The latest issue of the FKR community zine, Neverending Drachenschwanz #2: Every Book is a Sourcebook just dropped! Inside you'll find roleplaying games based on Snow Crash and The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagaon, adapting Mouse Guard and Numenera to more of a rules-light style, and more! Free as in Kriegsspiel, free as in beer.
Yours truly has an article, "Three Book Campaign Creation," giving some random tables for the following book-based methodology, which is probably ultimately better with your own bookshelf than my examples:
- One book of general or social history, giving an overview of the life and dynamics of some time and place.Scratch the serial numbers off and you've got most of a setting.
- One nonfiction book about magic and shit, either describing an elaborate belief system or some spooky stuff we can't explain. Inject that into the setting, changing each as necessary so they feel seamless.
- One book about some kind of effort to do something, giving you the basic set of plot hooks. Heists gone wrong, voyages gone wrong, and wars gone wrong (all of them) are always right.
When I specify nonfiction, don't imagine that accuracy is all that important. Crankery is wonderful, especially but not exclusively in section #2. The point of going to nonfiction is to avoid creating a genre work based on a genre work based on a genre work, which I consider to be a weakness to which I am quite vulnerable. Of course, you can Rule 0 this stricture just like you'd Rule 0 anything else!
The Special Achievement Mode of this, of course, is to ask each of your players to give you a book in each of these categories, doubling up as necessary, and then you run that campaign in a month.
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