Twenty-five years ago, the world put the screens down.

Not out of ideology, and not by force. Out of exhaustion. The decades before are now called the Long Fading, and by the end of them nobody could be sure whose voice they were hearing, whose face they were seeing, which version of the news was real. So a treaty was signed, the Concord, and the digital infrastructure was withdrawn from daily life. Not regulated. Withdrawn.

This is what came after.

You live in a village. You know the names of your neighbours. You file your registrations with the local Scribe, you pass the Beacon on your way to the market, and you have come to find all of this ordinary. Most people have.

What the Concord could not measure was the other thing. Some people feel something in the world that no instrument registers. A warmth in a room before anyone has spoken. A weight when two strangers pass on a narrow path. Officially, this does not exist. Unofficially, it is called the Hush.

Analogue is a set of games about living in that world, and about the letters people write to each other in it.

This campaign funds the Correspondence Trilogy: three games in one hardcover book, all played through the same medium, the letter.

Solo is a journaling game for one. You keep a journal in the voice of someone living twenty-five years after the Concord, one season at a time, and you write sealed letters to your own future.

Duet is a game for two. You and one other person write to each other, by hand, through the post, over weeks or months.

Ensemble is a correspondence roleplaying game for a circle of three to six people, played by post over months and, if the circle lasts, over years.

Three ways of being in the same world: alone with a journal, as two people writing across a distance, as a circle holding each other through years of correspondence. Start with whichever suits you. The book is built so that each game teaches something the next one uses.

Solo is where most people will start, and it is a complete game on its own.

You write as one person in the world, season by season. A twelve-sided die beside your journal shows where the world stands between the Hush and the Hum, and its result colours what you notice and what you write. When your character touches a device, the object goes under a cup on your desk as a Sealed Reading, and it stays there, unread, sometimes for weeks. You will be surprised how much a cup can weigh.

Then there are the Letters. During play you write sealed letters to your own future. On the outside of each envelope you write the condition under which it may be opened: after the first frost, when someone you trust has let you down, the day you consider leaving. You do not decide when that happens. The world does. The last letter is never opened at all.

Solo needs a notebook, a pen, a d12, a cup and a few envelopes. It fits in a quiet evening, or a whole winter.

Duet is the game we have playtested longest, and the one that taught us what correspondence can do that a table cannot.

Two players each take a character in the world. You agree on a cadence, say a letter every two weeks, and then you write. By hand. Through the post. The delay is not a limitation, it is the game: what you wrote in March arrives in a different April than the one you imagined.

The mechanics are light and they all live in the letter. Letter Questions give you something to answer and something to withhold. The Mark is what accumulates between two people who keep writing. And the Shared Hush is the moment the same weight lands in two cities in the same week, in two letters, neither of which had been sent yet.

Duet is for partners, old friends, siblings in different countries, and two people who met once at a convention and would like an excuse to keep talking.

Ensemble is why this book exists.

There is no modern multiplayer letter-writing roleplaying game with real mechanics. The closest thing, De Profundis from 2001, is a beautiful suggestion to write in a certain tone. Ensemble takes the tools that make Duet work and asks what they become when there are five of you instead of two.

A circle of three to six correspondents, spread across districts, most of whom will never meet. Letters between two of you belong to those two. But once a season, the Round goes out: one envelope that travels the whole circle in a fixed order. Each of you reads what is already inside, adds one sheet, and sends it on within the week. When it comes home it holds one sheet in every hand in the circle. It is the only place the circle is ever in one room, and the most dangerous object it owns.

While the Round is on your desk, you roll a d4. It names one correspondent, and you owe them a personal letter. The Aside keeps the circle alive between the Rounds, and it means the dice decide who gets written to, not the loudest voice.

Around this sit the Circle Balance, which tracks the fate of the circle as a whole beside the fate of each character; a Shared Hush that can land in three of five correspondents on the same evening and not the other two; and time scaling that lets fictional years pass across real months of play. Circles form, flourish, strain, and end. Ensemble takes that whole arc seriously.

You need no experience, no group, no evening free every week, and no rules to memorise. If you can write a letter, you can play Analogue.

