A lot of my friends are in North Carolina, and a little bit ago I moved across the country away from them. I missed playing physical games with them like D&D in person, so this was my attempt at developing a physical game playable over the distance.

SCP: Acquisitions Department is an RPG played by snail-mail. One player is the Game Master, and the others take on the role of Department Heads from the SCP Foundation in charge of the initial acquisition and containment of anomalies within their districts. The GM would send monthly letters describing suspected anomalies within each of their districts. In response, the players would allocate resources and write mission plans describing the procedures their teams should follow to investigate and contain the anomalies. The GM takes those, and writes up mission briefs on how the missions went and what information was gathered. This universe would progress in real-time for a campaign of developments that the players would have to respond to over the months. However, as is the nature of anomalies, a lot of the important information is secret, so much of the GM’s correspondence would include physical puzzles and keys for later or past information.

There were a few goals for this game experience:

• There should be lots of secrets and puzzles for moments of discovery
  • I wanted to create moments where one piece of information suddenly unlocks a chain of discoveries across multiple past letters
  • I wanted to play with Steganography, the art of hiding one message in another. Like decoder rings and whatnot
  • Physical puzzles have the unique capability of giving players a real toy to play with
• Players have their own autonomy, but need to rely on each other
  • This was done by giving some information/keys to each player that they’d need to be on the look out for when it can be applied
    • Not every key was obviously a key
• Players should have the creative freedom to do anything
  • Tabletop RPGs such as D&D have the unique capability of allowing players to set their creativity free and try literally anything
• The pace of the game needs to match the pace of the postal system
  • Letters only travel so fast. In research, RPGs played over mail tend to be something like an abstract representation of real-time combat or something similar. I wanted the pace of the postal system to be integrated into the experience

I really enjoyed producing the physical materials. I had made mock-government papers representing the dossier of their teams as well as letterhead for the correspondence. Resources took the form of custom-made playing cards with all the important bits. I had planned to mutate these cards over the course of play in secret ways, such as stamps added to StrikeTeam cards in response to the situations they were allocated to, without a clear idea of their purpose until it became clear.

The loop was like this:

• GM sends a vague report of anomaly sightings in the districts of the players
• Players each send a letter of procedure for the acquisition mission of a particular anomaly, attaching StrikeTeam cards to execute the mission. The may also attach Anomaly cards that they have already acquired that they think might be useful
• The GM writes up what happened when the given team executed those procedures based on the nature of the anomaly and the equipment/skills of the team. The resulting mission report/brief is sent to the players as well as an Anomaly card if it was captured.
• The Anomaly cards are bare at first. Players were invited to write and send Research Requests describing how their research teams should probe and test the anomaly to learn more details. They’d attach the anomaly card and the research team card.
• The GM would think up how the anomaly would respond to the tests and return a report and potentially edit the Anomaly card to reflect the new info (or the new state it was in, if changed)

Next month it’d start again. Players would receive the anomaly sightings of the other players, so they would have an awareness of what was going on and they were encouraged to talk (not just by mail) and share their findings in case some piece of info or an anomaly were discovered to be pertinent to the situations of the other player.

This was my most documentation-heavy project (and not just because its all about writing…). I had design specs for every piece of the puzzle and I was pretty happy with how it fit together. It was a great exercise in designing a fully interconnected system of mechanics.

I made a full prototype of the system. I wrote up a skeleton of a campaign as well as a catalog of connected anomalies and had a players handbook. Unfortunately, due to real-life commitments, we were not all able to consistently commit to playing the prototype.

The physical side of production was also a challenge, as I had wanted to produce quality playing cards myself (so that I could hide secrets in them if needed). I developed a process for this as well as a small webtool to help with designing the cards. The cards were made from JSON data but had a randomly-generated ID. The webtool would generate this as well as generate the barcode so that I could scan the cards easily with my phone. My long-term plan was to develop a database of these cards so that I could organize my meta-data surrounding them to keep track of progression, and giving them barcodes made this easier.

Feel free to take a look at the Player’s Handbook. If you have questions or feedback, please send me an email or something. I’d really like to know your thoughts.

I have examples of the Introduction letter I sent my players as well as first anomaly report letter.