Terms and Conditions

1. Who we are

The Society of Unseen Things is operated by Gizmopress Limited, a company registered in New Zealand, NZBN 9429046016478. In these terms “we”, “us” and “the Society” mean that company; “you” means the adult who holds the account.

You can reach us at [email protected].

2. What these terms cover

They cover our website, the Clearance Area at /clearance and everything behind it, the letters and enclosures we write and supply, the catalogue cards we post, and anything you send us through the service.

You accept these terms when you tick the box in the Clearance Area before your account opens. We record the date you did so. If you do not accept them, do not use the service.

The Society of Unseen Things is a work of fiction, presented as though it were real, and you take part in it knowingly. Nothing written in the Society’s voice — in a letter, on a card, or on the in-world pages of this site — is a statement of fact, a promise, or a term of this agreement. The agreement is this page, together with the documents it points to.

3. The rule we never break

We never send a letter to a child.

This is a term of this agreement, not a slogan. Every letter and every piece of the Society’s correspondence is supplied to an adult, who decides how and when their child sees it. No child signs up here. We do not ask for and do not want a child’s real name; the only name we hold for a recruit is the codename an adult chose.

The one thing we address to a codename is a packet of catalogue cards, posted to an address an adult gave us. The full explanation is on Safety for Parents.

What this promise does not say. It is about letters and how they are delivered. It is not a promise that your child will never use anything we make. Your account is yours, and if you choose to let your child use a part of the service on it, that is your decision to make and yours to supervise — you remain responsible for what is done through your account (section 5), and what we would then hold is dealt with in section 12.

4. Who may hold an account

You must be 18 or over. You must be the parent or legal guardian of the child a commission is for, or have that parent or guardian’s permission, and you confirm which when you enrol a recruit.

Where an account is opened for a child by someone who is not their parent or guardian — a grandparent, an aunt, a family friend — the parent or guardian must know about it and agree to it.

5. Your account, and the adults around a recruit

We sign you in by email — a code or a link sent to your address — so keep your email account secure and tell us promptly if you think someone else has reached yours. You are responsible for what is done through your account.

A commission may involve two adults: the one at the child’s address, and the one playing the Society’s officer. Each holds their own account, and each sees only what their role needs. Inviting another adult means giving them access to that child’s commission, so invite only adults you would trust with your child’s post.

We hold one address per adult, given to us for a purpose. We do not show one adult another adult’s address.

6. The subscription, and what it costs

A Field Commission is a monthly subscription: a letter a week, supplied to you as a PDF to print at home, and two catalogue cards a month, posted by the Archive in batches. The current price, in your billing region’s currency, and what is included are on the pricing page, and are shown to you again before you pay. Prices include GST where GST applies.

You pay in advance for each month. Your billing country decides which price list applies, and we record it when you pay. We may change our prices; a change never applies to a month you have already paid for, and we will tell you before it applies to your next one.

You provide the printer, the paper, the ink and the envelope. The letters are designed for a single sheet of ordinary A4 and a domestic printer, but we cannot promise a particular result on your equipment.

7. Renewal, cancellation and refunds

The subscription renews monthly until you stop it. You can stop it at any time, without a fee, and it then runs to the end of the month you have paid for.

We offer a full refund of the first month if your child is not taken with it. The guarantee runs until they show they are — the exact terms, and the acts that close it, are on the pricing page, and we honour them as written there. While the window is open, the adult who paid can ask for the refund from their billing page in the app: it returns the first month’s payment to the card that made it and stops the subscription that day. You can also end the guarantee yourself, deliberately, so that the welcome kit can be sent sooner; we say so plainly at the point we offer it. The guarantee is offered once per recruit: if you take the refund and later subscribe again for the same child, the letters pick up where they stopped, and that second first month is not refundable.

Anything already sent to you is yours to keep. Catalogue cards and the welcome kit, once posted, are not refundable, because they have been printed for and posted to you. Nothing in this section limits your rights under section 16.

8. Catalogue cards, and posting them

Cards are printed in batches and posted from New Zealand on monthly runs. We tell you when a run closes. We do not promise a delivery date, and once a parcel is with the postal service its timing is not ours to control. The welcome kit is the one parcel that does not ride a monthly run: it is sent once, near the start, as soon as the guarantee in section 7 has closed.

The Archive chooses which cards go in an envelope. You cannot choose them, and duplicates are deliberate. You can buy additional cards at the per-card price on the pricing page.

