Wednesday, February 21, 2024

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. 


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