I'm Tyler, a GM for the last 10+ years and the mind behind the Table-top Roleplaying Game (TTRPG) Book Club at Atomic Empire in Durham, NC!

I got my start playing TTRPGs with a hack of Savage Worlds combining Deadlands with the generic Sci-fi source book to replicate Firefly, and that sort of experimentation and fiddliness would stick with me throughout my ttrpg career!

From there, I went in pretty much the exact opposite order one might expect, and played Pathfinder, followed closely by the playtest for 5e D&D. I stuck with 5e for most of my highschool career, though my gaming group often ventured out into the wild unknowns of the Fantasy Flight Star Wars RPG, Numenera, or any other slew of even more obscure indies that we fell in love with.

I attribute all of that experimentation to the wonderful community at my game store at the time, the Wyvern's Tale in Asheville. The community was extraordinarily welcoming, open to playing new games, and excited to hear about whatever funky new game I had been getting into at the time.

It wasn't until I moved to Durham that I found that that experience not only wasn't universal, it was very much outside of the norm. Every LGS I went to had a steady crowd for Adventurer's League, but almost no indie rpg scene outside of the occasional forum post in their discord asking if anyone was running a given game.

When I finally started working at my LGS, I made it my personal mission to change all of that. I started actively researching new games to recommend to people. As soon as I saw a book hit our shelves, I was looking at the publsiher's website and drivethrurpg to find out as much as I could to try and get this new game into someone else's hands. To that end, I suggested many iterations of what would become the TTRPG Book Club, but community interest was comparatively low, with the dominance of 5e.

Thankfully, Wizards of the Coast angered quite a lot of people in January of 2023, and I finally saw my opportunity. It took a couple of months to build interest, but gradually, I had a big enough player-base to take to the higher-ups to get them to sign off on a regular event! The idea was simple: Every month, we would have two sessions of a game, one being a session 0 and discussion of what interested us from the system or the setting, and a second to actually sit down and play a one-shot of that month's game.

I daresay that the book club was a success, given that we're a year and a half into it, and interest is only growing!

With that said, I thought it would be prudent to record my experiences of running games for the book club for posterity's sake, so that other people could hear about the amazing adventures my player's and I have been on, as well as the misadventures best left on the shelf.