Sure looks like the place to search for Lost Treasures to me!
Image by Dimitris Vetsikas from Pixabay, cropped and dramatized by Mike

I spent most of my Sunday evening trying to put together a submission for this month’s Blog Carnival. It’s been a while since I was last inspired to create a submission – way back in June of last year, in fact.

Blind Alley I

The first thing you notice when you scroll to the bottom of the Blog Carnival archive, where dwell the oldest entries, are the number of past participants whose sites (for one reason or another) are no longer with us.

My first thought was to use the Wayback Machine to recover one of those lost submissions pages or roundup posts, to make it live again.

You see, it had occurred to me that while the anchor post or roundup may have vanished into the ether of the internet, some of the posts that were part of that carnival would still be around, now orphaned.

If a reconnection to those lost treasures could be found, that would constitute a worthwhile entry in the Carnival.

Sadly, without an exact url to the lost entry, it seems so hit-and-miss that the odds of success were vanishingly small. I tried anyway, without success.

Blind Alley II

No problem, I thought – I’ll simply pick something I liked from one of the many times Campaign Mastery has hosted the carnival to which I can add something.

Big problem: it takes way too long to go through the hundreds of links so contained in search of something that was both worth preserving, and to which I could add something.

If I’d had more time up my sleeve, it might have been possible, but I lost most of Friday afternoon collecting a new pair of eyeglasses from my Optometrist, and all of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning to accumulated exhaustion..

Reluctantly, I conceded that this was another blind alley – one that had a fire escape or trap door tantalizingly just out of reach.

Blind Alley III?

Never Mind, I thought, I’ll simply pick on of the roundup pages that are still active and find a link therein to a blog that is no longer with us according to the archive, and search the Wayback Machine for that.

I knew that this would take so much time that I would not have any opportunity to add to the subject matter, so I dropped that element of what I had intended to do. Instead, I was now searching for a lost treasure that deserved excavating.

It soon transpired that this was a lottery. Not only did the page in question have to be archived by the Wayback Machine (the chances were good), but I had to find it (the chances were so-so), and it had to be worth preserving – something that could not be assessed until after the effort of steps 1 and 2 had been made.

Even if there was a good chance of that, something that I could influence through my choice of Carnival subject, that was still a conflation of two reasonable chances and one so-so. At best, the net chance would be another so-so probability.

So that’s what I intend to do. But it’s entirely possible that this will turn out to be a third blind alley, and that time will run out before any success is achieved.

Reflecting on the bigger issue

Internet content, including blogs, comes in two flavors: the transient, and the stable.

Transient content rapidly loses its relevance. That includes things like Kickstarter reviews – which might be extremely relevant when published, but which can deteriorate with extraordinary speed once the fundraising campaign concludes, one way or another.

Some submissions to the Blog Carnival are like that, too – the links might go out of date, or the campaign they relate to come to an end. This diminishes, but may not completely extinguish, their value.

Some submissions are more stable, being about a game system; their lifespan is largely tied to that of the game system to which they refer. Each time that game system diminishes in relevance, so does the blog content that relates to it.

Take D&D 3.x -related content; while it may have been highly relevant back in the day, despite 4e having been released, that relevance will have declined with the advent of 5e. But only a small fraction, because most of it would still be relevant to Pathfinder. That value would have been again attenuated when Pathfinder moved to its second edition, however. At best, it probably holds only 1/3rd of the value that it once possessed.

And some are stable and evergreen; this is what Campaign Mastery tries to deliver (though sometimes we pander to those demanding more immediacy of value). A lot of the earliest blogs posted here are still relevant and useful, more than a decade after first publication.

The stability of RPG-related internet content

In general, RPG-related material retains more stability and value than most types of internet content. I still have internet-sourced material from AD&D and Champions First Edition filed away, and while it may be out of date, it can still be a source of reference and ideas. In 99% of cases (if not more), the source site has long ago vanished, but the material that I found to be of (potential) value then has been preserved.

