Review & Commentary On Souless Children By Kirt A. Dankmyer From Ivanhoe Unbound For The Liminaal Horror Rpg

 "Content Warning for This Game: harm to children"

"The world is a creepy place, if you scratch the surface.  Luckily, you're one of the things that go bump in the night yourself. 

If only other monsters would leave you alone.

"In Soulless Children, you play immortal dark-eyed children, escaped from Neverland and damaged by the ritual that took their soul and granted immortality. Take that, Peter Pan!"

So I came into Souless Children with zero preconcieved notions, Ivanhoe Unbound sent me the adventure or supplement. And Souless Children is  done in the style of  a continuation of Neverland & Peter Pan with some really nasty undertones. You are not playing the 'good guy' and in point of fact playing the Souless Children of the title. And these are monsters no doubt about it. This is really a bare bones supplement giving the player's just enough to bring these horrors to life. While Souless Children is rules lite, because of the nature of the supplement I'd personally run this with Silent Legions. The PC's are playing the devouring monsters and they play the investigators tracking down and possibly destroying thier old PC's. 
Souless Children only tracks in at twenty one distrubing pages but it brings home these monsters. And there's a paragraph on rpg 'safety tools' & you can easily ignore those. And yes I'm using this product outside of the the acclaimed rules-light horror game Liminal Horror. 
Be warned the material is disturbing but not mature in nature. I do think that Souless Children is well done. And with the right group this could be an excellent supplement/adventure. 
Souless Children brings options and tightness to the character generation. The idea that you are working on an incredibly dangerous monster who wants to eat the souls of it's victims. 
This is a well written supplement and it provides a very interesting take on the Black  Eyed Children urban legend. One could take a completely different approach and take the Souless Children supplement for a bit of a joy ride with the 2d6 Quantum Dark rpg. And here's where things go a bit sideways because of the fact that you as the DM & players are going  be using Quantum Dark for the PC's abilities, and actual play systems. PC generation uses a combination of Souless Children and Quantum Dark for backgrounds, histories, etc. One group of player's PC's could be the Souless Children and the other could be thier hunters. This is a situation that we've done with Game Designer's Workshop's Dark Conspiracy ages ago. 

And with a bit of work Souless Children could be the cornerstone of a horror campaign. Here the PC's might be trying to recover the sliver of innocence that thier denied all while hunting for 'food' and undead 'survival'. All of this could be against the background of retaking Neverland. 

The Spawn of Pan - A Sanity Blasting Cult for Silent Legions rpg & Your Old School Campaigns

There are times when you need a cult for a game & that's where the Silent Legions rpg comes in very handy. Arthur Machen remains an old favorite of ours & its easy to take 'the Great God Pan novel' of his & exploit into a 
 a full blown cult easily.


The novel's plot is a quick go really according to the Wiki entry on 'The Great God Pan' ; "The Great God Pan is a horror and fantasy novella by Welsh writer Arthur Machen. Machen was inspired to write The Great God Pan by his experiences at the ruins of a pagan temple in Wales. What would become the first chapter of the novella was published in the magazine The Whirlwind in 1890. Machen later extended The Great God Pan and it was published as a book alongside another story, "The Inmost Light", in 1894. The novella begins with an experiment to allow a woman named Mary to see the supernatural world. This is followed by an account of a series of mysterious happenings and deaths over many years surrounding a woman named Helen Vaughan. At the end, the heroes confront Helen and force her to kill herself. She undergoes a series of unearthly transformations before dying and she is revealed to be a supernatural entity."

Helen Vaughan had a daughter at the novel's conclusion & that daughter is Mrs. Helen Beaumont whom at the novel's climax committed suicide when confronted by the novel's protagonists. Mrs. Helen Beaumont was the child of Pan; "Raymond informs Clarke that Mary became pregnant after his experiment caused her to see the god Pan, implying that Pan fathered Helen."  But does an 
 alien demi god easily die?! In the novel;"Helen disappears for some time; according to rumor, she spent the time taking part in disturbing orgies somewhere in the Americas. She eventually returns to London under the pseudonym Mrs. Beaumont. "  
What if Mrs. Helen Beaumont is still out in the world!? And that the children of those orgies are actually today in 2020 still operating secret cults dedicated to Pan out in the remote areas of the American Mid West. 
 Mrs. Helen Beaumont is still alive after a fashion like any entity capable of extreme shape shifting she reproduces by budding off a piece of itself with all of the memories of the original 
Helen going back to 1894. 
The spawn of Pan are capable of shape shifting between human male, female, & finally a sanity blasting form. 
The Spawn of Pan 

 AC:5 
HD:7 
Attacks : weapon revolver 

Skill :+3 

Special: Unnamable,charm person ability 

Move: 30'

Morale: 9 

Damage: per weapon 

Madness: 1d10 

Save:12+

Anyone seeing the true form of a Spawn of Pan must make their save or be subject to their own insignificance in the sanity shattering scheme of the grand cosmic design. Those that don't will be subject to highly sanity shattering thoughts, vistas, & illusions as their sense of reality is over wrought. 

