Each holiday season, I review different modules, games or supplements as a thank you to the wider tabletop roleplaying game community. All of the work I review during Critique Navidad is either given to me by fans of the work or the authors themselves. This holiday season, I hope I can bring attention to a broader range of tabletop roleplaying game work than I usually would be able to, and find things that are new and exciting!

This Mortal Coil is a 140 page roleplaying game by David Garrett with art by Zach Vaupen, Its compatible with Liminal Horror. In it, you play a space traveler seeking eternal life and raising an army of undead thralls by harvesting aliens. This is ostensibly Liminal Horror, but separating it from the core line is sensible, because here you’re effectively playing the enemy in any other Liminal Horror module — this is filled with body horror, cosmic horror, and morally indefensible choices.

Right off the bat here, I’m seeing some conflict with the choice of an OSR chassis and the themes. I don’t feel like necromancers should work together! 5his is a pitch issue (“necromancer in space!” is a great mashup), and more up front legwork needs to be made to frame the pitch so that my expectations are either redefined or clarified. Here’s my understanding of the pitch: “This is set 3000 years into the future, in a distant star system. I’m not sure what happened in the intervening millennia, but there’s a heaven and a hell, and unless your funeral is on point, the forces of hell will animate your corpse as at least a zombie bit potentially a more powerful evil undead being, driven to devour all life. So, the companies that control all are funerary companies. And recently, a constellation appeared in the sky that made it possible to see and possibly control the forces of hell — and this is how you and your companions hope to avoid death.” That slaps, right? The pitch is technically right, but a half-decent summary of what’s actually going on skips the strange disjoint between pitch and system.

Next up comes character creation: You choose one of the backgrounds, and randomly generate your character from that page. It’s neat, although it’s still unclear on why you were suddenly “offered the chance for eternal life” — is this just the existence of the new constellation? Half way through the character creation chapter we get a hint of who offered you the chance: Each of you have a unique voice that speaks to you. But I’m still just guessing — my theory remains unconfirmed. Anyway, containing items and histories like “Never bring a gun to a proton cannon fight.” and “You sought to inhale the divine spores of the Mycelial Belt” these are pretty flavourful backgrounds with a good dose of humour. The whole game is filled with clever, fun writing, and that might just be enough for you to want to bring it to the table. The many random tables are really excellent: An adverse effect of hyperspace travel might be “Your name has changed, though all memories and records of it have changed along with it.”, or your interfering in the negaverse might cause “Your chest collapses, leaving a gaping void in the middle of your torso. You feel like you are suffocating, but you no longer need to breathe.”.

Your power in This Mortal Coil is souls, and that’s the driving force of play — to be more powerful, more people have to trade you their soul willingly (although it’s not clear if they then have to die before you can use it). This is a really compelling drive for the players to interact with the world actively, which I adore. There’s a direct relationship between fallout that fills your inventory and the number of thralls you can have — this is neat, as the more damaged your character is, the more powerful a necromancer they are. If you get 12 souls and all your ingredients, you get to be immortal, which is basically the core loop of the game. The game implies that the loop continues after you gain immortality, although I’m not sure what will drive play past that point, and I don’t get any clues.

While there is a lot of generic referee advice here, my favourite stuff are the specifics — we get a bunch of brokers to help guide the players to their ingredients, for example, and a character generator for NPCs willing to trade their souls to the players. We also get a flavourful bestiary of undead, and a flavourful list of items. These are all pretty cool. One regular issue with these capsule OSR games is the repetition of the rules — there are a lot of rules here, covering magic, space travel, crews and more. It’s comprehensive, but I really would’ve preferred a less is more approach — I get confused with what type of game this is intended to be, because the rules cover every outcome. Survival space horror and necromancy devils bargaining don’t feel like they belong in the same game with the same characters, to me? I struggle with the lack of support in the stranger mash ups here.

In terms of layout, this one is sparse, flavourful, and easy to read and navigate. I don’t love Zach Vaupen’s art for this particular game — I’d love to have had a more concrete suggestion for what the world looks like. Art really helps picture worlds, when they’re a little different, and this one is a very unusual mash up — and as I alluded to earlier, I struggle with the mash ups already. But it’s solid art in and of itself and you might prefer having the less concrete art yourself, to let your imagination go wild.

This Mortal Coil is a really interesting mash up, sort of Mothership meets Liminal Horror with an emphasis on negotiation. If you enjoy the Liminal Horror chassis, there are a lot of changes and you may be excited to add them into your game, if you wanted to take your investigators into space or have them turn coat. But when push comes to shove if the idea of an OSR style game that puts the spotlight on persuading NPCs to sell you their souls and having a cohort of undead minions as henchmen, you already know should check This Mortal Coil out immediately.

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