There's a web site out there that, no matter how crummy I feel, gives me a momentary grin.
Remember the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the Ark of the Covenant is safely sealed away in a crate, presumably to be studied by ?top men,? but the camera pans back to reveal that the Ark is really just getting buried in a vast warehouse of similar crates? The implication is that God is once again working to remove this ultimate relic from mankind's hands.
In my mind, that warehouse was stuffed with trivia, but some clever fellow had the wits to realize that every single crate in the warehouse had a similar adventure attached to it. The mind boggles. Once the suggestion was out, dedicated fans started a list of what else might be found in that warehouse. Many of the entries were icons of fanboy culture: Frodo's ring, kryptonite, a sonic screwdriver, transmissions received from Gilligan's island. But some of the suggestions were more imaginative.
The warehouse was the inspiration for an adventure game supplement called Warehouse 23, published by Steve Jackson Games. The folks at SJG have modified the atmosphere of the Warehouse from wondrous to sinister, reinterpreting it as the storehouse of things the Secret Masters want to hide from the world. (This is no surprise. The folks at SJG reinterpret everything in terms of the fictional Grand Conspiracy ruling the world. They never tire of the joke.) Warehouse 23 is full of isolated inexplicable phenomena: a window that opens onto a sunny field, a TV Guide from 2104, perpetual motion machines. It also hides all the things THEY don't want you to have: the 100-mpg carburetor, miracle grains that would end world hunger, the cure for cancer. It also holds things with powers nobody should ever use, but which the Secret Masters keep for the day they may want to try: antimatter hand grenades, deals with the devil, alien fetuses suspended in life-support tanks. Most darkly, it holds evidence that the Secret Masters already have used secrets man was not meant to know for their nefarious ends.
Nothing is too silly for Warehouse 23, as long as it's properly sinister. Once you know this ground rule, even cheerful innocuous things become menacing ? you just need to figure out why. Some of the items in deep storage have long histories, or profound implications, and deserve a few pages of description, but many, many more are one-liners; in two or three sentences at most, you know all you need (All you're allowed?) in order to spin ideas around them. SJG has made several thousand of them available for your exploration, and they'll take donations.
You can go look up a few right now. Come on, what's it going to hurt? (Certainly no any more than my dentist's appointment today. That's why I'm here.) Just click on over to http://www.warehouse23.com/basement/. Oh, and uh? don't drink the coffee.