Review: Dead Letter Society

Blurb

Dead Letter Society is A GM-less roleplaying game for 1-2 vampires who need an ally or rival. Exchange letters via a secret society, achieve your ambitions, and question everything. 

If the crowdfunding campaign is successful, it will be available as:

• A 100+ page, full colour, pdf on itch.io, DriveThruRPG, and montfordtales.com
• A first printing of the 100+ page, full colour, A5 perfectbound book

This is a journaling game with a difference. Dead Letter Society structures joint storytelling between players and guides playing in multiple genres and styles. 

The information players include in their letters forms the basis of the game’s journaling sections. You can explore any topic by stating an intention about the action you want to take, and then drawing a journaling prompt to go with it. You then write back about your experiences, and the cross-pollination of ideas continues.

The stories told by Dead Letter Society are as varied as the vampires that write them.

Review

If I could only play one game ever again it would be probably be this one.

To say I adore it… doesn’t scrape the surface.

If you are a fan of vampire TTRPGs, then you are going to lap this up like cream (or blood, in fact, if you prefer).

The beauty of this gorgeous game lies in the freedom that it gifts players to completely construct what type of vampires they would like to be and what kind of world they would like to play in.

Whether you want to be a high society vampire in Victorian London, a feral fiend stalking your swampy lair in some medieval marsh, a cyberpunk scoundrel working on your next high-tech heist or even a sci-fi vampire in space, you can build your characters and world exactly as you wish.

Once the character creation and collaborative world building are done, the carefully crafted structure of the game guides both players seamlessly through a narrative that is spun from a combination of journaling prompts and the players imaginations.

Your vampire starts the game with a problem they cannot solve alone – so they reach out to the Dead Letter Society – a secret organisation which puts vampires in touch with eachother… for a price.

What are the motives of the society? What payment will they demand? Will the two vampires be able to help eachother or will they fail, or even have their secret plans discovered?

Overall

If you ever wanted to just spend your days playing vampire pen-pals with your bestie then this game is your dream come true.

I’m overflowing with character and world ideas for this – and already in the process of starting games with two other people – one will be online and the other by actual snail mail so part of the joy is also shopping for beautiful stationary, quill pens and wax seals to add to the fun!

The pdf and physical book have been so beautifully created and the system is intuitive, easy to understand and, best of all, empowers players to bring their own ideas and creativity to life.

Get It Here…

A preview of the game will be available on itch TODAY AT 3PM!

https://montfordtales.itch.io/

Dead Letter Society is crowdfunding with Crowdfundr from Feb 7th to March 6th: https://fnd.us/DeadLetterSociety The funding campaign will begin on February 7th, 2023, and run for 30 days until March 6th, 2023.

Design, writing, layout, and art: Rori Montford (@MontfordTales)

Editing: E. R. F. Jordan (@erfjordan)