Late Bloomer

Some GM tips for running The Bloom, for Liminal Horror, plus a quick and unrelated mention of Alice Munro after her passing

[A note, after I first published this: This was written before the emergence of revelations about how Alice Munro dealt with her daughter's accusations of sexual abuse against Munro's husband, her daughter's stepfather. Those definitely complicate how I feel about her work, and I recommend reading what her daughter has written about the situation, if you're planning to read Alice Munro’s stories and books.]

Something nasty this way has come

Who doesn’t love some small-town creepiness? A small-town TTRPG sandbox where your players can wander around and find things as they like, running into ghouls and weirdos and friendly NPCs who are really evil, is just heaven. And the module The Bloom, an official publication for the ttrpg Liminal Horror, is a great example of that.

There are campers who have gone missing from a small touristy Oregon mountain town (at least, I believe it is canonically located in Oregon). That's the hook if you are going to play multiple sessions of The Bloom (they do suggest multiple ways to use it as a one-shot), but there are plenty of other odd things going on in the town and the surroundings.

The module gives you a great system for ratcheting up tension and driving player interest and discovery, and there are plenty of fun NPCs for your

So I can only recommend the module.

(A note of importance: You don't necessarily need to own Liminal Horror to play it, because it comes with abbreviated rules and any additional rules needed are available online. In general, however, is’s a great game to own, which takes Into the Odd and Cairn and puts a specific modern horror twist on those games.)

However, I did have some specific problems when running it, and I’d like to lay out some tips for GMs looking to run it themselves.

There are spoilers for The Bloom and The Bureau ahead. You’ve been warned.

Unstated connections

One of the biggest and most prominent issues with the module is that there are a number of elements that are connected to a different Liminal Horror module, The Bureau.

The Bureau deals with an otherworldly incursion into the headquarters of the shadowy government agency the Bureau, which has subverted various bureaucrats and agents of the Bureau.

That comes up in two major ways in The Bloom, as the creators of the module have confirmed on Discord.

One is the behavior of the two agents at a lodge outside of town. They've been compromised by the extra-earthly entities that have invaded the Bureau’s headquarters—but the module doesn't tell you that.

Another is a body that the PCs will find underneath the titular Bloom, a fungal mass located deep underground that has infected the area. The body is dessicated and is holding an artifact that is the same as ones you can find in the Bureau's headquarters. The body is unlike other bodies that you'll find in the module, in the sense that it doesn't seem to have been affected by fungus.

The suggestion is that this is a Bureau agent and that they were possibly involved in the event that caused the Bloom to turn deadly. Furthermore, it may have some connections to the events at the Bureau's headquarters.

It's true that even without ever having read The Bureau, a GM could come up with explanations for the agents and the dead body. It's also clear that the authors of the module didn't intend for there to be canonical explanations that GMs should adhere to. However, GMs who don't realize that there were connections that the authors had in mind when writing these scenarios might find themselves stumped, because the module does not give explicit explanations, as a person buying an adventure module might expect it to do.

That decision to not give canonical explanations left me doing some improvisation. I added a suit to the corpse in the Bloom’s cavern and a business card from the lodge, giving my players more reason to make a connection to the Bureau agents. But that was ad hoc and lucky. Having a connection in mind up front would have been easier.

Making connections yourself

That decision to not give canonical explanations to many things going on in the module plays out in a large number of places, including ones that may or may not be connected with other modules.

A good deal of this can be fixed by a GM carefully reading the module and deciding on explanations up front—something I admit I didn't do well enough, forcing me to later improvise.

Here are a few examples:

There are two characters who are connected by a reference to the Stephen King book Misery—though you might not realize that at first. One of the main NPCs in town is Kassandra, a waitress at the local cafe. Her stat block notes that she writes fiction under a pseudonym, Anna Stone.

Later in the module, in a section about the areas surrounding the town of Coldwater, the Wilkes cabin is mentioned. It’s owned by a Mrs. Wilkes, who the module tells us is a voracious reader of Anna Stone novels. The description of the cellar below her cabin slightly suggests that she may be a serial killer or something similar. The module seems to be setting up a kidnapping plot of some sort, in which Mrs. Wilkes—who shares the last name with Annie Wilkes, the antagonist of Misery—will take Kassandra. But it doesn’t put that idea front and center and doesn’t give any suggestion of how a GM would use all of this. That’s left for them to deal with.

Another strange thing that a GM has to figure out how to use is in the same section of the module. The “makeshift post office” is another location in the environs of Coldwater. The postal employee, named Logan, is described as being in some state of confusion. Furthermore, the mail sorting machine that he has has been modified to first record mail and then destroy it.

