The Last Open Exhibits
Every exhibit in this archive came with a label, and most labels came with a shelf: the archivist’s own playlists, strung through the stacks like guide-ropes. The Keeper has been following them hand over hand for some time. This cycle it reached the last of the loose ends, where each rope was knotted to a crate that nobody had yet opened.
They are an untidy lot, as last crates usually are. Several belong to the solo wing, which the Keeper had believed finished; it was not, and now it is. One is a ranked list of screens rather than tables. One is a wish list of games that do not exist, which the Keeper has filed with particular care, since it is the only shelf in the building whose contents are entirely hypothetical. And one is not a game at all. It is a man walking into a wood with a rucksack, looking for a tunnel.
That last crate, the Keeper suspects, is the key to the room. Nearly everything in the solo wing is an argument about why anyone would choose to play alone, and here the argument is finally made without dice: a boy in the high desert, a stick for a broadsword, a world whose rules nobody else had to agree to. The engines, journals and random tables filling the rest of the wing are simply that boy’s equipment, acquired later and at greater expense.
Five older exhibits from the same shelves hang among the new, so a visitor arriving cold can walk the wing from its first beginner’s guide to its last field trip without noticing the seams. The ropes are coiled. The playlists, so far as the Keeper can tell, are closed.
Exhibit Catalogue, earliest first:
- Quest for the Lost Pixel - Take a Look — $130 shipped, and the designer clears about thirty cents a copy.
- The Totally Rad Zone - A look at Rad Zone solo RPG — no combat rolls: survivors dodge, bribe or bluff, and map radiation in pencil.
- Pilgrimage of the Sun Guard - a journaling / solo-RPG from Amanda P. — a father’s compass, hung on the antlers of a stag king.
- D6 Video Games for fans of Dungeon Dive Board Games — his would-be favourite board game of all time, mercifully trapped on a screen.
- Let’s take a look at Ronin (solo RPG) and talk about Dagger of Kamui (1985; Dir: Rintaro) — a blind tonfa fighter, and a 1985 anime epic featuring Mark Twain.
- A Beginner’s Guide to Solo Role Playing (solo RPGs), by the Dungeon Dive — scripted or sandbox, system or tool: a map of solo play’s spectrums.
- Three Recommendations for Solo RPG Systems / Combos (+1 Bonus Recommendation!) - Solo RPG Friday — three on-ramps under thirty dollars, and the broken-record answer.
- Into the Heart of Darkroot Forest: The Quest for the Tunnel of Doom — no dice, just a forest, a Conan twirl, and why he plays alone.
- Top 5 Board Game Wishlist! — Kowloon Walled City, Captain Bluebear, and the strange absence of wuxia board games.
- Top 10 Solo RPG Things (games, tools, systems etc.) — generators, decks and tables, with Mörk Borg’s Solitary Defilement on top.
- A guide to solo, analog, dungeon crawls (solo RPG) — eight solo crawls, from NoteQuest’s simplicity to D100 Dungeon’s depth.
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– The Keeper
Has coiled the last guide-rope and can no longer recall which way the exit was, which in a library it considers a good sign.