https://rpggeek.

com/rpg/2029/de-profundis
From the back cover: De Profundis is a radical GM-free role-playing game of modern and 1920s
horror in the style of H.P. Lovecraft. It can be used solo or with a group. Written in an
atmospheric and immersive style, this book contains all the information you need to enter the
game’s disturbing world, as well as a description of psychodramatic role-playing techniques.

https://rpggeek.com/thread/579258/review-found-attic

John-

I know it has been some time and I'm a little loathe to contact you, but now I know I have to
warn you. I didn't take you perhaps as seriously as I should have the first time, but now it has
returned.

De Profundis.

I remember reading about it years ago when it first came out. Translated from the Polish
someone said, a game unlike any other. Then within an hour of my curiosity being piqued you
sent me an email. Would I like to try playing a new game you'd found, De Profundis? At the time
I took it for an amusing coincidence, but now I see that it wasn't that. The book had plans. Our
abortive attempt to play it, with only a few letters exchanged between us- that was the damnable
thing laying a seed inside our heads. Perhaps it could not fully bring itself forth into our world
yet. Perhaps the stars were not right.

I fear that they are in alignment now. For now there comes a second edition of this game-- more
extensive and more dangerous.

At this point I'm certain that you will be shaking your head. The last time I spoke with you about
De Profundis you looked at me as if I was mad. You claimed you'd never played such a game,
never even heard of it. It had made you forget, but I remembered to an unknown purpose. Please
believe me that you have played- perhaps in my describing it again, a recollection might stir.

De Profundis is a role-playing game, though saying stretches the definition. Certainly there are
those who would not recognize it as such: it lacks a gamemaster (though perhaps there might be
an organizing force...), a conventional play structure or even a resolution system. Instead it is
closer to the shared narrative of something like Baron Munchausen or Fiasco. You may dismiss
that out of hand and perhaps if you do so you might be the better for it. But let us assume that
you are intrigued and wondering what kind of a 'game' this might actually be. Maybe you've
started to recall our earlier encounter with it. Or perhaps not.

It styles itself as a psychodrama, an odd term. In that it suggests that the players, the
participants as the book terms them, will not necessarily explore a plot-driven story. Instead
they will carry out the exploration and reflective dissection of the character they decide to take
on. That exploration comes through the exchange of letters, missives, notes and perhaps even
ephemera. In this it resembles the style of Stoker's Dracula, that novel built from
correspondence, annotations and fictitious news clippings. For a more modern version one has
to look to something like Griffin & Sabine or even House of Leaves. Of course we argued over
that latter book before, whether it exists as a true book or dread or simply executes a literary
magic trick. But the real precursor, the spiritual and explicit grandfather of De Profundis is the
work of H.P. Lovecraft.

In that sense, it is another Call of Cthulhu game, but very different. It stakes itself on discovery,
rather than investigation. As a game format, it could feed on any genre-- but somehow this is
more appropriate. And I suspect De Profundis has its own ideas for why the Lovecraftian
Mythos must be at the core. One can play oneself, select an old Call of Cthulhu character, or even
chose someone from one of the original HPL stories. That selection merely sets the scene and
the background; no one has a character sheet as such. What's important is the persona they
inhabit in the play of this psychodrama.

The 'rules', such as they are, provide guidelines and suggestions for how to carry out and support
the mood of such play. Some might dismiss the game as simply a fancified forum thread: an
exchange of letters form the narrative. It could be that, I suspect, but the text provides keys for
other paths. Methods for establishing timelessness, for marking play, for the physical nature of
the game carried out in actual parchment, action versus experience...all of these things. Though
it may seem like a passive game, there exists a passive and an active position in the play it
discusses. You might be a subject without even being aware of it. The language of the book itself
draws the reader in. As I warned you...I did warn you, didn't I???...De Profundis plays with you
even as it reveals its secrets.

The first half of De Profundis lays out these things in hints and suggestions-- beginning with an
extensive abstract presentation of the concepts. Two smaller sections follow on how to visualize
the secret world necessary for this writing. It becomes almost a relief when the tone of the
dreadful thing shifts halfway through- finally becoming more meta, like a conventional
rulesbook. Beware, though, even that's a trick to lull you in with the excellent discussion and
make you forget the brain worm it strives to embed in your consciousness. It provides
mechanical tools which some may grasp as a reference point. It may give them a sense of
familiarity...but on closer examination those tables are a straw-man, a scarecrow pointing down
a dark road. Wait...
I'm sorry, I thought I heard something, but it was only the rustling of the pages. I purchased this
game on pdf, but somehow everywhere I look, out of the corner of my eye I see it. It seems to
have bled into my thinking about other games. I must put my copy of The Armitage Files down
in the basement where it will be secure.

