Appendix Lit: A Gamer’s Inspiration Book Club
- A Timspiration Project
Welcome to Appendix Lit, a book club designed to inspire your tabletop games through diverse and engaging reads. Whether you’re a seasoned game master or a player looking to enrich your experience, our selections spark new ideas, plotlines, and characters to bring your games to life.
We focus on modern authors and inclusive perspectives, ensuring our inspiration reflects the world we live in and the stories we want to tell. Through lively discussions and subjective ratings, we’ll explore how each book fuels creativity and shapes our gaming sessions. Ready to dive in? Let’s read, share, and game together.
“Upon such a base I built my interest in fantasy”
– in reference to Appendix N found in the first DMG 1979
Book Club features
Game Focused
We want you to enjoy the book, with a second mind on how to use it in your gaming.
Subjective Ratings
Instead of rating “how good”, we focus on how likely we are to use the book’s content in our games, providing a personalized and practical assessment.
Creative Inspiration
We use using our dice system to rate each book on its: quality, ability to spark creativity, or provide new ideas for game plots, characters, and settings.
Support Local
We make efforts to purchase our books from local stores, borrow from libraries, or at least buy from Indigo in Canada and not Amazon.
DEIR Authors & Characters
Our selections are curated to: emphasize cultural and ethnic diversity, feature QUILTBAG peoples, and include Canadian authors.
Group Discussions
Engage in lively discussions with fellow gamers. We share what we thought and exchange ideas to use the book bits to enhance our gaming sessions. When you join let us know you’re “here for Appendix Lit”.
Book Club Questions
What
did you like best about the book?
Which
role-playing game system would you use?
What
do you think the author’s purpose was in writing this book?
Which
scenes or chapters could you turn into encounters in an game?
If
you were running this story as an adventure, or playing in it as a character, where would it be difficult to progress the plot without being pulled along?
Which character’s journey did you find the most compelling, and why?
What did you like least about this book?
What feelings did this book evoke for you?
What did you think of the book’s ending? Was it satisfying, or did it leave you wanting more?
Was there a quote or passage from the book that stood out to you? Why?
How did the setting influence the story’s tone and mood?
If the characters were D&D Characters, what would their species, background, and class be?
Which of the characters do you think you could make into Non-Player Characters, and how would you use these NPCs in the game?
Which places in the book would you most like to visit?
Did you think the book was too long or short? Were you able to see some pacing opportunities for your own stories?
If you were making a movie of this book, who would you cast?
Did this book make you think of a style of music at all? Create a book group playlist together!
What ideas were being put forward? Did you get the encoded messages while reading the book or learn it after?
If you could hear this same story from another person’s point of view, who would you choose?
No 1-5 stars here, we use dice.
Where we do the chatting about the books.
The Discord has a zero-tolerance policy for spoilers or hate.
Even if you don’t join the club, we encourage you to hunt down a local bookstore or library wherever you are. There is something special about wandering the aisles, looking at the covers, and breathing in that paper smell in the air that you just don’t get from online shopping. If you need online, most the bookstores we mention below have you covered, also we’ve linked the season’s books to Indigo, a Canadian bookstore chain. Also, sometimes you don’t have the money or space for new books, luckily these books are likely to be at your public library—and they have air conditioning for those stupid hot days.
Here are our favourite bookstores in the different cities we’ve been to that we support & recommend:
- If you’re in the greater Vancouver area, Pulp Fiction Books on the Drive and Iron Dog Books are both *chefs kiss.
- Kelowna has one of our favourite book stores anywhere, Mosaic Books.
- In Portland, of course, there is Powell’s.
- In San Fransisco we really enjoyed Fabulosa Books. LOOOVE a queer bookstore that knows their stuff <3
if you have suggestions where you live/love, let us know and we’ll add it.
