De Profundis (role-playing game)

The Diana Jones Award committee noted that the game instead reinvents the role-playing form.

[2] Hogshead marketed De Profundis with the tagline, "This game is intended for mentally stable adults".

It is best remembered for its correspondence rules, which allowed players to rather uniquely play the game through the exchange of in-character letters.

The final game in Hogshead's New Style line was an English translation of De Profundis published in 2002.

[3]: 306 However, later the same year, in November 2002, James Wallis, Director of Hogshead Publishing, announced that Hogshead was leaving the adventure gaming industry due to boredom, creative frustration, and increasing despondence about the future of the specialist gaming industry.

[3]: 307 In his 2023 book Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground, RPG historian Stu Horvath noted, "There is an intimacy in letter writing that the game seeks to embrace, encouraging play to involve ink and paper, rather than emails and blogs ...

Horvath concluded, "De Profundis revels something essential but previously hidden about how little structure a game needs to still be recognizable as something that can be played.