Where was I? Yes- De Profundis wants to be larger, wants to be used. The Lovecraft connections
reveal its true heritage, but it could easily infect other genres: fantasy, the mythic, historical...all
could fall victim. I suggests that such a play could be used to complement an on-going tabletop
game- to provide another perspective. There- you see how it tries to extend its tendrils? The
vivid examples of play at the end of the book stay with me even now- creating more ideas for
bringing De Profundis into the world. I even suggests how one might use this in an electronic
medium without losing the atmosphere...reaching a broader audience.

Which is what it wants...I see that now.

The most important thing is that we must not allow reviews of this game to be posted on the
internet-- good, bad or indifferent, they can only spark some dark thoughts at the back of
readers' minds. They'll be clicking through some easy shopping site and it will pop up in a
sidebar, the Adsense of Azathoth as it were. They'll buy it, download it and then they'll read it.
The game itself compels me to give it a positive review-- to speak of its potency and how it can
get into the consciousness. I must resist, I must not review it...

(4 Stars Are Right)

https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/classic/rev_6859.phtml

Introduction

De Profundis, an English translation of a roleplaying game from Poland, is a 32-page booklet

containing a set of rules for epistolary psychodrama—a sort of roleplaying by letter—in the world
of Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. Psychodrama, as explained by an article in an appendix, is a
diceless, game-masterless method of roleplaying, in which the course of the narrative is decided
by the course of conversation among the gamers. It seems very similar to the freestyle form of
roleplay used in MUSHes and other on-line roleplay environments.

Most roleplaying games contain rules, play examples, and game-world fiction. De Profundis
somehow manages to combine all three of those elements into the very same text.

That text contains a tale that actually works on several different levels. Not only is it a set of
rules and instructions explaining how to play, it is also an example of how to play—the rules are
laid down as a series of letters from Michal to one of his friends, becoming more and more
erratic as he approaches the end of the book. And thus, it is also itself a work of fiction—an
enjoyable pastiche of the Lovecraftian milieu.

Summary

The first section, Letters from the Abyss, makes up the largest portion of the book. This is the
section that focuses on the writing of letters. For their letters, players first make up a character,
or choose one of Lovecraft's, and play in either the 1920s or the present day. In either case, each
tries to get into the mind of his character, and writes his letters strictly from that point of view.

One part of this section that has become moderately controversial among gamers urges players
to avoid the faster and more modern "shortcuts" of email, and suggests instead using an old-
style fountain pen, or perhaps a typewriter. Taking the care and time to write a letter in the old
style turns De Profundis into a sort of "ceremony"—letting the reader get into the proper frame
of mind in which to read and correspond. Needless to say, gamers may ignore the anti-
technology dictate at their whim, and some have; there are already several YahooGroups De
Profundis mailing lists.

In De Profundis, as in any psychodrama, there is no one game-master, per se—rather, everyone

has an equal stake in creating the world and deciding where it goes.

Except, perhaps "creating" the world is a misnomer…for, as the correspondent-author explains,

we will actually be playing in our own world. In De Profundis, we blur the line between fiction
and reality, using our imagination to discover the "Truth" behind commonplace, everyday
events.

In De Profundis we don't declare to the Game-master that we are going to do a library search.
We go to a real library ourselves to look for vague comments and hints which cause shivers of
cosmic terror. We have all the books of all the libraries in the world to look through and fish for
secrets and hidden, disguised truths.

The second part of the book, Phantasmagoria, elaborates, explaining how gamers can use their
imagination to turn any ordinary place into a horror-haunted Lovecraftian realm: take
something normal, like the sound of a distant factory, and imagine some otherworldly
explanation for it. Picture it in your mind, until you can almost believe it is real…

The third section, The Hermitage, is not so much game content as the author telling (and
demonstrating) why he refuses to expose his epistolary friend to the true third part of the game
De Profundis. The appendices include a mail-in form to get onto Hogshead's international
player registry, and the aforementioned article about psychodrama in general.
Despite its Lovecraftian slant, De Profundis need hardly be limited to the Cthulhu mythos; one
could take the same epistolary techniques and apply them to any genre—fantasy, science fiction,
adventure, and so on. There is little functional difference between a letter carried by post and a
message carried from star to star by courier ship—both take time to arrive and to return.

