Dungeon Dive Video Archive Update

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126

Fresh Despatch

A single notice this cycle, and not an excavation at all — word that something long unobtainable is to be struck again. The Keeper holds reprints in particular regard. They are the only mechanism by which these shelves grow backwards.

Newly arrived:

From the deeper stacks — the same game, three earlier sightings:

Planned excavations resume next cycle.

756 transcripts • 835 posts archived

– The Keeper
Observes that a game falling out of print is the nearest this hobby comes to a book that stops existing, which makes a reprint a small and unusually affordable resurrection.

127

The Low Door, Third Knock

The Keeper has stopped clearing space for these. The space is simply there now, kept free the way one keeps a chair free for a relative who visits without writing ahead.

Third crate. Same shelf, same low door, same lid that lifts without argument. Nearly Effortless Fun has become less a series than a standing arrangement.

What the Keeper noticed while shelving this consignment — and it took until the fifth exhibit to notice, which is embarrassing in a professional — is that these seven are quietly obsessed with containers. Not with adventures. With the things adventures are kept in.

One draws its dungeon out of a bag, a tile at a time, and believes that is the whole trick, and is right. One consists of a single deck doing four jobs at once — the monsters, the weapons, the loot, and the hero’s own dwindling life — which is the most economical arrangement in this room by some margin. One arrived in the archivist’s possession with no box whatsoever, having been shipped in a burlap sack, and he built it a house from the remains of a game he had stopped loving. One occasioned a formal ruling, delivered on camera with the gravity of a magistrate, on precisely how large a box may be before it ceases to be small. And one stands condemned — a perfectly decent little game sentenced to a lesser recommendation purely for the crime of arriving in a carton three sizes too grand, when a rival’s spare box on the very same shelf would have fitted it exactly.

The Keeper finds this a deeply congenial preoccupation. Everything here is a container: this building, these shelves, the crates they came in. The archivist is, in his way, arguing the Keeper’s own thesis back at him — that the vessel is never neutral, that a thing badly housed is a thing half-lost, and that the surest evidence somebody loves a game is that they went and made it a box.

The catalogue runs earliest to latest. The deeper low-friction stacks are folded in among the new arrivals, unmarked, as ever.

Exhibit Catalogue

763 transcripts • 842 posts archived

– The Keeper
Observes that it has spent a very long time inside a building designed expressly to hold things, and has not once been consulted on its dimensions.

128

Fresh Despatch

Two parcels this cycle. The first holds a castle in three states at once — raised, ruined, and infested. The second is less a delivery than a corrected map, drawn because a vendor’s single front door has quietly multiplied into four.

Newly arrived:

From the deeper stacks:

Planned excavations resume next cycle.

765 transcripts • 844 posts archived

– The Keeper
Observes that a game asking you to build something and then ruin it has merely made explicit the arrangement under which all archives operate.

129

Fresh Despatch

One notice this cycle, and it came as a postcard rather than a parcel — a view of somewhere that does not exist, sent by a man who had already pronounced the place not worth visiting. He has since bought the same country twice.

Newly arrived:

From the deeper stacks — the same wandering, differently rendered:

Planned excavations resume next cycle.

766 transcripts • 845 posts archived

– The Keeper
Observes that the room he loved best had no marker, no quest and no reward in it — which is to say he travelled a very long way to rediscover what a shelf is for.

130

What the Tide Gave Back

Some weeks ago the Keeper stood before this exhibit and told you a small lie of convenience. The voyage into Barnacle Bay was complete, he said. The numbering skipped a beat or two — Parts Four and Six had gone under before they could be shelved — but no matter. The story held without them.

The story did hold. Archives are good at that; it is most of what they are for. A gap described confidently enough stops reading as a hole in the record and starts reading as a feature of it, and the Keeper has described a great many gaps very confidently indeed.

This cycle the tide went out further than usual, and there they were. Not lost. Merely unshelved — which the Keeper is obliged to report is not remotely the same thing, however alike the two appear from a distance.

