the ossuary mechanic
Like many wannabe TTRPG designers, I have a long pipeline of things I want to release and a very lightweight portfolio of actual releases.
Somehow, though, Liminal Horror has inspired me to put out not one but three releases into the world. The latest is part of the Liminal Horror Summer Jam 2026. It’s a Horror, a so-called monster. I call it the ossuary mechanic.
The idea came about when I was on holiday up in Yorkshire, seeking respite from the brutal summer temperatures. A few weekends previously, I’d been talking to my cousin about their kidney stones. It sounded miserable, and they’d bemoaned whatever they’d done in a past life!
Now this percolated back into my brain as sweat dripped and dribbled. What if they HAD done something terrible and the kidney stone was a series of encoded instructions on how to correct their wrongdoing, and what if an unseen entity instructed a cult to collect these Service Stones and, through a ritual, correct the imbalance?
Furthermore, what if the correction was for both good and bad things happening to an individual? A stroke of good fortune on the lottery, a torn ACL in a friendly game of football, the path of banality had diverged, a Service Stone set out the instructions to correct and realign.
My brain now whirring, fuelled by caffeine and cake, the cult was the Calcified Order, who collected and enacted the nine steps to prepare the Service Stone and the individual from whom it had been extracted. When all steps were correctly enacted, the ossuary mechanic would produce a Construct, and the correction could occur.
The Prescience table was a series of clues that you could drop into a scenario to hint at the tasks the order were slowly performing, all leading up to the ossuary mechanic’s Construct appearing and causing havoc.
Lastly, a table of injuries that a construct could inflict on anyone that tried to stop it. Mostly they do not impact Stats or HP; they instead leave an opponent fundamentally changed: a memory lost, a piece of good fortune reversed, a surgical procedure revisited. Inserting a little bit of story games and improvisation into Liminal Horror. At this stage, I realise the ossuary mechanic doesn’t actually appear; it’s its hands at work, but the creature itself is always in the background, the perfect setup for a campaign centred around tracking it down or figuring out its purpose.
The Horror template from Gobin Archives and Josh Domanski sets this all out for you: a heading, a stats block, art (I’m a Patreon of his, so my art is from the wonderful pen of Kim Diaz Holm), creature description, a bonus text, useable information and a couple of random tables.
It is important to point out how much Goblin Archives and Josh have given to the Liminal Horror community in terms of resources and how much the community has responded; it’s this melting pot that has got me stirred.
You can buy the ossuary mechanic on the following sites for one dollar or seventy-five British pence.
