Okay, there are a few things you need to know before we get started.
First up, this is a review copy, sent to me by the author himself. That's why I'm reviewing it, despite my unsuitability to do so, which you will no doubt pick up on soon.
Second, Amber the RPG operates under the very strong assumption that you know the world of Amber very well, through having read the novels set there. It does not explain the setting to those who do not know it. What's more, it also assumes you really really REALLY loved the books, and adore the setting, with the same insane passion of the author. And I'm talking the rolling-around-in-it-naked kinda passion.
For example, the first page of the book, calls Amber "the grandest setting of them all", and goes on to explain that everybody reading this book have one thing in common, they all wonder what another generation would have been like. If, like me, you don't know what that means, then there's not a lot of chance that Amber is really going to grab you. Unless, of course, you're terribly terribly fascinated by diceless mechanics - which is the third thing you need to know.
Yes, as the name suggests, Amber Diceless Roleplaying is indeed diceless, quelle surprise. If, like me, you're not a fan of diceless mechanics, you'll probably have another reason not to care much about this game.
The fourth thing you need to know is that Amber is rather proud of its diceless status, and has few other problems with superiority. It was published back in the early nineties, when gaming was suffering through its "one true way" period, when RPGs fervently believed that their way of roleplaying was the best, that drama and story were holy above all, and that roleplaying games not being games at all was somehow a good thing, and they felt obliged to tell you all this in snooty tones. Be warned: Amber does include the sentences "[Amber] is not a game" and "the best kind of roleplaying is pure roleplaying. No rules, no points, and no mechanics." Those of you sensitive to such things should be considered warned to have barf bags on stand by.
Speaking of barf bags, Amber also includes the words: "Too often game masters complain about players who aren't good roleplayers. That's like a teacher complaining about students who don't learn. They're both bogus complaints." Ah, most amusing - and spoken like a man who has never taught in his life. Amber also thinks that making good roleplayers is the GM's job, which is a little bugbear of mine. Next to this assertion, it gives the typical advice for stopping monsterbashing and ruleslawyering. Still, I suppose it does work on some people, so might as well stick it in there.
Thankfully, these moments are spotted throughout the book. Between these, the writing style is fluid, conversational and mostly readable, although it suffers from sometimes just not being able to care as much as Wujcik does about the game or the stories, and sometimes his passion means he doesn't explain things clearly, because he's expecting you to fill in the blanks. The writing also in patches slides from conversational into juvenile buddy-buddy chit-chat, dumbed-down point labouring or the kind of dramatic stresses and pauses that John Wick likes so much. The ones he always uses.
You know the ones I mean.
But as I said, when it's not doing this, it's an easy read. It is also saved by the inclusion of something Wujcik does a lot but which - to their detriment - few games these days emulate: player dialogues. Not only are these often fun to read, they're also a great way to teach any part of a game. They're the closest thing we have to what the Japanese call replays, and we should use them more often. Heck, TMNT fans know that the game just wouldn't be the same without the legendary sparrow-eagle conversation. The book is also peppered with often quite sizeable chunks of text from the novels to provide examples for everything, which s mostly nice but it does get a bit annoying after a while. Not everything that has a quote really needs one.
Continuing with presentation, the layout of the book is very good, using the standard Palladium two-column format, but using it a lot more prettily than in most Palladium works. The editing is exceptionally high quality and the index and contents are very thorough. The interior art is excellent - a few pictures are just weird, but none are ugly and most are nicely atmospheric. The exception is the cover painting which is like the cover art for some horrible 1970's fantasy novel- a sprawling, incomprehensible, LSD-inspired mess of eyes, tentacles, boxes, swords and some screwed-up duck-legged chick (guy?) floating in the middle of it. It not only tells you nothing about the game, it's gobsmackingly boring. But then, RPGs with shithouse covers are the rule, not the exception.
