From pen pal to player - the correspondence RPG

An envelope on the doormat. A handwritten address, a stamp stuck on crooked, and inside a letter from someone you know, signed with a name that is not theirs. They write about a book found at a flea market, about a sound in the cellar, about a dream that will not stop. You read it standing in the hallway, and somewhere halfway through you notice the game has already begun.

That is how you play De Profundis. No table, no game master, no dice. Only letters, and the days in between.

A game without rules

De Profundis appeared in Poland in 2001, published by Portal and written by Michał Oracz. It is a thin booklet, 32 pages in the English edition, and it contains no rules. The book itself is made of letters: Oracz writes to a friend about a book he saw in a dream, about his old gaming groups, about how to make a diary look convincingly weathered, and along the way the writer loses his grip, exactly as a Lovecraft narrator should. By the time you finish it, you know how the game works without it ever having been explained.

The English edition came from Hogshead, in the New Style line that also gave us Baron Munchausen and Puppetland, games that questioned the form itself. The cover carried a warning: this game is intended for mentally stable adults. Oracz called his method psychodrama. You do not write about your character, you write as your character, to a real person, on real paper, and you post the letter. What comes back is out of your hands. In 2002 it was shortlisted for the Diana Jones Award; in 2010 Cubicle 7 released a second edition.

In 2001 the rest of the hobby sat at a table, with a game master and a handful of dice. How Call of Cthulhu had brought Lovecraft's horror there is the story of From hero to victim. De Profundis took that same horror off the table and put it in an envelope.

Older than the hobby

The idea was not new. It was older than roleplaying itself. The epistolary novel is one of the oldest forms of the European novel: Samuel Richardson's Pamela in 1740, Les Liaisons dangereuses in 1782, and Dracula in 1897, built entirely from letters, diaries, and newspaper clippings. The reader never knows more than the people writing those documents, and that is exactly why the fear gets so close. Lovecraft himself wrote tens of thousands of letters; his correspondence outweighs his fiction.

And the post had been a game table before. In From mailbox to map table we told how play by mail worked: you sent your move to a game master, who worked out what happened and wrote back. There, the letter was a vehicle. In a correspondence game, the letter is the game. There is no move to process, no referee, only two people taking turns putting a piece of the world on paper.

Silence, then a wave

After De Profundis, it went quiet for a long time. The odd game tried again, such as Callisto, in which players wrote in-character letters to one another while a referee kept up the news, but it never became a genre. Letters were slow, stamps cost money, and the hobby was busy with other things.

In 2020 the world locked down, and that changed everything. Sitting at a table was no longer possible; writing was. That same year saw Alice is Missing by Spenser Starke, a game played at an ordinary table where nobody speaks: the whole story runs through the messages the characters send each other. It is the closest cousin of the letter game, with the same discovery at its heart. What you write down weighs more than what you say, because it stays.

On itch.io a Correspondence Jam appeared, and the epistolary tag now counts more than a hundred games. Epistolary by En Sattaur has two or more players solve a mystery by post, and turns the stamps into a clock: when they run out, the game is over. Dead Letter Society by Rori Montford, from 2023, has two vampires correspond through a secret society. The titles differ, but the mechanism is always the one from 1740: someone writes, someone waits, someone answers.

The messy parts

Honesty demands it: the letter game is fragile. A game at a table can survive a bad evening. A letter game dies of a single unanswered letter, and that happens more often than anyone admits. Of those hundred games on itch.io, many are downloaded far more than they are played.

There is a stranger side too. Oracz sent players out into the world to forge diaries and receive letters from strangers, and that warning on the cover was only half a joke. When the fiction arrives at your home by post, with a real postmark, the line between game and life is thinner than at any table. That is exactly what the game wants, and exactly why not everyone wants it.

And then there is time. A correspondence game takes weeks or months, and whoever is in the middle of one cannot speed it up. That waiting is not a side effect. It is the form.

What lies in the mailbox

That waiting is also why we started one ourselves. With Analogue: The Correspondence Trilogy we are making three games played by post: Solo, for one player; Duet, for two; Ensemble, for a circle of three to six. Time in the story and time on your calendar run in step, the letters really go in the mailbox, and the envelope may be sealed with wax. The crowdfunding launches on BackerKit in June 2027; follow the project there and you will hear the moment it goes live, and receive small games from the same world in the months before. If you would rather feel the idea at a table first, there is Alice is Missing, or the solo and journaling games in which you practice the same patience on your own; we told that history in From full table to table for one.

Back to the doormat. The letter is still there, and you do not know what you will write back. You only know it will take a few days for the answer to come, and that in those days something happens that never happens at a table: you keep thinking about the story while nobody has the turn. One crooked stamp, and the desire to know what is in the next envelope. This game has never needed more than that.