Episode: 2770
Title: HPR2770: Navigating the maze of RPG books
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2770/hpr2770.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 16:36:50

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This is HPR Episode 2,770 entitled, navigating the main of RPG books and in part of the series, Tabletop Gaming.
It is hosted by Klaatu and is about 31 minutes long and carrying a clean flag.
The summary is, there are so many kinds of RPG books out there, where do you start? Klaatu Tell Ball.
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Hey everyone, this is Klaatu, you're listening to Hacker Public Radio. This is an episode about RPG, again, and in this one, I'm going to talk about the different types of books that you can find around RPG.
By this I mean, there are lots of different types of books being published for RPGs, and it can be very, very overwhelming if you're this sort of person who wants to get started, and goes to the bookstore, looks up the thing that you want to get started with, and you find 30 different things, and you have no idea where to start.
I don't feel like this is a problem with air quotes around problem, exclusive to RPG. It is something that certainly I've experienced with comic books, a couple of times where I think, I'm going to go read comics for a change, I'm going to actually, I'm going to be a comics person, and so I go to the store, and I look at all the different comic books, and thinking, okay, well, I better narrow my search down, I'll just start with Batman, and then I look for the Batman stuff and find Dark Knight, and Batman, and Detective Comics, and all of these other things, and you would
have no idea where to, what to buy first, or how far back in history you would need to start buying things in order to make sense of where you are now, just don't know where to start. Same things happens with Linux, right? You want to get started with Linux, okay, well, which of these eight distributions would you like to try? I don't even know what a distribution is yet, so it is a common thing, it happens, this kind of information overload, and lack of maybe taxonomy, but hey, there is taxonomy actually, there is a way to sort this,
and I'm going to do that with you right now. So the types of RPG books that you will find out there on the market, in the order that you should start looking for them in arguably. The first type are rule books. The rule books are called different things within different systems. They generally all share the same kind of name, though. They're usually called a core rule book, or a handbook, or a manual. Sometimes you might even see something like a player
as a guide, and so on. You do want to make sure that if you're playing an RPG, you should probably have a copy of the rules. I mean, you don't need it initially. You can certainly fly by on the grace of others for the first couple of games. It's not a problem, people kind of expect it, and we were all there once, right? People didn't generally purchase the rule book first, and then go play the game. That's not the order in which you do it, because you don't want to put out the money first before you even know whether you like it or not. That's fair. Heck, when I
started RPGs, quote-unquote, around started, because I didn't really play the game when I started. I didn't even know what I... We were building characters, and I literally didn't even know why we were doing it. I just thought it was a fun game on how to build, make, believe people. I just thought that was fun. I had no idea what those numbers that I was rolling on the die actually meant, aside from, well, this is what you're... The person that you've just created, that's how they are. Like, he's stronger than he is.
Dexterous. That's just... That's an attribute of your character, of this thing that you'll never do anything with. So, rule book by... No means is an essential thing to get started, but if you're looking... If you've started, and you think, well, now I should go buy the rule so I can figure out what other cool spells my wizard can cast, or something like that, then you'll go and find the rule book for the game. And you'll want to make sure that what you purchase is the rule book. As I say, there are lots of books out there,
and generally speaking, there is one designated core rule book for the game that you're going to play. So Dungeons & Dragons has famously, for the past, I don't know, 40 years or something, or 20 years or whatever it's been, not 40 years.
Famously has the player's handbook, usually abbreviated either PH or PHB, player's handbook. So that is the canonical first purchase that you would want to get if you were playing D&D. Shadowrun has the core rule book, I think it is. Yes, core rule book. Pathfinder has a core rule book. So there are designated first purchases.
Unfortunately, on the front, it doesn't say buy this first, it doesn't have a sticker telling you this is the thing that you should purchase before you purchase anything else.
So that can get a little bit confusing, especially since there are additions to the core rule books. The sets of rules for these games tend to compound on themselves.
So you have things like you'll have the core rule book, but then you'll also have the ultimate campaign at addition, and you can buy that, and now you can do other, you can do more things than you could with just the core rule book, because you have the way that that thing works written down on paper, and you can show it to your GM, or GM when you're playing, and say, hey, I'm going to do this right now, and this is what it says you need to consider upon me doing that.
