The first page of the notebook

Every project has a first page, and mine is a coffee-stained notebook I still keep on the desk. The idea for LIMINAL did not arrive as a game. It arrived as a question I could not stop turning over: what if the monster was never in the room, only in your certainty that it was?

I had spent years playing trading card games where victory meant grinding a life total to zero. Effective, familiar, and — for a horror game — completely wrong. Real dread is not a health bar. It is the slow erosion of what you trust. I wanted a game where fear itself was the mechanic, not the flavour text.

Fear as a resource

The first real design decision was to treat Fear as a currency you build rather than damage you deal. Instead of attacking an opponent directly, you accumulate Fear and use it to distort the shared reality of the table — bending rules, rewriting memories, and awakening your Entity. It reframed the entire loop from confrontation to corruption.

That single reframing answered a dozen questions at once. Why do Entities not simply hit each other? Because they do not defeat you — they convince you. Why do Locations matter? Because a haunted place changes how Fear spreads. The notebook page filled up fast after that.

What if the monster was never in the room, only in your certainty that it was?

I am documenting all of this in the open because I think the process is the interesting part. The finished cards will speak for themselves eventually. But the notebook, the arguments, the discarded mechanics — that is the real story of how LIMINAL is being built. Thanks for reading the first entry.