A Year at the Lending Library

You keep a small lending library in a quiet town. People come in, and you write down what happened. That is the whole game — one die, one pen, and about twenty minutes an evening.

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🌙 WHAT THIS IS

A solo RPG journal — a solo journaling game about one year behind a library desk.

You are not a hero and there is nothing to defeat. You look after a room full of books and the town that borrows them. Some people know exactly what they have come in for. Most of them have come in for something else.

You play one evening at a time:

🎲 Roll for who comes in.

🎲 Roll for what they want.

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

If the two rolls do not fit together — somebody who only wants to sit in the warm, on the evening the lamp oil ran out — 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.

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📦 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 library

▪ 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.

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🗝️ HOW THE YEAR STARTS

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

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

Three for the place — the building, what the collection is, and what needs doing before winter.

Then you give it a name. The name over the door and the name the town uses are rarely the same, and you should know both.

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🍂 FOUR SEASONS, AND THE LIBRARY IS A DIFFERENT PLACE IN EACH

🌱 SPRING — The windows open

The damp lifts, the committee meets for the first time in months, and everything found during the spring cleaning is brought back at once.

☀️ SUMMER — Nobody reads in summer

The long evenings empty the reading room and fill the town with visitors, and the ones who do come in are the ones with nowhere else to be.

🍁 AUTUMN — The stock-take

Once a year every book is counted against the ledger, and whatever does not match is yours to explain to the committee.

❄️ WINTER — The reading room fills

The cold brings people in for the warmth and the light as much as the books, and lamp oil becomes the only number that matters.

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⚖️ THREE THINGS YOU ARE KEEPING

📚 Shelves 🪔 Lamp Oil 🤝 Goodwill

Anything you lend takes a Shelves. An evening kept open after dark takes a Lamp Oil. 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.

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📖 A FEW LINES FROM INSIDE

"Somebody returning a book forty-one years overdue. It was their father's. They have brought the fine, in old coins."

"A girl of sixteen who asks for something specific, quietly, and does not want it written in the ledger."

"You find a letter tucked inside a returned book. It was never sent, and it is not addressed to the borrower."

"Only to be warm, and to hold a book as the reason for it."

"You take down the book you would lend to yourself, and you lend it."

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✨ THIS IS FOR YOU IF

▪ You love books, and would like to spend a year looking after some

▪ 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 journal and want prompts that build on each other instead of starting over

▪ 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

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🎒 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 library carries over, so you inherit whatever they did to the shelves.

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🚫 WHAT IS NOT IN IT

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

Nothing here is fought. If something arrives that you cannot solve, you cannot solve it, and you write that down.

It is a library, a small town, and four seasons of people who want something from you. Some of them even bring the books back.

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📚 THE A YEAR AT… SERIES

This is the second book. A Year at the Wayside (an inn on a quiet road), A Year at the Ferry (a rope ferry on a wide river) and A Year on the Salt Road (a salt cart on a long road) use the same rules with a different place, different people and different things running out. Each book stands on its own, and all four are also sold together as one bundle.

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📄 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.

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🕯️ ONE GOOD EVENING

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