So you just want to find the base level, the beginning rule book for your game system, and you want to purchase that, and the way that you want to identify that is you want to read the back of the book, and see what it tells you.
It will say this is where this is where to start, if you are going to play this RPG game, that's the one that you want, the one that starts you out on the game.
Now the even easier way, of course, to do this is to go play the game with some friends, and then ask them, so what should I, what should I get to be a more informed player, what should I purchase, and they will, they will show you exactly what you need to get.
So that's the easy way. Now, around the core rule book classification, or the category of books, there are generally speaking other rule books for other types of players, meaning that if you are a player in an RPG,
you are a player, you are controlling a PC, a player character. Now obviously there's another kind of player sitting at the table, and that person is the game master or the dungeon master, and there are books usually, not always, but many times in a big gaming system, there are books specifically geared towards the dungeon master.
So there may be a separate rule book, just for the dungeon master, that the player would not need to purchase, and maybe should not even purchase, because maybe that it reveals a lot of stuff that would be more fun if you didn't know about it yet.
It doesn't break the game, but it is a little bit more fun, for instance, you've never heard of the hand of Affectna, and suddenly it appears in the dungeon that you're playing through, and isn't that more exciting now, because you didn't buy the dungeon master guide, so you don't know that such a thing exists.
So those are the rule books, there's a players guide, or a players handbook, or whatever, and then there's the dungeon master guide, or the dungeon master rule book, or whatever, and those are the ones that you would purchase initially to help you actually play the game.
Now the second category exists very, very closely around the rule books, and they are books of rules, which I know that's just saying rule books in a different way, but that's my point.
There are books out there that are essentially optional sets of additional rules, that you can very modularly decide to add to your game, or not.
This is one of the most beautiful things about RPG in my humble opinion, I love this about RPGs, but you can have your rule book with all the essential things that you can do in the game.
I mean, you can do anything in an RPG, that's the selling point, but these rule books codify certain actions, and they tell you when you take this action out of all the possible things that you can do, if you do this thing, then here's what you and the DM need to figure out in order to determine how successful this action was, or what effect this action has on the world.
Now sometimes that can be a little bit limiting, right? I mean, because it means you could fail that action, but it also can be hugely beneficial because it may have unexpected results, something that seems simple to you, maybe you hack into a computer really quickly, just to get some information on one of your enemies that you've been tracking throughout the game.
It's not a big deal to you, but because it's been codified in a book, it turns out that when you do that, you set off a chain reaction, and the database starts to crumble, and so randomly throughout the game from now on, bits of information about one thing or another are missing when other people go and look to look for them.
Maybe it's information about you that's missing. Maybe you're slowly clearing the database, the enemy database of all knowledge of your existence. Who knows, I'm just making this stuff up, but that's the kind of thing that a rule book can provide, additional constraints, and also additional benefits.
Now if an action isn't contained within the rule book that you purchased, that one initial purchase, then you may find that there are other modular rule books that you can purchase and add to your collection, and then at the table, at the gaming table, when you're playing the game, you can invoke something from a different rule book.
Now obviously this is subject to everyone's agreement. You don't want to spring something on people out of the blue and say, well over the weekend, I purchased this module called Run Faster, and it has all these different hacks in there, and suddenly this hack has a much more important thing than it did in last week's game, because I just happened to go by this book. You wouldn't want to do that.
You would want to make sure that everyone's okay with using this extra rule book in the game, all of a sudden, but usually people are because the game is being designed by a central authority, and so the things contained in your extra rule book are not going to conflict with the things contained in your base rule book, so it's a modular system.
So you can go and buy other rule books for your game. I'm going to include here, and this isn't an exact fit, but part of the process of defining the constraints of the world that you're playing in are defining the things that you might encounter in that world.
And so you have books in Dungeon Dragons, they are the canonical names, the monster manual, but they might be called something different in Pathfinder, it's called the bestiary in Starfinder, it is the alien archive, so it's a book, in other words, of statistics for each alien or monster or extra planer or whatever kind of creature you might encounter in that game world.
That's not something that usually the player would buy, it's something that the dungeon master would buy, it's something that players in a game that meets frequently might want to collaboratively contribute to, and actually purchase it for the dungeon master, so the dungeon master has not to spend the money themselves, or not, it just kind of depends.