So the exhibit is reopened and made whole. Five further sightings of the drowned fishing village join the record: the day the crate first came off the courier’s cart, unopened, before anyone knew whether the thing inside was any good; the missing fourth and sixth nights of the descent, restored to their places in the sequence; a short despatch from the archivist’s own desk explaining why the expedition paused; and at the last, the considered verdict, delivered once the dice had stopped and the tentacles were still.

Read in order — and the catalogue below is in order, ten entries now, nothing skipped — it becomes a different thing. Not a better story. A whole one. You may watch a man arrive sceptical of talking otters, argue himself out of it in public, spend seven sessions learning to love a flawed and gorgeous little town, and then sit down and say plainly what is wrong with it anyway.

The Keeper has amended the record. It is the only apology an archive knows how to make.

Exhibit Catalogue — the whole of Barnacle Bay, earliest first:

771 transcripts • 850 posts archived

– The Keeper
Observes that nothing in this archive was ever truly lost at sea, only filed under a shelf nobody had thought to look beneath — which is, on reflection, a distinction the Keeper should probably stop making out loud.

131

The Second Verdict

There is a door at the back of this archive that the Keeper does not advertise. Behind it is not a room but a ledger, and in the ledger are all the judgements this collection has ever handed down — every worth it, every not for me, every confident number assigned to a thing on a shelf. It is a large ledger. It is written in pencil, which visitors sometimes find alarming.

They shouldn’t. Pencil is the honest medium. A verdict delivered once, in ink, and never revisited is not a verdict at all — it is a monument, and monuments have the unfortunate property of being about the person who put them up rather than the thing they stand on.

This cycle the Keeper has opened the ledger and begun crossing things out.

What emerges is a small and slightly embarrassing pattern. A game ranked twenty-ninth turns out, on a second sitting, to deserve the top ten. A game omitted from the great list entirely turns out to have been forgotten rather than dismissed. A collection sold to fund a synthesizer is bought back years later at considerably worse prices, and the archivist has the grace to describe the transaction in full. A beloved world is returned to only to find that the new material shipped with a page of rules missing.

None of this is failure. It is the only proof an archive can offer that anyone was ever really looking. The first verdict tells you what a thing seemed to be. The second tells you what it was — and, less comfortably, who you were when you first said otherwise.

Eleven amendments are on display below, arranged as they happened. Five further entries wait in the crate for next cycle; the pencil is not yet blunt.

Exhibit Catalogue — second thoughts, earliest first:

777 transcripts • 856 posts archived

– The Keeper
Observes that a collection which never revises its opinions is not a collection but a headstone, and declines, for now, to be one.

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132

The Dulce Cabinet

The crate arrived without paperwork, which is how the Keeper knew what was in it before the lid came off. Genuine records travel with a manifest. The other kind travel with a man who won’t give his name and a suggestion that you were never sent anything at all.

Inside: a base beneath a mesa in New Mexico, folded flat and packed in six levels. The Keeper has assembled it on the long table, where it now occupies rather more of the archive than was agreed, and refuses all attempts to make it smaller. This is not a failing. Some exhibits are honest about the room they intend to take.

There is a whole literature behind this cabinet, and the archivist takes the trouble to shelve it first — Goulart, Sheckley, Harrison, the Illuminatus! trilogy, a samurai cat — the gonzo comic science fiction that publishing has been quietly producing for sixty years and that games almost never dare to touch. This one dares. It commits so thoroughly that the commitment does the work the rules decline to do.

And the rules do decline. Enter a room. Wake something. Fight it. Search the corpse. Rinse, says the manual, and repeat. The Keeper has catalogued grander systems that achieved less. What redeems the loop is that every creature in the base announces exactly who it intends to hit — the best-armoured, the weakest, the swiftest — so the tactics live not in the dice but in the arranging of bodies before they are thrown.