That makes CM a Resource for the gaming community, something I take a lot of pride in. But it begs the question: what happens on the day I become too ill, or too destitute, to maintain it? If I die, the resource will continue to be available for a while – but eventually, it will shut down. And all those who would have one day benefited from that resource will be the poorer for it.

(Have no fear – I’m not suffering from an excess of mortality (that I know of) – but a past scare or two, and the still-raging pandemic, should remind us all that tomorrow is always a complete unknown).

This is what has befallen those lost hosts of the Blog Carnival – their owners have fallen by the wayside or migrated into other endeavors, and their contributions are now lost. Some of that content will have depreciated markedly; some will be evergreen, and undeserving of such a fate; and some will be somewhere in between.

Implications For The Blog Carnival

There has been some concern that the Blog Carnival was no longer worth preserving, worth continuing. Fewer and fewer blogs get published these days, on gaming (or on any other subject, for that matter), and it gets harder every year to find willing hosts and subjects that excite and create a willingness to participate.

This month’s subject matter grew out of such a discussion. It was hoped that digging into the past would re-energize the Blog Carnival of today. It may succeed – or it may not. If web traffic to the archive rises markedly, then even if there are no entries to celebrate (other than this one), it will still have been at least a partial success. I don’t have access to those statistics, so I can only guess.

If the Blog Carnival is lost

But it begs the question – what would be lost, were the Carnival to go away?

I have lamented, in the past, the disappearance of the bloggers who simply reviewed the material of other blogs that they found to be of interest, because these were a static connection from the now to the content of the past.

The Blog Carnival is a free-floating variation on this idea. Each roundup post indexes content for posterity. I would therefore argue, after much reflection, that even if it were to cease as an ongoing practice, it’s legacy should be secured as a window to the past. Even if most of the links cease to function, if they are there, they still hold value. It was the removal of dead links that created the first Blind Alley upon which my intentions for this post floundered.

If a monthly carnival cannot be sustained, let it be two-monthly, or quarterly; if a quarterly carnival cannot be sustained, make it twice a year, or even annual (making the subjects bigger, and allowing more time for participation). Bring Video Bloggers into the fold, and Facebook Groups of relevance.

But that’s just the opinion of someone with no responsibility for the maintenance and organization of the Carnival. Ultimately, the carnival host (Of Dice And Dragons) and that site’s owner, Scot, will have to make the call.

The Responsibility Of the RPG Blogger

And it brings me back to the question, which every site owner should contemplate – what arrangements can they put in place to preserve the content that they have created, so that it does not wither and vanish as so much already has?

I have plans in place should something happen to me. I will probably never know if those plans come to fruition, because I have no intention of abandoning ship voluntarily any time soon. But at the same time, I have to be realistic; slowly-deteriorating health has made the twice-weekly schedule, with which Campaign Mastery began, unsustainable. Eventually I will no longer be able to post weekly, and may have to shift to a fortnightly schedule, or less. That might take five years, it may take twenty. Economic factors may accelerate or delay this event. I don’t know what the future holds – I just know that I have prepared for it, to the best of my ability. Anyone reading this should do likewise.

Lost Treasure Quest I

In October of 2008, Musings of the Chatty DM offered up Super Heroes in RPGs. One of the submissions was by The Fine Art Of The TPK which is now hosted on Blogger with a redirect from the direct link. The comment accompanying the submission suggests that this was the case, even way back when. The problem is that when you open that link, you get a permission denied; the blog, it seems, is now open to invited readers only.

Wayback Machine results: failure. It has captured the Arabic version of the login page to Blogger, to which it redirects a request for the web page.

Lost Treasure Quest II

Same host, same Carnival. The Geek Emporium submitted Super Heroes of the Apocalypse: The Templars. They don’t appear to have ever hosted the Carnival, but the post comes up with a 404 these days.

