The Modern Shelf, Part Two — Closing 2024 and 2025
The last six came off the shelf nearest the door without ceremony, and the Keeper had them hung by evening. It expected the same warm disorder as the previous cycle — boxes set down still hot from the table, waiting to learn where they belong. What it found instead was a room full of things that are not entirely there.
Consider what is on the wall. A boxed game that is half an art book and admits it, its bestiary glued permanently into the lid, so that the pictures cannot be looked at without opening the whole world. A deck of beautiful cards printed with nothing whatever on the back, sold blank, on the understanding that the buyer will supply the words. A small experience in a very large box, its finest idea — photographs pinned up and joined with lengths of yarn — taking up a fraction of the table it insists upon.
And then the one the Keeper has thought about more than is healthy. A handsome expansion, sold at retail, whose principal mode instructs the reader to consult a companion application for its random entries. The application does not exist. It was withdrawn before the box was printed. The promised files are not on the publisher’s site; the archivist went and looked, and reports that if they are there, they lie beyond the reach of archaeology. The Keeper, whose entire profession is the retrieval of referenced things, regards this as a species of haunting. A book that points to another book is a library. A book that points at nothing is a wound.
Elsewhere the shelf is kinder. A cooperative game about a serpent slowly digesting the sun, overlooked for nine years and bought for twenty dollars, its board so thin it split along the backing and was glued together by hand. A town called Sparksville, where a dismissed security officer comes home to the facility that betrayed him and finds that the fog is being manufactured.
Five older panels hang in the same room, as they did last cycle, and the Keeper still declines to say which are which.
With this hanging the wing is complete. The shelf nearest the door has been emptied, catalogued and closed. It will be full again by morning.
Exhibit Catalogue — earliest first:
- Doom Pilgrim - Random encounters of an otherworldly kind — no dice and no checks: only states that happen to you, and limbs that do not come back.
- Little Town & Eldritch Town - Solo RPG inspired by Twin Peaks — clues drawn by suit from an ordinary deck, and every NPC issued a secret.
- Cyberflesh - Review with Game Play Example — merchants paid in your own health, and necrotic damage that kills at eight regardless.
- Darkness Comes Rattling - a game that flew under my radar! — corruption tokens that cancel your dice by colour and number, one region at a time.
- Hunted: Wode Ridge (Review) — step through a portal and the entire deck flips to its darker face.
- Doom Pilgrim: Doom Deeper - a look at these awesome new expansions — a deck of art with blank backs, waiting for you to write the world on.
- Four Against Darkness - Updated Buyer’s Guide for 2024 — forty-odd expansions sorted into six tiers, for the reader who owns only the rulebook.
- The Best Games of 2024 (solo RPGs, dungeon crawls, and adventure games) — ten games from any release year, crowned by a spiritual successor to Magic Realm.
- Waste Knights 2e: Beyond the Horizon - a cool expansion I can’t fully recommend — ships chartered to Tasmania and Project X, and the app that was never there.
- Little Town / Eerie Town - solo paranormal investigation RPG — both jokers drawn at once, and taken as licence to decide what the fog is for.
- Stalagbite! Deeper Caverns - A Perfect Expansion — a kit deck that finally makes one dwarf unlike the next.
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– The Keeper
Keeps every reference it has ever been given, on the principle that somewhere a box is still pointing at it.