# Epistolary *Created:* 2026-11-10, *Modified:* 2026-11-10 ![[Epistolary (cover).jpg]] **Epistolary** is a game played by post, and the post is the clock. Each player is an investigator chasing a mystery through letters to the others, every letter costs a stamp, and you begin with eighteen to twenty-one of them. When one is left, your investigator is finished — out of the game, with their papers inherited by whoever finds the body. ## Setting The group picks the setting in the first conversation, and the book only insists on two things: that the characters are working together on a mystery, and that there is a believable reason they cannot simply telephone each other. Its own default is the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, Lovecraft-flavoured, with the investigators scattered across the world and the post as their only reliable line. The alternatives it offers are pointedly broad — scientists sharing discoveries between distant stars, tired office workers stumbling onto a conspiracy by email, princesses of two warring kingdoms exchanging secret letters to end their parents' feud. Each investigator is a name, a location, a **specialism**, and a **reputation** — what the others have heard about you, and why. The specialism is the mechanical heart of the character: **Art & The Occult** interprets photographs and sketches, **Linguistics & Cryptography** interprets codes and riddles, **Natural Philosophy** interprets physical evidence, and **Intelligence & Politics** interprets reports, quotations and newspaper clippings. The example investigators set the register for the whole game: a historian's daughter in London, a war artist in New Orleans, a governess in Qingdao who spends her evenings drawing the coast. Two mysteries are in play at once, and neither has an author. The **Mystery** is the terrible thing that is going to happen, and nobody decides what it is at the start — there is no game master to have decided it in advance. It is assembled, letter by letter, by the people it is threatening. The **Intrigues** are the smaller mysteries that get things moving: a book that has vanished from every library, cracks spreading across a town's walls, a relative struck down by an unknown illness, the stars going out one by one. Each Intrigue belongs to the investigator who received it and can only be solved by them. They look unrelated at the start. They are not. ## Mechanics The engine is one table, two ten-sided dice and a limited supply of postage. ### Investigating You investigate once per day. Choose an Intrigue, describe how your investigator goes at it — as vague or as specific as you like — then roll two d10 for a number from 1 to 100 and read it off the **Investigation Table** inside the front cover. - **1–13 — a Clue.** You find something that brings you closer. Three Clues solve one of your Intrigues. - **14–53 — Evidence.** One of four kinds, matching the four specialisms: something to sketch, a riddle or code, a cutting from a newspaper, or a small object that would fit in an envelope. - **54–61 — Travel.** The investigation moves you, and you must tell your contacts where you have gone before you can investigate again. - **62–63 — Contact.** You may introduce two of your contacts to each other — and, optionally, introduce a new investigator that way. - **64–73 — Present an Intrigue.** Your investigation raises more questions than it answers. Until you have written to someone setting out the new mystery, you cannot investigate again. - **74–78 — Delayed.** You are detained, lost or cut off: no letters, sent or read, for d10+6 days. You may still investigate. - **79–83 — Lose a Stamp.** Research stolen, a curse, a descent into nightmares. The postage runs down faster than you planned. - **84–95 — Personal Development.** Something happens in your investigator's life worth mentioning in the next letter. No mechanical effect; it is there for the fiction. - **96–100 — Red Herring.** The lead collapses. Your Intrigue ends and presents a new one, and you must write to whoever gave you the original before you can start again. That is a lot of table for a game about letters, and it earns its place: the results are almost all things that give you something to write about rather than numbers to change. A twentieth of your investigations will simply have been wrong, which is the most realistic rule in the book. **Evidence is not a Clue yet.