By the next morning, much of the Lodge had developed a fascination with the concept of Secret Lore tickets. They wanted to get secret lore tickets of their own.

Not the whole Lodge, of course.

“Those things are a waste of time,” Arthur warned us, as he and the other high-level players prepped for their own mission. “The players that were here when I got here obsessed over those things for years and all they ever got was a few trinkets. They’re all flavor and no substance.”

“We should pack it up then,” Roxie whispered to Grace with a smirk after Arthur was out of earshot. “Those folks never missed anything.”

“Don’t speak ill of the dead,” Grace said, while still laughing at her remark.

We had arranged the couches in a big circle with a couple of coffee tables in the middle. Arthur took the stairs up to where he, Adeline, Chris, Todd, Valorie, and a couple of other strong players were running through their plans. Something involving a travel agency.

Grace had the corded telephone that was at the Lodge in her lap. The receiver was in her ear. She was on hold.

“No, I’m still here,” she said into the phone. “What do you have for me?”

She listened intently as the person on the other end spoke. She had a notepad and pen in her hand. She pretended to write things down on the sheet but didn’t need to. She had a trope that would transcribe information like that onto the red wallpaper whenever she mimed writing it down.

“Uh, huh,” she said. “Thanks, Harvey, you’re the best.”

She hung up the phone.

“My friend at the station says that a Nicholas Hesper went missing near the property in question about a decade ago. Made a point to tell me how strange it was that there was no follow-up. The case file was empty. Wasn’t even a search.” She smiled as she spoke. “Harvey drew special attention to Nicholas above the other missing people. Definitely confirms that he’s important.”

Grace was a Detective archetype. She had a trope called My Friend at the Station that allowed her to call her titular cop friend for information on a storyline. It was a scouting trope so it could be used without even being in a storyline, much like my I don’t like it here… trope.

Around thirty veteran players had taken an interest in finding these tickets. Lukas the Hysteric who had found one over a decade earlier had suddenly stepped in as our resident expert on the subject, despite having admitted that he had never managed to find a second lore ticket.

Apparently, about twelve years earlier, the players stopped being interested in Secret Lore. Rescue Tickets had just disappeared and there was a period where players were failing storylines left and right before they adapted to a more cautious style of play. As I understood it, players used to routinely play storylines even ten levels over their Plot Armor and their style of play was risky as well. None of that was done anymore.

When the dust settled, the remaining players deemed Secret Lore too dangerous to be worth it, especially since they could not find any Secret Lore storylines in the lower levels. Until we found one, that is.

Lukas listened to Grace’s information intently.

“Yes, Grace,” Lukas said, sipping his coffee. “That’s good work. Definitely good information.”

That's what he did. He agreed with everyone. Even when people were arguing, he agreed with both sides.

The first step of their investigation was retracing our steps, so to speak. The idea was that stumbling onto a Secret Lore ticket is not very useful. They wanted to find out how a player might detect the presence of such a ticket in the first place. Relying on luck was not enough. They wanted to be able to find more tickets afterward, after all.

“What do you have, Lara?” Grace asked.

Lara, the Psychic archetype, was cycling through her binder of tickets, trying to find a scouting trope that would give her new information.

“Nothing,” Lara answered. "I can’t find anything that helps me detect the presence of the being they describe."

She was clearly growing frustrated.

“It was really high level,” Anna said. She sat on the same couch as me. Dina and Camden were nearby. Antoine and Kimberly were off together trying not to think about the Straggler Forest.

“It would have to be,” Lara answered. “It just looks like a normal storyline to me.”

I furrowed my brow. “It’s weird, in stories, Psychics usually have a tough time around eldritch entities. It’s strange that you can’t see it.”

“It was the same way with the ghosts in the storyline I found my ticket in. Psychics didn’t even know they were there,” Lukas said.

Grace stood up and stretched. “Maybe when Garrett gets back, he’ll have something.”