But these are books that they're not exactly rules, but they do help build the game world, and they do contain things that rules apply to. Do you absolutely need one of these? No, the dungeon master can create all of it out of their own mind and just kind of drum up some statistics, but if you're playing by the book and you want things to be more or less accurate to a specific baseline, then this is probably something that you would want to purchase.
Similarly, there are books of just equipment, just a book full of gear that your player character can purchase, so you could buy maybe a fancier sword or a stronger shield or a fancier gun, laser blaster, whatever.
Again, the statistics are contained within these books, and these statistics, while you could make them up out of thin air, have been mathematically checked against the core rule book, the player handbook or whatever, the system itself, so that everything is more or less balanced by some measure of the word balance.
So those are more or less rule books, although they're not specifically books of rules, but they are around the effect of the rules.
So those are the two categories, those are the front-loaded categories, the rule books and the books of rules.
Now, at some point you might want to purchase an adventure to play, so you've purchased or you've obtained in some way these books of rules that tell you how to play the game, but as I've discussed previously, as both me and Lost in Bronx have discussed previously, all you have now is the engine.
You need the track, you need the thing that you're going to play now. If we think of it as a board game, you've got the game, you just don't have the board.
So you need something to play through, and those are the next category of books that you may be able to purchase in certain game systems.
Of course, not all game systems are prolific enough to provide this for you, and they may just expect your dungeon master or your game master to generate the adventure.
But if you're playing a pretty big game system that publishes a lot of content, you're going to find a lot of modules, as they used to be called.
Now I think they're just called an adventure. Adventures are published puzzles, essentially. They're scenarios through which the player characters are going to play.
They provide details for the dungeon master, so that the dungeon master knows what to tell the players at the table.
This is what you see. This is what is around you. These are the threats. What do you want to do?
And how to respond when players take some action. So for instance, if a player moves too close to a precipice, maybe a die roll is required to see whether the precipice crumbles beneath their feet, causing them to possibly fall to their doom, or whether everything's okay.
Obviously a module or an adventure cannot cover all possible scenarios. There's just no way for a writer to predict that a player is going to grab onto a torch and pull it down and then left to see if it's actually a hidden trap door trigger.
There's no way to anticipate all the possible random things a player can do, but the adventures provide as much of a framework as is required to get players through some scenario with a hook, a reason to play through the scenario, and the conclusion, the results of a bunch of successful actions.
Everything else between all of that is largely the purview of the game master to invent responses for all the wacky things the players do.
This kind of leads me in an interesting way to the next category, which are source books or settings for RPGs. Again, not every game system is going to have this.
It very much requires that a game system is popular and sells enough material to justify yet more material to be written and sold.
But the cool thing about source books or settings for an RPG is that it turns a non-rules based introspective eye towards the place where you are playing the game.
So if we take that very, very simply, we could just say, well, is it a fantasy world or is it a sci-fi world? Where's it a post-apocalyptic world? There's a setting question for you.
And yes, a game has a set of rules that it has given you, and a lot of times those rules make sense no matter what you're setting.
Now there are some specific things, right? I mean, like if you're playing in the modern day and age where there is no presumption of magic existing, then it doesn't make sense to have a bunch of magic rules in your set of rules.
It just doesn't translate. And in fact, you might find that you are missing quite a lot of rules based around computers and automobiles, for instance.
So it doesn't always, it's not always completely general and independent of its setting.
But a lot of times there is enough flexibility there that you could say, well, it's a fantasy world here, but you could also use it as a sci-fi game if you took all magic to be mental powers,
strange sci-fi, psionic, mental powers, and just kind of looked at it that way, or maybe your magic is spiritual based.
Maybe it's based on a force, a great force that binds and moves through all living creatures. Who knows? It's up to you.
And that's what the setting books provide you, is some kind of look at the presumptions that are safe to make while playing through a specific adventure.
Now that might seem kind of arbitrary and kind of fluffy. It doesn't really make that big of a difference on a game, right? Because I mean, who cares?
You've told me that I'm moving through a dungeon, looking for forgotten treasure, and that there might be a dragon lurking at the end of the tunnel. That's all we need to know, really, right?