Now, to the game itself. For those who don't know, Amber is a multi-reality universe which was detailed in two five-book fantasy series written by Robert Zelazny, in which a bunch of multiversing, reality-shaping, uber-powerful, universe-ruling bitchfighting godlike dudes (in the classic Nordic style of bitchfighting godlike dudes, only more glib) spend a lot of time stabbing their friends and relatives in the back and playing other such games of courtly secession, and also kick some Chaos ass from time to time. Plus, like most godly types, they wear seriously cool Renaissance threads and tend to carry bitchin' swords a lot.
Amber the RPG casts the PCs as the next generation of bitchfighting relatives, the sons and daughters of the heroes of the first two books, once again struggling for secession and holding back enemies old and new. For those who've read the books then, this wires them right into the important and familiar events of the past and stands them ready to do important things themselves - something Star Wars (either version) never communicated nearly as well. The game then is designed for long-term campaign play with a very strong focus on character interplay, and is particularly suited to larger groups. And the system backs this up fairly well, as we shall see.
After the introduction to roleplay page, we launch straight into chargen. The first part of which is the attribute auction.
There are four attributes in Amber - Psyche (magical/psychic power), Strength, Endurance and Warfare, the latter of which is absolutely any type of fighting, strategy or competition at all, except wrestling people (Strength) and magical combat (Psyche). Strength also covers general buffness, how much damage you can take, but Endurance is still important as it is the "battery" that keeps you standing up in any fight using the other three. As this a game about player cunning more than character intelligence, no intelligence stats are really possible, and much the same argument goes for social stats.
Now, being ass-kicking bitch-slapping godlike dudes, an objective rating in your abilities isn't really important. No, what matters is whose ass you can kick, who can kick your ass, and why you hate both of them. In a brilliant move, Wujcik ensures such abilities come about by auctioning off the ranks in each attribute.
Every player has 100 points to spend on both the auction and cool powers later on. The bidding is for top rank (which is untouchably shit-hot), but any points spent bidding are lost, and how much you bid determines your final attribute rank. The GM is encouraged to manipulate his players to make them spend spend spend, and the cut-throat nature of an auction will keep players at each other's throats. Wujcik compliments each attribute description with a full dialogue of an auction for that attribute. Again, a perfect example and fun to read.
After this, it provides descriptions of what the champions of those attributes can do, based on examples from the book. Unfortunately, it's often rather vague even there, and offers no real insight into the lower levels. Not through a lack of information, provided however - there is a lot of description about what these powers can do, just no absolute scale which those of us used to absolute (as opposed to relative) mechanics are used to.
However, because of the nature of the setting, almost all attribute tests will either be possible (because the heroes are massively powerful types), impossible (because it involves interacting with a different magical construct) or opposed (because whenever you do anything in Amber, you're screwing with somebody else's plans). Want to climb a cliff? You can, unless it's impossible, or somebody deliberately made it impossible to climb to gain a tactical advantage (then, compare Warfare stats). I'm not sure what you do if he made the cliff impossible to climb out of a sense of whimsy, but Amberites don't seem very big on whimsy, I guess.
After the attribute options, players then spend their remainder of their points. They can buy levels in attributes after the auction, by paying the same amount as another bidder to be ranked just below them (called 3.5 if just below third etc). These bids are kept secret from the others, to drive up the old rivalry another desperate notch. They can also buy funky powers, allies, items, home dimensions and Good and Bad Stuff. We'll go through these one by one.
The major powers cost a lot (eg 50 points for the most basic) but are quite effective. Pattern allows you to walk between worlds, and shift reality within worlds, and without it, you're pretty much lame in the world of Amber. It's opposed by Logrus, the power of Chaos, which has a fairly similar level of power. Finally, there is Trump which is basically a powerful communication, spying and fortune-telling art through playing cards featuring important people in the major arcana - all people can use these cards, but Trump Mastery allows a lot more funky options. Like attributes, these powers are described in length, but only vaguely defined in the way we commonly expect powers to be. Again, though, given the reality bending, do anything nature of the powers, more is not really needed - or even, perhaps, possible. I hate to use the old cop-out of "no mechanics because none could do it" but in this case, it's pretty accurate.