We post to whichever adult handles your recruit’s letters, at the address that adult gives us and in their own name. We hold no address for a child. If a parcel is lost in the post, tell us and we will send a replacement once it is reasonable to conclude it is not coming.

9. Artwork and anything else you send us

In short: a sighting record is our drawing to begin with, and colouring it in completes a Society document — so when you send it back, it becomes ours. We will publish it on the internet and in print, we will sell it as part of the Society’s catalogue, and we do not pay for it. Your family keeps the right to use your own child’s work at home and to share it yourselves. Do not send us anything you are not happy for us to keep and use in the way this section describes.

9.1 What this applies to

This section applies to every image, drawing, photograph, scan, piece of writing or other material you upload or otherwise send to us through the service, and to anything a child produced that you send us on their behalf. We call all of it Submitted Material.

9.2 It becomes ours

Nearly everything that comes back to us started here. A sighting record, a service record, the front of a card — the drawing is ours, and colouring it in completes a document the Archive issued. That underlying artwork stays ours throughout: sending a finished sheet back to us gives you, the child, or anyone else no right in it, and nothing in this section transfers any part of it to you. What is dealt with below is what the child added to it.

You assign to us, absolutely and for all countries, all copyright and every other intellectual property right you hold in the Submitted Material, for the full term of those rights including all renewals and extensions. Where the child is the author, you confirm that you have the authority to deal with the rights in their work, you assign those rights to us so far as you are able, and you agree to do anything we reasonably ask to confirm or complete that assignment. The assignment takes effect the moment the material reaches us, and it cannot be revoked.

If for any reason that assignment does not take effect, you instead grant us a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable licence to do everything set out below, free of charge.

9.3 What we will do with it

We may — and intend to — copy, adapt, crop, recolour, combine, edit, reproduce, publish, broadcast, display, distribute, licence and sell the Submitted Material anywhere in the world and in any medium now known or invented later. In particular:

• it may be composed onto a trading card and become part of the Society’s catalogue, printed, and sold to anyone;
• it may appear on this website, in the Clearance Area, on printed letters and enclosures, in our packaging, and in advertising;
• it may be published on the internet, including on social media and other platforms whose own terms then apply to it;
• it may be altered, and it may be shown alongside material it was not made with.

Cards made from a child’s artwork go into general circulation, and other children will receive them.

9.4 What your family may still do

None of this stops you using your own child’s work. You, the child and your family may keep, copy, display and share the coloured sheet for your own personal, non-commercial purposes — on the fridge, in an album, printed for a grandparent, posted on your own accounts. We grant you a free, worldwide, perpetual licence to do exactly that, and we will not object to it.

What that licence does not cover is commerce: you may not sell it, licence it to anyone else, or use it to advertise anything. Our own artwork underneath it stays subject to section 10.

9.5 Names, and what we will not publish

We will never publish a child’s real name, age, address or contact details alongside their artwork, and we do not hold those things in the first place (section 3). Where a piece of artwork is credited at all, it is credited to a codename.

A codename you choose is public the moment a card carrying it is printed, so choose one you are content to see in circulation.

9.6 Moral rights

To the fullest extent the law allows, you waive, and confirm that the child through you waives, all moral rights in the Submitted Material — the right to be identified as its author and the right to object to how it is treated — and you each agree not to assert them. Where a waiver is not effective, you consent, and confirm the child’s consent, to every act described in this section.

9.7 What you promise us

You confirm, each time you send us something, that:

• it was made by the child the commission is for — with whatever help the family gave — or by you;
• you are the parent or legal guardian of that child, or have their parent or guardian’s permission, and you have the authority to grant everything in this section on that child’s behalf;
• apart from our own artwork underneath it, it does not copy anyone else’s work, and does not include a brand, character or photograph belonging to someone else;
• it does not show an identifiable person, and contains nothing offensive or unlawful;
• you have looked it over for anything that would identify the child — a real name, a school, a street — and it carries none of it.

You indemnify us against any claim arising from those confirmations being wrong.

9.8 No obligation, and no return

We do not have to use anything you send us, print it, put it on a card, or keep it. We may decline artwork for any reason and will say why in plain words. What reaches us is a photograph or scan — the original stays with you — and we do not undertake to keep what we receive indefinitely, so keep your own copy of anything you care about.

If, after all of that, you would rather we stopped using a particular piece, write to us. We are not obliged to agree, and we cannot recall cards already printed and posted, but we will listen and we will usually stop using it going forward.

