The Prototype Table
There is a table near the loading door where the Keeper puts things that have not finished becoming themselves. Unbound proofs. Print-on-demand cards with the laser soot still on them. Boxes hand-packed by the people who designed them, one of which arrived wrapped in nothing but bubble wrap and optimism.
This crate is that table’s catalogue, and it is a strange one to file. Every exhibit here describes an object that did not, at the moment of description, exist — or existed only as a handful of copies, sent to a handful of people, to be posted back afterwards. The archivist is documenting something you cannot yet buy, sometimes something you will never be able to buy, and the document outlives the thing documented.
What the shelf preserves, then, is not games. It is the moment before a game hardens: when the rulebook still says adjacent where it means orthogonal, when the initiative track is ugly and somebody says so on camera, when a designer is still deciding whether to delete the last of his own flavour text. Some of these objects duly arrived. One arrives twice in this very catalogue, two years apart — and the second visit finds it thin-carded, crushed in the post, hand-packed with a thank-you note inside, and loved regardless. Others went quiet after their photograph was taken, which is its own kind of exhibit.
The Keeper is fond of this table for an unsentimental reason. A finished game tells you what it decided. A prototype tells you what it was still deciding, and these notes are frequently the only record anyone thought to keep of that.
The catalogue runs earliest to latest, March 2022 to January 2025. Two of these panels have hung here since the autumn; the rest went up this morning. The Keeper declines, as ever, to say which are which.
Exhibit Catalogue
- Let’s Unbox Dawnshade: The Watcher’s Prophecy — sixteen pounds in the box, most of it poker chips nobody asked for.
- Dawnshade - Why it isn’t for me — how you built your character never touches the challenge; you flick a chip instead.
- Arcadia Tenebra - A look at the prototype — cursed gear that arrives with its own removal quest attached.
- A Look at The Dungeons of Doria Prototype - Part 1 - The Stuff — four hundred loot cards, with traps shuffled in among them.
- The Dungeons of Doria Prototype - Part 2 - Game Discussion — swing the slowest weapon last, when action points are allowed to go negative.
- Nanolith - A look at the prototype of this cyberpunk adventure game — pushing a cybernetic body costs stress, and the stress meter shrinks each time it breaks.
- Rogue Angels - Mass Effect for your table top — injuries arrive as cards that clog the very slots your abilities need.
- Slay the Dragon - an OSR / NSR fantasy RPG — treasure drawn blind from a bag, too dangerous to sort while still underground.
- Arcadia Tenebra - the embodiment of a flawed gem (review) — two years on: stolen boots, and the needled armour that answered for them.
- Grimcoven - a look at this boss-battler prototype from Awaken Realms — destroy a body part and that attack leaves the boss’s deck permanently.
- Dragons Down - An Adventure for the Ages (Review) — almost none of what he usually asks for, and among the best he has played.
- Dragons Down: Desolation — two new terrains, twelve new classes, and a hydra minding a grotto.
- Neon Hope - A Cyberpunk Adventure Card Game (Preview) — three chips set aside unseen, so the pool never quite tells the truth.
- Dragons Down - Natives & Legends (Kickstarter preview) — the last scraps of flavour text deleted on purpose, so you must invent them.
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– The Keeper
Observes that this is the only shelf in the building where the label was written before the exhibit, and that several labels have now outlived the thing they were written for.