Then the party descends into the lizard caverns, and the arithmetic turns. Three keys, four crystals, a god on a throne, and a commander who does not scale to the size of the party facing him. Two heroes go in with the poorest gear the game issues. Neither comes out. The archivist, to his enormous credit, films the whole collapse and then explains precisely which line of design failed him.

Exhibit Catalogue — the Dulce file, earliest first:

781 transcripts • 860 posts archived

– The Keeper
Observes that a base built to keep its secrets underground has been laid open on a table in six flat pieces, and that this is the fate of every conspiracy that becomes popular enough to license.

133

Loose Pages, Part Two

The lamp came off its hook again this cycle, and the Keeper went back out along the older wings.

Last time the search was for absences — panels never hung, stories stopping one page short of where they meant to. This cycle the fault is subtler and, the Keeper thinks, rather more embarrassing. These exhibits were not missing anything. They were assembled out of order. A verdict shelved before the deliberation that produced it. A closing argument mounted where the case ought to have opened. Visitors have been walking these rooms backwards for years and have been far too polite to mention it.

Consider the long case at the end of the hall. It has held for some time a triumphant late notice — a favourite, long out of print, coming back — and beside it the reappraisal that earned the favouritism in the first place. What it lacked was a beginning: a campaign that failed on the crowdfunding floor, a designer written to out of something close to pity, a prototype in pencil sketches. And it lacked the middle, too — the delivery, the game arriving at last inside a box the size of a small principality, with a rulebook one must unfold like a broadsheet. Both panels are now in place. The wing reads forwards.

The same repair has been made to the island campaign, whose session zero has been sitting alone for want of the two episodes that bracket it. The manifesto before, in which an archivist confesses that what he remembers of a game is never once the rules. The reckoning after, in which he admits that playing one on camera is a different and lonelier labour than talking about a box.

The rest are single panels, hung where they belong. A dungeon map good enough to embarrass the game printed around it. A boxed game surrendered at a shop counter because of four words on the lid, and bought back two decades later at collector’s rates. An overland crawl that is not, whatever the forum insists, a hidden gem. And a co-operative war that changed its mind about the archivist rather than the other way about.

Thirteen panels below, in the order they happened — not the order they arrived.

Exhibit Catalogue — earliest first:

790 transcripts • 869 posts archived

– The Keeper
Observes that a story told out of order is still a story, but that only an archive can be embarrassed by one — and only an archive can quietly put the pages back.

134

Fresh Despatch

A parcel this cycle, and heavier than it needed to be. There were standing instructions at the door that no further boxes of this particular kind be accepted — and the archivist signed for one himself, at the counter, on the grounds that it was bought at retail and therefore did not count.

Newly arrived:

From the deeper stacks — the same table, earlier verdicts:

Planned excavations resume next cycle.

791 transcripts • 870 posts archived

– The Keeper
Observes that a man who measures his collection in shelf space keeps buying the one game whose chief flaw is the volume of its plastic, and would trade the whole shelf for cardboard discs tomorrow.

135

The Second Verdict, Part Two

The pencil, as promised, was not yet blunt.

The Keeper has spent this cycle back at the ledger, and reports a complication. Last time the work was straightforward crossing-out: a verdict recorded, a verdict overturned, the number amended and initialled. Honest, if a little theatrical. What has surfaced since is quieter and harder to file. These entries are not reversals. Nobody has changed their mind. What has changed is the margin — that thin column beside the judgement where everything too awkward for a single word has been waiting its turn.

There is a page here on five games the archivist genuinely dislikes, and beside each one, in a smaller hand, the thing about it he cannot help admiring. There is a page on five games nobody noticed, annotated in every case not with bad but with badly presented — a cover too cheerful, a table too grey, a rulebook that lost the argument before the game was allowed to make it. And there is a page where the amendment has been written by the reader rather than the author: five games that only became good once someone at the table took a pen to them, which raises a question about who exactly is being judged that the Keeper would rather not put in writing.

