Borrowed Fiction — Page, Screen, and Panel on the Table
A library holds two kinds of book: the ones it owns and the ones it has borrowed. The second kind is the more troublesome, because sooner or later someone comes to collect. This cycle the Keeper opened the annex where the borrowed stories live. It is a long, crowded room, and every shelf in it belongs, strictly speaking, to someone else.
Here the stories of other people’s books, films and comic panels have been pressed into cardboard and wooden pieces, with the edges sanded down until they fit a box lid. An outlaw of Sherwood is now a wooden meeple. A She-Devil with a Sword takes orders from four dice. A whole Arabian night has been parcelled into numbered paragraphs, a Musketeer has been fitted with a facing token, and a castle once explored by mouse-click has become a deck of cards. None of the original owners was consulted. The Keeper suspects several would have objections. At least one, a cryptid with a grudge against bridges, would probably have objections to everything.
What the annex teaches is that a borrowed story is judged twice: once against the game it became, and once against the book it came from. Some exhibits pass the first test and fail the second. Some are too faithful to their source to please anyone who doesn’t already love it. A few come with their own reading lists, as if apologising to the author. And one, the Keeper notes approvingly, ships with a rulebook that cannot reach its own first scenario, which is the most literary flaw in the room.
Older loans from the same shelves have been hung among the new arrivals, so a visitor can walk the annex end to end and decide which debts were repaid.
Exhibit Catalogue, earliest first:
- Big Trouble in Little China: The Game: The Review — a “once-a-year game”, with a fate track that can simply kill you.
- Some Thoughts on LotR: Journeys in Middle Earth — fearing an app’s future is like refusing scotch because it’ll run out.
- The Sword & Sorcery Saga - Part One - What is Sword & Sorcery? — two hundred books, and why these heroes chase plunder, not prophecy.
- The Adventures of Robin Hood - Take a Look — the board’s art is the game: if a cart is painted there, you can visit it.
- Tales of the Arabian Nights - a great time of random adventure — Scheherazade finds love in jail and bears a child as ugly as a camel.
- Red Sonja: Hyrkania’s Legacy - become the She-Devil with a Sword! — six out-of-print novels, and a bikini-armoured box that rates a B-minus.
- Shadowgate: The Living Castle - a review from a solo perspective — MacVenture memories, and a Blaster Master novel that recommends Madeleine L’Engle.
- Gascony’s Legacy - a tactical skirmish game set in the fiction of Alexandre Dumas — he kicks a flaming brazier onto the Cardinal’s Captain.
- Unmatched Adventures: Tales to Amaze! - Review — the Mothman hates bridges; Daniel doubts the word “Adventures”.
- The Hobbit: Adventure Board Game (1995) (RetroLook) — riddle battles won by holding the card that bears the answer.
- Lord of the Rings: Adventure to Mount Doom (Review) — glorious art, a co-op label, and a game that plays alone.
- The Weird and Wonderful World of Novelizations — Alan Dean Foster wrote Alien without knowing what the xenomorph looked like.
- Is the new solo mode actually good? Tales of the Arabian Nights: 40th Anniversary Edition — fifteen bespoke solo quests, and a dark river that turns you into a beast.
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– The Keeper
Has stamped every exhibit in the annex “on loan” and is awaiting the late fees with interest.