LIMINAL: GASLIGHT — The Metropolitan Bound

"They walked the line every Ascension Day since before the Fire. Vicar, warden, beadle, and a crowd of boys with willow wands, striking each stone in turn, and at certain of them they'd turn a lad upside down and bump his head against it so he'd remember where it was his whole life. Drunk by two o'clock, every one of them. Nobody could tell you why they did it.

They stopped last spring. Some clerk redrew the parish."

London, January 1889. The fog is yellow and it kills people. The docks employ a hundred thousand men who are about to stop working. Whitechapel has not slept since the autumn. And beneath all of it runs a Hidden World of Fae courts, vampire underwriters, werewolf families, cunning women, sewer-guilds and things older than the city — held apart from ordinary life by wards, customs and boundary stones that nobody living entirely understands.

On 21 March the new London County Council takes office and begins redrawing the parishes.

You are a Crew: half a dozen people who found out. A medium who is genuinely hearing something. A tosher who knows what runs under the City. A tired detective inspector with a card index and no budget. A cunning woman, a returned soldier, a New Woman with a camera, a changeling, a selkie a very long way from the sea. You are not heroes and you are not an agency. You are the people who turn up when the thing in the cellar is somebody's brother.

This is investigative urban fantasy in a city with no forensics, no telephones and eleven postal deliveries a day — where the real obstacles are class, propriety, the coroner's court, the newspapers, and the fact that murder is a hanging matter. Expect fog, séances, inquests, faction politics, terrible decisions made for good reasons, and one horse-drawn cab that is always waiting when you need it.

Rules-light system (2d6, roll high). No prior Liminal experience needed. Play-by-post.

The Game

Liminal (Paul Mitchener, Modiphius) is a rules-light modern urban fantasy game about a Crew of people caught between ordinary Britain and the Hidden World — too strange for one, too human for the other. This campaign runs it in late-Victorian London, starting 1 January 1889.

Everything mechanical you need is on the Rules & Setting page (the Gaslight supplement, third edition). You don't need to have read the core rulebook to apply; you'll need access to it, or a generous fellow player, to play.

The core mechanic is 2d6 + Skill against a Challenge Level, usually 8. Beat it by five and you've done something remarkable. You have a pool of Will you can spend to force a success, and it runs out, and getting it back means doing the thing your character actually cares about. That tension is the whole game.

The Spine

Three things are true in London in 1889, and the campaign lives where they cross.

The boundaries are being redrawn. The Metropolitan Board of Works is abolished in March and the London County Council takes its place. Parishes are being amalgamated, boundaries resurveyed, stones moved. The wards that hold the Hidden World apart from ordinary London were laid against the old lines, and they are maintained — not by geomancers, but by ten thousand ordinary people beating the bounds once a year without knowing why. Some processions will not go out this Ascension Day. Some will find the stone gone.

The river is dying. The Old Man of the Thames is still alive under the Pool of London. He has not spoken to a mortal in twenty years, the sewers and the gasworks are poisoning him by inches, and he will take another seventy years about it. His people are watermen and mudlarks. His claimants are already circling.

There is no peace. The arrangement your characters' great-grandchildren will take for granted — a London that isn't fought over, a river that both sides respect, a police division that knows what it's looking at — does not exist yet. It is signed in 1952. What exists in 1889 is custom, fear, and the memory of what happened last time somebody broke custom. Somebody is going to have to get every power in London into one room. Nobody with the standing has the neutrality, and nobody with the neutrality has the standing.

That's the campaign. It is not a plot you're on rails for; it's the weather the cases happen in.

What a Case Looks Like

Three to six weeks of real time. Something has gone wrong in a specific London street, and the Crew is the only body that can or will look at it. There's a locked social door and a locked physical one, and the Crew has to have both keys between them. There's paper somewhere — a parish register, a coroner's deposition, a shipping manifest, a certificate at Somerset House — and finding it matters more than winning a fight. There's usually an inquest. There is frequently a séance. There is occasionally somebody who has to be persuaded not to shoot anybody, because shooting people in 1889 London leads to a rope.

Between cases: downtime. Recovering, spending advancement, clearing the heat off the Crew, and one scene of your character's ordinary life. This is where the setting does its best work and where PbP is genuinely better than tabletop.

What's Different About 1889

The supplement covers this in full; the headlines:

• Standing. Everyone has a class rating from 1 (Outcast) to 5 (Gentry). It's not a skill and it costs nothing, and it determines which doors open. Cases are built to need both ends of the Crew — the problem the baronet can't solve because he can't walk into that public house, and the docker can't solve because he can't get past the club porter.

