SPINE - Siderius Plug's Immortality in Ninety-nine Endnotes

You're a researcher who has inherited a book from an estranged relative. The book is odd. It’s modern and appears inexpensive. Yet it must have been one of your relative’s most prized possessions, locked behind a thick glass case among her rare books. What’s inside the book is equally strange, a collection of excerpts about eternal life and the magicians who sought it. These excerpts include texts of diverse genres — an essay, biography, diary, and collection of poetry — all by different authors and sewn together at the spine by some obscure scholar.

This book is titled Siderius Plug’s Immortality in Ninety-nine Endnotes. SPINE for short. You feel compelled to read it.

What is this game?

In SPINE, you physically embody a researcher who is reading and annotating this book, uncovering its backstory and dredging up old memories through Siderius Plug’s endnotes. But you soon discover a catch. You are enthralled by the book, and the clock ticks down as you realize you are becoming completely absorbed by it. The only way to lessen its power is by defacing the text.

What do you need to play?

The book. A pencil. Your curiosity. A spine…

SPINE is meant to be played with a physical copy.

SPINE is easy to learn. It has only one page of rules. The book takes care of the rest.

Why this game?

In SPINE, you physically embody your character as you uncover their memories, decode the book’s secrets, and manipulate the physical prop that is the book. That is what is so unique about this book: The book is the game, and the game is the book. The book is your anchor to the fictional world. The book is a prop too. And it’s also a keepsake, something that you annotate and draw in as the game progresses.

At the same time, this game seeks to emulate the experience of books like Nabokov’s Pale Fire, books that make you work and play in such a way that blur the lines between fiction and reality, books that force you to work and play with language.

In SPINE, Asa Donald sets out to make a tabletop RPG that insists on language as the backbone of TTRPGs. He set out to make a tabletop RPG that foregrounds the textual nature of the genre, that codifies reading as play, and whose text insists upon itself in a very material way.