Undercroft
A free online text adventure in five acts. A Somerset priory in 1348 and 1968, six days before a road goes through it, and a book with four gaps in it.
You are Dr Margaret Aveling, fifty-four, director of a rescue excavation on the site of the priory of St Ethelburga. It is the last week of the 1968 season. The road contract starts on the fourteenth of October, the trenches will be under a carriageway by 1974, and what you are doing is called preservation by record, which means you write it down and then it goes.
On the twenty-second of July you went down the ladder into Trench IV at four in the morning and came up nine hours later with your coat wet on a dry night. Between those two moments it was Michaelmas 1348, the undercroft had a vault on it, and there were fourteen men in the building.
The register
The house kept a book. It came out of a cavity in the frater wall in June and it is on a trestle table in the site hut in a polythene bag, catalogued as MS Aveling 1, and there are eleven entries in it, in five hands, across a hundred and fifty years, about the woman who comes to the undercroft. She is to be fed. She is not to be questioned in the church. What she says is to be written down.
The last of the eleven is dated 1319 and ends: and she asked what year it was, and was told, and sat down on the step.
Four gaps
The register also has four holes in it that have been arguments in print since 1889. Why the west range was pulled down in the spring of 1349. Which three of the fourteen lived. Who wrote the last entry, in a hand that appears nowhere else in the book. And what is inside a lead-lined recess in the north wall of the undercroft that a Victorian surveyor declined to open.
You are going to fill all four of them, in 1348, with your own hands, and then read them in 1968 in a book that has said so since 1349.
What you cannot do
Eleven of fourteen die between the feast of St Stephen and Lady Day. That is not a prediction the game is making and it is not a disaster the game is inviting you to avert. It is an entry. You have read it, in gloves, on a trestle table, and telling them turns out to be part of how it came to be written.
The game will not let you contradict anything the record already states, and when it stops you it names the entry that stopped you. Everything that is blank is yours: what happens to the three, why a building comes down, what goes into a hole in a wall, and whose hand writes the last thing anybody ever wrote in that book.
And the archaeology is real
You cannot lift a sealed context because you happen to know what is in it. It gets drawn at 1:20, photographed with a scale, its mortar sampled and bagged, and — because you are the author of the deposit and the only living person who knows it — it gets a witness, because a find with one witness who is also its author is not evidence, it is a story.
Stuck?
The hint page gives you one nudge at a time, act by act, without spoiling anything you have not asked about. The full walkthrough is there if you would rather just be told.