Player One is Matthias Pias. German cop procedural actor. First time on American TV, brick-thick accent, always tossing out half-assed ideas to make his role feel “real,” like yeah dude, nobody gives a shit.
Player Two has Annie—camera operator, baddie, e-girl, hot as hell. Eve, audio tech, whatever. Third mess: safety officer Bum.
Player Three’s got a loose-cannon location scout, rooting out abandoned paranormal dumps. A gaffer, hairy lighting guy wrestling the glow. A Correspondent, ex-intern, costume hack.
INT. COMPUTER SCREEN – NIGHT
A close-up of a Discord video call. Four small video windows glow against the black interface — the FACILITATOR and three PLAYERS. The faint hum of a computer fan fills the silence.
There was an episode of season one that was filmed but never aired. What happened?
Yeah. Um… I think it should be—let’s see if we can build this story together, guys. I think it should be, maybe—maybe something that was recorded in the studio, maybe? Like… let’s see.
(beat)
Yeah, like maybe there was a haunted trailer in the studio. And we’re like, oh, this was abandoned by a famous star—blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What do you guys think?
Alright.
Yeah?
Yeah.
So, uh, this was an abandoned trailer that was supposed to be from this old star from our studio—like a huge star that disappeared, right?
And we’re going there, and we don’t see anything at first, but we keep filming, right?
And like… we just start filming. We go there, we don’t see anything, we don’t find anything.
But the camera keeps rolling for the rest of the day, and later we find that in the video—and in the audio—we can see a face. Like, in the reflection of mirrors. And in the audio, we can hear whispering from someone.
The studio doesn’t want to release this video because it’s gonna be bad for them, right? I don’t know. What are you guys feeling?
Oh, okay—going off of that vibe. If it’s from a famous person, then we thought we’d do this kind of cool thing where we’d get this paranormal thing from this famous guy’s stuff. But when we actually started picking up on some of the stuff, the studio got antsy because they were afraid of copyright from the famous person’s estate.
Yeah, I like that. PLAYER ONE, do you have anything to add to the story? You think it’s good enough as it is?
Copyright infringement—my character would be mad because there are some German films he acted in that never got released due to meddling and not being sure whether the rights were there or not.
At the same time, I’m just wondering… like, my character was already involved in the production. So he probably already has an idea of what he was doing.
And I’m just wondering—do you have someone in the production team who does not approve of the project in general? Maybe it was deliberately put on the shelf by someone from the executive level. They don’t want us to succeed.
Okay. So we’re just gonna say that y’all are in L.A., wrapping up your development for the first episode of season two.
Is there anything else you guys want to spend money on? You’ve got some cash. You also have a vehicle—a van.
I think I don’t want to spend any money. I just want to roll with it. You’ve given me a lot of good stuff.
So… you have a place of interest close by. You’ve got a motel room for three days.
This town was also the site of a movie called The Farmer’s Daughter. It was filmed here.
It’s kind of famous for its old onion train back in the day. Used to send a bunch of onions up north on the trains.
And the most decorated war hero in America from World War II was from this town.
Audie Murphy?
Yes.
Awesome.
And, um, we have the scout here, so I’m gonna post a map of the area.
[INSERT MAP HANDOUT — A new image appears on the computer screen, showing the map the Facilitator is sharing on Discord. The players lean in toward their webcams as the map loads.]
So the ten here in the center is just a neighborhood of ten homes. There’s this school, the motel’s on the top. On the left side of the map is a fence—and beyond the fence is this burnt church and some woods.
Do we know the circumstances of why the church was burned? Especially in America?
They said a long time ago, it was burned by some teenagers.
Teenagers? Okay. Alright. Whatever happened to those teenagers?
They disappeared.
They disappeared. Okay.
So… yeah. We’ll say the development phase is gonna end, and y’all can start at the motel.
You have three nights here—trying to get enough footage of the church and whatever else you can investigate.
I highly highly recommend y’all trying running Liminal Horror in its new Documentary Mode ruleset. It feels like a brand new game. Very exciting stuff. My players were really into it.
Writing game play summaries is so exhausting. Sorry I’m leaving y’all hanging. I wrote most of the summary but decided against posting it because I plan to submit ‘the monster’ in the adventure to the new Liminal Horror Halloween Monster Jam that’s going down right now over at itch.io
I encourage everyone to submit to the jam and remember the most important writing advice: Don't worry.
I recommend running Zombie Kiss Zero: Nightmare City Battalion for spooky season. It’s based on urban exploitation films like Tenement (1985). Zombie films to a lesser degree.
In other news I’ve been drawing an Alien a day for inktober in preparation to release a new alien-themed Liminal Horror adventure over at my Bluesky account.
