Review: Quill, a Letter-Writing RPG by Trollish Delver Games
I'm very, very late to the party on this review. Quill: A Letter Writing Roleplaying Game for a Single Player won the title of "Best Free RPG" at the Indie RPG Awards all the way back in 2016. So I'm about 8 years too late.
Still, when I was looking in 2022 for a system for an idea that I had for a court politics, no-combat, asynchronous game, I ultimately settled on hacking Quill for longer-term play. That home game has been going steady for almost two years now. The bones of Quill are solid, and I think a retrospective review is worth doing.
Quill is available on DriveThruRPG and on Itch.io as a Pay What You Want title. This post includes affiliate links for DriveThruRPG & DMsGuild.
What is Quill?
Quill is a letter-writing, single-player RPG. If you thought RPGs needed to all take place around a table – real or virtual – and involve a bunch of friends, take a second look at what defines an RPG. Solo games are great! Though I am fortunate enough to have a regular group, as a GM, sometimes I want to experience RPGs from the player perspective again. For the many, many people who want to roleplay but cannot find a group, solo games provide an easy avenue to practice roleplaying on your own. In fact, solo games are so popular that, as of the time of writing this article, the Solo Adventurer's Toolbox – a way to play Dungeons & Dragons 5e solo – is the current 3rd most popular title on DMsGuild.
The "letter writing" part of this description is really what separates Quill from your traditional RPG. In Quill, you are not off fighting or delving through dungeons; you are writing letters. Rather than athletics or attack rolls, you are rolling things like "Eloquence" or "Heart". In practice, Quill plays mostly as a creative writing prompt with some restrictions and with a scoring system tacked on top.
Character Creation
Character creation in Quill is fairly small in terms of rules, but I do think it can be expansive for the purposes of flavor. Mechanically, you pick a character class – monk, poet, knight, courtier, aristocrat, or scholar – which determines your attributes and what you'll be rolling for each of the game's three types of rolls. You'll pick an additional skill, which gives you a buff for one sort of roll that you can use once per letter.
And that's it. Those are all the rules for character creation. Any additional flavor you want to give your character is added in yourself and has no real mechanical backing.
In practice, this does mean that all the characters sort of play the same. You don't really pick which type of roll you'll use for any given situation, as each has a specific use, which means your choices do not have much impact on how the game plays mechanically (though it certainly has a large effect on your success or failure).
On the other hand, if you want to flesh out your character with a personality, the game is wide open to do so.
Mechanics
Each scenario in the book lays out why you are writing (and to whom), some additional quirks for this scenario (such as an extra die or not allowing the benefits of a particular skill), the "ink pot", and outcomes depending on your score.
Of these, the ink pot is the most important. The ink pot is a list of paired words that you can use to increase your score. For each of the 5 paragraphs in your letter, you must attempt to use a word from the ink pot. When you do, you'll roll, and on a success, you get to use the superior version of the word.
For example, in one of the scenarios in Quill, you get the word pair "Angels/Seraphim". You may be writing the line "may a chorus of ____ smile upon you." You'll then roll your Language skill–a number of dice equal to your language attribute as determined by your class–and if you roll at least one 5 or 6, you will fill that sentence in as "may a chorus of seraphim smile upon you," and you'll get one point at the end of the letter for that paragraph. If you fail the roll, you'll instead say "may a chorus of angels smile upon you," and you'll instead get zero.
You can choose to try to add a flourish (an adjective or adverb) by rolling Heart before one of these language rolls. If you succeed on both the heart roll and the following language roll, you add the adjective – for example, "brilliant seraphim" in the example above – and gain extra points. If you succeed on the flourish roll but fail the language roll and use an inferior word ("brilliant angels"), you will lose points. If you fail the flourish roll, there is no effect and you do not add the adjective.
At the end of each paragraph, you'll roll Penmanship for an additional point.
