Amber RPG Review

A role playing game about a unique genre. It also has no dice, it’s not collaborative and players are nearly immortals with unlimited power.

I was a Game Master for Amber a few times, and in the end of the most successful campaign I was a reduced to a “scenery describer”, every other aspect of the plot was ruled by the players. It was amazing!

Amber RPG is based on the “Chronicles of Amber” novel series from Roger Zelazny. In the first book, he starts the story with a man (Corwin) with no memory, waking up in the bed of a hospital and the plot twists until Corwin finds he can walk through realities.

The books were written from 1970 to 1991. Amber RPG was published at 1991. Apart from being old, it’s still one of the most innovatives RPG to the date.

How come? Let me tell you…

Scenario

In the beginning there was the Chaos, twisting and whirling violently. At it’s borders nearly the Abyss some realities spawned life, they grew and evolved, then they formed the Court of Chaos.

One of those, Dworkin was the name, rebelled against the Court, flew and drew the Pattern, an artifact that solidified the reality around it. This is the center of Amber, the one true reality. It’s image is distorted by the Chaos, casting Shadows of Amber in all directions. Any possible reality can be found as a Shadow of Amber, our own dear Earth is nothing more than one of these Shadows.

The sons of Dworkin, princes of Amber, can walk through Shadows at will, changing reality around them. However, there are two limitations: you need to be in movement and it takes time, seconds to change minor things, hours to big ones. The nearest you are from Amber, more time you need to change even the tiniest thing.

Amber itself resembles Earth by 1700, with no technology or gunpowder. There are nine Princes and four Princesses of Amber, most of them scattered through the Shadows.

In Amber RPG you play as a son of one of those Princes.

Game Mechanics

In the books, there are almost no friendship between the family, most of the time the characters are working together just for personal gain. This is reflected in the rules from the beginning.

There are only 4 attributes for the players:

• Psyche — mental power and will.
• Strength — physical strength and resistance.
• Endurance — stamina and recovery.
• Warfare — every martial ability, including tactics and strategy.

During character creation these attributes are auctioned, players “fight” for them with biddings.

This mechanic suits perfectly to the theme, from the very beginning they are not collaborating.

After that, the players can buy powers, artifacts, allies and personal shadows. In the end, good and bad luck can also be brought or even sold, which makes perfect sense in a diceless game.

A diceless game

Speaking of diceless game, the most frequent questions are “how that works”, “who decides”?

To understand that, you need to understand how the actions are narrated. Let’s say two players are in combat (Warfare attribute), instead of asking the players what are they doing blow to blow, I ask them if they are putting pressure over the opponent or if they are fighting in a defensive manner, or anything between these.

Then I describe part of the fight and tell the player with less Warfare that he is “feeling pressure” and that his opponent is pushing him back. If his rank in Warfare is really below the other, I describe a wound or two.

Every action is narrated this way, wounds and bad outcomes are hints that you are not going to succeed, how fast they are coming are hints for how fast you are going to fail if you keep doing the same thing.

If the opponents are really far apart from each other, you could have no chance of reaction. That makes players a little cautious, asking questions and trying to figure out opponents before entering in a fight, but not too cautious, after all even an “average” amberite is better than most of shadow dwellers out there.

For things that are “random”, like encounters or the mood of NPCs, there is bad and good luck (bad stuff and good stuff in Amber terminology).

So, that’s how a diceless RPG works. From my experience, it’s awesome. After you play or narrate Amber, every other RPG is different, you start to ask yourself if you could skip the whole “throw dice” thing.

Conclusion

There is so much to tell about Amber RPG, but it’s already too much reading until this point :)

The RPG really shines on the system and the scenario. Being diceless is not just a feature of the game, it feels like a necessary condition to play this scenario.

There are two more things that are really precious about the game. It has the best chapters about “how to play RPG” I ever saw. They are not the usual “be nice” rules, they explain how to get “in character”, how to play while the Game Master is focusing his attention elsewhere and other things we all take for granted, but that are not.

The same thing for Game Masters, there are useful and welcome guides in the book: like how to narrate a scene, not getting in too much detail or how to describe a scene differently for different player perceptions.

The whole book is filled with gameplay examples, which turns everything far easier to catch and apply in game.

The game is out of print for a long time, but it’s easy to get it by DriveThruRPG.