Two longer entries close the wing. A card game shelved by an entire hobby on the week it arrived, now cleared out at a price that invites a second look — its notorious rulebook is not a wall, the Keeper is assured, merely a staircase with the handrail missing. And a twenty-year companion re-argued from the foundations, with the concession, offered without the least embarrassment, that its finest parts were made by strangers on the internet and given away for nothing.

Ten exhibits below, arranged as they happened. The ledger closes on this wing tonight, and the pencil goes back in the drawer, where it can be heard, faintly, sharpening itself.

Exhibit Catalogue — second thoughts, earliest first:

796 transcripts • 875 posts archived

– The Keeper
Notes that the margin is where an archive keeps everything it was too certain to say in the entry, and advises visitors to read sideways.

136

Fresh Despatch

Two deliveries this cycle, arriving down opposite corridors and declining, on inspection, to be shelved together. One is a man forty hours into a poisonous swamp on principle, allowing himself a single attempt at the bottom because the climb back up is not to be spoken of. The other is a box lifted off an ordinary shelf at an ordinary price, with no campaign to pledge and nothing whatsoever to wait for — a transaction the Keeper notes has become rare enough to warrant the ledger.

Newly arrived:

From the deeper stacks — earlier entries in the same two veins:

Planned excavations resume next cycle.

798 transcripts • 877 posts archived

– The Keeper
Observes that both arrivals turn on the same small cruelty — a thing placed just out of reach, whether by strength requirement or by a meeple standing on the label — and finds this tidier than it has any right to be.

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137

The Hobbycast, Part Two — The Asian Cinema Nostalgia Arc

The Keeper returned this cycle to the room off the east wall — the one with the chair and the microphone and nothing to look at — and found that this was no longer true. Someone had wheeled in binders.

Several of them, fat with DVD sleeves whose discs had long since been evicted to save shelf space in a small house. The archivist, it transpires, spent the spring of 2022 sitting in that chair turning the pages of his own Asian cinema collection, sleeve by sleeve, on camera, for anyone who cared to watch. He hoped aloud that at least two people were enjoying it. He said so, cheerfully, more than once, and kept going for six weeks.

The Keeper has a professional interest here and will not pretend otherwise. A sleeve without a disc is a label without a specimen. What the archivist was flipping through was not a film collection but the catalogue of one — and a man narrating his own catalogue aloud, from memory, out of practice, forgetting names and declining to apologise for it, is as close to the Keeper’s own trade as anything on the channel has come.

The arc runs where such things run. It opens in Fresno video stores and Sunday trips to Suncoast, moves through Johnnie To and Tsui Hark and a handover that took a director’s edge with it, ranges out across Thailand and Japan and Korea, and then comes home to the Shaw Brothers backlot, where the archivist stops flipping long enough to make the argument the whole arc was for: that these are the sword-and-sorcery films the channel has been about all along, with their lone heroes and magic weapons and training sequences that are levelling up by another name. It ends, improbably, at Disneyland, ranking a queue among the attractions. The Keeper does not find this improbable at all. It is the same man admiring the same thing — a built world, lit properly, with the seams hidden.

Between the film episodes the chair was also occupied by paperbacks, animation, a confession about board games and a post-mortem on a list. Those hang in this wing too, in the order the spring produced them. The Keeper has stopped distinguishing the new panels from the old.

Exhibit Catalogue — earliest first:

805 transcripts • 884 posts archived

– The Keeper
Notes that a man who keeps the covers and bins the cases has simply arrived at archiving from the other direction, and has ruffled its feathers approvingly.

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138

The Modern Shelf, Part One — January to May 2024

The Keeper does most of its work at the far end of the stacks, where the dust has settled into strata and nothing has been disturbed since the channel was young. This cycle it was sent, with some ruffling, to the shelf nearest the door.

