Amber Diceless RPG Articles

I have recently returned to the worlds of Amber Diceless Roleplay after nearly a decade long absence.  Over the years, I've run 6 different Amber campaigns, and about that many one-shot Throne Wars, and one spin-off Everway game that took place after the Pattern got re-written in the Amber campaign ahead of it.

My Current Campaign

Campaign Logs and thoughts on returning to Amber:

• I'm starting a new Amber campaign in 2020 
• Attribute Auction for 8 
• I Love My New Amberites! 
• A Sneaky Little Thing With The Birds 
• A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Plotlines 
• A Horse Of Another Timbre - Campaign Log Session 1
  
• A Horse Of Another Timbre - Campaign Log Session 2
• How To Do A Decent Corwin
  
• A Horse Of Another Timbre - Campaign Log Session 3
  
• A Horse Of Another Timbre - Campaign Log Session 4
  
• A Horse Of Another Timbre - Campaign Log Session 5
  
• Shock & Awe: How To Do A Decent Benedict
  
• A Horse Of Another Timbre - Campaign Log Session 6
  
• A Horse Of Another Timbre - Campaign Log Session 7
  
• A Horse Of Another Timbre - Campaign Log Session 8
  
• A Horse Of Another Timbre - Campaign Log Session 9
  
• A Horse Of Another Timbre - Campaign Log Session 10
  
• Corwin Is Wrong - Amber Thesis / Zelazny Apologia
• A Horse Of Another Timbre - Campaign Log Session 11
  
• Yig at Amaranthe - a bit of world-building for the campaign
• A Horse Of Another Timbre - Campaign Log Session 12
  
• A Horse Of Another Timbre - Campaign Log Session 13
  
• A Horse Of Another Timbre - Campaign Log Session 14
• Medore in Tir-na Nog'th 
  
• A Horse Of Another Timbre - Campaign Log Session 15
  
• A Horse Of Another Timber - Campaign Log Session 16
• A Horse Of Another Timber - Campaign Log Session 17
  
• A Horse Of Another Timber - Campaign Log Session 18
  
• The King Is Dead - out of order
  
• A Tree Full Of Holes - remembering the unnamed dead and missing Elder Amberites
  
• A Horse Of Another Timber - Campaign Log Session 19
• A Very Confusing Map
• A Horse Of Another Timber - Campaign Log Session 20 
• A Horse Of Another Timber - Campaign Log Session 21
• A Horse Of Another Timber - Campaign Log Session 22
• A Horse Of Another Timber - Campaign Log Session 23    
• Scoreboard says Oberon Zero, Brand Thirteen
• Unleashing AI on the Faiella-Bionin - Images to catch the feel of the underwater stairs.
  
• ...and more to come if I ever get around to cleaning up an posting the 50+ additional campaign logs we have on my Roll20 for the ongoing campaign. Still running strong in late 2023.

Older Articles: Long ago, I had an extensive Amber-themed website, but that was back in the days of GeoCities, and only scraps of it can be found on the WayBack Machine these days. Most of this was lost, like tears in a Shadow Storm, but I saved a few things, below, and have woven into the list a few newer topics and columns as well.

House Rules

• Amber character creation is wonderfully painless, but I recommend one tiny tweak that makes it even better.
• Scientific Laws In Amber - What Corwin's novels tell us about how reality works in and near Amber proper
• Alternatives to Merlin's Chaos. Why I don't think the Courts of Chaos as seen in Merlin's books fit at all in Corwin's books.
• Entropy Mastery a new power, for use with a Logrus-less Chaos that better matches Corwin's tale
• So you want to be a Lord of the Living Void - Hand out for players about Chaos and Entropy.
• Dynamic Form an alternate Shapeshifting power. Much trimmed back from the default rules to better emulate Corwin's novels.
• Chaotic Shapeshifting vs Orderly Shapeshifting - a proposal to with different versions of shapeshifting for each end of the universe
• Lamarckian Shapeshifting What I could remember of another alternate shape-shifting system I used in a campaign from 20 years ago
• Mentalism power, to ensure that Psyche truly is the most important Attribute
• Revised Shadow World rules for Character Creation (and mid-campaign purchases) designed to fix a few things that are broken in the main rules
• My old new combat system. Back in the day I made a slightly more codified system for handling Amber combat. It was something pretty close to at least one of these two old archive versions. I don't think either of these were my final draft of the system from back in the GeoCities days or not. I went a few years without Amber in my life once before, and during that time my laptop died and GeoCities shut down. I was left without access to the system I'd fine-tuned before the gap, and I don't think either of these archived versions are exactly it.

