The Back Office
Behind the exhibition halls, where the lighting is worse and nobody has ever thought to hang a placard, there is a room the Keeper does not usually show visitors. It is where the channel kept its paperwork.
Not reviews. Not playthroughs. The other material entirely — notices pinned to a door, apologies for silence, draws conducted on camera with a random number and a straight face, and the years in which somebody had to explain why the videos had stopped and when they might resume. Every archive has a room like this. Most institutions burn it.
The Annals covered the ledger years. This is the room next door, and it holds the more revealing documents. A forty-second statement of intent from April 2018, recorded by a man with no idea what he was starting. A Christmas greeting delivered through bronchitis. Two giveaway videos six weeks apart, across which a wry joke about the postal service becomes, with no warning whatsoever, a genuine loss. A funding announcement that is mostly a list of refusals. An update recorded in a hobby room that had become an office, by someone who could feel exactly what that was doing to him.
Then the stranger filings. Two shelves of vintage paperbacks, among them a dead man’s library the archivist tried and failed to reconstruct. A red chili recipe with a stated position on authenticity and a low opinion of those who dispute it. A t-shirt announcement. Two hauls of books described with the undimmed optimism of a man who has never once been defeated by a to-read pile.
Read in order, this room is the channel’s actual autobiography. The reviews tell you what Daniel thought of a game. These tell you what it cost him to keep making them.
Exhibit Catalogue
- Welcome to the Dungeon Dive! — forty seconds, one promise, and the word “tangentially” doing a decade of heavy lifting.
- Channel Update — three months of silence explained by total immersion in David Lynch.
- Shelf by Shelf - Part One — Philip K. Dick, Lord Dunsany, and a volume that once sat on Tolkien’s shelf.
- Happy Holidays from the Dungeon Dive — bronchitis, a cancelled series, and why a game changing your mind matters.
- Dark Venture - Winner Announcement — a winner chosen unscientifically, for naming Dungeoneer, Lone Wolf and Gamma World.
- Win a Copy of the WHQ Chaos Adversary Cards — out-of-print cards given away on one condition: open them, don’t flip them.
- Winner Announced! WHQ - Chaos Adversary Cards give away — the draw goes fine; the second prize is lost in the post forever.
- Announcing the Dungeon Dive Patreon — a funding announcement built almost entirely out of things he refuses to do.
- Shelf by Shelf - Part Five — Olaf Stapledon’s Sirius, the only book to make him cry in public.
- The Dungeon Dive Update - June 2021 — jury duty, burnout, and a hard pivot toward games with fewer pieces.
- Shelf by Shelf - Part 6 — a dead stranger’s stamped books, and an obituary reading only “an avid reader.”
- Cooking with the Dungeon Dive - Episode 1 - Dungeon Dive Red Chili — chipotles in adobo, cocoa powder, and a very low opinion of chili people.
- The Dungeon Dive’s 2021 year-end review, Patreon Questions, a look forward to 2022 — ten cents an hour, and board games ranked below books and music.
- Show and Tell at the Dungeon Dive — a table of new purchases, and an argument that DCC misreads sword and sorcery.
- Dungeon Dive T-Shirts are Here! — merch drawn by the same artists whose games keep landing on the table.
- Low Effort Show and Tell - Episode 2 — solo RPGs bought, admired, binder-prepped, and not yet played.
- I’ve made a huge mistake (channel update) — the separate book channel was a tactical error; the fiction comes home.
922 transcripts • 1001 posts archived
– The Keeper
Maintains that an institution’s true history lives in its correspondence rather than its exhibits, which is precisely why the correspondence is kept behind a door that sticks.