There is a place that appears on no map.
Trains arrive from directions no compass knows. They carry lost objects: keys without locks, photographs without faces, mismatched shoes, letters never sent. Every object holds the story of whoever once owned it.
This place is called Terminus. You are its Night Shift Keeper — and you are a psychometrist.
When you touch an object, you see scenes from the past. You cannot speak to the people in the vision. You cannot change what happened. You only watch, and write.
What is The Unclaimed Things?
The Unclaimed Things is a psychometry journaling experience: a nightly ritual of writing, attention, and small discovery.
Each session — roughly the time of a tisane before sleep — is a complete story. A new object arrives at Terminus. You touch it. A vision opens. You write what you see, phase by phase, guided by questions that push you deeper into the scene.
The stories you find here are small. No heroes, no monsters. A man repairing a bicycle. A woman at a bus stop. A child dropping a marble. The power is in the detail, not the scale.
The Web App
Every night, a new lost object arrives at theunclaimedthings.com. The same object, for every Keeper in the world — at the same time.
The structure is always the same: five phases — CONTACT, KI, SHŌ, TEN, KETSU — guide you from the first sensation to the final echo. Each phase has its question. You write your answer. Then something shifts.
But after each answer, the AI Terminus reads what you wrote and asks a follow-up question written specifically for your story. Not a generic prompt. A response to the exact words you chose, the scene you opened, the detail you let slip.
At the end of the session, you make one choice: Archive the object in the Register of Lost Things — or Burn it. Both are acts of care.
If you archive, the AI Scribe transforms your session into a short illustrated story: 400 to 600 words, a page of the Book of Unclaimed Things you can keep, print, or share.
The first five nights are free.
The Structure of a Session
The game uses kishōtenketsu, a Japanese narrative structure built not on conflict, but on a shift in meaning.
- CONTACT — A non-visual sensation opens the psychometric portal.
- KI — The vision begins: a place, a person, an action.
- SHŌ — Tension. What moves beneath the surface.
- TEN — The turn. Something changes meaning — subtly, inevitably.
- KETSU — The echo. What the loss reveals.
The best answers are the ones that surprise you. A man you thought was waiting for someone was actually saying goodbye. A couple who seemed angry was holding back tears of relief. The smallest shift — the TEN — is often the most powerful.
Also: the TTRPG
Before the web app, there was a deck of cards and a journal.
The Unclaimed Things TTRPG is a solo journaling game for one player, a standard deck of 52 playing cards, and a notebook. No dice. No GM. No screen. Each card maps to a lost object — drawn from a suit of personal objects, tools, documents, and garments. Face cards carry something heavier: relics, anomalies, or an instruction to pick up a real object from your own world.
The same five phases. The same kishōtenketsu. The same final choice.
The TTRPG is available as a free PDF (pay what you want) in English, Italian, French, German, and Spanish.
The Keepers' Community
The Register is never full. This is where Keepers of the Night Shift leave their stories, find new objects to investigate, and hear what arrives next from Terminus.
Because the web app sends the same object to every Keeper each night, you can read what others saw in the same vision — the same lost watch, the same unopened letter, the same cracked marble — and find that no two stories are alike.
Share what you archived. Share what you burned. News, supplements, and updates live here too.
About the Project
The Unclaimed Things is an experiment by DialoArt (aka dialobot aka Roberto Gilli). It explores what happens when you slow down, hold something that belonged to someone else, and write toward a story you didn't plan.
The project is inspired by mono no aware — the Japanese sense of the pathos of things — and by the quiet narrative philosophy of Midnight Diner: ordinary people, small moments, the weight of what goes unsaid.
The web app and the TTRPG are two versions of the same question: what remains when something is lost?
Contact
- Email: dialobot @ gmail.com
- Website: dialoart.com
- Web app: theunclaimedthings.com
- TTRPG on itch.io: dialobot.itch.io/theunclaimedthings
- Discord: discord.gg/TvBxpacd