Dear Quartermaster Vale,
My partner says our garage has become unusable because I keep too many things from LARP events. I think “unusable” is unfair. It remains possible to enter the garage and, with planning, turn around.
The collection includes normal equipment such as costumes and foam weapons, but also objects with campaign significance: the cracked shield from the Siege of Orison, forty-seven potion bottles, a wooden spoon awarded for diplomatic courage, six banners from houses that no longer exist, and the rope we used to pull Brother Aldous from the symbolic well.
My partner keeps asking why we need a broken shield. I have explained that it is not merely broken; it was broken by Tamsin while defending the western stair. My partner says Tamsin is an accountant named Leah and the western stair was behind a community center. This is both true and beside the point.
Last weekend we needed a wrench, and I discovered it inside a chest labeled RELICS OF THE FIRST AGE. My partner asked whether the First Age had standardized metric bolts. The conversation deteriorated from there.
I admit some items are difficult to defend individually. I do not remember which plot used the blue wax apples, but throwing them away feels like erasing something. What if someone remembers later? What if the old campaign returns? What if a new player asks how we made the world feel so detailed and the answer is that I sent it all to a landfill?
How do I protect the history without becoming the final dungeon?
—Keeper of Too Much Lore
Dear Keeper,
You are correct that the cracked shield is not merely a cracked shield. Your partner is correct that it is preventing access to the wrench.
Objects from play are unusually persuasive. A photograph shows that something happened. A dented shield appears to have survived it. The thing carries paint, weight, damage, and the memory of Leah making a choice on the western stair behind the community center. Of course it feels cruel to place that in a bin beside ordinary household debris.
Unfortunately, meaning does not reduce cubic volume.
Your task is not to decide which objects are meaningful. Clearly, far too many of them are. Your task is to decide which objects must remain physically present for their meanings to remain available.
Start by giving the collection a border. Choose a cabinet, shelving unit, or fixed number of archival tubs. Do not begin by evaluating every wax apple while standing in the garage. That is how a six-hour sorting project becomes a private revival of the Orchard Prophecy. Decide the amount of space your household can offer the campaign, together, before the artifacts begin pleading their cases.
Then sort by function.
Keep active equipment that is safe, usable, and likely to return to play. Repair what can be repaired. Retire foam weapons whose cores are becoming unsafe, no matter how many goblins remember them unfavorably.
Keep a small set of singular story objects: the shield that marks a real turning point, the wooden spoon that still makes everyone laugh, one banner whose stains have acquired legitimate historiography. Choose objects that can summon a story for more than one person. You are curating a memory, not proving that your past occupied acreage.
Photograph the rest before letting it go. Write the names, date, event, and one sentence about why the object mattered. Better yet, invite other players to annotate the record. You may learn that the blue wax apples belonged to no plot at all and were purchased because someone mistook them for candles. This, too, is history.
Offer meaningful items back to the people connected to them. Leah may want the cracked shield. Brother Aldous may have no interest whatsoever in the rope that saved him from the symbolic well. Either answer tells you something. Do not distribute twelve boxes among your friends without asking; that is not archival stewardship but a curse with postage.
For house and faction materials, consider making a compact campaign box: one folded banner, a character list, a map, several photographs, and the object that best expresses how the group played. The box should let a future person understand the campaign without requiring them to excavate it.
Some things should be dismantled. Salvage buckles, fabric, safe foam, and hardware you will actually reuse. Reusing a component does not dishonor its first story. LARPing has always depended on the noble transformation of one improbable object into another. Today’s ruined portcullis is tomorrow’s suspiciously textured tavern wall.
Include your partner in deciding what shared space can hold, but do not require them to judge the emotional worth of individual relics. “This means nothing to me” and “this cannot occupy the workbench” are different statements. Ask for agreement about access, safety, and volume. Retain responsibility for making the collection fit those agreements.
And free the wrench. Tools used for maintaining your actual home should not require an archaeological permit.
You fear that discarding an object will erase the event. Test that fear gently. Put several uncertain items in a dated holding box. If nobody seeks them over the next six months, photograph them and let them leave. Notice which memories remain. The campaign was never stored entirely in the potion bottles. It lived among the people who agreed, for an afternoon, that the liquid inside could heal them.
Keep enough to open that door again. Leave enough room to walk through it.