The Gnomish Treasury (TALP)
Crates of stolen treasures have been returned to the gnome kingdom. As custodian of the royal treasury, it's your job to restore these priceless artifacts and curate an exhibition fit for the king.
Find the broken pieces of rare and unusual items, and uncover their historical significance, in this cozy, crafting-driven puzzle game for anyone who loves museums or beautiful objects.
The Gnomish Treasury is a parser-based interactive fiction game, also known as a text adventure. It's designed to be a welcoming introduction to the genre, and includes an in-game tutorial, hints, map, and "help" command with instructions.
Created for the Text Adventure Literacy Jam (TALP) in response to the theme "Archaeology." Play all the entries and vote for your favorites through May 31, 2026! And if you enjoy this game, please also consider leaving a rating here on itch.io and on IFDB.
(If you'd like to see the solutions to the puzzles, a step-by-step walkthrough is included with the .zip file of the game, or as a separate .txt file, available to download below.)
A production of Lamp Post Projects. Written & illustrated by Nell. Coded in Inform 7. Playtested by Burt, Deborah, Gianluca Girelli, and John R.
This game does not include any AI-generated content.
Contact lamppostprojects@gmail.com with questions or comments.
Follow Lamp Post Projects on itch.io, Tumblr, and Patreon.
Copyright © 2026 Nell Shaw Cohen.
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Development log
- Bug fix3 hours ago
- "The Gnomish Treasury" is released!1 day ago
Comments
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Hey, so, very intrigued, but the game froze for me at one point. So I downloaded the zip version and ran it locally and it froze at the same point, which makes it look more like a bug than a browser problem.
Sadly, since it's frozen, I can't paste a transcript or a command history, but roughly speaking what I had done was:
I have no idea if this is helpful. (I did check the browser console to see if it reported anything useful; it did not.) Looking forward to getting back to this, though!
Really sorry your first experience with The Gnomish Treasury was cut short! Thanks so much for letting me know about the bug, and the details of what happened. It's very helpful.
It seems you've run into a super specific edge case, which hadn't come up in testing. I was able to recreate the crash under certain conditions that have to do with the bowl or the knife, specifically; and whether they are labeled, which labels are used, and in what order.
I'm still working on identifying the cause of the bug (neither my browser nor dev environment are offering error messages, and I haven't spotted any issues in my source code).
UPDATE: Alright, the bug is fixed and the game is updated! You should be able to proceed with exactly what you were in the middle of doing.
(That was a tricky one! There were no explicit errors that I could find in the source code. Yet under those very specific conditions, the Inform 7 compiler was getting stuck in a loop trying to print the list. Adjusting the method by which the list was printed did the trick.)
Man, Inform 7 is like magic, in that who even knows how it works. (Obviously not true. I even know people who know how it works. Still: magic.) Glad to hear it was eventually debuggable, and I look forward to getting back to this!