The Dulce Cabinet
The crate arrived without paperwork, which is how the Keeper knew what was in it before the lid came off. Genuine records travel with a manifest. The other kind travel with a man who won’t give his name and a suggestion that you were never sent anything at all.
Inside: a base beneath a mesa in New Mexico, folded flat and packed in six levels. The Keeper has assembled it on the long table, where it now occupies rather more of the archive than was agreed, and refuses all attempts to make it smaller. This is not a failing. Some exhibits are honest about the room they intend to take.
There is a whole literature behind this cabinet, and the archivist takes the trouble to shelve it first — Goulart, Sheckley, Harrison, the Illuminatus! trilogy, a samurai cat — the gonzo comic science fiction that publishing has been quietly producing for sixty years and that games almost never dare to touch. This one dares. It commits so thoroughly that the commitment does the work the rules decline to do.
And the rules do decline. Enter a room. Wake something. Fight it. Search the corpse. Rinse, says the manual, and repeat. The Keeper has catalogued grander systems that achieved less. What redeems the loop is that every creature in the base announces exactly who it intends to hit — the best-armoured, the weakest, the swiftest — so the tactics live not in the dice but in the arranging of bodies before they are thrown.
Then the party descends into the lizard caverns, and the arithmetic turns. Three keys, four crystals, a god on a throne, and a commander who does not scale to the size of the party facing him. Two heroes go in with the poorest gear the game issues. Neither comes out. The archivist, to his enormous credit, films the whole collapse and then explains precisely which line of design failed him.
Exhibit Catalogue — the Dulce file, earliest first:
- Secret Unknown Stuff: Escape From Dulce - Review — a Mothman summoned with two Richard Gere cassettes, and a Man in Black climbing the alarm track.
- Escape From Dulce - The Hidden Shrine of Umugatu - Part One — an expansion disguised as a 1979 module, and an XP awarded for reading aloud with sufficient gusto.
- Escape From Dulce - The Hidden Shrine of Umugatu - Part Two — a knight of low intellect eats a cavern mushroom; something with tentacles answers.
- Escape From Dulce - The Hidden Shrine of Umugatu - Part Three - Finale — a total party wipe, and the respawn rule that hands the survivor a rusty pipe.
- A superb solo RPG of paranormal investigation - The Unseen World — evidence gathered in a burnt-out school, then sold as magazine copy to fund the next haunting.
- Minion Hunter (a Dark Conspiracy game) - RetroLook — 1992, four conspiracies loose across America, and not one line of flavour text to warm them.
- Kryptothera - The Cryptid Pursuit (Overview) — rival guilds hunting monsters for coin, and the moment your caged catch becomes someone else’s.
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– The Keeper
Observes that a base built to keep its secrets underground has been laid open on a table in six flat pieces, and that this is the fate of every conspiracy that becomes popular enough to license.