• Investigation runs backwards from what you'd expect. No fingerprints, no ballistics, no blood typing: +4 CL to anything resting on physical evidence. But no cameras, no records, no privacy and no anonymity: −2 CL to asking around, tailing someone, or getting a servant to talk.

• Nobody can telephone anybody. A split party is genuinely split. The post, however, is astonishing — twelve deliveries a day, same-day correspondence.

• Guns are legal, cheap and mail-order. Black powder fills the room with smoke, revolvers take a full round to reload, and killing a man the police can trace to you gives the whole Crew a standing penalty and a recurring detective until it's resolved.

• Sepsis. There are no antibiotics. Going below zero Endurance means a roll at the end of the case, and a bad one costs you permanently.

• Notice. A six-box Crew track for how conspicuous you've been. At four boxes a very courteous gentleman from the Order of St. Bede comes to call and explains what the papers are going to print instead. At six, something worse notices.

• Five new schools of magic for the period: Mediumship, Mesmerism, the Ceremonial Art, Chymistry, and Aetheric Engineering — the last for people who have read both the Electrician and a grimoire and cannot see why anyone thinks those are different subjects.

• Giving In. If your character isn't entirely human, you can take on more of what you are, at any time, for more power. There's no limit. There's just the point at which you stop being a player character.

The Powers

The Council of Merlin at its imperial zenith, systematically looting the magical traditions of a quarter of the world and calling it scholarship. The Order of St. Bede, who no longer keep things out of the papers — they make sure the printed version is too lurid to believe. The Sodality of the Crown, vampires at their high-water mark, whose real holding is not the Home Office but the City of London: a self-governing, self-policing jurisdiction older than the Conquest. The Ninefold Veil, an eighteen-month-old occult order full of clerks and schoolmistresses who are learning faster than anyone thought possible, and one of whose founders is a coroner. The Guilds of the Hidden — toshers, sewer hunters, tunnellers, lamplighters — who never take money, only promises. And the Knowledge, which drives a hansom cab, badged 01 to 50, and is neutral in every quarrel except London's.

Characters

• Six players. Party size may flex by one either way. Small subgroups and solo scenes are likely as individual posting frequency might vary and needs of the adventure are unlikely to require all the characters to be in one place at all times.

• Standard starting build: 17 skill points, Skill Cap 4; 5 Trait points, up to two Limitations.

• All concepts welcome, human and otherwise. Rule of thumb: one or two supernatural backgrounds in a Crew of six. The rest should be people who found out. If everyone's a selkie the campaign becomes a tour of supernatural ethnographies rather than a story about London.

• Traits and Limitations. If you have an idea for a character, Traits, or Limitations that are not included in the main rules or the 1889 supplement, let's talk.

• Play across the class range. A Crew that's all Standing 4 is a Crew that can't get into half the city. A Crew that's all Standing 1 can't get into the other half.

• You will build the Crew together, in the recruitment thread, after selection: a shared goal, assets, faction relationships, and one line each on how you know two of the others.

Practicalities

• Posting rate: aim for 3–4 posts a week; one post minimum, and tell us in the OOC thread if life happens. Seven days quiet and I'll run your character sympathetically in the background; fourteen and I'll write them out gracefully with the door left open.

• Combat runs on a 48-hour clock. Every combat post carries a stated fallback and a default action if you go quiet, so nobody ever waits on anybody.

• I publish all the numbers. You roll your own attacks and your own defenses against Challenge Levels I post in the scene. I roll almost nothing.

• Declare your Will ceiling before you roll — "spending up to 3 to make this" — and apply the minimum needed. Fast, honest, and it keeps the tension.

• Label every roll. An unlabelled roll doesn't count; roll again.

• Threads: Rules & Setting · Applications · The Casebook (IC) · The Snug (OOC) · The Crew · Character Sheets · Dramatis Personae.

Tone

Gaslight and fog, but not gothic pastiche. Nobody says "egad." The horror is mostly quiet and frequently domestic, and every ghost in this setting has a family who is still alive, still keeping the crape up, and would very much like to speak to them. Infant mortality in the East End is one in four; there is not a household in London without a small grave in it. That's what makes this 1889 and not a costume.

Expect wit. Expect the Crew to be fond of each other. Expect the fight to be the part where things have already gone wrong.