Pyramid Pick
De Profundis
Published by Hogshead Publishing
Written by Michal Oracz
Translated from Polish by Maja Apollonia Pica
Cover Artwork by Dennis Detwiller
32 pages; $6.95
De Profundis, subtitled "Letters from the Abyss," is part of Hogshead Publishing's "New Style" line of roleplaying and storytelling games. Like its companions in the series, De Profundis proposes a unique new way to explore the boundaries of the roleplaying hobby and to create fascinating stories. Unlike a few of its forebears of the New Style, it also makes for truly fun gaming.
The goal of De Profundis is to replicate the horror stories of H.P. Lovecraft through a style of roleplaying the author calls "psychodrama." Psychodrama, in this context, is a fancy word for storytelling without rules and without a gamemaster. While the book gives rules for plain psychodrama (simply -- taking turns in a dark room cooperatively narrating a story in which you play yourself), the heart of De Profundis employs "correspondence psychodrama" as its primary format. Translation: De Profundis is played out in letters -- hand-written and in-character -- shared between two participants and posted through the regular mail.
Correspondence psychodrama is rules-free and GM-less, but this doesn't mean it is entirely without strictures or focus. What De Profundis does is exchange rules for the epistolary format, which brings with it some significant restrictions and qualifiers. Coupled with the requirements . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: January 11, 2002
Copyright © 2002 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.