The site has been having issues since I posted it, so I’m reposting it here from my RSS reader.
Libraries in fantasy literature and media are always magical and mysterious. In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, Unseen University’s library books have to be chained down for the safety of the students. In Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, the library in the Dreaming contains every book ever dreamt. In David Tennant’s Doctor Who run, the Doctor and Donna visit a freaky space library where people’s bodies are stripped to bone and others disappear, supposedly saved by the library itself. Libraries are weird and scary and cool, librarians have magic powers, and visitors never leave unchanged.
The Librarian’s Apprentice Almost Bedtime Theater 2023
Sidequest was provided with a copy of The Librarian’s Apprentice in exchange for a fair and honest review.
Prior to playing The Librarian’s Apprentice, my day-to-day work experience had sucked the magic out of libraries for me. The first time I volunteered in a library I helped with a teddy bear story time, where we donned pajamas and read books to children on the theme of teddy bears and bedtime. Before they left, each kid gave us a stuffed animal, and after the library closed we staged silly photos of the animals having a sleepover. They snuck into the workroom fridge for a late night snack, got up to shenanigans in the stacks, and I, a normal civilian, got to be in the library after closing. It’s super dorky, but I remember how cool that felt! Now I know my workplace intimately, I have good and bad memories there, and I curate the material that it contains. There is no thrill, just public service.
The mockup of the print version of The Librarian’s Apprentice, showing the covers of volumes 1 and 2 and character sheets.
Playing The Librarian’s Apprentice allowed me to reexperience the magic and mystery of libraries. It’s a solo journaling game, which isn’t usually my bag—I’d only played Remember August before this—but the premise was just too good. Rather than describe it myself, I want to share the beautiful description that pulled me right in:
Infinite, ever-shifting, and sometimes dangerous, the Great Library exists in the space between worlds and times. Among the many who call it home are the Librarians, and only those who truly understand it may join their ranks. You seek to do so.
The path of a Librarian’s apprentice is a long one. Your current task is designed to test your skills at traversing the Library and finding information. Retrieve the six documents requested by your Librarian before the day is out and you will have completed one more step on your journey.
The lure of the infinite, ever-shifting, and dangerous library was stronger than I realized, because when I finally sat down and played The Librarian’s Apprentice I was much more interested in the setting than in my character. The mechanics also play a role in the draw of setting over character, so let’s take a moment to break them down.
As with most roleplaying games, the first step is to create your character by filling out a character sheet. In The Librarian’s Apprentice, this is quick and simple: you name your character, assign a +2, +1, and +0 to each of your three skills—Navigation, Research, and Lore—and answer three questions to create three truths that fill out some of their history and personality. Your character also gets a familiar who can take one point of fatigue and has a +1 to one of the aforementioned skills, which you can use until they get that point of fatigue.
I do want to take a moment to compliment the “truths” that you create, because they’re pretty intriguing! They cover your character’s background and the community where you live, and allow you to immediately create some lore for your library. This third truth in particular is really brilliant, because it gets the player thinking immediately about how they can create and influence the world of The Librarian’s Apprentice. This was, for me, really a game about world building and leaning into the fun of imaging a complex, wild, and magical world. By layering an aspect of that process into character creation, the game’s creators get players swiftly into that mindset.