Physical Layout

The space on De Profundis's 32 pages is used quite efficiently. Most pages have two full columns
of text, and very narrow margins. The material is dense, broken only by headers in a typewriter
font, and by small, odd illustrations. The pictures seem to have no relationship to the text
surrounding them, and most resemble clip-art from someone's word processor. In fact, the book
might have been better off without them, as they detract from the illusion that the book really
was a series of handwritten letters.

Other than the art, a few grammatical nitpicks ("dice" is not a singular noun!) and a formatting
issue with excess page numbers on the appendix article, the presentation is top notch. However,
I also have a few reservations about the content.

Opinions

De Profundis is an excellent story and a great game—clearly a work of remarkable imagination

and vision, elegant in its simplicity and execution. Its unique angle on writing should prove
fascinating for roleplayers and nonroleplayers alike. The price of $6.95 is quite a bargain,
especially in today's market. (The fact that all or most of the source material—Lovecraft's works
—can be found online for free is simply a nice bonus.)

And yet, I find I am a trifle concerned about Phantasmagoria.

Apparently, so was Hogshead; an italicized disclaimer on its copyright page states that De
Profundis is for mentally mature and well-balanced people only, and emphasizes that it "should
be read and interpreted only as a game. Under no circumstances should it be treated as a way of
living."

And yet, the rules themselves seem to recommend precisely that—"filtering" our view of reality;
looking at the world through Cthulhu-colored glasses, as it were.

The best way to filter the reality around you is to evoke the state of controlled paranoia, or
schizophrenia. You see something, and say this is It. You can see the second bottom, the hidden
side of the world, the real face of monsters and mysteries inhabiting our world in disguise. You
can see through all this, through their camouflage. You begin to notice the details that have been
hidden from your view.

I may be taking the quote slightly out of context, yet I cannot help reflecting on the struggle that
RPGs have faced for years against organizations such as BADD ("Bothered About Dungeons &
Dragons") who claim that roleplaying games promote satanism, disconnection from reality, and
suicide. RPG advocates have responded with pamphlets and rebuttals, claiming that almost all
gamers were able to tell the difference between reality and fantasy, and the result has been a
kind of stalemate.

And now, along comes a game that encourages gamers to blur those lines…that suggests
inducing paranoia or schizophrenia, and overlaying the real world with our imaginations. For
BADD propaganda, it would seem almost heaven-sent—and for people who already have trouble
distinguishing fantasy from reality, any alternate-reality game would be bad, but De Profundis
could be more dangerous than most.

It's getting harder and harder to tell fictitious letters, which come from the insides of our
minds, from the real letters from the real world. Actually it wouldn't make a difference if our
reality turned out to be as nightmarish as we describe it in our De Profundis letters. The two
types of letters would just be the same. They would just all be letters from the Abyss.

Most of us can read this book and realize that it is simply fiction, written to provide a means of
playing out a Lovecraftian story—the literary equivalent of ghost stories around a campfire. But
will everybody share this viewpoint?

Conclusion

Worries aside, De Profundis is both an excellent game and an excellent story, at an excellent
price. At less than $7, buy it just to read it, and consider any fun you get out of playing it an
unexpected bonus. But do be careful with it.

http://diehardgamefan.com/2011/10/11/tabletop-review-de-profundis-second-edition-2/

Tabletop Review: De Profundis (Second Edition)

Justin Jeffers | October 11, 2011 | Archive, Tabletop Gaming, Top Story | No Comments

De Profundis (Second Edition)

Publisher: Wydawnictwo Portal/Cubicle 7 Entertainment Ltd.
Authors: Michal Oracz, Marcel Galka, Rafal Szyma
Page Count: 110
Release Date: 09/29/2010
Cost: $14.99 (PDF)
Get it here: DriveThruRPG.com