Advanced versions of the powers are also available, and come with warnings that they should only be used by experienced players. Which is a good juncture to point out that much like rules-heavy games like Rifts and D&D, this is an RPG which can be mastered - although it will take a long while. And as it is a skill to be mastered, it's an RPG with some competition built into the system, on top of the rivalry already created. If these things excite you, bring a mop; if not, forget it and move on.
Anyhoo, then there are lesser powers, which include Power Words (fast but limited spells), Sorcery and Conjuration (which between them cover the magic of more common fantasy RPGs). Allies are fairly obvious. Items include animal companions and have fairly complex rules for their design - assigning various point values for a whole bevy of different aspects. Anyone who's ever read a Wujcik Palladium book knows he's the master of this sort of thing. A similar points-purchasing system also appears for buying personal universes, or Shadows as they call them in Amber. It's VERY nice to see that Amber doesn't take Diceless to mean rules-light.
Finally, left over points become Good Stuff, and negative points become Bad Stuff. These are basically good and bad luck, with extras. Those with Good Stuff tend to have things go their way, have people like them more easily, and see the best of everything, and Bad Stuff types get the opposite. Personally, I think having to adjust player perceptions depending on their stats like this would drive me completely batty, but a luck stat makes sense. It certainly helps for those situations where a GM can't decide if some random bad (or good) event should happen, and the dice normally step in.
Players can get more points by selling down their attributes (which is a very bad thing - this is not a system for gamers who enjoy handicapping themselves), or by helping out the GM with metagame tasks like drawing pictures or writing fiction. Yes, the game actually gives points. While this has its heart in the right place, I think it's seriously risky because it would be nigh-impossible to adjudicate. It also loses points because it proffers poetry writing as an option. Writing poetry should never, EVER be encouraged in amateurs. Shudder.
There's no skills in chargen because Amberites can just hop into a slow-time universe and learn all the skills they want. So you can go crazy in that department, but there's no guarantee, of course, that your skills will still be applicable, or even make sense, in the new universe.
After chargen, we have a big section explaining all the above traits and their costs and so on. Then we have a few pages of hints for players, some of which is pretty lame - like "play in character", thanks for the tip - but some of which are quite useful. Especially if you're into the whole 'mastering the game' dealie. Then we hit the game master section.
We lead off with combat, which basically comes down to five possible situations, or actually three, since two are reversible. Either one person is hugely better than the other, clearly better than the other, or close enough for things to be blurry. In the last case, the rule is simply that "if the combat keeps going, whoever has the better attribute (note - no attributes are the same) will give more wounds than he receives." (parentheses added by me). And that's basically the system.
Along with this rule, however, are lots and lots of guidelines to add detail and colour to such events. Combatants can attack furiously, be opportunistic or fight defensively. Then for each arena - Warfare, Strength and Psyche - they add even more detail with various typical manoeuvres to try and attitudes that can be struck. The Warfare info, about feints and blocks and deceptions, is most helpful for those of us who know nothing of swordfighting and the Psyche stuff is vital for adding flavour to fights where two guys just look at each other and sweat. Again, I'm impressed to see a diceless system that provides lots of combat detail. Most RPGs are made up of dice rolls to provide the language of battle, Amber takes them out, but makes sure to replace them with a new set of building blocks. In fact, most any GM would probably find this chapter a useful read to heighten their descriptive powers.
The only weak spot is the section on describing different types and levels of damage. Despite a "this may offend" warning at the start, these are ridiculously tame and decidedly uninteresting. Pick up a copy of Warhammer or RoleMaster to see how this should really be done. Compare "Precise thrust through the heart. Death is instantaneous" (Amber) with "Your opponent's abdominal cavity ruptures, spilling blood and entrails over a wide area. Death is instantaneous" - there's just no contest.
The GM section then goes on to cover basic task resolution, as I described above (easy, impossible or opposed), and then provides even more tips and guidelines for adjudicating on, and running the use of the big-ass powers. The basic sentiment is 'give em enough rope' - despite their potency, the PCs don't control their powers entirely, and there are many things out there that they don't understand, and can squash them like a bug. With deft use of these, a GM can stop abuses. The section also has descriptive help, similar to the combat section.