Well, not necessarily. There are a lot of assumptions that we make when we're playing games, and they're usually based off of either the real world, the way that our actual physical world works, or based on whatever it is in our own private headspace that represents fantasy or sci-fi or whatever kind of game we're playing. Let's go with fantasy for right now.
So if we are really big fans of Lord of the Rings, then we have certain assumptions that we can make based on Lord of the Rings, and it's going to be fairly low magic, and it's going to have a very strong emphasis on race, because halflings will work one way, and elves will work a very specific way, and humans will be a very specific way.
And a dragon, dragons are going to be very rare, and so on. But if our favorite fantasy is a world of warcraft, then we'll have a completely different view of a fantasy world, right? It will be heavy, heavy magic.
Race, maybe, won't even play much of a role at all in abilities, and what we would be expected to do, and so on. So the setting actually does inform the assumptions that players and dungeon masters make while playing through an adventure, and it can be a lot of fun to agree on what setting is being played in, and then go research that setting. Learn more about that setting.
Find out why certain things might be true, and you'll find that you may go to a dungeon, and you'll go exploring in this area, and maybe you'll find a specific or symbol somewhere that previously would have just been wallpaper to you.
But now you know that there's a very important god in this fantasy setting, whose symbol that is, and if you go to that symbol and maybe touch it, then maybe you'll be healed, because that god is a god of healing, and so this is a very positive sign for you as a player.
Or vice versa, you might know that that symbol is the symbol of a very evil god, and that if you go near it, and start messing around in that area, and looking for treasure, you may be cursed, or trapped, or whatever.
So the settings guides are not at all essential, but they can add a new dimension to your game, and for that reason there are a lot of fun.
Now they can also change the game entirely. These rules tend to be fairly flexible, so the settings book can completely change the space where you're playing out these rules.
It might take you from a generic fantasy world, to a very specific fantasy world, with specific rules on how this kind of magic works, or that this other kind of magic doesn't work at all, or it might have specific new races that don't exist in the other place, so players can play different types of characters, or maybe it takes you into a world where magic has been used and abused so greatly that there's been a magic apocalypse.
And now there's a wasteland through which everyone wanders aimlessly. And then last but not least, and somewhat related to the previous category, there's the category of just the extra stuff, the extra matter that you don't use necessarily directly in gameplay.
And this tends to be pretty specific to a couple of different game systems that have a solid machine behind them producing things, and are quite popular, but you will see this stuff, and it's frankly quite enjoyable if you're into it.
So you've got novels, you've got comic books, you've got movies, you've got lots of different things that get introduced around a game system for people to consume.
So for Dungeons and Dragons, for instance, a lot of people's actual first exposure to Dungeons and Dragons have been through novels about Dungeons and Dragons.
I mean, a set in the Dungeons and Dragons world, so the forgotten realms, for instance, or Dragon Lance Chronicles, these are books that were set in Dungeons and Dragons lands, but have nothing to do with sitting down and playing the game.
And certainly anyone in the world could just sit down with one of these books and read it from cover to cover and never played D&D ever, and it would be perfectly, perfectly enjoyable.
Same goes for Shadow Run. Shadow Run is a vast library of novels and video games behind it that people can enjoy without ever, I mean obviously the video game would be playing Shadow Run after a fashion, but certainly you could enjoy this whether you enjoy pen and paper RPG or not.
They are simply, they're just media around that game system. Warhammer is another one. They've got lots of content for Warhammer.
A lot of this stuff, it establishes a canonical lore to the game world, and that's nice because then you may know, certainly if there's shared, there's shared knowledge at the table, then when someone mentions a specific character from a book,
then the importance of that character or the vialness of that character, maybe that's significant and that can influence the game in subtle ways.
It won't influence the rules necessarily, but there's just a shared lore there that's fun to tap into.
I was traveling for work once and decided to stop in at a local game store to join in on a Thursday night game, just for fun because I could, I had the evening available.
And so we were playing through out of the abyss, a campaign for dungeons and dragons, and we found ourselves in the big auditorium adjacent to a underground lake, big underground lake.
And from this lake, there arose a 350 foot tall demon called Dimagorgon. He was moving rapidly towards us, and he struck two of our players with fear such that they couldn't even move.
They were just completely stunned for three or four rounds, and we all ran and dragged our companions out of the room in utter terror because we were way underpowered to face such a malevolent creature.
