Every Dungeon Master should use this indie TTRPG to sharpen their skills

This gives you an idea of how wild the game can get, but the best is still to come. Once a player has finished writing their list of spells, the books are swapped. Players now only know the names of the spells they can cast — not their effects, until they decide to cast them. The result is unadulterated chaos. Considering that spells are the main way in which the characters can interact with the world, this unpredictable mechanic sits at the core of Thieves of the Tome, making each session memorable.

Image: Tom Lowell/First Pancake Studios

Each book is also used to create characters by providing words or sentences picked from random pages. “Adjectives” function as the game’s stats, granting a situational bonus to rolls used to resolve uncertain outcomes. “Destinies” are goals and outcomes each thief has to pursue during a session, granting a bonus once a specific condition has been fulfilled. Finally, “dooms” act like hit points: every time a thief fails a “reaction” (usually triggered by an enemy attack or another harmful situation), they activate one doom, a negative descriptor that applies from that moment onward. Once four dooms are activated, that thief is removed from the game due to dying, going mad, or worse!

The players are not the only ones who get to play with their favorite books. The GM also has to pick one that will be used as the setting of the adventure, determining the Tomeality (one of the near-endless worlds created by Na’zar) where the story takes place. Every Thieves of the Tome game has the same goal: the thieves must escape with their precious magical books, avoiding pursuit by the antagonists, usually members of the White Guard, an order of wizards who hoard magic and knowledge. After choosing a Tomeality, the GM sets the escape condition, which usually involves reaching a specific location with two or more stealable items. Those are determined by using words from the last pages of the GM’s chosen book.

The GM preps for the session by filling out a “palette,” or a list of locations (places in the world where scenes can take place), obstacles (things that stand between the thieves and their goals), and actions (things that people inhabiting the world can do) — of course, these are all determined by picking words or sentences from the GM’s book. By consulting the palette, the GM can respond to the actions and decisions of the players on the fly, thus creating a true collaborative storytelling experience. The same can be said about the action/reaction dynamic (essentially the only hard rule in the game where dice rolling comes into play). If a player succeeds in an action, they gain “narrative control” of that scene and are allowed to describe it as they see fit. If they fail, the GM will introduce a complication and gain narrative control over the scene.

This method might not surprise experienced GMs who rely on improvisation more than preparation. However, it’s significant how Thieves of the Tome makes it a core part of its game structure by standardizing the prep process and encouraging GMs to rely on a “fixed” source of inspiration, their chosen book. In my experience, this process can be a bit challenging, so I would encourage GMs trying this game for the first time to add some prep to the palette process.

Image: Paul Kidby/Modiphius Entertainment

I picked up Terry Pratchett’s The Light Fantastic as my Tomeality — what’s better than the Discworld as the setting for a chaotic romp with magic going wild? The adventure was fun and the players loved it. One player brought a book about black holes to the table, with predictably catastrophic consequences. The poor Librarian was disintegrated, and the adventure ended with a spell that unleashed a swarm of miniature black holes in the Unseen University bar, which is full of poor students and academics. It genuinely felt like the ending of a lost Terry Pratchett book. However, there were a couple of instances where I wished I had prepped more detailed scenarios for the adventure.

Still, this is Thieves of the Tome’s best quality: it forces GMs to be creative by delegating most aspects of prepping to an external source (the Tomeality book). Improvisation is one of the hardest skills to acquire for GMs, and there’s nothing wrong with relying on extensive preparation instead. However, in TTRPGs, reactive skills are often needed to ensure the smooth flow of a session or to make players feel more actively involved in the story.

Thieves of the Tome can help you train those creative muscles, and it succeeds because it transforms improvisation from a soft GM skill into the foundation of the entire game. The “number one rule to GMing” this game is: “When in doubt, read a sentence from your Tome.” It’s messy, unpredictable, and occasionally taxing, but any game that forces you to look for inspiration and turn that into something creative is a worthy addition to a GM’s library.