Epistolary: Great RPG Mechanics

#RPGMechanics: Week Five

You may or may not remember De Profundis. I died a little inside when I discovered it came out in 2002. In English at least. The Polish original came out even earlier. It was among a group of smaller, indie publications launching at the time– a few years later we’d start to see things like My Life With Master and The Shab Al-Hiri Roach. De Profundis, though, was a little more abstract. It’s literally play-by-post, because you write physical letters. 

The basic concept is that you write sprawling, meditative letters about weirdness in a character’s life, possibly a thinly glossed version of yourself in another place or time. The letters themselves should be artifacts– physical objects you can mark up, annotate, and leave little additional clues or objects in. You send these to another player who then replies to your strangeness with queries or their own experiences. You continue this back and forth with an escalating sense of things being off. 

The game leans into a Lovecraftian vibe, though it is not particularly specific about the mythos itself, which is great. That allows you to lean into one of, IMHO, the best aspects of Role-Playing": being able to consider and describe something from the first person. What would this strangeness actually look like to someone unfamiliar with the interior intricacies? There’s a whole series for the original Hunter: The Reckoning rpg from White Wolf built on this– humans trying to make sense of all the supernatural bs of the world.

The touchstone here is the work of Lovecraft and a lot of his followers. But it also points to Dracula, not the original epistolary novel, but the shadow which looms over this form for literary form in horror. That’s notable for being a strongly mixed-media piece– with different voices over time as well as newspaper clippings and summaries.

De Profundis is also interesting in that it comes about right at the turn of the millennium, when most people were starting to have email as an ever-present and constant feature in their lives. Folks began to realize that this would always be something they’d need to have and be connected to. De Profundis reacts to that by asking the players to create something concrete and not ephemeral.  

It’s also interesting that De Profundis is among the first solo rpgs, a movement which has become stronger and more developed in recent years. In this sense the game really offers just a loose form– more an idea that you could do some writing like this. I don’t think there’s a direct line from De Profundis to something like Thousand Year Vampire, but there is a connection.

I never got more than a couple of exchanges into a De Profundis game. Some of that’s my own problem with solo gaming. I’ve never been able to get into play by post either. I go in with the best of intentions, but inevitably crash out. There’s not enough feedback to catch my lizard brain. So I was a little worried when I played the Good Society, with its dedicated epistolary phase. 

Good Society’s gameplay has a tight structure: Novel, Reputation, Rumor & Scandal, and finally Epistolary. In this last phase players write letters, I believe 1 or 2, from the characters  under their control. These can be written out fully or sketched out and then summarized by the player. I’m glad the game encourages the former and permits the latter. 

These are an absolute joy. These letters offer the chance for characters to regroup and consider the implications of events from earlier. You can reveal new details, comment on occurrences, set up new plot threads, question people’s motivations. They’re dynamite as a moment of commentary. I get that they’re echoing the original literary sources, but I think it is worth considering how well they operate as a moment of reflection built into the game. 

That’s something I think a lot of games could benefit from mechanically. Lots of groups do Stars & Wishes, Epilogues, Debriefs, but often these are either meta-discussions or done at the end of a campaign. Good Society has these connected to a regular cycle of play. You could build something like this into a campaign to serve as a breaker or signal for the changing of arcs. Ask each player to write or summarize a letter, journal entry, or email from their character. I think it offers way to explore character we often don’t get in ttrpgs.