On "De Profundis" (2001)

(Originally posted on Goodreads around September 15, 2023)

De Profundis is a wonderful book. Half epistolary novel, half experimental roleplaying "game", it is a beautiful piece of metafiction and psychodrama that seeks to bring innovation, psychological depth, empathy, and -- real -- paranoia to gaming circles. As an appreciator of postmodern literature writ large, I am a great enjoyer of Michał Oracz's choice to deliberately blur the line between his fiction and instructions; and as a fan of method acting and certified mental illness haver™, I absolutely adore his feverish, bizarre, and almost certainly maddening advice on how to conjure, through sheer willpower and immersion into collective emergent fiction, the weird and horrible into the corners of your IRL perception as a tool to enrich that fiction.

I think this "game" is a powerful tool even (and perhaps especially) for those who:
a) hate the rote, descriptive, instructive style of traditional TRPG books;
b) cannot cope with the copious amount of math and dice-rolling traditionally associated with those games;
c) want to shatter wholesale the illusory wall between "me" and "my character" -- or, at least, to make it less solid; and
d) have, like me, frequent trouble playing tabletop RPGs with your friends on account of mutually incompatible, busy schedules.

Grab this book, a pen, and paper. Start writing letters to your friends.

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