Reviewing every rpg book on my shelf: 4, The Stygian Library
It occurs to me that I should be including links to these things... so here you go or here if you like pdfs.
The Stygian Library by Emily Allen is a depth crawl (a term originating with her previous iteration of the concept The Gardens of Ynn) where you delve into a spooky extradimensional library that generates as you explore it.
As the party explores the library you roll on tables of location, detail, and event, with the rolls modified by the depth you are at so things will tend to get weirder and more dangerous the further you get (and you will uncover more about the 'lore' of the library).
The first thing that Library excells at is atmosphere. The whole thing evokes a great blending of creepy and whimsical (aided by Alec Sorenson's evocative illustations). Somthing that helps this that many of the situations generated will not require combat (at least until the party does enough to piss off the denizens of the library to move from rolling on the 'encounters for visitors' table to the far less friendly 'encounters for intruders').
So long as you don't make a nuisance of yourselves it's possible to spend most of your time in the library fiddling with interesting stuff and chatting with amicable (if creepy) academics.
The book advises that you do not need to roll on tables to generate the library ahead of time. It's true that you don't need to but I would suggest that you probably should, unless your players have a fair bit of patience. Rolling all the tables and then looking up the details and stats blocks can take some time and a decent bit of cognative load. On generating my first room I ended up needing to roll a lot of times as I hit the jackpot on 'results that direct you to roll on different tables', which did put some of my more storygamer players backs up a bit.
I ended up calling a 5 min break and quickly prerolling enough rooms to get a good buffer going and I would suggest that as a good plan for anyone else running it. I also found it beneficial to have an idea what was going to be coming next as it gave me the option of linking the events in different rooms together. for instance I had rolled an encounter with some librarians that turned up badly injured and, as I knew what monster I had rolled in the next room, I was able to link those together and set up the next encounter.
Its a great book, but be prepared to flip back and forwards through it a lot (or be more sensible than me and print out some of the things you will need to keep referencing)