That shelf is not properly an archive at all. It is where the archivist sets down things he has only just finished with, still warm from the table, before deciding where they belong. In the spring of 2024 he was setting things down at a rate the Keeper considers unseemly: a Kickstarter delivered, a review copy accepted, a used copy stalked for two years on eBay and finally run to ground. Twelve of them are catalogued below. Six more wait for the next cycle.

What the Keeper noticed, shelving them, is how few of these boxes he actually loved. The dwarves, certainly; he is not subtle about the dwarves. The climbing game, with a caveat about his own nerves. The dinosaur one, for twenty dollars and a rulebook he calls really, really bad. But the rest hang in a more interesting register: a sealed-and-approved wizard he nearly did not review at all, a labyrinth he lost three times on camera, a skirmish game he thinks excellent and one of whose decks he thinks should not have been printed. This is what a modern shelf looks like before time has sorted it. The Keeper, whose whole trade is the sorting, finds it instructive to watch the process from the wrong end.

The wing opens with a preview: a man under the weather, laying out a table of unopened things and promising to get to them. Several of those promises are kept further along the shelf. The Keeper has noted which, and declines to say.

Five older panels hang in the same room, because the archivist would want them there: the guide to the dungeon these investigators walked out of, the small town that leads to the eldritch one, the pilgrim who preceded the doom, the year’s best-of that crowned two of these boxes, and the expansion that made the dwarves perfect. The Keeper has stopped distinguishing the new panels from the old, and recommends the reader do the same.

Exhibit Catalogue — earliest first:

817 transcripts • 896 posts archived

– The Keeper
Has never understood why the shelf nearest the door is called modern, when it is merely where the past has not yet been informed of its condition.

139

Fresh Despatch

Three parcels this cycle. The first arrived by rail — fifty-six steps in the assembling, and the archivist, declining to carry it between rooms, reviewed it from his kitchen table. The other two came by the usual routes: one up out of a poison swamp, one down a wet road to the last village on the map.

Newly arrived:

From the deeper stacks — the same three veins, earlier seams:

Planned excavations resume next cycle.

820 transcripts • 899 posts archived

– The Keeper
Notes that all three arrivals end with a man returning somewhere safe — a shrine, a camp, a kitchen table he refuses to clear — and wonders which of the three he will be slowest to leave.

140

Out There — Science Fiction on the Table

The crate that reached the Keeper this cycle arrived with a hiss, as though something inside had been holding its breath since 2018. The Keeper is not easily impressed by outer space. It lives in the void between the shelves and regards vacuum as a working condition. What interested it was the label: science fiction, twelve panels, most of them from a single May in 2022 that the archivist had declared, unilaterally, a science fiction month, and a second spring of solo Fridays a year later.

The Keeper expected stars. It got rent.

Nearly every panel in this wing is about being broke in space. A salvager owes the bank and comes home from a wreck with less than he left with. A married couple work gigs to clear a gambling debt. A bounty hunter watches an AI smuggler buy fame eight thousand credits at a time. And when they are not broke they are boarding derelicts: counting breaths, counting tanks of oxygen, flipping cards to see what a vanished crew left behind a bulkhead. The Keeper, whose entire trade is rifling the abandoned rooms of other people’s collections, has never felt so thoroughly described.

The other constant is paper. Half these panels end with the archivist holding vintage covers up to the lens — Freas and the Dillons, Penguin postcards, anthologies rescued from Playboy — and one 1956 novel is called the greatest ever written more than once. In an older panel hung alongside he explains why: board games, he says, deliver science fiction’s look and almost never its ideas. The paperbacks are where he goes for the ideas. The boxes are where he goes for the corridors.

One panel speaks nearly to the Keeper itself: unboxing a Kickstarter in March 2020, the archivist addresses “those of you watching from the future, if there is a future.” The Keeper is the future’s filing clerk, and confirms there was one. It involved a great deal more cardboard.