The Spawn of Pan are not combat oriented & instead attack with the weapons of mankind such as fire arms, knives, & swords. Those foolish enough to mate with a spawn of Pan are subject to horrid depravities & attentions they will often become pregenent with a demigod child in order to continue the spread of their fertility cults. 
These entities also have a charm ability that allows the spawn to  make a humanoid creature regard you as its trusted friend and ally (treat the target’s attitude as friendly) unless the appropriate saves are made. 

The spawn of pan are often in the ongoing process of corrupting body & soul various indivduals in order to continue its line of cults. These cults are dedicated to material weath, fertility, and utter corruption of body & soul. 

Paul Delaroche - Offering to the God Pan

These cults will often have several enforcers who are known as satyrs & recruiters who are known as nymphs. The cults operate under a number of names & covers evolving to spread their message far & wide. The cults rites always culminate with a Spring orgy where the spawning of the children happens within the inner cult circles. 

Those that are truly blessed are taken into the folds of the spawn & through a degenerate rite turned into true 'corrupted satyrs' the guardians of the cult. These entites are capable of acts of extreme depravity & violence. 

Commentary & Review of 'His Flesh Becomes My Key' By Kort'thalis Publishing For Your Old School Horror Campaigns

One of the harder tricks to pull off is telling a modern  & engaging Neo noir/horror adventure with OSR overtones. Well, 'His Flesh Becomes My Key' is one part John Carpenter/Stephen King / mixed in with a simmering helping of Cliver Barkerish weirdness strained through the lens of Venger Satanis.

Alright this is the usual Outer Presence rpg included in the adventure package bit we've seen before & I'm going to go out on a limb here & throw that right into the waste basket.
" This is an eldritch pulp / investigative horror scenario especially suited for The Outer Presence roleplaying game. A serial killer case opens up before the investigators and leads to something beyond the usual detective story."
So after reading through this adventure which puts the PC's front & center of a murder investigation/slash horror story I'm going to say that this would make a killer horror story adventure for the 

Silent Legions From  Sine Nomine Publishing. 

Why? Because quite frankly this adventure has a bit of it all; 

1. Viable underworld/sleaze encounters, a trail of madness & dead bodies everywhere. 
2. Sex & weird reality warping world sex magick occult themes pepper throughout the adveture. 
3. Darkness & dangerous cultists waiting. 
4. Independent Venger Mythos action, if you know the Venger's other adventures then you know the drill here. He's big on working his own brand of horror that fits the same DYI horror ideal that Silent Legions adheres to. 
5. There are not enough Silent Legion adventures & this one actually fits the bill very well. He's sort of toned down the T&A to actually tell a coherent adventure & it shows.
   "The Outer Presence RPG is about curtailing obscenity and darkness.  Horror = fear + revulsion.  Does that mean spectators, rather than participants, are just as subject to "mature content"?  Should reading or listening to the description of unwholesome things also be restricted to "adults only"?"
6. Because he's toned down the sex Venger has upped the weirdness which makes this far more accessible as a dungeon master. 

So the PC's are on the trail of Richard Black a horror novelist & run smack into the back burner of a whole lot of unraveling pulp horror business. Sure there's plenty of bloods, guts, gore & more here. But this is a thinking man's adventure that can be played over several nights sessions. Sure it includes everything you need to get started and play through but I want more. I want solid pacing, plot/setting, and a set of rules that's going to give me extended modern OSR neo horror play. That's where Silent Legions comes in and frankly there aren't enough adventure modules to support at system but 
'His Flesh Becomes My Key' fills the slimy gap quite nicely. This really isn't Lamentations of the Flame Presence turf although there is this sort of thing,  ‘When his gaze meets that of  the investigators, the chartreuse-hued dweller of the cavern begins to melt into a pool of liquid flesh.’
Instead this is one part X Files twisted around an unraveling 'In The Mouth of Madness' with a good helping of Cthulhu & Venger's tendrils of horror. So yes its a good solid fit for a Silent Legions game.



 

What I like about this adventure is that its about holding back the darkness but it doesn't play cute with the subject matter. This adventure handles things in a quick & with a deft hand. Its the sort of thing to spring on a group that needs to be eased into the deep end of a horror game without the numbness that one sometimes finds with Call of Cthulhu. This is an investigation adventure that is quick, down, dirty and apocalyptic. 

Are there any complains? Well a few.  There needed to be more of this adventure & I don't mean padding. I mean there needs to be more encounters & more of a fleshed out world for the Outer Presence or perhaps not. The fact is that sometimes less is more and more horror and material might have bogged down  'His Flesh Becomes My Key' as an adventure. I really need to run this adventure to get the real gist of it as a DM. So with that said I'm still weighing in on that part of the adventure. 

The content itself is a step up and off for Venger as a writer/designer. Quite frankly I want to see more of this sort of adventure  from him. Now that I know that he's capable of doing this sort of Neo OSR adventure then I want to see this sort of a standard from him. 

Who should buy  'His Flesh Becomes My Key'? Those who are looking for a different take on the investigative horror adventure. Who shouldn't buy  'His Flesh Becomes My Key'? Stodgy horror dungeon masters  who would rather research obscure historical facts, timelines, and historical events rather then run an action packed Eighties horror inspired adventure. Grab this one if you want a quick jumpstart for an easy to run horror campaign.