But afterwards, after the game, I remember feeling such an affinity for this group of strangers who I'd never met before, and such a sense of pride that we had survived and encounter with the Prince of demons.
And I don't think that the same sense of accomplishment would have existed if it had just been a generic monster that I'd never heard of before.
But because I had read about Dimagorgon before, because I knew where he fit into the rankings or lack thereof of the abyss, it was significant that I had encountered him, and it truly did influence the rest of my week.
I went through the rest of that week feeling different about myself. So these books, the extra media that you might encounter from a game system, they can be significant additions to the gaming experience, even if they don't play directly into it.
But of course, that cuts both ways. So you wouldn't want to go by a novel about Shadow Run instead of the rule book in order to start playing the game. That would be a mistake. You would be disappointed in one if you admit to get the other.
So it's important to identify what it is that you're holding in your hand while you're standing at the bookstore, trying to figure out, well, is this something that I should purchase in order to start playing this game or to add to my gaming experience?
Maybe it is. Maybe it's got a bunch of lore that you're interested in learning about, or maybe it's just a story in the universe because you can't spend enough time in the universe because you're really, really enjoying it.
Or maybe it's a rule book, or maybe it's an additional book of rules, or maybe it's an adventure module, determine which one it is, and then make an informed purchase based on what you're looking for.
And because this episode has concentrated so heavily on what types of books are out there that you can purchase, I want to also encourage you not to feel that you need to purchase anything at all, because while it is a lot of fun to explore the universe of games that have been created by gaming companies and created quite well,
it's important to realize that RPGs are by nature and very intentionally. It is part of their design that the players and dungeon masters out there in the real world are empowered to create their own game world.
There are books that you can purchase to help you build stuff for your world such that you don't have to purchase other books, or you cannot purchase anything at all and just build your own everything.
I've got friends who have done exactly that. I play in a game that the dungeon master did by the Game Masterbot set up books a long, long time ago for the rules, but the world itself largely is of his own design.
So there is plenty of room in a game not to purchase anything extra at all, and depending on your level of consumer cynicism and your level of tolerance for consumption, the game systems out there can feel a little bit like an endless run for the money.
But at the same time, certainly I think there's an argument to be made that maybe you're not consuming movies or music or other things that other people consume TV, I guess, would be in there as well.
And your entertainment budget possibly goes towards these game materials. So it's really a question of just of where you want to direct things.
But if you don't have the funds for any of those things, then RPG is one of the best things to get into because all it requires is either the purchase of a rulebook or the acquisition of a free rulebook online because there are several of those out there that are just creative commons or public domain, set of rules, and this is how you play now build your world and play in it.
And that's perfectly acceptable. It requires no categorization of a bunch of different types of media within a big marketing campaign, and it empowers you to be creative and to build your own resources.
And that's really, really exciting. And it's kind of what Lost in Bronx has been doing with his Star Drifter series, or at least that's my interpretation of what he's been doing.
I don't know if he knows he's doing that yet, but in my mind, he's writing these creative commons sci-fi books with such detail.
And if you haven't heard his voice from the Void podcast, you should check that out. It's available at his Patreon page.
And look, I've just advertised Lost in Bronx. But seriously, you can go there. You can give him some money, I think, for his Patreon.
Or I think you can even subscribe without doing that and get this voice from the Void podcast, which breaks down the world in which he has set his novels to such fine green detail that, well, it's like he's writing a source book, really.
I mean, he is writing a sci-fi setting ripe for exploitation as an RPG location.
So it's exciting stuff. It is creative stuff. It can be something that you buy into, or it can be something that you produce yourself.
Or heck, you can do both. They're not mutually exclusive.
So hopefully this categorization of all the different types of materials that you're likely to find helps.
Hopefully it helps you when you're trying to make a purchase decision, but also when you're trying to organize your own thoughts when creating your own game world.
What kind of material am I writing right now? How is this going to be used? Well, those are your categories, my friend.
You've got rule books. You've got books of rules. You've got modules or adventures. You've got settings or source books.
And then you've got the extra stuff like novels and books of lore and comic books and soundtracks and video games and so on.
So thank you very much for listening. Hopefully this has been informative and inspiring and helpful. I will talk to you next time.
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