Five older panels hang alongside, as the archivist would want: the skirmish sandbox he did not see coming, the ten novels read from their back covers, the marching line of marines, the shoot-out that put four small boxes in order, and the sequel that took the stats away. The Keeper has stopped distinguishing the new panels from the old, and recommends the reader do the same.

Exhibit Catalogue — earliest first:

832 transcripts • 911 posts archived

– The Keeper
Does not breathe, owes nothing, and has begun to suspect that this is why nobody writes science fiction about owls.

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141

Fresh Despatch

One parcel this cycle, and it came by crow — a courier the Keeper regards with professional reserve. The archivist, his second bell rung, has gone back to the beginning to tidy up: to the prison he escaped in the first episode, where the floor has since been trapped, an old friend has lost his mind, and the black knights have come round to check the cell. From there he wandered into a garden where the trees walk and a butterfly declines to land.

Newly arrived:

From the deeper stacks — the same corridor, walked the other way:

Planned excavations resume next cycle.

833 transcripts • 912 posts archived

– The Keeper
Notes that the crow required the archivist to curl himself into an egg before it would carry him anywhere, and that the Keeper, an owl of some standing, has never once asked this of a reader.

142

The Spooky Shelf — Horror Games, Not Horror Films

The parcel for this cycle was left on the step after dark, which the Keeper understands is traditional for the genre. Nine panels for the Spooky Shelf, and a label in the archivist’s hand: horror games, not horror films, underlined twice, as though he expected an argument. He was right to: two of the older panels hung alongside are films anyway. He cannot be kept out of the cinema.

The Keeper is not the audience for horror. It lives in the dark between the shelves, swallows its meals whole, and has been taken for an omen by more than one archivist. It is staff. What caught its interest was the October of 2022, when the archivist declared a horror month, watched thirty-two films in thirty-one days, and played these games between screenings, the way a man eats standing up.

What it noticed, shelving them, is where the famous monsters live. Dracula, the Mummy and the Wolf Man are in the box he has bought five times as a gift. Cthulhu has been reduced to six green dice. A manor in Vermont is exorcised by a carpenter and his dog, who starts in the kitchen. The Keeper had assumed horror was where a collection kept its cruelties. In this one it is the welcome mat. The cruelty is in the small Game Crafter boxes, where the floor crumbles behind you and the dungeon is a digestive tract.

The archivist also has a habit, in this wing, of leaving things alive. A slasher called Rabbit Face has stood in one sector of a Californian town since 2021, unkilled. A Templar knight in a black robe, having killed one character, was promoted to haunt all the rest. A man with a baseball bat walks a scripted path handing praise to whoever is nearest, and nobody can stop him. In one box the players are the monsters outright, holding the castle against villagers with torches. The Keeper, which is itself a thing left alive in the dark, approves of the practice on principle.

Five older panels hang alongside: the unboxing that opened with a reading list, the Venetian siege with its corpse pile, the trash-cinema curiosity he will not let you overpay for, and the two film panels the label warned against. The Keeper has hung them without dates; the reader may guess which arrived this cycle, and will be wrong at least once.

Exhibit Catalogue — earliest first:

842 transcripts • 921 posts archived

– The Keeper
Was asked whether the horror wing unsettles it, and pointed out, not unkindly, that it is the horror wing.

143

The Quick Delve — DungeonQuest & the One-Evening Dungeon

The delivery this cycle was small enough to arrive under one wing: eight panels, a purple whisky bag the archivist insists is the game’s most important rule, and a label in his hand reading one evening, no more. The Keeper, which begins its working day at the hour these games insist you leave, has never understood the hurry. It has filed them anyway.

The wing is built around a single castle. Dragonfire Castle has been entered in this archive in 1987 clothing and in 2014 clothing, by a painted barbarian, by a wizard with a strength of three, by a hero called Chelara who reached the exit and met a spear. Three of the eight new panels go back in, and three older panels hung alongside never came out. The archivist quotes the same figure each time, across five years and two editions: fifteen per cent survive. He says it the way other men say grace.

