how does our library go?

You are a library. You travel and grow in interaction and service.

There are several games about unusual libraries. This one is designed according to the "Five Laws of Library Science" promoted by S.R. Ranganathan. In his radical vision, a library is the nexus of documents, users, and caretakers, a dynamic, dialogically-constituted experience. In this game, then, you play as the collection of documents as well as the people maintaining and using it.

Ranganathan's fifth law maintains that a library is a growing organism. You are in motion and always growing. You will travel to remote communities and seek to satisfy both readers and documents.

Inspirations

• WPA Kentucky Pack-Horse Librarians
• Paturi Nagabhushanam's boat libraries in Andhra Pradesh
• El Biblioburro, Luis Soriano, founder (Colombia)
• Cinetrains (USSR)
• Street Books (Portland, OR)
• The Free Black Women's Library, Ola Ronke Akinmowo, founder (Brooklyn, NY)
• La Bicicloteca, Robson Mendonça, founder (São Paulo)

How to Play

Play solo or among a few friends; there is no referee or DM. Keep a journal of your play or talk it out as a collaborative story. It can be mostly narrative or an elaborated story with procedurally-generated prompts. Play the two parts in any order. You can draw a map if you want.

You will need: 

• 1 coin
• 1-3 six-sided dice (D6)
• a book you love
• 1 D20 (optional)
• pen & paper (optional)

Credits

Made for the 2025 One-Page RPG Jam, the theme of which is "growth". All human-made, fuck AI. Images from Wikimedia Commons. CC-BY-SA 4.0 2025.