** It has to be posted to an investigator with the matching specialism, interpreted — with as much or as little detail as that player likes — and sent back. Only then does it become a Clue. Clues are physical objects in every sense: one Clue solves one Intrigue, and once you have posted it away you cannot use it yourself unless it comes back. You can interpret your own Evidence if it happens to match your specialism, which is precisely the loophole a table of four will spend an evening arguing about. ### Stamps and Final Letters Every letter you send costs a stamp. That is the entire pacing mechanism, and it does more work than most games' turn order: the mail arrives when it arrives, so the fiction runs on real weeks or months, at the pace of the postal service and the players' lives rather than a session. When you lose your second-to-last stamp — to a letter or to the table — your investigator's luck has run out. Roll d10+6 for the days before someone finds their research, write the letter from whoever found it, and **post everything you have received** to one of your contacts: letters, notes, the lot. That player inherits your Intrigues, your Clues, your Evidence and your specialism. The book is explicit that keeping your letters is not sentimentality but the mechanism by which a campaign survives a player dropping out, and that the less you kept, the more explaining you will have to do out of character. It is also an unusually kind death rule: you die, and your friend gets your homework. ### Ending Solve every Intrigue presented to you and your correspondence is no longer limited by stamps — though you may no longer investigate, and you may still interpret Evidence for others. Once every investigator has cleared their Intrigues, the Mystery is solved: the group decides between them what it was and how it was beaten. By then the last player to finish usually has the full picture, which is the design quietly paying off. ### Advancement Optional, and driven by the same clock: at fifteen stamps remaining take a **Minor** advancement, at ten a **Major** or another Minor, at five a **Final**. They are permissions rather than bigger numbers — *Chatty* spends a stamp you would have lost anyway on a letter, *Collector* lets six pieces of Evidence (all four types) stand in for three Clues, *Reckless* trades half your remaining stamps for a Clue, and *It Was Me All Along* solves an Intrigue outright. You get better at the game by still having postage left, which is a neat inversion of the usual reward loop. No opportunity can be banked, and nothing can be taken twice. ### Two and Three Players Fewer players means everyone is in contact from the start, which makes the game too easy. The fix is to require every piece of Evidence to be interpreted by someone else before it counts as a Clue, and to loosen specialisms into a second opinion rather than a licence. ### Writing the Letters The final chapter is not rules at all but a short, genuine guide to writing nineteenth-century letters — the heading and its date, the salutation that moves from *Dear Sir* to *My dear Smith* as the acquaintance warms, and the complimentary close that was once a whole sentence and became a formality. It is sourced properly (Richardson's 1741 model letters, Westlake's 1876 guide) and it is the chapter that tells you what the game is really asking of you: not a report, but a letter. ## Editions **Epistolary** is at v1.1, published in 2023 as a 37-page illustrated book, and it grew out of a 2019 Global Game Jam entry by the same designer, *I Believe The World May Be Ending*. One edition, sold as three builds of the same document. *In the library.* - **Print** — the illustrated book at full quality, ready for a print shop. - **Printer friendly** — the same book for a home printer. - **Screen** — the reading build, offered both as a small file and as a selectable-text PDF. Design, writing and layout are En Sattaur's; Kira Smith painted the cover and William Kerr the interior illustrations. Its closest relative is [[Letters to the Stars - An Epistolary RPG|Letters to the Stars]], which makes the letter the unit of play too, and hangs it on a starship voyage instead of a post box. ## References - [Epistolary - itch.io](https://nobodyisthere.itch.io/epistolary) — the designer's page: the pitch, the preview pages, and thirteen player ratings averaging 4.4. - [Take a break from Twitter and send letters to friends with these epistolary RPGs - Dicebreaker](https://www.dicebreaker.com/companies/itchio/best-games/epistolary-rpg-list-twitter-break) — a survey of the letter-game shelf that singles **Epistolary** out for bridging the gap between pure correspondence and a game with clues in it. - [Letter-Writing Tabletop Games With Stories About (& In) Correspondence - ScreenRant](https://screenrant.com/letter-writing-tabletop-games-rpgs-love-quill-epistolary) — a wider tour of the form, with **Epistolary** as the play-by-post example. - [Correspondence RPGs - Netherbook](https://netherbook.com/pages/from-pen-pal-to-player-the-correspondence-rpg) — an essay on the lineage from the epistolary novel to *De Profundis* and on, which is the context this game is best read in.