Forgotten Palaces: Explore the liminality of digital worlds in these three tabletop RPGs

Polygons are missing, NPCs are glitching, and the ghosts of forgotten code lurk everywhere.

Forgotten Palaces is a trilogy of two small TTRPGS and one DTRPG about digital worlds out of time: Shareware games clumsily designed by online teens, MMOs abandoned to time and rot. Our digital histories are littered with worlds that were crafted lovingly by their creators, then lost to time and robbed of their contexts. Forgotten Palaces – written by game designer Anna Anthropy and featuring art by Jacob Potterfield – is an invitation to explore three of these worlds.

The trilogy includes L0ST K1NGD0M, a game about a streamer and their audience exploring Arcadia, a haunted, abandoned MMO; it can be played with huge groups of audience members and was playtested primarily in classrooms. It also includes This Maze Will Be Big Enough to Call Home Someday, a 3-5 player map-drawing game inspired by 90s game-creation tools like ZZT. In This Maze, players are online teens co-designing the video game of their dreams.

How will you express your vision when you have to fit them into such a limited graphical palette – and when your rival teammate has a completely different idea of what the game should be? Can you make something that will impress the XYZZY Forums?

The final game, Run on Ventacorp, is a solo DTRPG – a Desktop Role-Playing Game, played on your actual desktop. As a hacker, search folders and edit files to rewrite your destiny and steal Ventacorp's most well-guarded secret: A program that can hack reality.

Run on Ventacorp is free to download and play. For just USD 6, you can unlock the other two games. Create and explore beautiful, broken digital worlds on your tabletop.