Dark Venture — Eight Years in the Company of One Weird Game
Most exhibits in this building arrive by the crate. A publisher’s parcel, a review copy, a season of enthusiasm that runs its course and gets filed. This one arrived differently, and so the Keeper has given it a room rather than a shelf.
In late 2018 the archivist saw a game on a crowdfunding page, decided the art belonged to him personally, and wrote to the man who drew it asking permission to make a video nobody had commissioned and nobody was paying for. The Keeper records this detail first because everything else in the room follows from it. Eight years of catalogue entries, beginning with an unsolicited letter.
What accumulated afterwards is not a review cycle. It is a correspondence. The archivist writes house rules to fix a mode he finds too slow; the designer adopts them, and some years later they turn up printed in an official rulebook as though they had always been there. The designer draws a logo for the archivist’s clipboard, which thereafter appears in the background of several hundred entirely unrelated videos. The world spawns a second game in a genre the archivist openly dislikes, and he covers it anyway — three times — because the monsters are the same monsters and he has grown attached to them.
The Keeper has watched a great many enthusiasms pass through these halls and can confirm that most of them are shorter than this. What sustains it, so far as the Keeper can determine from the void between the shelves, is that the archivist never quite finished being surprised: by a world seeded differently on every shuffle, by characters who want things of their own, by artwork he keeps calling grotesque in a tone anyone listening closely would identify as affection.
The catalogue below runs earliest to latest. Some panels were hung this morning. Some have been on the wall for years. The Keeper declines, as ever, to say which.
Exhibit Catalogue — earliest first:
- Dark Venture (Kickstarter Preview) - Take a Look — an unpaid preview he asked to make himself, eight days before the campaign closed.
- Dark Venture - Review and Give Away — the full verdict, and the discovery of exactly one helmet in the entire item deck.
- Battle of the Ancients - A Look at the Demo Version — a skirmish game he would normally decline, barricading a laboratory against hungry wolves.
- Dark Venture - Further Discussion — board games are seeded like roguelikes, and nobody thinks to publish the seed.
- Dark Venture: Battle of the Ancients - a look at the pre-production game and expansions — three boxes opened at once; towers that gain a second floor as you climb them.
- Interview with Rob Lemon! Dark Venture! Battle of the Ancients! Galactic Keep! And More! — the designer’s own account: the skirmish game began life as hidden movement.
- Dark Venture: Battle of the Ancients - Narrative skirmish battles in a weird and twisted world — a quackalope laying grenade eggs, and one very firm complaint about gathering wood.
- Dark Venture - taking a look at the new expansions — Crawl and the Khrag Pit Arena, two standalone modes grafted onto Darkgrange.
- Grimgrove Expansion | Soundtracks for Dark Venture and Cyanstarlight — a soundtrack on cassette that ships with a map and a rules card.
- Dark Venture 2nd Edition (w Expansions) - Review — his own house rules, now printed as official, and closer than ever to the top ten.
721 transcripts • 800 posts archived
– The Keeper
Observes that a letter sent without invitation has produced eight years of shelving, one logo, one adopted rulebook and a great many eggs, and considers this a better return than most correspondence achieves.