Then, just to remind us once again that this is Erick "TMNT" Wujcik, we have yet another set of get-the-calculator-out point-spending rules for building completely new powers from scratch. Once again, an impressive level of artifice for a fairly free-form universe. Many modern game designers would be tempted to just say "wing it". Bad game designers! No soup for you! Course, the rules aren't exactly gripping, but it's comforting that they're there if you need them.
The next twenty pages then cover campaign construction, beginning with the bog-standard beginning-middle-end stuff, but then going into much more useful material. Each major element of the setting is described - powers, places, mysteries, items, creatures - and then suggestions are provided about what else could be added to them, and how and why to use such things in a story. This is the luxury a licensed setting has - it needs to spend much lesss time describing the What, so it can concentrate on the far more important How. Yet, strangely, many licensed games still bugger this up. Oy again.
Following this is a similar section, but covering each major character in the novel. This is probably the best section in the book, because Wujcik loves Zelazny, and Zelazny loves his characters. Indeed, Amber is most of all about character, with all the crap about Pattern and Logrus really just window dressing. So naturally it wasn't until I actually read this section that I finally understood what the game was really about, and got an inkling why the books appeal so much.
For each major character - and there are 20 of these bastards - a full description and full stats are provided for at least two but usually three different versions of them, at various points in the book or from various points of view and based on various numbers of creation points, depending on how and where you want to use them. Stats are not ranked, but the number of points spent on them gives a good indication of where they might be ranked. Included also are tips on just how to use the characters: what their plans and goals might be, how they might pursue them, and effective tricks to roleplay them convincingly. All good, useful stuff.
We then close with a few adventures, one of which is simply a powergaming free-for-all to grab the throne, and one of which is quite sketchy but the third is nicely done, and again, surprisingly detailed for a game so lacking in absolute rules calls and so centred on character. We close with a uninspiring but functional character sheet and the aforementioned index.
The adventures include necessary stats for the bad guys and their powers, and sketches for the power level of any monsters or goons they might encounter, but beyond this and the 20 major Amberites, no other character stats are in the book. And you'll notice, the only stats in the system are those devoted to character generation. Combat is summarised in a sentence, but building the precise item of power you desire is given pages of complex building rules. Powers get a few more rules, but because power struggles are life in Amber, they're a big part of who you are so they're effectively chargen rules anyway.
In other words, this game is all about character, with a rules preponderance on this aspect reminiscent of the most unbalanced Palladium games. Unlike Palladium, however, it balances out the big character sections with equally character-centric setting info and lots and lots of handy tools, ideas, guidelines and tips to take all that and make it into a game. Like Palladium, it has that big bunch of crazy different tools, pick whatever you like feel to it, but unlike most Palladium stuff, the majority of these tools are sharp. Some of the tips are weak and annoying, but most of them are useful. Some of the powers descriptions are just too vague, but with a good group and knowledge of the book, there shouldn't be any problems. The dicelessness may grate but the points ensure balance and they and other rules provide structure. I don't understand a hell of a lot of what he's talking about, but lovers of the books surely will.
In short, this game delivers the goods. The system is simple but effective, fairly well conceived, mostly well explained and surprisingly well detailed, and it creates a good sense of character, rivalry and own-the-universe kinda powers. Despite moments of pomposity, it's well written, despite its niche mechanics it offers good support for newbies, and despite a total assumption of knowledge of the books, it isn't entirely impenetrable and gets the feel of Amber across well.
In short, if you are a fan of Amber, and a fan of diceless roleplaying, you probably won't regret picking up Amber Diceless Roleplaying. It's not Cthulhu, but it meets its specifications well. Of course, if you're a fan of neither diceless roleplaying or Amber, then best give it a miss - there's nothing to interest you here. Damn, if only all RPGs had such nice descriptive titles.
Look for my next review: Dungeoncrawling RulesHeavy Gamist Roleplaying - the Retro Edition.
Substance: 4
Style: 3
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