A Year at the Bookshop

You keep a small secondhand bookshop, and the town comes through the door with boxes to sell, presents to find and an hour to spend among the shelves without buying anything. You write down what happened. That is the whole game — one die, one pen, and about twenty minutes an evening.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

🌙 WHAT THIS IS

A solo RPG journal — a solo journaling game about one year behind the counter of a secondhand bookshop.

You are not a hero and there is nothing to defeat. You have four rooms of books, a ladder that sticks, a stove, and a cellar full of boxes nobody has sorted, and the year brings you house clearances, holiday visitors, schoolbooks and the Christmas rush. Most people want a book. Some of them want to sell you one. A few only want to stand in the warm and not be asked.

You play one evening at a time:

🎲 Roll for who comes in.

🎲 Roll for what they want.

✒️ Write three or four lines: what you found for them, what it cost, and what you did not say.

If the two rolls do not fit together — the man who says he is a writer, whose one book has not moved off your shelf in four years, asking for something set in this town, when there is only one and nobody local likes it — that tension IS the evening. You do not reroll. You write your way through it.

⚖️ You never roll to find out whether you succeed.

The die says what happens. You say what you did about it. There is no failure in this game, only what it cost.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

📦 WHAT YOU GET

▪ 162 written entries across 25 tables — every one of them rolled on a single d6

▪ 4 seasons, with 72 entries that belong to the seasons alone, and not one repeated

▪ 12 writing prompts, three per season, for evenings when you would rather write than roll

▪ 3 ending tables — which one you roll on depends on how you kept the shop

▪ One day worked through from the first roll to the written entry, so the first evening does not start with a decision

▪ 8 journal sheets, because in a game you play by writing, the writing space is the product

▪ 20 pages · 4 PDFs

Nothing here is a stub. Every table is written out in full.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

🗝️ HOW THE YEAR STARTS

Six rolls and a name, and the bookshop is yours.

Three for you — why the bookshop is yours, what you are good at, and what you do not say.

Three for the place — the shop itself, what the stock is, and what needs doing before winter.

Then you give it a name, and choose one book for the window. The book will tell the town more about you than the name does.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

🍂 FOUR SEASONS, AND THE TOWN COMES IN FOR DIFFERENT BOOKS IN EACH

🌱 SPRING — House clearances

The spring cleaning starts, and every attic in the district sends its boxes to you, wanting to know what they are worth before the cart comes back.

☀️ SUMMER — Visitors in the doorway

The town fills with people on holiday, who browse for an hour, buy one small book, and tell you on the way out that they could spend all day in here.

🍁 AUTUMN — The readers come back

The visitors go, the school goes back, the evenings draw in, and the people who actually read start coming in again with their coats on.

❄️ WINTER — Books for presents

Everybody wants a present, nobody knows what to give, and for six weeks the shop takes more money than in all the rest of the year together.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

⚖️ THREE THINGS YOU ARE KEEPING

📦 Stock 🔥 Coal 🤝 Goodwill

Anything that leaves the shelves takes a Stock. Anything that keeps somebody in by the stove takes a Coal. Anything kind gives a Goodwill. A day moves one of them, never more, and together they are the reason the year has a shape instead of being a pile of evenings.

Whichever one is highest when the year ends decides which ending you roll on.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

📖 A FEW LINES FROM INSIDE

"A woman looking for a book she read as a girl. She cannot remember the title, only that there was a horse."

"To swap two books for one, and they have brought the two worst books you have ever seen."

"Somebody reads an entire novel in the armchair over four afternoons, says thank you, and leaves without it."

"A boy who wants to sell his bicycle to buy a set of encyclopaedias, and has brought the bicycle."

"The shop cat sleeps in the window across three books, and you put a card beside her: not for sale."

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

✨ THIS IS FOR YOU IF

▪ You love secondhand bookshops, the smell of old paper and finding the book you did not know you were looking for

▪ You want a cozy game that still has structure and consequences

▪ This would be your first solo RPG and you want one that explains itself

▪ You keep a reading journal, or always meant to, and want prompts that build on each other

▪ You want twenty quiet minutes in the evening that are not a screen

▪ You are tired of combat and stat blocks

▪ You own one six-sided die and nothing else, and would like that to be enough

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

🎒 WHAT YOU NEED

▪ This book

▪ A pen

▪ One six-sided die

▪ Somewhere quiet

That is the list. No deck of cards, no second die, no app, and no account.

It is made for one player. If you want somebody else in it, take a season each: read the other person's entries before you start yours, and do not discuss them. The shop carries over, so you inherit whatever they did to the shelves.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

🚫 WHAT IS NOT IN IT

No combat. No monsters. No magic. No stat blocks and no character sheet.

Nothing here is fought. If somebody comes in for a book you do not have, you do not have it, and you write that down.

It is four rooms of books, a stove, and four seasons of people who come in to look.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

📚 THE A YEAR AT… SERIES

This is the ninth book. A Year at the Wayside (an inn on a quiet road), A Year at the Lending Library (a small town library), A Year at the Ferry (a rope ferry on a river), A Year on the Salt Road (a salt cart on a long road), A Year at the Apothecary (a country apothecary), A Year at the Witch's Cottage (a cottage at the edge of the wood), A Year at the Café (a café on a town square) and A Year in the Walled Garden (an old walled kitchen garden) use the same rules with a different place, different people and different things running out. Each book stands on its own.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

📄 THE FILES

Two zip files, one for each paper size, so you only download the one you print on:

▪ A4 — colour and ink-saver

▪ US Letter — colour and ink-saver

The ink-saver build drops the tint and the cover painting and keeps every word. Same book, same 20 pages, cheaper to run — and the journal sheets are the ones you will reprint.

⬇️ Instant digital download. Nothing is posted to you.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

🕯️ ONE GOOD EVENING

Games for a table, and for a chair by the fire.