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Tab Your Books

by Mike on 6 October 2025

Add little re-usable adhesive tabs to your player's guides, gamemaster guides, and other RPG books you use at your table. Add some extra tabs to your monster books so you can tab the monsters you're using in your next game.

Next to writing page numbers down in your prep notes and character sheets – using adhesive tabs in your books makes them far more usable at your table whether you're a GM or a player. Adding tabs to your books takes a little work – maybe ten or fifteen minutes per book – but adds tremendous value. Like the best lazy GM tricks, tabbing your books offers many advantages:

You learn what your book has
You think about what parts of the book give you the most value at the table
You speed up referencing material in your books during play and can reference more stuff
You understand what one book has over another
You have fun spending time with physical books

Even if you play online, it's often faster to open a tabbed book on your desk and find something than it is to search through several PDFs.

How to Tab Your Books

Re-usable adhesive tabs can be found at most drug stores, stationary stores, big-box stores, or online. I picked up 500 1" tabs for seven dollars.

When adding tabs to your book, use a fine-point permanent pen or marker. Start at the back of the book and work forwards. Open the book to the back and start going through it. When you find a page or section you think you'll reference during the game, fill out the label for that section on the tab and then put the tab at the outside bottom of the page opposite the spine of the book. Then flip through to the next section you'll use, write out the label for that section, and put the tab just above the last one you put in. This way, when you're done, all the tabs go from top to bottom, with the upper most labels opening to the front of the book and the lowest labels going to the back.

Choosing What to Tab

Don't just tab the chapters of the book. You can already easily find the chapters. Instead, put tabs on the specific sections you think you'll use at the table. Random tables you might otherwise miss, list of random names, spell sections, random magic item tables – all the things you might reference as you play.

Tabbing Player Guides

I tabbed my A5e Adventurer's Guide, my Tales of the Valiant Player's Guide, and my D&D 2024 Player's Handbook. Here are the common sections I tabbed in these guides:

Classes
Lineages, Heritages, Species, Ancestries
Backgrounds
Feats
Equipment
Rules
Spells
Conditions
Skills
Appearance Tables
Trinkets

Tabbing Gamemaster Guides

Gamemaster guides have a bad reputation for not being particularly useful at the table but there's a lot in them we can use if we know that useful material is there and can get to it easily. Here are sections I tabbed in my various gamemaster guides:

Taverns and Landmarks
Dungeons
Weather
NPC Names
Hazards
Traps
Poisons
Settlements
Journey Activities
Magic Items
Random Magic Item Tables
Magic Item Properties
Monster Traits
Monster Stats by CR
Encounter Building Guidelines
Random Encounters
Random Campaign Dressing
Maps

Tabbing Monster Books

You don't need to tab your monster book the same way you tab your player's books and GM books. Some monster books might have useful tables or encounter lists you might want to tab and use regularly but mostly you'll tab the monsters you plan to use in your next game. I keep a set of five or so extra tabs in the front or back of the book that I can use during the game to mark the monster pages I need at the moment.

Speed Up Play

Tabbing your books makes it far easier to look up what you need. If you're a player, tabbing the sections you typically use for your character helps you quickly look up what you need when you need it. Re-usable adhesive tabs let you move the tabs around when you're switching spells or adding new features to your character. If you're a GM, recommend to your players that they tab the sections of their books that they need. Drop a stack of tabs on the table so they can enjoy tabbing their books themselves.

Learn What You Have

Going through and tabbing your books helps you become more familiar with the material in your books. You'll find things you forgot about. You might forget about the trinkets table in the Player's Handbook but it's a fun way to add flavorful items to otherwise common hoards of treasure. Spend the time tabbing your books to help you better internalize what's in your books and make them more useful for your actual game.

Enjoy Crafting Your Own Reference Books

Tabbing books is fun! Too infrequently do we have the chance to get away from screens for a little while and craft our own tools to run our games. Adding adhesive tabs to your books may not seem like much, but it's a great way to get closer to your books – to the materials we use to run these games we love.

Tab your books.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs.

Last Week's Lazy RPG Talk Show Topics

Here are last week's topics with time stamped links to the YouTube video.

Patreon Questions and Answers

Also on the Talk Show, I answer questions from Sly Flourish Patrons. Here are last week's questions and answers.

Talk Show Links

Here are links to the sites I referenced during the talk show.

Last week I also posted a couple of YouTube videos including Mash Up the Eight Steps and Heroes of Four of Forty Fingers – Dragon Empire Prep Session 39.

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

Keep general purpose monster stats on hand so you can easily improvise monsters at the table.
Prep what you need to improvise at the table.
If time is tight, cut from the boring middle.
Give improvised monsters one feature that shows off their role in the world.
The simplest quest model: an NPC wants the characters to do something at a location.
Draw small maps as characters explore a location.
Use a small tackle box to keep your rpg tools handy.

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This work includes material taken from SlyFlourish.com by Michael E. Shea available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license.

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