Ahoy Shipmates!

Welcome to Shipwreck Library! This site is intended to archive my writings, from my numerous gaming materials to the salvaged flotsam and jetsam of The Modern Word. Over the last twenty-five years, I have published numerous Web sites under various guises: The Libyrinth (1995–1999) and The Modern Word (1999-2014), two resources dedicated to exploring experimental literature; Sarnath (1995-2003), my personal “homepage” back in the days when people actually had personal homepages; New York By Night (1996–2003),  an extensive campaign setting for White Wolf’s Vampire: The Masquerade game; White Leviathan (1997-2002) a limited site dedicated to a Melville-based horror game I’m currently writing; and several other lesser endeavors not worth mentioning. Oh yeah, and I had a respectable presence on What.cd, R.I.P., thanks for all the fish, and fuck you France for burning down music’s Library of Alexandria.

It’s my hope that Shipwreck Library will eventually feature elements from all of these now-defunct resources. I’m writing this introduction primarily to address the people I know from bygone years and previous incarnations, many of whom still send me emails about gaming stuff I had online back in the nineties. So let me answer a few Frequently Asked Questions.

Are you the Great Quail?
Yes. Yes, I am that guy. I used to run “Sarnath” at GreatQuail.com, but I let that URL accidentally expire, and some ass-hat bought it and tried to charge me $1000. You’ll see my name as “A. Buell Ruch” on some new material, because that has a nice Civil War ring, and it’s hard to be taken seriously when you present as a small, ground-dwelling bird with a feathered cowlick.

What happened to The Modern Word?
It was attacked by hackers in 2014, who wiped out the server that was kindly hosting us for free. I still have all of the material saved, however, and I am slowly restoring, revising, and refurbishing the original material from The Modern Word, including The Brazen Head, The Garden of Forking Paths, Spermatikos Logos, Apmonia, Das Schloss, and The Scriptorium. All developments will be posted on the “What’s New?” page.

What happened to New York By Night?
I stopped playing Vampire: The Masquerade in the early 2000s, and the site eventually went down after The Modern Word’s servers were torched. Although I have no intention to return to that particular gaming milieu, I restored and revised much of that material in 2017-2019.

And are you the White Leviathan guy, too?
Yes! In fact, I plan to finally publish White Leviathan, my epic Moby-Dick inspired Call of Cthulhu game. I may even kickstart it and make it into a box set.

I see you’re running a new game. What the hell is Deadlands?
My new RPG obsession is the alternate-history Weird West game Deadlands Reloaded, which uses the Savage Worlds gaming milieu. I have created a lot of new material for my own personal Deadlands 1876 campaign, which has been on-hold because of COVID. I hope to return to it in the near future,

Nice links, there. I see you still shill for the Evil Empire. 
Yes, this site has many links to Amazon.com, and I am an Amazon Affiliate. You buy something from Amazon through my site, and I get a nickel or two, while Jeff Bezos gets to keep building his moon base and plotting the destruction of physical bookstores. I offer my written materials for free, and encourage gamers to use, adapt, and alter my stuff in whatever way best suits their needs. Whatever spare change I make through Amazon helps defray the cost of hosting this site. In fact, the Libyrinth was one of the first Amazon.com Associates, and I’m still kind of shocked Amazon didn’t go the way of Infoseek, Netscape, and Urban Fetch. I also believe that Amazon’s product pages are good resources for obscure books and music—like Wikipedia, but with more stupid comments and the ability to impulse-buy that CD of sea shanties!

Ok, whatever, you’re a whore. But a PayPal “Donate” button? Really?
If you enjoy reading or using my gaming materials, you are free to make a small contribution. If you don’t want to do that, that’s perfectly ok! I would’t make this stuff freely available if I didn’t mind it being, well, freely available. But it’s nice to be appreciated, too, and those out-of-print books about 1970s prog rock don’t buy themselves.

Thank you, and it’s great to be back! If you have any comments, criticisms, suggestions, questions, or proposals, feel free to send me some email or use the comments section. (Comments! So not 1995 anymore…)

You can also follow me on Twitter, but I am hardly a frequent poster:

Follow @GreatQuail

Last Modified: 24 July 2022
Contact: quail(at)shipwrecklibrary(dot)com