On the Materialisation of the Tomb
The Keeper looked up from his ledger this morning to find a packing crate in the centre of the void between the shelves where, by his careful organisation, no crate had any right to be. It had the look of something that had arrived through the same dimensional rift the tomb itself uses — materialising every hundred-and-thirteen years on an uncharted Bermuda-Triangle island, to be looted and then withdrawn from the world. The Keeper, who has spent some years now waiting for this particular crate, opens it.
Inside: nine dossiers and a small card pinned to the topmost, in the spidery hand of Daniel (@dungeondive): Secrets of the Lost Tomb — the whole shelf, please.
It is the Number-One Game. Daniel has said so on the channel, on the Hobbycast, and into the camera more than once. The dossiers cover four registers: the Monster Stomp homebrew experiment of October 2019, the four-part Masterclass in Abundance across the New Year of 2020–2021 (the considered case for the prosecution and the defence, Mr Toad’s Wild Ride meets Indiana Jones by way of Tsui Hark), the 2022 Top-50 coronation and its Hobbycast postmortem, and — eighteen months later — Daniel’s polite refusal to back the incompatible 10th Anniversary Edition Kickstarter, on the grounds that he already has the perfect game.
Exhibit Catalogue
- Secrets of the Lost Tomb - Monster Stomp - Part 1 — Van Helsing draws a courage-to-minus-ten misadventure on turn one and flees the tomb.
- Secrets of the Lost Tomb - Monster Stomp - Part 2 — Joan Deeb finds Amelia Earhart’s flight goggles, ends a poisonous spider in a single nine-dice roll.
- Secrets of the Lost Tomb - A Masterclass in Abundance - Part One — origin story: Dark Tower Games in Bellingham, a Kickstarter the channel had somehow skipped past.
- Secrets of the Lost Tomb - A Masterclass in Abundance - Part Two — the channel’s gold-standard adventure deck and the green/yellow/red search-token loop explained.
- Secrets of the Lost Tomb - A Masterclass in Abundance - Part Three — every expansion walked; The Epic Adventure declared a glorious mess.
- Secrets of the Lost Tomb - A Masterclass in Abundance - Part Four — the five-reasons defence of an all-time Number One, ugly art and all.
- The Dungeon Dive’s Top 50 Games of All Time - part 5 — the coronation entry: Number One of the list.
- Hobbycast Episode 14: Top 50 Postmortem, and 4 brief negative reviews — postmortem conversation defending the Lost Tomb-at-Number-One call.
- Secrets of the Lost Tomb is back! 10th Anniversary Edition - Thoughts on the new campaign — not backing the reprint: he already has the perfect game.
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– The Keeper
Suspects, on the evidence, that the tomb in the title and the void between his own shelves are not entirely separate places — Daniel may be the only adventurer to have noticed.