not like strictly the move, because these aren't bonuses, they're separable resources: that just means your eggs are all in one basket.)

Tools and Weapons

Tools and Weapons basically are the same thing in the current iteration - they weigh 2-4, have 6-10 charge or ammo, 2 combat moves (each costs 1/3 resource in the quickstart, or 3/5 resources for some of the ones outside of the quickstart), and you can spend charges/ammo to use them outside combat to gain Assets on rolls. And it sucks bad that they're the same thing. The flaw in this became really apparent to me as I started to make more tools: you run into a real issue of "well they have to have two combat moves each, because that's how this fucking game works"...which then informs what you're making, and then informs what professions can even be. I blame basically only making combat-centric games before this, which Liminal Void isn't really intended to be in that as-sport sense unless your crew intentionally kits out for it (which then loses them opportunities to take other equipment, etc).

Right off the bat, tools aren't getting full combat moves as such anymore. At most, they might get a combat modification or two to existing things if it makes sense - someone with an exoskeleton might be able to spend charge to leap to Far instead of Near when moving or someone with a big fucking drill might be able to step up Harm when attacking hand to hand in addition to generic increases to Struggle, for instance.

What they WILL get is a non-combat move. I experimented with these a little in EXPLOIT, which I was intentionally taking a more PbtA style approach to noncombat stuff with moves like:

Tread Carefully

When one or more players try to circumvent a hazard or dangerous enemy that can be physically avoided in some manner, whoever is in the lead rolls. They remove up to Low Die of the following possible consequences from the outcome:

• You don’t get all the way to where you want to go.
• Someone takes Inverse Mid Die Harm.
• Something or someone that didn’t know where you are now knows.
• Half Inverse High Die pieces of personal gear are compromised or depleted.
• It will take Inverse Mid Die extra minutes (or actions, if in combat) to do this.

---

• 13+: Avoid all consequences.
• 17+: The leader may add a detail to the scene that explains how they avoided any consequences.

In this case, I think the play is to give each tool an explicit Move in addition to a generic "you can spend 1 Charge to use as an Asset". Like that Exoskeleton might have an explicit Move Or Wreck Heavy Physical Shit Move. I have two levers I want to bring into these powers:

• Spending an Attribute. You'd be able to spend Attributes for Advantage/step-ups like with normal "skill" checks, but the idea would be that some moves might either cost an Attribute or do something extra if you had spent one for Advantage.
• Discharging. I want some extra expenditures to risk a full discharge: something like "roll a die, if it's higher than your current charge you're now out."

(I'd also just make batteries/ammo give a flat charge/reload amount instead of the stupid recover/recharge/reloads.)

Weapons feel better from the start. Having two explicit combat moves makes a dedicated weapon feel a little better than trying to stick with like, tools, but also it requires you to bring ammo. Instead of relying on 1 ammo/3 ammo moves or 3 ammo/5 ammo moves, though, I think the play is to lean back on the same levers I want to pull for tools: instead of always been 1/3 or 3/5, you could have moves being 1 ammo/1 ammo+1 attribute, or 1 ammo/risk running out in that same "discharge" way.

So those are the big takeaways I have at the high level (other than that I should lean less on Progress/Resistance). When I have time to rebuild the quickstart with this kind of stuff in mind, we'll see where else we need to go.

(Read the original on cohost here!)