Sit and read this letter slowly, there’s something I have to tell you. Late at night, something has
been calling to me, urging me to come outside and learn the secrets of the world. The voice calls
from the foot of the nearby mountains; there is an old abandoned mine shaft there… a daunting
place to be sure. At first I resisted any impulse to go, but now I am not going to ignore it
anymore, why should I? What else do I have? What stops me from transcending my droll
existence? Nothing. I have resolved that tomorrow night I will pack my most necessary things
and make the trek to the mine entrance, there my fate awaits. If you don’t hear further from me,
burn my letters and the diary I keep in the top drawer of my nightstand…

Overview
This is De Profundis, a role-playing game where the players write more than they roll dice,
where they think more than they talk, and where they imagine more than is really there… or is
all that is imagined really there and more? The book was written and conceived by Polish game
designer Michal Oracz, whom board game players might know from his popular Neuroshima
Hex!, a quick, tactical war game. De Profundis is loosely set in the mythos of H.P. Lovecraft, an
ever-popular source of setting material for a number of games, especially in the last ten years.
The reason I say “loosely” is because the game is more about imitating the feel of Lovecraft’s
stories, and not about using the specific terminology of the Lovecraft universe.

The Lovecraft mythos has seen some love in recent days and has received a lot of different
treatments. The gaming community has seen everything from the grandiose Arkham Horror and
Mansions of Madness, to the cheesy Cthulhu themes slapped onto basic dice and card games.
Then of course, there is the grandpappy of Lovecraft RPGs: Call of Cthulhu. Well, this is totally
different from all of them.

Gameplay and Feel

De Profundis is a game about communicating your imagined experiences. Whether you do this
with a large group of people (called a Society or Network), one other person, or just yourself, the
goal is to create a narrative through a series of writings. Before you start writing, you have to
choose who you are going to be. You can simply be yourself in the current time, or you can be a
person in the 1920s, or you can be a specific character from one of Lovecraft’s stories.

Later in the book there is some equivocating as to whether this is a hard and fast rule, and it
seems that you are free to be anyone in any time period as long as you are experiencing strange
occurrences in the style of Lovecraft’s stories. This brings up one of my only complaints with this
book: that there are multiple writers for the various “supplemental”  chapters, and some of
what they write seems to slightly expand upon (or maybe even contradict a little) what was
written by Michal Oracz in the introduction and three “books”  (sections) that comprise the
main concepts of the game.

For example, in the “On Conventions” section of the first supplemental chapter it reads: “The
possibilities for role-playing by letter-writing are practically limitless, defined only by the nature
and character of the Society writing them rather than by any specific rules in De Profundis
itself”. After reading 52 pages of what the game was about and how it was played, here the
book is saying the specific rules don’t really matter! Well, being the open-minded role-player
that I am, this does not bother me all that much, except for the general contradiction itself.
However, it makes me think twice about the cohesiveness of the game if part of the core book is
telling me that it is fine to disregard the rules and do what I want.

Well, what are those specific rules that I can ignore if I want to? Um…well you have to write
letters and…basically be interesting and creepy. Heck, there really aren’t any specific rules in De
Profundis aside from guidelines like time (a person in 1925 can’t be writing letters to a person in
1887 for example…unless you decide to ignore those guidelines), the whole game is about
creating an atmosphere, a feel. This is key to getting into the game, and possibly one aspect that
will make some people not call it a game at all. Instead of accomplishing a specific goal that is set
by the game or the GM (did I tell you this is primarily a GM-less game? It is.), the goal is more
abstract. How do I write a good narrative? Well, that is one of the things that the book does, it
gives you some hints on how to create your story in a Lovecraftian way; it instructs you to hint
instead of tell, to feel instead of know. I should also note that you don’t even have to write letters
if you don’t want to, you can just take pictures or record yourself speaking. I’ll just push these
guidelines out a little further…

Anyway, back to characters. Ideally, players in a Society (a group of people playing De

Profundis) will choose their identity and begin writing to each other as those identities. For
instance, if I choose to be Dr. Fernsbury, a small-town physician in 1927, I will expect letters
addressed to me with “Dear Dr. Fernsbury” or some such greeting. I will expect the letter to
be written with a dip pen, fountain pen or a typewriter, and on paper that bears a little
resemblance to paper technology back then. I will write letters to my confidante (fellow player),
and if their identity is a Madame Du Feuilles I will address my letters accordingly. You see, the
world created in the letter exchange is the game world, and the game world is special in that
while it is shaped by each player individually, it is supposed to be shared universally. As an
illustration, imagine a small group of people sitting around a table holding up signs saying what
they are feeling, or Tarot cards, or masks, but not having much say in what other people decide
to reveal. In this sense the game is about creating a shared experience that is not necessarily
cooperative, but shared nonetheless.