Garrett was a Soldier archetype who floated around from team to team. He had a handful of abilities for scouting out enemies.

The other players weren't as concerned with finding out information. They were focused on figuring out how to trigger the secret lore version of the storyline as painlessly as possible. They interrogated my friends and me for hours. They wanted to know every single detail.

We were pretty quick to conclude that getting the Straggler/NPC Nicholas out of the forest was essential.

The first trouble there was trying to get Nicholas out of the Forest given the fact that the Straggler’s curse made it difficult to know friend from foe. A further and bigger problem was that when they did get Nicholas out, they would be leaving behind a player who would end up in the same boat as Antoine. Nobody wanted to risk being stuck in that Straggler Forest for who knows how long.

Those were only the first two problems. On top of that, we stressed to them exactly how mentally taxing being in the presence of the Unknowable Host was.

They said that they were taking it seriously but most of them appeared to think that it was nothing they couldn't handle. I wasn't sure about that but I didn’t know what other kinds of horrors they had come across. They took mental health tropes just in case.

Truthfully, a problem we didn’t speak about much was whether you could spoil a secret storyline and make it so that other players could not trigger it. Roxie seemed to think you couldn’t, that spoilers don’t matter after you’ve played through a storyline. There were lots of times they would discuss completed storylines and variations of those storylines and it didn’t seem to matter. I hoped she was right.

If she wasn’t, all of their efforts would be in vain.

It was interesting watching them work on the problem. Up until this point, we had never been able to sit in on their prepping sessions. They were worried about spoiling important storylines for us so we just weren't included in those conversations.

They planned out how to find secret treasure and other consumables. They theorized about how to get a perfect run in a storyline, a feat that was heavily rewarded.

This time was different. We couldn't be spoiled on this storyline because we had already run it.

We actually had a seat at the table for this one.

The first strategy they came up with to avoid getting stuck in the Straggler Forest was something called Scared to Death. It was a Hysteric trope. The way it worked was simple: when you are confronted by an enemy, you pretend to have a heart attack or a stroke, and then you die. You actually die. Your death will count as First Blood if you time it right.

Their thought was that if five players entered the Straggler Forest and then one died of a heart attack, four players could leave along with Nicholas without anybody having to worry about staying in the forest for who knows how long.

Lukas thought of this plan himself. Not only was it his trope, but Lukas had a few screws loose and was always willing to die.

The problem with this plan is that it left too much uncertainty. If there was no one to pass his curse on to, would Nicholas be allowed out of the forest? Or was the whole thing about the number that entered always having to be the number that left thing literal? Could it be that simple?

Luckily, Roxie had a better idea.

She observed that the only time an NPC was brought into the forest was when one of the players started the game as a Straggler and would need to pass their curse onto the NPC to get out. This was what Dina had done to the NPC Roberta.

“But what happens if we bring in an NPC of our own?” Roxie suggested.

She presented the group with three of her tropes that could do just that. One was an Eye Candy trope called Carry the Bags, which allowed her character to have a hired assistant or servant. Her second, Hired Muscle, worked the same way, but with a hired bodyguard.

Her final trope was called Meet My Mark, a Femme Fatale trope that allowed her to enter the story with an NPC on whom she was running a scam. Usually, the NPC in question would have money, information, or access her character was trying to get from them that would further the storyline.

The first two cost money to use and limited the player’s role to something that could conceivably have a servant or bodyguard. Not a big deal. The third was a risk because she would have to be a Femme Fatale to use it and doing so might alter the storyline so much that the secret ending wouldn’t trigger. Advance Archetypes had that problem.

“That is stone cold,” Reggie, Grace’s Bruiser brother said.

It was quite cold-hearted. But it was a good idea.

“Think about it,” she said. "We need someone for the Straggler to pass his curse to. Why not an NPC?”

No one could argue with that.

