Dead Letter: A Solitaire Journaling TTRPG

Dead Letter: A Solitaire Journaling TTRPG

The living and the dead write to each other more than either side wants to admit. They burn letters, bury them, post them to old addresses, leave them at headstones, but every one of them arrives at the Post Office of Dead Letters. However, the laws of the dead are strict and arcane, and each letter needs to pass a rigorous inspection from a Dead Letter Customs Clerk, someone who may be waiting for a letter themselves, someone like you...

Dead Letter is a solo journaling TTRPG that uses a standard deck of playing cards, a pen, and a notebook or paper. Each session is one shift at the Post Office of Dead Letters. You get six letters, you decide what happens to each one before you know what is inside it, and then you find out and write it down.

Notes from the Designer

Designing Dead Letter was a unique challenge for me as it was the first solo TTRPG I've ever designed. I'm also not someone who frequently plays solo TTRPGs, so it required me to do more research and more immersion than I usually put into my games, as I have a larger background playing other tabletop game genres.

From my reading and explorations I found there was a big narrative focus for solo TTRPGs, more so than the multiplayer games in the genre. While I wanted to explore solo TTRPGs, it being my first one I wanted to follow the main tropes of the genre in order to find my feet. While I find flipping or twisting genre tropes to be fun and interesting, I don't think you should do this until you understand the original tropes to begin with. I personally prefer more "crunch" and structure, so I was looking to honour the high narrative focus of the solo TTRPG trope as well as my personal design style.

This is why I brought in the mechanism around letters. Making letters out of regular playing cards, and having specific actions you must take for each, creates a more rigid spine that your own narrative can then be journaled from. This gives a more "board game" feel, and also fits the design philosophy around 52 Pickup games in general, reusing standard components in new and interesting ways. This also makes it a good intro for solo TTRPGs as it gives new players a really concrete process, set of actions, and objectives.

For the theme I used a hybrid genre, borrowing from sources like bureaucratic horror, gothic, and dystopian. I drew inspiration from games like Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn, fiction from authors like Kafka and Orwell, and movies like Beetlejuice and Office Space. I've explored some of these themes individually before here in the 52 Pickup series, like bureaucracy in Merger (issue 5) and Coin Workers (issue 12), horror in Frontline Grind (issue 31) and Coins Over Deadeyes (issue 7), and dystopian in Sentience (issue 15) and Dust Highway (issue 25), but not explicitly together. I really enjoy making hybrid themes for games, and I particularly like how different themes converse with each other to create something meaningful. Bureaucracy and horror go really well together as it takes something ordinary (everyday bureaucracy) and twists it with horror, while the gothic elements bring it into the fantastical realm, allowing it to be slightly more "fun" as players have a little bit of distance (I wasn't aiming to just have people fill out dry office forms).

When designing your own games try asking "what would this game look like if I added one more theme to it?" See if that sparks some creativity or brings the game in a more interesting direction. But do balance your themes, like your mechanisms, as it could make your tone and voice messy.