Players in a Society will also choose a convention, or a specific theme and style of the game you
wish to run. An example convention might be a Victorian era theme and aristocratic style,
another might be current-day Illuminati theme and a formal political style, yet another might be
a London street urchin theme with a barely-literate-pauper style. It’s all up to you and the
Society in which you play in.

Now, here is another guideline that is emphasized in the book: if you want to play a specialist in
a particular field of knowledge like, say, a physician in 1927, you should be knowledgeable about
that subject. Logical, eh? You should write about how you treated a patient with abnormal
reflexes and a pallid complexion who happened to have eerily long canines, and in real life take
yourself to the library or Wikipedia and research basic medical terms and language so that your
letters can be as authentic as possible. Are you going to play a map-maker from the Colonial era?
Better study your 18th century maps. How about a Civil War soldier who deserted and got lost in
the woods? Find a regiment and an army to belong to, as well as a town to be from. These kinds
of ideas are guidelines I can get behind. These are the guidelines that you ignore to the
detriment of your game!

Other General Thoughts

I don’t want to give too much away about what the De Profundis book says to the reader and the
great ideas that are contained inside, but I will talk a little more about what the book as a whole
is like and some of my thoughts on it.

As someone who collects RPGs and often wonders what changes the authors make from one
edition to the next, I was of course curious to see if I could find out what the first edition of De
Profundis contained. Unfortunately I was unable to find a copy easily and instead could only
surmise based on the page count information I could dig up, which put the first edition (in
Polish, this may have been a very early edition) at 28 pages, while the second edition is 110
pages. Wow! If that information is correct, that is quite a jump in content. If there are any first
edition owners reading this, I can only say that it might be worth your while to pick up the
second edition, you might be pleasantly surprised. Of course, the original edition seems to have
been written in the late 90’s and was published in 2001, so it’s not surprising that several years
later a substantial update would be in order.

Another aspect of the book that I really enjoy is the style it is written in. The three main sections
of the book (and one of the supplemental sections) are written like letters. I love that. The author
begins each “chapter” like a new letter in a series of letters, which takes away the normally dry
core rulebook format and instead immerses you in a hot bath of theme. The author
demonstrates the feel of the game right in the rules.

There are about 49 pages of those letter-chapters that comprise the main thrust of the game, and
then the following sections are updates or supplemental materials presented in a more
conventional style (except for the section on e-mails). These additional sections are excellent in
the way that they expand upon and clarify the intentions of the game (with the few exceptions of
small contradictions that I noted earlier). There are sections on Society play, where groups of
people form what is essentially a campaign group that plays De Profundis; a section on an
example campaign with commentary; a section of using De Profundis with Call of Cthulhu or
other RPGs; and even more to help get your games going.

One more thing about actually playing De Profundis: it’s harder than it sounds. I couldn’t find
anyone to play with me on short notice so I tried writing some solo material, and capturing the
subtlety and creepiness required to make it interesting was really hard. Much like writing a good
story, so much of the challenge is how to make it interesting.

Conclusion
This book made me very excited about role-playing, and I like the possibilities that spring up in
my mind when I read this book. The concept of psychodrama, not as a psychological therapy tool
but as a sort of self-imposed, paranoia-inducing state of mind, is an idea that really appeals to
me as a gamer and as a writer. You might also think of it as attuning your perceptions to
Lovecraft and his idea of horror, putting yourself in a Lovecraft story. I want to sit down on a
rainy evening with a lit candle and scratch out a letter about strange faces in the windows after
reading this book, and that is cool.

As far as playing the game, I worry that an exchange of letters would just be a few people writing
to each other about weird stuff without any provocation. What I mean is, I don’t see how a game
could carry on if players are just trying to write about their creepy experiences without asking
the other players questions relating to their experiences. Basically, I worry about selfish playing.
With a game so dependent upon individual effort, I can see some folks writing their narrative
continuously without engaging the narratives of other players and I would implore any of you to
consider that if and when you play the game.

If you like role-playing, getting a little creeped out, and especially if you like the feel of H.P.
Lovecraft’s stories and want to take a crack at recreating that, definitely check out De Profundis,
you will not be disappointed.