The Book Club RPG

A novel TTRPG.

Everyone brings a book to the game. It must be a physical copy that you own and are willing to mark up.

You will need a random number generator set to the number of pages in your book. You may be able to do this with dice, but an online random number generator is easiest, as you can set a range that directly corresponds to the number of pages. Follow the book’s pagination and ignore introductions, appendices, or anything else outside the normal page number range. 

Character creation

Name

“Roll” a random page. Start from the top of the page and grab the first name you find. You can use your own judgment if something “counts” as a name, but generally, err in the direction of choosing the first word that seems reasonably name-like. This is your character’s name.

Mark the word so that you remember that you already used it. A highlighter may help, if you want to keep the book readable. But blacking it out with a sharpie has a powerful energy to it.

Try to stick with this character name, even if you don’t like it, or it isn’t the sort of name you would normally choose for a character (especially if it isn’t the sort of name you typically choose). If you really want to change it, you can reroll, but you must mark one “dogear” on your character sheet. More on that later.

Appearance

Roll three random pages. For each result, choose the first adjective that appears on that page. When you have three adjectives, that’s the description of your character. 

You may get an adjective that doesn’t really make sense for describing a person. Try to use it anyway, even if you think of it as more of a figurative description than a literal one. Mark each word in the same fashion as you did the name.

If you genuinely can’t find any way to make the adjective work, or just dislike the adjective so much that you don’t want it associated with your character, reroll and mark a dogear on your character sheet.

Skills

Roll three random pages. For each result, choose the first verb that appears on that page. These three verbs are your character’s skills.

Some of these will be easy to interpret as player skills, like running or fighting. Others will require some interpretation. What does it mean to have a skill at “representing,” “isolating,” or “facilitating.” Or a verb that is not normally associated with a person, say, “flooding”? You will have to employ some lateral thinking. 

As before, mark the words you use. Basically you’re going to mark a word every time you roll for a word. If you forget every once and a while, that’s fine, but try to do it when you can.

If you really can’t make a verb work, that’s OK, but you know the drill; take a dogear.

Equipment

Roll for three more pages. For each one, take the first concrete noun that refers to a physical object that a person could carry in one hand. It doesn’t have to be something that a person would ordinarily carry. Use common sense.

Ethos

This one is optional, but may be useful to your game if your character still feels fuzzy. You don’t need this for a one-shot, but it may come in handy for a longer game. 

Roll for three more pages and choose the first three abstract nouns you see. Your character has strong feelings about these ideas, but they don’t have to be affirmative. For example, if you get a word like “slavery,” the character could simply be an anti-slavery advocate. Same rule as above with dogears. 

Content

If you ever roll a word that violates the table’s agreed-upon content and vibe for the game, you can reroll such results without taking a dogear. For example, if you use lines and veils, a word that is strongly associated with a subject covered by a line or veil can be rerolled for “free.”  

Action Resolution 

Whenever you do something uncertain, roll a random number and flip to that page. The first letter of the first complete word determines the nature of the outcome.

• A-B: Yes, and 
• C-F: Yes
• G-L: Yes, but 
• M-P: No, and
• Q-S: No
• T-Z: No, but

If you have a relevant skill or piece of equipment, you can look at the first two words with different letters and choose an outcome from between them (for example, if the first series of words on a page was “all actionable attributes have been accounted for,” you would choose “A” and “H”). Mark any words that you “use” in this way. 

The math doesn’t work out perfectly with these letter divisions, but it doesn’t need to; if anything, I kinda like flat “no” as the smallest category and “no, but” as the largest one.

Dogears

You may acquire a few dogears during character creation or play. This is a metacurrency that a player can spend to compel the player with a dogear to roll in a situation that otherwise wouldn't require a roll; or to make that player reroll a result that they just rolled.

When you call in someone's dogear, the affected player erases it from their sheet and you add it to your sheet. If a player cashes one of your dogears during a session, you can’t cash one on them until the next session. So only a few dogears should change hands each session, and they should always be circulating among the players.

Focus and Genre

While you can do this game with very different books, if you want to concentrate the tone a bit more, have everyone select books from the same genre. For an even more focused experience, have everyone use the exact same book. Novels are an obvious choice, but remember that anything full of text made up of full sentences can work pretty well. There's no reason this game wouldn't work for a group all using copies of an air conditioning unit's operation manual.