There’s one kind of liminal space we’ve not covered at all, and it’s known as an epoch. A few people have been asking about how Curseborne might expand to grander schemes, conspiracies, and worlds of horror, and an epoch is one such way.
Epochs
The strangest of liminalities and also the hardest to access are epochs. Little is understood about these vanished eras, swallowed into time. The theory goes that a liminality can develop to such strength that it consumes the entire world, taking most of the people in the world with it. These are the people who accept the new reality at face value, including most Accursed.
The most recent chronicled epoch was somewhere in the early 1990s, around the time the Cold War was considered finished. A new world had dawned, and with it, a new epoch emerged. Another occurred with the start of the Great War, in 1914. Accursed speculate as to when other epochs occurred, with many guessing that September 11th 2001 was one. The Archivists maintain that that epoch wave is still washing over the world, and it’s too early to declare a new world state, but the Raptors hotly debate this claim.
Note that only most of the world’s people move with a liminal epoch. A small percentage remain in the prior epoch, lost in a world where over 99% of the world’s population just disappeared, became blank-faced avatars, or transformed into world eating imps and worse creatures. Each epoch has a different effect on the surviving population and the people who moved with it.
Those trapped in prior epochs might try to claw their way forward to another epoch, but to do so they need to understand the nature of what’s occurred. Tales tell of epoch spaces where Accursed lead nation states of humans in a desperate fight to flourish in their time prisons or escape to another epoch. But these liminalities are obdurate. Reality has a way of punishing those who try to breach an epoch. Those who try and fail are thrown back to the zero point where the coming epoch first sloughed away.
These poor souls find themselves facing the same trials as before, only with full awareness of their futile struggle and the horrors awaiting them.
The most startling thing about epochs is that even most Accursed are unaware of them. They get washed along with the tide, and those left behind become scant remembrances, more fleeting even than phantasms and dreams. Faces vanish from memories, names disappear from records, people move on with their lives.
Accessing an epoch takes magic beyond most Accursed. A Dead story holds that the Mavens’ patriarch traveled to the Great War epoch. Supposedly, he wanted to forge a fae deal to alter the course of the 20th century and save millions of lives. Whatever the outcome, King Cholera hasn’t been seen since, and nobody who knows of this tale believes he was successful. After all, the First World War still happened.
And some liminalities are just down the street…
Of course, the majority of games you play and stories you tell won’t concern hidden worlds folded into reality, forgotten by the majority of the population. They will contain places like Twin Lakes Underground Station.
Twin Lakes Underground Station
Twin Lakes shouldn’t exist. It was proposed as a station decades ago but never advanced beyond that stage, as soon after that meeting, the designated station spot flooded in a sewer collapse and has never been drained. Yet, every year there’s a metro passenger who reports their late-night train stopping at Twin Lakes. They all say the station looks old, gray, and damp. They claim the doors open, the lights flicker, and… the story then differs.
Some passengers, possessed of a foolish curiosity, step from the train into this Shattered Space and report tales of traveling back in time, to another reality, or receiving visions of deaths in their future. Others remain on the train and report seeing passengers on the station platform, their faces blank or hungry. Sometimes they scratch at the train carriage, sometimes they ignore it. On one occasion, one of these strangers climbed onto the train and lunged for those in the carriage. He was only held back through a concerted effort before finally being ejected at the next station, where — to the trauma of everyone on board — he fell between the train and the platform edge.
Is Twin Lakes a simple Shattered Space or something more? Are there more stations like this? The city’s Nephilim are certain there’s an entire network of forbidden stations and all the disappearances that take place on the subway are from people getting off at the wrong stop. They don’t know what happens to them after that but expect there’s maybe many lives to be saved. These disappearances started years ago, so how anyone could survive in such a place doesn’t bear considering.
Very spooky. I love it!