Characters

• Advice on portraying the big NPCs of the Amber setting
• Parachuting Narwhal, the most unique and memorable PC I've ever seen someone play.
• The most broken and unfun Amber character I've seen. Beware this abusive rules loop-hole. 
• How To Do A Decent Corwin - a simple gimmick to help you capture the voice of Zelazny's most difficult character
• Shock & Awe: How To Do A Decent Benedict - Benedict isn't nearly as difficult to emulate as Corwin, but it does take a bit of thought to get him sounding right.
• A Tree Full Of Holes - there are 5 unnamed dead Elder Amberites every GM gets to invent, and they could make your campaign quite unique
  
• The Meaning of Barimen - I think I may have stumbled upon an easter egg in the "last name" of Dworkin, and why it doesn't get used by Oberon or Corwin.

Parallel Shadows

• Ideas for combining Amber with other games.
• Firefly RPG using Amber mechanics
• The Warriors one-shot idea using Amber (and a lot of other game systems) to riff off the 1970s movie.
• I've done enough with Everway & Amber mixed together that it needs it's own heading:

Amber in Everway

• Trump Artistry written up as an Everway Magic
• Amber as an Everway Realm
• Redsky, Bleys' world as an Everway Realm
• A Black Road themed encounter for Everway
• Everway names for Amber characters

Alternate Ambers

• Ultimate Amber Conspiracies Theories about Random and Caine
• More Amber Conspiracy Theories - Theories about the Unicorn, Fiona and/or Brand's favorite rug
• Twists and Turns that made old settings fresh and new (not just Amber)
• My House-Rules section, above, has a lot of Alternate takes on Chaos, mostly intended to make the Courts fit better with Corwin's descriptions in the first series. I tend to be a first-series purist. Entropy Mastery instead of Logrus, and various restrictions on Shape-Shifting to better match what the black road throws at Corwin.
  

Older Campaign Logs and Random Thoughts

Logs from my current 2020-2021 Campaign are linked at the top of the page.

• Procrastination destroys worlds
• Out-maneuvered by a horse, parts one and two
• Dworkin vs Random and Vialle
• Befriend a Redhead
• Index of some of the older amber pages
• Syncretic gaming
• Reincarnation in gaming
• Stats on how commonly players make certain decisions during Amber character creation
• Amber campaigns tend to be better with people who know the Amber setting
• Specifically, it seems like if there's 1 newb in your Amber campaign, they love it, but if there's 3 or more the campaign has a hard time getting to critical mass. (Update: my current campaign seems to have disproven this theory.)
  
• The fifth campaign kinda flopped, the four before it were great.
• I stumbled upon a great quiz question, and one my former players gave it solid in-character response.
• Continuum killed my Amber pacing.
• Recurring villains tend to die too soon. PCs are just murderers.
• Elder Amberites are manipulative jerks.
• An amazing PC death.
• A somewhat incomplete Archive via the Wayback machine of an Amber campaign I ran more than 20 years ago
• The rainstorm at the end of the universe.
• Caine's Amplifier - discusses how one word used in two places in one chapter of the novels seems to imply very different technology in Amber than the rest of the first 5 books do.
• Corwin Is Wrong - Amber thesis summary and Zelazny apologia
• A Tree Full Of Holes - there are 5 unnamed dead Elder Amberites every GM gets to invent, and they could make your campaign quite unique
  
• The Meaning of Barimen - I think I may have stumbled upon an easter egg in the "last name" of Dworkin, and why it doesn't get used by Oberon or Corwin.