troik tue: books of bookholm

24 Mar, 2026

A book can serve any purpose. Some ideas:

• grant Skill Ranks
• birth an NPC faction (cult; political movement; fanclub)
• grant money to the author and publishers
• increase or decrease someone's reputation
• unlock secret knowledge
• be a spellbook or grimoire

A given book has a single unnamed stat, and would be notated as such:

The Bloody Book (27). A grimoire of sentences so dreadful they could literally stop your heart.

The Stat functions like Luck. Every time the book exercises its intended purpose, the Referee rolls 2D6 to determine if it is successful, aiming to score under the Stat, and then decreases it. The amount it is decreased by should be adjudicated based on how profound the effect is. For example, if you use a book to start a revolution that will sweep through Zamonia at large, you should probably deplete its stat entirely¹.

The Stat does not replenish -- you may need to write a sequel!

so you want to write a book?

If you've somehow found yourself on the crooked, choked streets of Bookholm, chances are you've got an idea for a book.

Writing is an Advanced Skill, but its usage for the authorship of books comes with extra caveats.

A Writing roll represents a single sitting. Choose how much you're going to write in this session:

Note down a rough description of what you wrote, and whether it was successful or not. Like:

A Short History of the Leyden Manikin. Required: 5 chapters, 10 pages each. Completed: 1 chapter, 1 page
21/2/26. Page: On the Alchemasters of the Late Cretaceous. Successful.
15/3/26. Chapter: On the Chemical Makeup of the Manikin. Failed.

Between writing sessions, you will need to recharge. Sufficient examples include an adventure full of inspiring experiences; a night's sleep in a good bed; a hallucinogenic experience; reading a good book; or a few hours in a comfy chair smoking good tobacco from a pipe.

The Referee will tell you how many sentences/pages/whatever's you need to complete your book, based on what you've told them you are trying to write. When that amount has been reached, the book is complete. Its Stat is equal to the number of successful book elements you've written. In the example above, the book would have a score of 1, and you could write it in your inventory like this:

A Short History of the Leyden Manikin (1). Commissioned by Seneschal Zloteb III. special: +1 to Skill Total when making a Manikin.

Note that this book has zero chance of activating its special function because its Score is lower than what you can roll on 2D6. However, the author was seemingly commissioned to write it, and so will at least get some remuneration for her efforts.

Some books, such as those written with the aim of winning public appeal or making money, may only be useful when published en masse. In this case, you would need to locate a publisher, who may require you to edit the book, do more pages, give over a cut of the profits, or perhaps even perform a task or quest before it is sent to the printers.

notes to referees

This should go without saying but you should heavily reward the player who writes pages or chapters For Realz. I suggest you count these as automatic Critical Successes, having double or triple potency compared to a normal success.

Finally, bin all this and create a new ruling at the soonest opportunity. A mechanic can only serve to place limits on a power that should be limitless. In our world, books regularly accomplish reality-shaping feats(The Vedas, Das Kapital, etc., etc.). This can only be even more true in Bookholm.

addendum

I add here some examples I gave in a Discord server, that hopefully help outline a bit more clearly how this is meant to work in my head.

There's a few scenarios that could unfold:

1. player wants a book on the theology of their cleric's god. Referee says they'll need a book with 9 chapters, each containing some arbitrary number of pages (roll for it maybe?). The player decides if they want to write individual pages (more successes, takes longer) or hammer it out in an evening (high chance of failure, it gets done quick). < in this scenario the player is probably writing the book for a non-mechanically described benefit, but depending on how many successful elements they've written out, once it's complete it could be used situationally, e.g. they use it to win a theological debate

2. player wants to write a book that will cause the person who reads it's head to explode. the Referee decides this is crazy, and so a single use of this book would deplete its Stat by 500. This means the player needs a minimum of 500 successful Writing checks to use the book just once. They would just keep making Writing checks until they finally get enough successes. This example specifically would be basically impossible for a player to accomplish; they'd be better off trying to find such a book out in the wild, or employing magic to help them maybe. < in this scenario it's more like researching a magical item for a specific purpose; the Referee can set the required Stat based on how desirable/overpowered the intended purpose is; and makes it so that truly powerful books are probably beyond the players' remit of authorship and would need to be found via adventuring or purchased from a bookseller. OR, I would rule they could write an actual high-effort piece of prose in real life to add onto the book's Stat

#troika-tuesday #zamonia