Everything happens on paper. There is no game master. The book tells you what to write about and when, the dice occasionally tell you something you did not expect, and the post does the rest. Solo is a journal with a few rules. Duet is a pen pal with a world attached. Ensemble is what happens when several pen pals share one.

If you have played a lot of roleplaying games: this is the slow, literary, ordinary-people end of the hobby. Think Thousand Year Old Vampire, Wanderhome, The Quiet Year. Nobody is a hero. Nothing resolves. The die on the desk still matters.

The Correspondence Trilogy is one A5 hardcover, sewn so it opens flat on the desk where you will write. The pages are uncoated cream paper, printed in black with a single warm terracotta accent, the color of old ink and wax seals. The cover has the look of kraft paper.

Throughout the book you will find dozens of illustrations, all drawn by hand: pencil on paper first, then scanned and finished digitally by me.

Every physical copy comes with a digital edition for the people you play with, so one book at the table is enough to start a correspondence.

I started thinking about Analogue when I found it harder and harder to tell real news from fake. The channels I read had slowly become funnels for what I hoped to see, and after a while I no longer knew what was true. Some stories were so absurd that they could not possibly be real, and later they were. Others were so plausible that I chose to believe them, and later I was woken from that dream.

So I started to imagine a world where the cause of all this had been taken away. Not by a catastrophe, not by some dystopian collapse, but because the world made a wise choice. Or believed it did. That world is where Analogue takes place, and it is why the games are quiet: they ask you, calmly, to think about what you trust, and they touch the kind of nostalgia everyone longs for at some point in their life, for a world that was slower and could be believed.

Duet taught me what letters do that a table cannot: the slow accumulation, the object on the desk, the moment that arrives in two cities the same week. Once I had written it, one question would not go away. What does this become with more than two people? Not a louder Duet. A circle. Ensemble is the answer, and it is the most distinctive thing I have made.

I have spent years reading and recommending the kind of quiet, literary indie game that Analogue is trying to be, and since last year I run a small, curated shop that imports them. This is my turn to add one to the shelf.

Quality before speed has been the rule for this project from the start. That is why the campaign runs in June 2027 and not earlier: the games have been through more than a year of real correspondence play before you see this page.

The campaign runs through June 2027. After it closes, you receive the digital editions, the book goes through its final corrections and to the printer, and it ships to you as soon as it is ready. How soon depends on the printer and the post, among other things, and I would rather tell you that here than promise a date and miss it. You will hear from me at every step.

This is a book in development. What you read on this page describes the Correspondence Trilogy as it stands today, after more than a year of design and playtesting. Names, mechanics, page count and the look of the book can still change between now and the printed copy, and some of them will, because that is what the last months before a print run are for. What will not change is the shape of the thing: three correspondence games in one book, set in the world of the Concord and the Hush.

The artwork is made by hand. Every illustration in the book is drawn by a person: on paper first, then scanned and finished by the same hand on screen.

Digital tools used in making the book: Microsoft Word, Obsidian, Photoshop, Pixelmator Pro, InDesign and Acrobat Pro. 

Netherbook started by publishing their own "Morrovion's Guide to Gambling" after a successful Kickstarter campaign. What it brought me was enough to start my own TTRPG-webshop in 2025. Netherbook is a small, curated tabletop roleplaying game shop in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, with soon (oktober/November 2026) a physical store in a former prison cell in the Blokhuispoort.
We sell the games we would put on our own shelves, we write about them, and we answer questions from people who have never played before with the same care as questions from people who have played for thirty years.

Analogue is published under the Netherbook name. After the campaign, the trilogy will be available through the indie TTRPG channels we already work with in Europe and North America, so this book will not disappear once the campaign ends. And the Analogue World will also stay around for all to enter, to explore and to build upon.

If you back this campaign, what you are buying is a world examined carefully, and three games that match what they are trying to be.

What you are not buying is a heroic adventure, a power fantasy, or a story that resolves. The games do not crown a winner. There is no revolution, no secret revealed, no clean answer. That is what this world produces, and it is what these games try to be honest about.

The room is quiet. The envelope is waiting. The wax seal is warm.

Write when you can.