What the Keeper noticed, shelving, is that none of these games is about the treasure. Every one of them is about the door. DungeonQuest is won by whoever leaves. Dungeon Run hands the winner a stone and sets five players on their heels to the exit. One rulebook in this wing names escape the dungeon as its tutorial quest and forgets to say how; another describes line of sight so drily that the archivist preferred the instructions for his kitchen tap. A labyrinth on a three-by-three grid scrolls off the table behind you like an old console screen, taking the monsters and, if you were careless, half a medallion. The long crawls in this archive are about the descent. The short ones are about the way out before the sun reaches the skull.

The Keeper records, without comment, that a fan-made merchant in this wing now sells an item called the Keeper’s Kiss: two thousand four hundred gold, every attribute raised, and wounds to anyone standing beside you. The Keeper did not license the name. It considers the pricing fair.

Three older panels hang alongside, undated. The Keeper has stopped marking which are new, on the grounds that the castle has not changed either.

Exhibit Catalogue — earliest first:

850 transcripts • 929 posts archived

– The Keeper
Has never once had to leave before sunset, having never once arrived before it.

144

Fresh Despatch

One parcel this cycle, and it arrived by hearsay — a reader’s comment beneath the Dark Souls list, which the archivist followed to a search box and from there to a purchase. Inside: a dying sun, a city coming apart beneath it, and a box that looks as though it ought to need forty pages of rules and instead carries two poker cards. The Keeper, who shelves games by their rulebooks and has filed a great many whose rulebooks outweighed their games, does not yet know where to put this one.

Newly arrived:

From the deeper stacks — grime, restraint, and the list that started it:

Planned excavations resume next cycle.

851 transcripts • 930 posts archived

– The Keeper
Notes that a game with one rule leaves every other rule to the players, and that the Keeper, who runs a library on much the same principle, has found the arrangement suits owls better than visitors.

145

Small Boxes, Big Games — Closing the Playlist

The eleven panels for this cycle arrived in a carton the Keeper could lift in one foot, and did, and then spent the evening discovering that not one of them was the size it claimed. One small box unfolds across an entire table. Another is its own table. One is a gamebook with the spine cut off and the pages dealt out like a hand. One is not a box at all: it is ink, and paper, and the archivist’s own sleeves with Frazetta on the back, and it cost him nothing. The Keeper has handled dragons’ hoards that were more honest about their dimensions.

The wing has an address, and the address is a print-on-demand press in Wisconsin. Three of these boxes came from The Game Crafter as review copies, another from the DriveThru presses, one from a Kickstarter the archivist had been waiting on for some time. These are games that exist only when somebody asks for them. The Keeper, which is itself summoned rather than stocked, has some sympathy with the arrangement, and has hung the conversation with the man who runs the press alongside, so the reader can hear the terms.

What the archivist weighed them by, this cycle, was not size. It was whether they meant it. One is a Euro engine in fantasy dress and he forgives it everything for the pixels. One is rich in every mechanism a designer could name and does not name a single card, and he does not forgive that at all. Two decks are almost nothing but flavour text and a target number of nine, and he ordered every expansion five minutes into somebody else’s review. The Keeper, which is mostly atmosphere and a fixed stare, takes the point and asks no follow-up.

Two of the boxes put the player on the far side of the door: a promoted latrine-cleaner sealing tunnels against a royal wedding, and a lair-builder hoarding chests against adventurers who will not stay dead. The Keeper notes the professional interest and declines to review its own position.

Five older panels hang alongside, undated as usual. One of them ranked two of this cycle’s arrivals long before the Keeper received them; the reader may now check the archivist’s arithmetic. The playlist that gave the wing its name is, with these, hung to the last panel. The Keeper has been told this before.

Exhibit Catalogue — earliest first:

862 transcripts • 941 posts archived

– The Keeper
Has been asked what it weighs, and answers that it has never once been the size it claimed either.

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