The Culture: You Will Never Run A Book Club This Cool

It is good that some of the folks out there are pushing hobbyists to engage with the foundational literature of the hobby.

The #BROSR's big hype man BDubs got a few of his pals together to turn what could have been the lamest of things--a book club--and made it into a competitive event by turning it into a tournament of competitive book reviews and essays. That event? #BROXT.

Due to my distrust of my crooked co-bookers @SaintsOfOHS and ESPECIALLY @DunderMoose I am removing the #BroXT booking committee from judging the Jeffro Crown Tournament! We’re also putting @JohnsonJeffro in a cage to prevent interference on behalf of Dm Rump again! #dnd https://t.co/xktpHMcRhq pic.twitter.com/fb15sskhWm

— BROXT Dubs (@Bdubs1776) January 30, 2025

Yes, all this for a book club.

It was simple enough: two men take a up a reading assignment, then write an essay about it in a public-facing outlet (e.g. Substack) with regard to playing the game. Best writer advances.

But no, BDubs doesn't do simple. There's Twitter threads, there's wresting angles, there's melodrama, there's sound and fury and sincere absurdity that only a Bro event can provide.

Hit up that hashtag. Read back through the threads and posts and the number of times someone came out of nowhere with the steel chair. Pure hype, pure amusement, pure excitement, and more than a few marks got rooked into helping BDubs promote the event thinking that they'd ankle-bite and instead broke some teeth on a piece of iron instead.

As I write this it's reached its climax and will soon descend into its denoument, but already there's hint of another stunt--another event--seeing if anyone will bite.

How brilliant is this? Enough that if I needed a light to torch vampires with, it would count as real sunlight from a clear sky at noon.

BDubs and the Bros clearing out the Soup Aisle (Dramatized)

You're not going to be able to pull this off for your book club. You can come up with something good enough.

The idea here is simple: hand each player in the book club the role of a Sage. Each round of competitive essays is two Sages disputing some issue of academic import, import that has impact on the campaign, with the winning player getting their Sage's opinion to become the consensus opinion (and if you've been in academia, you know that "consensus" and "correct" are not the same thing).

You can even do this in real time, representing Sages traveling to some location to dispute the matter before an audience of their peers (as real world medieval academics did), which may also prompt the intervention of other parties (i.e. hiring an Assassin to murk one or both with a literal poisoned pen, the Master of Winter takes offense at the topic and attempts to kill everyone there, World War Wish: The Sequel erupts as a direct consequence, everyone is turned into Muppets, etc.).

Hell of a way to run a book club, ain't it? Not as cool as #BROXT, but still pretty cool and it allows people not ordinarily playing in the campaign an avenue to do so.

"But what happens if my Sage gets murked?" You get another one. Sages are free; you can just roll them up. I have 435 Sages at home (they are very, very smol).

Sounds far more fun than "This week we're reading The Time My Incompetent Girlboss Ass Coundn't Decide Between The Rapist Prince Or The Princely Rapist At Dragon Riding School, doesn't it?"