The Drafting Table
Most of this archive records games being played. This wing records them being made — which is a stranger business, and considerably less flattering to everyone involved.
The Keeper cleared a long table for it. On one end: books so beautiful they barely function as tools, bought by a man who freely admits he will never run them and reads them as weird fiction instead. In the middle: a designer and an archivist, meeting on a schedule across two years, talking about art packs and algorithms and how little either of them earns. At the far end, under better light than it deserves, the wreckage — a decade of the archivist’s own abandoned games, laid out and labelled by cause of death.
That last stretch is why this exhibit exists. Anyone will show you a finished thing. Far fewer will show you the worker-placement dungeon crawl that collapsed under its own action economy, the five-tier nesting of world-environment-setting-area-location that ate itself, the d12 system that never balanced. Fewer still will name the actual disease: hitting a bad rule and patching it rather than going back, over and over, until what you have is not a game but a scaffold of repairs. The archivist names it, then spends the next diary demonstrating the cure on his own boss design — and the fix is so much better than the patch that the whole exhibit tilts toward optimism.
Between those poles sits the conversation itself, which keeps circling one idea: the tail. Games used to live for years and grow communities. Now they arrive complete and the talking stops on delivery. Both men would rather build something that outlasts its own announcement.
The catalogue below runs earliest to latest, some panels hung today and some hung seasons ago. The Keeper does not distinguish. Neither should you.
Exhibit Catalogue — earliest first:
- Silent Titans - A look at the new artistic RPG Module from Patrick Stuart — pushes the module-as-artwork right up to the point where it would stop being usable.
- Hobbycast Episode 16: A Casual Conversation with Dustin Freund, Designer of The Ghosts Betwixt — a designer on getting a first game out of the head and onto cardboard.
- Exploring the Perplexing Ruins: Fallen, Campaign Notebook, Hilgaarb and more — the usage die: survival texture with almost no bookkeeping.
- Interview with Rob Lemon! Dark Venture! Battle of the Ancients! Galactic Keep! And More! — an artist-designer whose own hand is the house style.
- Alone Together with the Dungeon Dive and Perplexing Ruins - Episode 1 (Solo RPG Friday) — a bookseller who’d never role-played, radicalised by d100 Dungeon.
- Alone Together with Perplexing Ruins and the Dungeon Dive - Episode 2 — heroes in sword and sorcery don’t die, because then there’d be no story.
- Alone Together - Episode 3 - Games, Game Design, and World Building Mechanisms — the long tail, and why Kickstarter keeps cutting it off.
- A Conversation with Jason Glover: Iron Helm! Game Design! Solo Gaming! And More! — this, that, or press your luck — a whole design philosophy in six words.
- Alone Together with the Dungeon Dive and Perplexing Ruins - Science Fiction and Other Stuff — two smugglers, one impounded starship, generated entirely by character creation.
- Design Diary #1 - All Aboard the Fail Train! Next Stop, the Island of Discarded Game Ideas! — ten years of dead prototypes, autopsied on camera.
- Design Diary #2 - A Land in Peril / Artist Reveal / Discussing Challenges / Player Questions — a timer that destroys the map instead of buffing the boss.
- Collecting Artist Trading Cards - a fun and affordable hobby — paying working artists in small amounts, one card at a time.
- A Conversation all about the Game Crafter with JT Smith — where the one-map, nine-deck game actually gets printed.
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– The Keeper
Notes that of the two men at this table, one draws the monsters and one describes them, and that both spend rather more of the conversation apologising for how little they charge.