Hello, whoever may be reading this! The Spirit of Small Gifts is a super nifty game, but it's definitely pretty different from a lot of games I've seen. I wanted to share how the game has gone for me so far, so if you're thinking about getting the game, think of this of a kind of play example I guess?
Last week, my wife and I decided to mail out some letters to some friends of ours, to help support the USPS. Originally, it was going to be just normal letters, but then I remember how much I loved this game when I first saw it browsing the material I got in the itch Racial Justice bundle, so I decided to try it out.
First, as it turns out, people are super stressed right now and my friends largely didn't want to/have the spoons to take the initiative to talk about their characters, so I ended up going a bit sideways of the rules and sent to a few characters I play with. This might just be my friend group, though, lol.
I sent my friend's Barbarian a weird plastic coin I found, because she's currently dealing with a bunch of conspiracies and trying to get to hell to find her wife; I figure it should worth a trade somewhere, or a fee, or a toll, but she's a pretty creative player, so I'm excited to see if she does anything else with it!
To the Divine in our Monster of the Week game I sent some incense, because that's often associated with meditation and prayer. Will they have anything to use it for? Maybe not, but I told the angel it was because Jesus was given frankincense and myrrh as a baby, which I thought was a cute justification.
To the demon-host Gumshoe in the same Monster of the Week game I sent a baggy of salt. He was, uh, really concerned with how it looked when it arrived in the mail, but realized his mistake pretty quickly and we had a laugh about it.
For the GM of our Curse of Strahd game, I ended up sending a letter to a major NPC, Ireena Kolyana. She got some toothpicks (tiny stakes?) which was possibly a little on the nose, but everybody absolutely loved it.
For the Grave Cleric in the same Curse of Strahd game, we sent some tea bags. She super needs to chill out, and she needs to connect with people, and... maybe it'll just help her sleep? This one was really fun, because we poked a lot at the parts of her backstory that she doesn't fully understand in-character yet, and was told that the spirit "didn't need to come for her entire life like that."
For the very tragic Wild Magic Sorcerer in CoS, we sent some bandages and gauze. Maybe a little modern, but multiversal postage is weird. She's, uh, had a lot of very bad injuries lately but I've got a feeling that she's going to find a very nice way to use it that isn't super obvious.
Everybody absolutely loved the gifts, which was definitely the point of it all! Plus, my wife had fun prettying up the envelopes, aging the letters, using our wax stamp that otherwise would be gathering dust, and so on.
In all, I found it a little tough to give gifts that are fitting but not too on the nose, and trying to get info from my friends without being too obvious that something was going on. But I don't think that's a bad thing, honestly, because there's definitely a sense of kayfabe that you need to maintain in roleplaying, and this game is no exception. The other thing I'll say is that I got super anxious that even the tiny gifts I was sending would make the envelope too thick to send on a single stamp, or run the risk of being non-machinable, so we ended up putting them in a second, larger envelope to protect them (and double stamped to make sure we paid adequate postage!). You probably don't need to do this, but we wanted to add a wax seal, which is very often an issue anyway, so it worked out.
Haven't had any gifts used or Lore sent back, so I haven't gotten to play around with much of the advancement or character definition yet, but definitely looking forward to it!
I can't rave about this game enough, so if you're thinking of trying it, please take this as a full, glowing recommendation!