Wayback Machine results: failure. The Wayback Machine has captured the same 404 page that comes up when you open the link.

Lost Treasure Quest III (I know there’s gold somewhere in them hills!)

Same Carnival, Greywolf submitted Secret IDs for D&D which now leads you to a link that offers to reset your default search engine and not to the content promised.

Wayback Machine results: Success! After an initial failure where the Wayback Machine took me to a completely unrelated page that it thought “I would enjoy more”, it kicked back with Blog Carnival Superheroes: Hero with a Secret ID, which is the actual title of the submission. Better yet, the Wayback Machine has also captured the comments that go with the post.

This is definitely worth reading for anyone who isn’t running a superhero campaign, as well as anyone who is and wants a broader take on NPCs who may be leading a secret life in a non-superheroic way or environment. Score!

But why stop there?

Lost Treasures Quest IV

Same Carnival, Reverend Mike’s The Book Of Rev submitted Superheroes? BAH! The Villains Are Where It’s At!

These days, that leads to a 404 in Indonesian!

Wayback Machine results: Hmm, that doesn’t look promising: “Saved 4 times between June 21, 2019, and February 24, 2021. I suspect that it may simply have captured the same 404. But we might get lucky – I’ll go for the earliest one and see what comes of it…

…and the answer is, a different version of the same Indonesian 404, this one mostly in English.

Never mind, one in three successes – now one in four – means that failure is going to occur more often than success, so it’s time to press on!

Lost Treasures Quest V

Same Carnival, another submission by The Geek Emporium, which leads to exactly the same 404 page as the last. Maybe we’ll have better luck with the Wayback Machine this time…

Wayback Machine results: DOUBLE PLAY, Baby! Not only did I find a copy of the submission, but discovered that the Wayback Machine captures and archives a lot of the linked articles – which gave me a link to the earlier lost article on the Templars that works!

Super Heroes Of The Apocalypse: The Templars

Supervillains of the Apocalypse

The first offers a view of what heroism might look like in a post-apocalyptic world (Mad max, anyone? How about Barb Wire?); the second creates a post-apocalyptic villain. And that could be adapted to many campaigns simply by employing the plot mechanism of a villain who has fled an apocalyptic wasteland, but cannot leave behind the things that living there have done to him.

Lost Treasures Quest VI

Same Carnival, another submission by The Geek Emporium…

Wayback Machine results: Immediate success!

Pulp Hero of the Apocalypse

This offers up a character concept that could be for a PC or it could be for an NPC with the potential to ally with the PCs in that environment. But, in light of the comments I made above, perhaps the greatest potential would be as an NPC pursuing the villain and so alerting the PCs to the danger. The character’s background is such that he would want to return to his desolate wasteland ASAP, and not stick around. He might seek to then emigrate with what remains of his family, but this would open the floodgates as others sought to follow him. Hundreds, thousands, potentially millions of refugees appearing out of nowhere, desperate to find a better life – that sounds like a full-blown campaign to me!

It hasn’t escaped my attention that all my successes have come from the one site. So I’m going to ignore any other links from The Geek Emporium and look for someone else’s lost offering.

Lost Treasures Quest VII

The next submission is from a site that is definitely gone, The Dice Bag. I know because their hosting of the November 2008 Carnival (on Religion in RPGs) was the one that I tried searching for by keyword, without success – that was Blind Alley I. But this time I have that exact URL that I did not have for their blog carnival hosting duties a month later, so let’s give it a whirl….

Wayback Machine results: Oh dear, this does not look promising. “Saved 1 time February 25, 2021″… still, we might get lucky!

And suddenly, there’s a second link, one dating back to December 2008. The original capture simply tells us that GoDaddy had parked the site by 2021, which doesn’t help us at all.