10. Our letters, and what you may do with them

The Society, its name, its officers, its departments, its storylines, the letters, the enclosures, the card designs and everything else we supply belong to us. While your subscription is running, you may print them, as many times as you need, and use them within your own household for the child the commission is for.

You may not:

• sell, hire out or otherwise commercialise anything we supply;
• publish our letters or PDFs, or share them in a form that lets others download them;
• use our material to run a similar service, paid or unpaid.

Printed catalogue cards are yours once posted, and you and your child may swap them or give them away.

11. What you agree not to do

• Give a child access to your account or to this side of the site, except through a feature we provide for that purpose and you have switched on.
• Use the service to send us anything unlawful, or anything showing an identifiable person.
• Attempt to reach another family’s records, interfere with the service, or work around any limit in it.
• Scrape, copy or republish the site or our material in bulk.
• Impersonate the Society to anyone outside your own household game.

12. Privacy, and what we hold

We hold as little as the service can run on. For each adult: an email address, a name if you give us one, a billing country, and a postal address only once there is something to post. For each recruit: a codename, a department, an age band, a few interests, and the record of their correspondence. Never a child’s real name.

We use it to run your subscription — to write and supply letters, to take payment, to post cards, and to email you about your own account. We do not sell personal information. Payment card details are handled by our payment provider and never reach our systems.

Artwork you send us is dealt with under section 9, and is published — that is what it is for. Everything else about your account is not.

If your child uses part of the service on your account — something we do not offer today, and would only ever offer as a thing you switch on — we will tell you, before you switch it on, exactly what it collects, how long we keep it and how to delete it.

We use service providers to host the service, send our email and take payment, and they hold this information on our behalf, including outside New Zealand. We keep records for as long as we need them to run the service and to meet our legal obligations, and then we delete them.

The Privacy Act 2020 gives you the right to ask for the personal information we hold about you and to have it corrected. Write to [email protected] and we will answer within the time the Act allows. You can close your account at any time and ask us to delete what we hold, subject to records we are required to keep.

We use cookies only to keep you signed in and to remember your light-or-dark preference on your own device. We do not use advertising cookies.

13. Availability, and changes to the service

We will do our best to keep the service running and the letters arriving, but we do not promise it will never be unavailable. We may change the storylines, the letters, the card designs and how the service works.

If we make a change that materially reduces what you are paying for, we will tell you, and you may stop your subscription and receive a proportionate refund of the month in progress.

14. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The revision date at the top of this page is always the current one. If a change materially affects you, we will email you before it takes effect and ask you to accept the new terms; if you would rather not, you may stop your subscription and we will refund the unused part of the month in progress.

Changes never apply backwards. In particular, a change to section 9 does not alter what we may do with artwork you have already sent us, and does not claw back rights in artwork you sent under earlier terms.

15. Suspending or closing an account

You may close your account at any time. We may suspend or close an account if these terms are broken, if a payment fails and is not put right, or if we reasonably believe a child is at risk. Where we can, we will tell you first and give you a chance to put it right.

If we close your account for a reason that is not your fault, we refund the unused part of the month in progress. Sections 9, 10, 17 and 18 survive the end of this agreement.

16. Your rights under New Zealand consumer law

Where you are a consumer, the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 and the Fair Trading Act 1986 give you rights that cannot be excluded. Nothing in these terms limits or excludes them, and where anything here conflicts with them, they win.

Where you acquire the service for the purposes of a business, those Acts do not apply, and you and we agree to contract out of them to the extent the law allows.

17. What we are responsible for

We are responsible for loss you suffer that is a foreseeable result of us breaking these terms or failing to use reasonable care. We are not responsible for loss that is not foreseeable, for anything caused by your own equipment or your own printer, for delays once a parcel is with the postal service, or for how the game goes in your household.

Except where the law says otherwise, our total liability to you in connection with the service is limited to the amount you have paid us in the twelve months before the claim.

We do not limit our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else the law does not allow us to limit — including the rights in section 16.

18. Governing law, and the rest

These terms are governed by New Zealand law, and the New Zealand courts have jurisdiction. If part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stands.

We may transfer our rights and obligations under these terms to another organisation, and your rights under them are unaffected. You may not transfer yours without our agreement. A delay in enforcing a term is not a waiver of it.

These terms, together with the pricing page and anything else we point you at from here, are the whole agreement between us.

19. How to reach us

Gizmopress Limited, New Zealand · NZBN 9429046016478
[email protected]

Revised 12 September 2026.