Flare Against The Void
A downloadable manifesto
you’ve been on ttrpg twitter right
same arguments over and over voices shouting to be heard shouting each other to silence but now Time yawns its great jaws and swallows a thousand thousand screaming sparks and shuts them again and leaves the living stumbling in the dark
we’ve been here before
google plus 2019, life support with a hand on the power cord, a desperate scramble to find anywhere else to survive and they find it but the library is already burned.
Veteran of battles whose names have been lost, look! Someone younger than you will fight them once more, and marvel that they are the first to bear such scars.
It’s not each other we’re fighting, it’s being forgotten.
I want advice for a game from 1974 and with just a few clicks I have dozens of posts ready to guide me
I want advice for a game from 2016 and it’s already link-rotted away
I want advice for a game from 2024 and it’s hidden away in a private discord server
It’s not each other we’re fighting, it’s being forgotten.
From 2019 to 2024 over fifty thousand games were added to Itch.io. What did we learn? What progress was made? And how do we prove it? Where is the record?
The one thing I truly, truly envy the OSR for is having a blog under every rock. You can just start reading and orient yourself, completely self-driven, and then follow them further and further back until you find a Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops arguing about THAC0. It’s a wealth of context and community continuity, even as other platforms rose and fell and communities split and merged. And it’s still growing. Meanwhile I can’t find any live communities for discussing “narrativist” games that aren’t microblogging, discord, or reddit.
The darkness takes us all, but not yet.
Build something useful. A game review, GM advice, a build guide, virtual character sheets, something. Think about people just getting started, unsure where to go next, and give them some help.
Build to be found. Don’t stick it in a discord server and call it good, post it somewhere that can be search indexed, discovered by someone who’s never heard your name before. Tagging isn’t enough; make it show up on Google.
Build for the future. You want something you can back up on Internet Archive and/or your own flash drive, not something that will vanish as soon as an aspiring tech monopolist has a bad day.
Build up a flame. Drive back the dark.
Status | Released |
Category | Physical game |
Rating | Rated 5.0 out of 5 stars (12 total ratings) |
Author | Stepnix |
Tags | indieweb, manifesto, oldweb, smallweb, Tabletop role-playing game |
Development log
- kindling54 days ago
Comments
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Dear, this is fire, I love it
Nice piece, but I generally disagree with the proposition. This isn’t just a ttrpg problem. Nothing on the internet is permanent. And I’m comfortable with that.
I see you have a neocities site; I had a geocities site, try to find it. I had a public PhishHook database, it’s long gone. Even the Internet Archive won’t last forever.
But of all the knowledge that came before, all the homebrew rules on scraps of paper, all the advice shared at the table, most of that isn’t in the public record either. And yet we continue on without trouble.
It’s human to want to leave a lasting legacy. Always has been. But never will be. Nothing is permanent.
But it’s also human nature to create. So, yes, do that. And when it is destroyed create something else.
My itch page and this comment won’t outlive me.
I guess it's not about creating something permanent, but buying more time. You can't fight back the entropy or the darkness, but you can delay them just a bit longer - just hoping someone from the future will keep up the flame after discovering some vintage (i.e. from 2025) game they fall in love with.
When I read this part:
"Build up a flame. Drive back the dark." I stood there a few minutes taking in the words. I realized that damn, if we don't catalog our experiences and build something for future and present gamers, what will we have to be remembered by?
What will people be able to recall about our stories and the creative work, if there is nothing to be found? Thank you for this sharp call to action to build something, even if it is not the strongest flame. I will help combat the dark, even if it is difficult.
Love this.