E-ink displays kinda suck for that even the color ones. Android tablets or iPad are hard to beat for graphic heavy PDFs like ttrpg rulebooks usually are.

Ideally, all the ttrpg publishers would change their e-books into markdown or something, but I'm not going to hold my breath for that lol.

Also, if I end up posting in this multiple ttrpg communities in other Lemmy instances, I apologize if you've read this before.

i have a shitty samsung tablet with a god awful case that doesn't let it stand up on its own very well, but it would be okay for something like this. I was thinking just last night, I wish I had a tablet similar to the iPad but that runs a rootable android or other OS so I can control wtf it is doing

I will second what the other commenter said about ereaders. I'm a huge evangelizer of my ereader with eink, but it would be terrible for this. A full iPad is probably not needed. If you're using it just for this, a basic android handheld tablet should be more than enough. You can get them for less than $100 which is crazy. You could probably get a pretty good one second hand. Someone I know uses a tablet phone which is less than 8 inches, and it's a little small for my taste, so I'd recommend 10 inches as a minimum, but it's probably worth seeing some examples in store to find what works for you. If you'd find any hidden gems, I'm sure we'd all love to hear about them. Have fun going through the backlog!