Most roleplaying games work from a broad base of shared assumptions - characters are individuals rated on known scales in pre-defined categories, play sessions are a few hours at a time and generally face to face, the GM handles the world and players handle the characters, and so on. Clearly these assumptions work well for a lot of purposes. But there's always room to reexamine the assumptions and try others.
I first heard about this game last spring, when I got to meet James Wallis in person for the first time. He'd been to a games convention in Poland, and was full of fascinating stories about the state of gaming there. One of the games was designed to simulate not just the environment of Lovecraft's stories but the stories themselves - to be played out as correspondence. When I learned, a few months later, that he'd managed to get an English translation done and was going to be publishing it, I begged for a copy.
To my taste, at least, this is the best-looking of the New Style games, apart from possibly Puppetland. If you haven't seen these before, go back and check the price and page count. Yes, these actually are complete games. You can play them, in some cases many times. De Profundis sports a lurid cover in his best disturbing style by Dennis Detwiller, and a beautiful, crisp, simple interior design. Section headings are in a jagged typewriter font, the body text in some gorgeous, easy-on-the-eyes font I don't quite recognize. The illustrations are pretty much clip art, well-chosen and positioned. The book is a pleasure to hold and read.
The book is also an example of play.
There are no mechanics as such in De Profundis. You build up your character as a person through correspondence with the other players. The book is a series of letters from other Oracz to a friend of his, weaving together his account of dreaming about an evil tome called De Profundis and how he feels compelled to release it into the waking world with the routine of his life, reminiscences about old gaming groups, and the like. Gradually, in the final Lovecraftian tradition, Oracz loses it, plunging in the end toward an uncertain doom. Along the way, he reviews the structure of Lovecraft's stories and provides many practical tips about characterization and other aspects of play.
This game was very clearly a work of love. Nobody would put this much effort into talking about the nitty-gritty of preparing mysteriously defiled diaries unless they were enjoying it. (At least I hope not.) The book covers both modern-day games and ones set in Lovecraft's own era, with some neat suggestions for conducting a correspondence as if between people in the 1920s.
Oracz is a correspondent of the old school. He's uncertain of the merits of ballpoint pens, against typewriters, and wildly against reliance on the Internet. For my part, I put together a game for friends now being played pseudonymously at livejournal.com, and apart from real life sometimes keeping me away from it for weeks on end, it works very well. However, that's a matter of taste. The spirit of the thing applies in any event.
This is not a game to get if you're looking for well-defined rules. It is very much a freeform exercise, in which the boundaries are set by shared consensus about genre and tone and players' respective judgments. That just doesn't work for some people, and I don't want to raise any false expectations. What you get here is, I think, an actual game. It's certainly playable, since we've been playing it. But it can also be seen as a shared-fiction creation guide or even a particularly sedate form of improv theatre.
Since I am a Lovecraft fan of long standing and also interested in experiments in fresh approaches to game design, I loved it. This is one of those games that I've been waiting for for years without ever knowing it until now. I am very glad to have this, and heartily recommend it.
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(Due to spamming, old forum discussions are no linked.)