The problem then was making sure Nicholas got out in the first place. This one was solved pretty quickly, funny enough. One of the Bruisers had an Advanced Archetype called Bounty Hunter. The Bounty Hunter had all sorts of tropes for finding and capturing NPC or enemies. One of them, It’s Just Not Your Day, was a rule trope that guaranteed the player would run into their target at the beginning of the story.

Other players had to figure out their own ways. Lara used one of her Psychic-Occultist tropes to scry for Nicholas and another trope to ward off Stragglers that weren’t Nicholas.

Still, others simply planned to wander around until they found him and then drag him out with them. It's not like he would argue.

It turned out that there were more tropes that could bring an NPC into a storyline with you, though they were usually for very specific use cases.

It took them three days to make it work. Making sure that the right Straggler got out was the biggest hurdle in practice.

Roxie and her team ran the storyline and managed to nab Nicholas from the Straggler Forest. But there was a problem. When they returned to the Lodge, they let us in on the bad news.

The secret route didn’t trigger. Something was missing.

To make matters worse, the storyline took five hours on average to reset. So, they could only try so many times.

“I knew it wasn’t going to work,” Garrett, the Soldier said. “There is something else going on here.”

I was eating lunch when another deflated team returned with their heads hanging low. Lara was sitting at the table near me, trying her Psychic tropes again. Her frustration was growing with every failed vision.

“Did you know that you should not trust your eyes in the Straggler Forest?” she asked in a huff. “That’s what this stupid Harbinger trope has told me twelve times now. Not a thing about the dead god. I thought you said Psychics should have a connection?”

Lara was usually calm and collected. She was clearly very frustrated.

The veterans were not pleased with the lack of forward progress. They kept asking for us to go on the storyline with them to see if anything about us specifically triggered the storyline.

Each team had developed a way to get Nicholas out, a way to not leave a player in the Straggler’s Forest, and a mental health trope to ensure they survived the encounter with the Unknowable Host.

Eventually, they came to the conclusion that they needed me to be there with them on their next run, a prospect I was not happy about. The aura of the Unknowable Host was still messing with me days after the fact.

They figured that I was all that they couldn't replicate. I was the only Film Buff, after all.

“You won’t even have to do anything hard,” Roxie suggested. “We’ll take care of you just like with the Grotesques.”

I really didn’t want to go. At the same time, I didn’t want to disappoint the other players.

I told them I would think about it.

A breakthrough came just in time. They had their own copies of every single trope that my friends brought on that storyline. They tried them all. What they didn't have were Film Buff tropes.

Of course, the real prize was my Trope Master ticket. It was the ability that would allow someone to detect the Unknowable Host indirectly. One look at a possessed animal or a Cloven Woman’s tropes would hint to you that something more was going on, that something linked the storylines together.

The question was, was it possible for them to replicate that ability without just bringing me with them?

We knew that there was an Outsider ability that would allow you to betray your teammates in order to join the bad guys and get a look at their tropes. The problem was that there were no Outsiders at the lodge who had that ability anymore.

But there were other abilities that worked similarly, they were just not the kind of trope that you would bring on a storyline like this.

For instance, Lara had a Psychic trope called Fatal Connection that allowed her to have visions through an enemy's eyes after it had Mutilated her. That wasn't a trope that she liked using, for understandable reasons. Not to mention trying to get it to work inside this storyline would be difficult.

The Stragglers wouldn't mutilate her, not that it mattered because they didn't have any tropes tying them to the Unknowable Host. The Cloven Women wouldn't even attack her because she was a woman, let alone mutilate her. The only option would be the possessed animals in the Mine storyline.

But then I don't think it actually mattered how feasible implementing the trope was.

My theory was that having a trope that would allow you to see the enemies' tropes would be enough. You wouldn't actually have to use it. After all, I had not detected the Unknowable Host until after I had seen it. Having the trope was important, but using it might not have been. I think you just needed the trope with you.

With this assumption, the veteran players collected tropes that might allow them to see an enemy’s abilities and went back to the Campfire storyline. It was a meager collection. Seeing an enemy’s tropes was a rare gift, apparently, and always required ridiculous amounts of setup.

