"Quill Noir" '30s Pulp Detective Setting for Quill RPG Now Available

Quill: A Letter-Writing Roleplaying Game for a Single Player is one of my favorite stand-alone solo games, as this review I wrote will attest. Last year, I wrote a scenario supplement for Quill called Quill Quest, in keeping with the pseudo-medieval theme of the original game. However, the open-ended mechanics of Quill seemed to be easily adaptable to other genres, other themes. So I stripped away the fantasy world trappings of original Quill and placed the game smack-dab in the middle of the 1930s pulp detective era. Hang tough, gumshoes, as you're about the enter the rough-and-tumble world of Quill Noir!

The case had me bewildered. I lit up a Lucky Strike and leaned back in my chair, propping my feet up on my desk. Lacing my fingers behind my head and closing my eyes, I mulled over what Sgt. Ward had said. Despite the fact mob boss Felix Bunte would be free to swoop in and take over the waterfront district, I didn’t think he had anything to do with Martino’s murder. It was too sloppy to be one of his goons. The blood at the crime scene had come from someone else; there were animal hairs clutched in Martino’s hand; and there was a cigarette butt found near the body. My eyes popped open and I lept from my chair as if I had been seated on Ol’ Sparky. I lunged for the phone and hurriedly dialed the station as I fumbled with my hat and overcoat.

“Sgt. Ward? Yeah, it’s me. Grab a couple of your boys and meet me at Luanne McKenzie’s place. Yeah, Martino’s girlfriend. I want to ask her again how she hurt her hand. Stop by Judge Smalls’ place on your way and get a search warrant too. I want to check out any fur stoles in her closet as well as what brand she smokes.”

Quill Noir takes place in the world of 1930s pulp crime fiction novels and 1940s hardboiled detective films. In Quill Noir, clever gumshoes try to solve baffling cases while gangsters and gun molls thwart their efforts to bring the guilty to justice. Using a new Quill letter format, “The First-Person Narrative,” you'll compose your solution in a first-person perspective, as if you were mulling over the facts of the case to yourself while sitting in your seedy downtown office, interrogating a suspect in a back alley, or staring down a mob enforcer. Quill Noir contains six new Character archetypes (the Private Eye, the Plainclothesman, the Dilettante, the G-Man, the Newshound, and the Enforcer) and four exciting cases for you to solve.

Quill Noir is now available in PDF at Drive Through RPG. (A copy of Quill: A Letter-Writing Roleplaying Game for a Single Player is required to play.) Both Quill and Quill Noir (and Quill Quest too) are available as Pay What You Want releases, so try before you buy, if you prefer. Also, Quill and Quill Noir have been released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.