Title: Amber Diceless Role-Playing
Company: Phage Press
Category: RPG System
Reviewer: Dirk DeJong

Roger Zelazney's greatest creation has finally made it ot the role-playing arena in Phage Press's Amber, a unique RPG based on teh best-selling books. As with any new offering, especially those based on interpreting another's work, Amber is a mixed bag of the good and bad.

First, this is a very flexible product, designed to handle as much of the mythos as possible from the first Amber series, Corwin's saga. Even so, many of the author's interpretations of Amber are inconsistent with one's I would have made, especially in light of the second Amber series, Merlin's saga, which was not taken into account, though a planned supplement should rectify that. The game can be broken into four parts: background, character generation, items and artifacts generation, and conflict resolution.

Amber is a well-fleshed out world both in teh books and the game. Zelazney's characters are truly brought to life, with the entire royal family being represented, down to possible motives, secrets, allies, enemies, and methods. And, to keep things interesting, there are various versions of each character, complete with differing powers, characteristics, etc., so your Amber will never quite be the same as your neighbors'. This helps in situationas where you want a different character description for a major NPC than the single version most games provide.

Character generation is relatively straightforward, with five statistics - Psyche for magic and mind combat, Strength for unarmed combat and physical feats, Warfare for armed combat and strategic thinking, Endurance for endurance and recovery, and Stuff (Good, Neutral, or Bad), for determining relative luck. Each of these values is bought when you create the character, and can be improved. You can also buy powers, items and/or artifacts, ranging from the ability to Shadow-walk to creating swords like Greyswandir.

Item and artifact generation is simply that, creating new items and artifacts for your character to adventure with. This includes animals, sidekicks, swords and other weapons, or anything else you can think up. The systems for this are simple, elegant, and one of the high points of the game.

Conflict resolution is where Amber falls down. The designer felt that a truly diceless system was needed, and though the use of Stuff allows for a certain latitude in the interpretation of results, any system that relies on either simple subtraction or blow by blow role-playing for all conflict resolution has made the game both simpler and more difficult. While I don't feel that hundreds of dice rolls are good either; a system of this sort lends itself best to very good, very experienced role-players, who want to spend time being their character from the inside.

For those who are Amber fans, pick this up, it's the best sourcebook available for Amber. If you aren't into Amber, read Zelazney again, and decide if you might want to run a campaign in Amber. If so, buy this. If you don't like Amber, or aren't interested in an Amber campaign, then Amber, whose biggest plus is its use of and adherence to the Amber mythos, is probably not for you.

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