…Aaaand, Hey Presto! The Things That Should Not Be

The submission, when I actually look at it, is rather disappointing, but I wasn’t expecting much, having been forewarned by the comments accompanying it. It’s more of an announcement that Bob has been inspired by Tom (the Dice Bag) and has a lot of good stuff coming as a result, just not yet.

But serendipity – digging for worms and striking gold – yields a link at the bottom to where the Wayback Machine has archived the lost blog roundup page!

ROUNDUP – RPG Bloggers Network Carnival – Religion

Not only that, but it appears that every one of the submissions has also been captured – at least, they all have links to elsewhere within the Internet Archive that is the Wayback Machine!

One of which is from another site that has long been gone (and is still missed by those who read it), Uncle Bear, who made two submissions to the Lost Carnival, and so would make the perfect test of this theory:

And… Touchdown! Religion and Fantasy, Opinion and Belief

In this post, Berin Kinsman (the first person to encourage me to write about RPGs!) offers an overview of the interactions between Gods and Mortals in an RPG environment and some of the implications and consequences. It made me immediately want to hit the “comment” button to add the worship of Pantheons to the discussion, but even without that, it is still a good read for anyone who has religion in their RPGs, and everyone who doesn’t – which should be just about everyone!

The Process – YOU can do this, too!

I don’t use the Wayback Machine very often, so I can never remember the url. So I started with a Google search.

That led me to The Wayback Machine Internet Archive .

Next, put a copy of the exact URL you want into the search field. Right-click, Copy-link and paste is the easiest and most accurate technique. Using Key Words does NOT find what you are looking for very often, even if the content in question is somewhere within the archive, at least not in my experience!

If you are lucky, that will take you to a calendar page, which is divided into two parts. The top part lists years, the bottom part dates within the chosen year. Here’s a snapshot of what comes up for Campaign Mastery in the top section:

Select the year that you are interested in by clicking on the calendar within the year you want, or the next one with a black bar to indicate that the Wayback Machine has an entry for the page you have requested captured at that time. As a general rule, go as early as possible! I have to admit that I’m curious about that spike in 2019, so I’ll pick that year.

The March result is what you would typically see when hunting for a specific post. The reason for the 2019 spike is clearly a bunch of saves in July.

You’ll notice that there are some results in Green, and others in Blue. The size of the dot indicates how many results took place on a given day.

if you hover your pointer over one of the days, a popup gives you details, as shown to the right.

On July 17, Campaign Mastery’s home page was saved three times – the first is a link in Green, the other two are in blue. The first blue link appears to have been taken just one second after the green.

If I right-click one of those dates, I can open the snapshot of the site as it appeared at that exact moment in a new tab; if you left-click, that will happen in the same tab as the Wayback Machine, which means that if the link doesn’t work or doesn’t lead to what you wanted, you are stuck; going back won’t take you to where you were.

I have to admit that I can’t see the difference between a green and a blue capture! But take it as read that there might be one.

Clicking on the bubbled dates does nothing,, you have to get the pop-up and click on the specific time. But if you right-click on a small bubble (indicating a single entry), you can open that result in a new tab without waiting for the pop-up. Right-clicking on a larger bubble without going through the pop-up takes you to the LAST entry – again, this might not be the one that you want!

Limitations of the Wayback Machine

There are some limitations to the Wayback Machine that you should definitely be aware of.

• It can be hard-to-impossible to find what you are looking for without an exact URL.
• It will capture 404s (page not found pages) and other non-results and treat them as results.
• Despite their best attempts, they don’t have everything!
• In the very early days, they did not save text formatting or images. In the slightly later days, they did not save images, but did preserve the formatting. In the modern era, they present a near-perfect snapshot of the site as it appeared.
• FILES are usually not saved. So if the website offers a PDF or whatever, you usually can’t retrieve it. That means, for example, that I can open this page listing the music that I had composed as of June 2003, but the songs themselves remain lost.

So it’s not perfect. But it is still a gateway to the lost treasures of yesterday, and that’s what this post is all about!