Day 2 of my Adventure Calendar. For 24 days, up until Christmas, I plan to release a lil bit of RPG content. Want to join as well? Join the jam!
Image: Unsplash
Depending on what type of timekeeping your campaign uses, PCs tend to get around 8 hours of rest, most of which will taken up by sleeping.
There’s a bunch of things the characters likely also do, but we gloss over for the sake of the story flow and level of simulation; toilet breaks, cleaning up the dishes, and maintaining weapons and armor.
I like to assume that player characters tend to spend some time journaling about their day, especially in a world where you can’t just check your phone calendar for what you did what day, and where you’ve been.
In an extension of that, especially assuming that player characters know they are in a dangerous line of work, lays the Quantum Goodbye Letter.
You Won’t Know What It Is Until You Get There
The Quantum Goodbye Letter is a letter written by a player character to their compatriots in case they perish in events to come. To ask players to write a letter for their fellow travelers at the end of each rest would be a lot of busy work, and those letters would hopefully be mostly useless.
Therefore, we assume that each player character carries a goodbye letter on them, written during the last relatively comfortable rest that the party enjoyed.
Its contents are only determined (and made up!) when it is opened upon that character’s death – hence my misuse of the term ‘quantum’. Only observation defines its contents!
This mechanic can give characters that die unceremoniously a way to say goodbye to their friends (“Thank you for giving me a home”), and it can add some pressure to retrieve a body (as the letter is on their person). It can resolve or reveal plot threads and secrets (“If you read this, I have failed. Please save my sister from the Tower of Thorns”). It can also give a final punchline (“I sure hope I don’t get mauled by wolves tomorrow”) or grant some final characterization (“Wait, his final letter was just… ‘I love dogs’?”).
So yeah, that’s Quantum Goodbye Letters! What would be in yours?