[Closed] Pen Pals vs Star Spawn

On the 21st of June 1840, a famous psychic Cora L. Scott presented a demonstration of her spiritual abilities to an international audience of 12 select guests. Ms. Scott regularly put on shows in an attempt to spread the message of the Spiritualist Church.

The events of that particular meeting however, were far from normal. Witnesses claimed that a demon manifested itself before them, warning them that they were meddling in powers that humanity had no right to, and as punishment, their lives would be cursed.

In the year after the séance, London skeptic journalist Stephen Barker began to investigate the event to determine how she had executed the apparition. His investigation was hampered however, when he determined that 8 of the 12 guests had died in the last 6 months.


I'd like to gauge the interest in starting up a game of 'Pen Pals vs Star Spawn' (with some minor rules variations). This is a Roleplaying Game played by exchanging in-character letters in the mail. Each Pen Pal plays a character with stats that they use to determine the results of their actions to uncover the conspiracy of the unknowable cosmic Threat, initiated by the news above, and document their adventures by posting letters to one another.

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The basic (free) manual will give you an idea of gameplay. There aren't many examples of gameplay online, due to the nature of the game.

A similar game is De Profundis (purely world building), which has an excellent manual and is well reviewed.


This will be different from a standard forum game in several ways:

The 'Game' narrative will not take place on the forum, but in the form of handwritten letter between the players. The GP forums will be used for session 0, all character dice rolls, and OOC.

This will be a long form commitment. Putting pen to paper every week and then getting to a post office to physically mail it, is much more of a commitment than posting to a forum on your mobile.

There will be an associated cost. Hopefully not too much, but there will be a weekly postage and stationary costs, potentially internationally.

This will involve sharing your real address with the other players. The forum would be closed, or we could even determine another way of sharing this information, however you would have to be happy with the fact that the other players would know your postal address.

All communication would be in the form of first person letter writing in character. This will mean information is not equally distributed, unless players share in character

Your characters would be three of the surviving attendee's of the seance, there would be a session 0 in GP to create characters and define relationships.

Let me know in the thread if you might be interested.

I like this idea. I'm going to read the rules now.

This looks very interesting and I'm tempted to join in (I'm going to read the rules tonight). But would there be any backup plan should the letters get eaten by the post? I sent a Christmass card to a friend in December (obviously) and he still hasn't received it. We are both in the EU. Can't imagine what the delay would be if we have to play across continents.

I'm in the UK, post can take a while sometimes, but it rarely goes missing. I like the idea of players taking a copy of all the letters that they send (perhaps using one of those photo to PDF mobile apps) in order that, at the end of the game, all the letters can be shared. I suppose that this could also be used as a backup in the event of a postal failure.

Alright, count me in, I'm willing to give it a shot [runs to buy pens and envelopes].

Fantastic! I've sent an invite. It will play with 2 players, (in fact the rules seem to presume that this is most likely) but I think 3 would add an extra dynamic, so there's room for one more if anybody else is interested.

Count me in as well.

Superb! I've sent an invite