But it worked.

A few hours later, Roxie, Lara, and the rest of their team came back to the lodge holding their brand-new secret lore tickets.

They weren't exactly thrilled about it. The aura of the Unknowable Host was just as hard on them as it was on us. We didn't say "I told you so."

They suddenly agreed that the Unknowable Host was causing the red wallpaper system to glitch along with the NPCs near it.

The Lodge was a quiet, dreary place for a while as people recovered from their run-in with the Unknowable Host’s aura.

What a convenient coincidence, my ability just happened to be the key to unlocking the secret lore that we just happened to find on a random storyline. This development felt unearned. None of the other players shared my reservations, at least not to the same extent. I added that to the pile of things causing me to be uncomfortable about the situation.

I knew our friend in high places was behind it, but still, it felt off. I couldn't articulate exactly why in a persuasive manner.

Within two days, all of the veterans who were interested had managed to scrounge up their own secret lore tickets from the campfire storyline.

Then it was time to go to the library. We needed to inquire about the tickets and hopefully find out how we were supposed to find more secret lore storylines.

I had never traveled in such a large group. We were doing it together because apparently getting into the library and moving about freely was quite a chore. It was better to do it once for everyone.

“So here's how it works,” Garrett told us as we stood outside the giant stone building. “There are omens all over the library. Luckily, they're all contained in books and they will leave you alone as long as you don't open them. Except for one. There is one storyline in that library that'll sneak up on you. And it's a real pain in the butt. But we have a workaround.

“You enter the library and you find an omen for a storyline called The Final Page. You can use others, but that one is near the entrance and it works well. You gotta run through that storyline; it's a little above your current level but it's nothing you won’t be able to handle soon. When you're inside that storyline you gotta make sure that you find an excuse to burn down the children's literature section. It'll make sense once you're there. You have to burn down the whole section while you're in the storyline; that is very important.

“After you finish the storyline, with the children's literature section burned down that sneaky omen isn't there anymore and you can move about the library freely without worrying about triggering it. That's what we’ve got to do every time we come here. It's a pain.”

Apparently, the team that went up ahead to clear the storyline was taking longer than expected.

Grace suggested that while we waited, we should go check out the job board next to the library. It was in a glass enclosure meant to protect the board inside from the rain. It almost looked like a bus stop but it wasn't next to the road. The way she described it, the job board held directions to omens that were related to storylines you had already completed or to tropes that you had equipped. It was largely random but now that we had a few levels we might be able to find something good.

The storylines would all be within our level range.

So that's what we did.

When we got there, there were only three jobs on the board.

The sheets of paper themselves seemed like normal ads for a job you might find on the Internet. They didn't really say much about the storyline.

One offered a job for a farmhand, another for a security guard of sorts, and the final for a maid.

What was on the paper itself didn't seem to be that important. What really mattered was what was on the red wallpaper.

As I looked from sheet to sheet I realized that I could see the title and poster for each of the storylines. These weren't omens so they didn't trigger any information for me in that way. They just told you where to go.

Our three options were:

The Final Straw.

We had been carried through The Final Straw II when we arrived in Carousel. Not a bad option. It would be nice to see what was going on in that franchise. We knew so little about it. The poster was of a scarecrow hung up on a wooden stand with some spatters of blood. Interestingly, this scarecrow was not wearing the coveralls that said Benny on them.

Subject of Inquiry.

The poster for this one depicted a bunch of security monitors, most of which were just showing static. There was blood on the screens.

House of Fane.

This showed a long fancy dinner table with people sitting in all of the seats. The people’s heads were all turned away from the viewer toward a chair at the head of the table with claw marks on it.

We voted and after much discussion, we decided to go with Subject of Inquiry. We grabbed the flier.

But that would come later. Soon, we were being ushered inside. We needed to talk to a librarian.