Sad News

[subplotkudzu]

Erick Wujick, the author of the gaming classic Amber Diceless Roleplaying has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. You can get further details here. Mr. Wujick's game is a wonder of design, and when it came out it upended a lot of long understood truths about what an RPG was and what components were needed to make them work. As whswhspoints out in his own post, this deserves recognition within our gaming community - I don't think it's much of a stretch to say that without his groundbreaking work the indy games market would be a very different place. 

I've run two campaigns with those rules, one in the standard Amber universe and one of my own fashioning (taking place in Llwewlla's pattern, created in the events of my first game), and played in a third. The best word to explain them was "intense". It's a demanding system that requires a considerable investment of energy, but it returns that energy many times over, producing a significant amount of player passion. I'm not likely to run Amber again any time soon because my life as a working adult and father running games for a lot of other working adults and parents precludes the necessary degree of commitment to do it right, but the things it taught me as a GM about shifting spotlight time and handling widely separated PCs approaching problems from multiple angles make my current GMing of, for example, Star Trek, possible. 

So thank you, Mr. Wujick, for your great work. You will be remembered. 

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

My Amber campaign was not actually in any version of Zelazny's world. I wanted to run a campaign set in E. R. Eddison's pagan Renaissance high fantasy world of Zimiamvia, and it struck me that Amber Diceless was the perfect system. The characters were either powerful nobles or totally free adventurers; they were all avatars of God or Goddess, with abilities that let them bestride lesser mortals like colossi; they spent their time in battle, brilliant artistic creation, romance, hot sex, and encounters with mythic beings; they had grand, often tragic passions—it's hard not to suppose that Zelazny himself was partly inspired by exposure to Eddison's work, the spirit is so similar.

And then, of course, my players turned it into something quite different, a mix of swashbuckling adventure and Shakespearean comedy, and the campaign ended with the chancellor of the realm inviting two of the PCs to his private chambers and proposing that one of them should marry him, bear his children, and eventually inherit the task of controlling the kingdom's intelligencers when he left her widowed, while the second would be his exclusive mistress and his true love—and, after the customary "heir and a spare," the first would be free to amuse herself as she chose. They were seriously thinking about it when the curtain fell. . . .

Anyway, Amber Diceless worked really well for this campaign. And as you say, it forces the GM to learn how to share spotlight time, sequence events dramatically, and judge how battles and clashes of wills will turn out, without ever having a dice roll to fall back on. It's an instructive experience. If there were a University of GMing, I would include running an Amber Campaign in the core requirements, I think.