Is this something to do with the Bureau and the monitoring of the town that seems to be going on? Maybe. The module doesn’t say, and the GM will have to decide.

One major NPC, the witchy woman Haru, exemplifies the kind of decisions that a GM has to make. Haru clearly has some resistance to the Bloom; her cabin will never be taken over by it. There are a number of mysterious aspects of her behavior and surroundings that show that she is someone of some great power. But the module doesn’t explain much of what role she should play. It says that she wants to “maintain her place of power” and that she’d like to keep the people she has grown fond of safe, which includes Kassandra. But how you’re going to use her is unclear.

The authors have said that Haru actually has some connections to an as-of-yet unpublished module, seemingly one about the town or city of Bayocean. That, of course, gives GMs little to go on right now. The fact that she has a power called “Shadow’s Embrace” has led some to suggest that her powers are related to the Shadow, one of the forces involved in the incursion into the Bureau’s headquarters. Does that mean she’s evil? What does that mean? It’s impossible to really know.

In my own game, Haru eventually went with the PCs to fight the Bloom, and she was killed during the TPK. That didn’t seem entirely discordant with how the module described her, and I had not much else to go on in figuring out what she would do.

Another character whose plans and role in the module seem similarly unclear is the minister, Thomas, who heads the local branch of a religious group that is interested in the entities that appear to be making incursions into our universe. But what that means in the context of this module isn’t really clear, even with some references to Thomas in the Doom Clock section of the book.

There are some practical things that a GM may need to figure out. One I’d point to is the geography of the caves under Coldwater. If you examine the map of the cave system and compare it with the maps of the area, you’ll see that some sections of the cave system extend very far, in a way that can sometimes defy a sense of realism, especially when it comes to traversal times. If the GM is aware of these issues, they can decide how they want to handle them, rather than simply sheepishly admitting on the spot to some weirdness, as I did.

How to use fallout

One last thing that I’d suggest that GMs running The Bloom decide on is how to use Liminal Horror’s stress and fallout system in this module. Stress and fallout in Liminal Horror serve as a way of having “horror effects” happen to players, as opposed to the usual physical effects of attacks that games centered around combat focus on.

In other modules for Liminal Horror, the modules often explicitly state that moments of horror that can occur will cause stress (which is essentially damage to the CTRL stat), which can become fallout if the player fails a CTRL save. That fallout is often a psychological or “spiritual” effect, with the player haunted in some way.

In The Bloom, the fallout table centers around ways in which the fungus and spores of the Bloom may affect the characters, with fungal growths on their bodies and so forth. But one other way in which the module differs is that it has fewer explicit moments when it says that characters take stress. It almost entirely reserves that for attacks by the Bloom-infested creatures, which can deliver spore-carried stress.

But the module does suggest that some locations may be full of spores that are in the air. While it doesn’t explicitly say that PCs should take stress in these locations, it appears that the authors have left that up to the GM. Creating a threat of spores may give the players incentive to search for ways to make or find masks, which itself may add fun gameplay.

Using stress more frequently will mean the characters will get damaged and perhaps die more quickly, but I will say that when I ran the module by the book, only using stress when it was explicitly mentioned, the threat of stress and fallout was minimal. I probably should have used it more, warping some of my PCs with the powers of the Bloom. GMs should choose for themselves when to use stress, I would suggest, and whether they want it to be more of a threat in some places.

Addenda

I just wanted to add two things to this post.

One is that for an alternative view on The Bloom and for a fuller review of the module, I highly recommend reading Moreau Vazh’s blogpost here. I had a different experience than he did when running it, especially in regard to the Voidcrawl, but different perspectives are great.

The second is that I’d like to acknowledge the death of one of the great authors of our time, Alice Munro, who was perhaps one of the greatest short story writers of all time. I was a fan of her writing, and my love of her writing made me friends, particularly one friend I’m thinking of. I remember the excitement I felt when she won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

If you’ve never read an Alice Munro short story, the best way I can describe them to you is that they are martial arts in text form. You start the story thinking that it is probably a nice traditional story, and then it delivers a massive kick to your solar plexus by the time it ends. Her stories don’t use gimmicks or literary tricks to do that, or at least not visible ones. They stun you emotionally in the most naturalistic way, the way that someone who knows jiu jitsu can shake your hand and then have you on the carpet in a headlock without seeming to have done anything. There are plenty of tributes to her out there, and mine is inadequate. I’d just recommend picking up one of her books and trying a story out.