I am clearly procrastinating on something, so here is the first draft of the letterlarp rules. Please post feedback here. Do the questions strike the right balance between being leading but also being open? Are there any obvious omissions from the list of professions, or the list of puzzles? Are the Moves suggestive enough? Does anyone really care about endings?
(This thread will eventually be moved to the letterlarp forum, once we work out a name and get one created)
How many players are you thinking of allowing? Thereās enough combinations there to have plenty if the interest is there, but how many letter-writers are too many for a GM to organise. What are the contingencies in place for players who simply stop participating (āghostingā their letter partners). I guess in the in-game newspaper you could just have them be horribly devoured.
Local interest seems to be about a dozen participants, and I think I can manage up to twenty. Iām not sure about more than that on a first attempt at something like this though.
Iām not sure how to handle ghosting (other than to mentally mark the person as āunreliableā). Iāll check with the experienced participants Iāve been talking to, but I suspect the answer is āit happens; make sure people have enough contacts to work around itā.
The only thing I see here that Iām a little uncertain about in play is in the use of lines and veils. The nature of most welfare checking in meatspace larping is done in real-time as situations evolve, and I can see that getting a little hazy when youāre writing as the themes and plots develop into places we might not expect. I imagine the potential trauma of reading something rather than experiencing it will also be different than in physical larping.
Lines and veils will work best if itās mandatory to check in with all our recipients, in much the same way as a tabletop group would at the beginning of a campaign, so that we know where our stories are not allowed to tread right from the get-go. I think itās a good system to use for these purposes, but I think the ruleset would do well to formalise when these lines and veils are introduced OOC.
As far as endings are concerned, I think that a lot of players (myself included) will be happy to let the story end naturally. You could also consider devising something whereby the players of āincapacitated charactersā are able to keep sending letters to develop the plots of their correspondents and try and move them towards a fitting climax? (Iām thinking letters from asylums, newspaper clippings about museum heists, etc.)
Yeah. I was planning on soliciting lines and veils at campaign start, perhaps via the signup form so its anonymous, and notifying them via the forums. That way everyone should know what content people want to explore, and where they really donāt want to go.
Iāve been keeping an eye on a gauntlet thread on safety tools for pbp games, which strongly suggests sideband communication and negotiation about content. Because sending stuff in the post is kindof final, and the content canāt be edited after the fact, Iād suggest pre-emptive checkins if youāre concerned about crossing a line.
Iād second a ācontrols channelā for communication that sits parallel to the ādata channelā of the letters going back and forth*. It could be as simple as using the PM system here on Diatribe for OOC messages between individual players.
Itās what happens face-to-face as well when you think about it: thereās always an IC and an OOC ālayerā to the game and most people are pretty good at distinguishing between the two. This is just laid out a bit more explicitly because you canāt see the other playerās reaction directly.
Oh, and asking for everybodyās no-gos before the game starts is probably a good idea as well. Again, itās what most GMs seem to do anyway so not too much of a stretch. You could then put a summary of the hard boundaries that come out of this in the rules so that everyone can see them.
*Sorry, bit of professional deformation going on thereā¦ 
I like this idea, though it obviously depends on how their story ends. If they solve their mystery, defeat the great old Ones and retire in comfort, they could always send letters about their rose garden 
But that seems a very un-Lovecraftian ending.