A delightful suppliment!
The Good:
- This book does for Chaos what the first book did for Amber.
- There are plenty of new powers and item types to play with.
- Full biographies for all of the players in the Merlin Chronicles.
- Loads and loads of information about the Courts of Chaos and how they changed after the Patternfall War with Amber.
- Now you too can create and play with demons for your Logrus Masters and Sorcerors.
The Bad:
- Too bad that the rules for demons resemble Aria in needless complexity. It's arguable that they aren't even neccessary because you can make them as normal creatures and just call them "demons."
- Unlike the first book, which is considered to be the bedrock canon, this is considered to be a gigantic campaign diary with a lot of notes attatched. The impression is to say "The first book is canon, but this isn't." This is a bad call because that's not the designer's decision to make.
- For a "non-canonical" suppliment, there sure is a lot of information that's suppossed to be used in Amber campaigns. Much of it deals with characters and places seen in the Merlin books. This would be a good thing, if not for the above piece of stupidity.
The Ugly:
- The first book says that no mere Shadow dweller could ever mount an effective opposition to most Amberites. In this book, we have a mere Shadow dweller (Julia Barnes) smack around Merlin (a damned competant Amberite) with Sorcery. You can pass this down to Zelazny for not thinking it through, but I put this on Wujcik for painting himself into the corner initially. The Corwin books don't say this, but the first Amber RPG book did; the contradiction is jarring, and the ways used to weasel out of it are worse.
- The GM advice for playing elder Amberites is unneccessary. A lot of space would be saved by directing the reader to "The Prince" and "The Art of War." Some of the advice is also close to violating long-held (and acknowledged) ethics regarding the Player-GM relationship.
- The fantasy bias continues, but it's not as bad as it once was.
Style: 4 (Classy and well done)
Substance: 4 (Meaty)
