Loose Pages, Part Two
The lamp came off its hook again this cycle, and the Keeper went back out along the older wings.
Last time the search was for absences — panels never hung, stories stopping one page short of where they meant to. This cycle the fault is subtler and, the Keeper thinks, rather more embarrassing. These exhibits were not missing anything. They were assembled out of order. A verdict shelved before the deliberation that produced it. A closing argument mounted where the case ought to have opened. Visitors have been walking these rooms backwards for years and have been far too polite to mention it.
Consider the long case at the end of the hall. It has held for some time a triumphant late notice — a favourite, long out of print, coming back — and beside it the reappraisal that earned the favouritism in the first place. What it lacked was a beginning: a campaign that failed on the crowdfunding floor, a designer written to out of something close to pity, a prototype in pencil sketches. And it lacked the middle, too — the delivery, the game arriving at last inside a box the size of a small principality, with a rulebook one must unfold like a broadsheet. Both panels are now in place. The wing reads forwards.
The same repair has been made to the island campaign, whose session zero has been sitting alone for want of the two episodes that bracket it. The manifesto before, in which an archivist confesses that what he remembers of a game is never once the rules. The reckoning after, in which he admits that playing one on camera is a different and lonelier labour than talking about a box.
The rest are single panels, hung where they belong. A dungeon map good enough to embarrass the game printed around it. A boxed game surrendered at a shop counter because of four words on the lid, and bought back two decades later at collector’s rates. An overland crawl that is not, whatever the forum insists, a hidden gem. And a co-operative war that changed its mind about the archivist rather than the other way about.
Thirteen panels below, in the order they happened — not the order they arrived.
Exhibit Catalogue — earliest first:
- Forgotten Depths - A Unique Dungeon Adventure — a failed campaign, a prototype in pencil, and cover art that sends him back to Elric.
- Mertwig’s Maze and the Satanic Panic — a boy sneaking home a cartoon board game, and a mother who read the lid.
- DungeonQuest - Review - Top 10 Game as of 2020 — a fifteen percent chance of walking out alive, defended as the entire point.
- Warlock of Firetop Mountain - Take a Look — an excellent dungeon map with a keys-and-bluffing deduction puzzle bolted to it.
- The Peril of Cymbaline Isle - Introduction - Who/What/When/Where/Why — a campaign assembled from twenty books and no single box.
- The Peril of Cymbaline Isle - Session 0 - A look at Scarlet Heroes, Character Creation (solo RPG) — Harlan Peters, adventuring archaeologist, and one bag of heinously sticky tar.
- Peril of Cymbaline Isle - Interlude — the tools that earned their keep, and the tome too vast to open mid-session.
- Forgotten Depths - A Smallish Game in a GIANT BOX! — a rulebook the size of a newspaper, three-fifths of it blank.
- Return of the Heroes - A Hidden Gem, or a Game Best Forgotten? — rules delivered as small talk between a dwarf and an elf.
- Defenders of the Realm - a long and casual discussion — Larry Elmore’s art, four competing fonts, and the finest cardboard he has ever held.
- Defenders of the Realm - detailed game discussion / customizing play for two heroes — a quest about black barges fails; a quest about pirates answers it.
- Forgotten Depths - A top 10 contender (solo dungeon crawl) — a second edition, a sensible box at last, and a place in the top ten.
- Forgotten Depths - Reprint Coming Soon! — a man who does not prize novelty, explaining his one standing exception.
790 transcripts • 869 posts archived
– The Keeper
Observes that a story told out of order is still a story, but that only an archive can be embarrassed by one — and only an archive can quietly put the pages back.