De Profundis is described as a psychodrama using H.P. Lovecrafts Cthulhu (who knew this was in bloggers dictionary) mythos. It certainly isn't like a normal RPG with dice and a game master. In fact in order to play the game the players must spend most of the play time away from each other. The game seems to mix fiction writing, LARP and online RP'ing like MUSH's all together into one horrifying -but awesome- game.
The idea is each player creates a character in the established world, it recommends the 1920's (for obvious reasons) or modern day. You keep close to how the world really is (was) but put a Lovecraft twist on it. The players correspond via letters and collectively tell the story of their decent into madness.
A few friends and I have just recently started a game of De Profundis and even though it has literally just started I've already been giddy with excitement. I know that sounds ridiculous but there is something exciting about role playing in such a different way.
We went against some of recommendations in the 'rule book'. For example it says that players should try writing actual letters to each other, I guess it gives a sense of legitimacy. We opted to go the techno root and are using email. At first I was a little apprehensive about this as I kinda liked the idea of writing letters, I never get letters, but then we realized that we have the whole internet at our disposal.. Soon we will have completely in-character blogs, twitter accounts (@NateCulture), we can link to online articles, share photos, videos, sound, pretty much anything we want and that seems much more awesome to me.
If you want to check it out for yourself you can get it right here. And you definitely should!