And that is it! The mechanics of the game are pretty simple but do a really good job of connecting with the activity of the gameplay. Trying to write in such a way that you set up a good use of the words from the ink pot is a fun writing challenge, on top of the more general creative writing prompt that comes just from the basic scenario.
Impressions
While the mechanics are fun and do impact the way you write in an interesting way, the mechanics themselves don't offer much depth or choice. If you have good a language attribute, it always makes sense to try to do a flourish; there's no impact for failing the heart roll, so what really matters is whether you'll succeed on the language roll for using the ink pot. You're always making a Penmanship roll at the end of each paragraph, and you're always trying to use a word from the ink pot, so there's no mechanical choice there.
Similarly, how well you write does not impact your score. You could write complete nonsense and, if you roll well, still "succeed." As this is a solo RPG, if that was the sort of thing you wanted to do, well... you'd probably just be playing a different game. However, I do think that the lack of connection between what you write and what you end up scoring is a weak point of the system.
That said, if you are looking for something that is essentially a creative writing prompt, I find Quill to be good for that purpose. You get to flex your creative writing and trying to fit ink pot words into each paragraph adds an extra constraint that really encouraged my creativity when I played.
The game works at transporting you into the role of the scenario, if you are willing to let it. I found myself trying to think of the best way to approach the subject of each scenario, how to be tactful yet clear, and how to strike an appropriate tone. I was thinking of this far more than I was about the dice I would be rolling, and to me, that is a positive mark for any RPG: it has a robust mechanical backing, but in practice, the mechanics are not at the forefront of your mind and don't distract you from the world you're playing in.
That said, the game would benefit from additional mechanics. Some existing supplements already expand on the game in interesting ways. My personal favorite is Quill Quest: the Warlord's Downfall, which adds in hidden conditions that impact your score at the end. For example, if you mention a specific person, the recipient of your letter is enraged by the mere mention of their name and it decreases your score. This is a really beneficial mechanic because it connects what you actually wrote with how you end up doing, and I wish that the core game had something like it.
For a more complete list of supplements, you can look on Trollish Delver's page about the state of the game.
Long-Term Play
The core rules of Quill are really designed just for you to play in single-letter bouts. There's no real connection between one letter and the next except for your character.
Quill Quest: the Warlord's Downfall does create a connection between the various letters, with excellent scores on one letter having impacts on future letters and a unifying narrative across the 'campaign' of the book.
My personal hack for Quill, which removes the single-player aspect of the game, involves a GM writing "responses" which then establish new scenarios. I also removed the ink pot to give my players more flexibility. Yes, this means it is essentially an entirely different game, just with the same basic dice mechanic. Turns out, a solo game revolving around one-off letters requires some substantial edits to turn it into a two-year campaign-oriented game with a GM and players.
More generally though, I think a 'campaign mode' for Quill that actually preserves the system that is written looks much more like Quill Quest than it does my personal hack. I'd still love more connection between letters than even Quill Quest provides with a stronger sense of narrative.
Overall
While the core rules of Quill suffer from these flaws – a lack of connection between what you write and how you score, and a lack of connection between letters – the system itself is elegant in its simplicity. It really does spark some fun creative writing as you try to navigate around the ink pot, and there are enough words in the ink pot that it does not suffer from a lack of replay value.
In all, Quill is well-deserving of its 2016 award as a basic system, even if supplements since have already shown how it can be improved. If you haven't played Quill yet, I definitely recommend it, and once you've done a letter or two to get a sense of the basic resolution system, I definitely encourage you to try out the more inventive supplements to the system.
Quill is available on DriveThruRPG and on Itch.io as a Pay What You Want title and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license, which allows for supplements to be written and shared easily.
And stay tuned! Next week, inspired by Quill, I'll be releasing my own Quill Quest supplement. It may be 8 years after Quill was first gathering hype, but I think the bones of the system certainly hold up for those looking for a fun creative writing game that they can do on their own, and it is worth it to continue using and expanding on those rules.