I’ve been getting concerned messages over my lumbago adventure last week. Thank you for your concern, it is objectively good of people to take care of each other. However, I can report that the pains have largely passed and I’m back to 99% back efficiency. It was a subjectively big experience for me in the short term, but apparently not a long term concern.
A bit more about Amber
After the Jack Kirby consumption documented in the last newsletter, I got inspired to review some Amber Diceless (that’s the rpg, to distinguish from the Chronicles of Amber novel series) stuff. Damn this is a great rpg text, top 20 of all time easy by most any sane metric. Amber’s crazy diffuse creatively, similar to e.g. Call of Cthulhu; in a certain Forgite sense of creative orientation it’s not a game at all, just a bunch of rules tech and extensive AP reporting about what some particular people have apparently gotten up to with it.
This is, generally speaking, the heritage we possess in roleplaying: creatively diffuse corpora of evidently powerful gaming, perceived in game texts as if through glass darkly. It’s the same whether considering Runequest or Rolemaster or C2020 or whatnot. The game mechanics, those are easy, because they are verbalized and understood. The dark depths of the creative psychology, on the other hand; damn tricky. It’s not like Eric Wujcik doesn’t understand what he’s doing himself, and clearly he has players with whom the game works. And Wujcik tries damn hard to transmit his creative vision, no doubt about that. But, still…
Here’s some creative conundrums I have with Amber:
If you “develop your dream character”, then why optimize?
Ron Miller on p. 24 encapsulates a clear throughline that might be the game’s inherent creative nature. Develop your dream character; the one you have always wanted to play — the one you have always wanted to be. My rpg theory lexicon would describe this as a pure expression of character-oriented Simulationism, an exhortation to enjoy character immersion a the goal of the game. Clear enough, but if this is the case, then what’s all that attribute auction rigamarole and point-buy character creation supposed to be about?
If you compete with the other players, then why freedom of objectives?
Amber gets really wargamey at times, it posits the notion that the players should in some way be set in competition against each other. There’s no adventuring party, everybody has their own motives and secrets and goals. Considering this attitude, it is astounding that character creation is extremely motivation-averse; it is as if the PCs should be antagonistic pro forma only, as the author forgot to structure antagonism into the game. Or, to put that in a different way: in reality no character has any reason to have any motivations, secrets or goals, going by the character creation procedures of the game. There is a piece missing there.
This is all, of course, just me wrestling with that old bugbear of creative agenda incoherence, the Eldorado of the rpg tradition. It’s easy to say that all of these creative concerns belong together, truly they do, but that misses the question of how: how can all of these things be true and at the forefront and sharp conscious concerns of play at once? What’s the structural primacy and therefore, the creative context that these ideals form for each other?
And, the answer to this relationship between the text and the reader is the same it ever was: as a traditional, creatively incoherent rpg text it is easy to interpret Amber in any which way. Traditionally you would interpret it in light of your own gaming assumptions, arriving at an Amber that pursues your own creative interests. As an analytical reader, I have to make choices, on the other hand, and lock down one of the many creative agenda possibilities I see in the game. (For what it’s worth, I’ve pretty much concluded that the game’s supposed to be Simulationistic. The elaborate player-vs-player stuff is there for funsies, not for Gamist purposes.)
By the way: Amber has one of the top-tier trad rpg theory overviews embedded in its GMing advice section (the only place where a true traditionalist writes rpg theory, of course). So if you’re not familiar with what the mature ’80s to ’90s dominant school of tabletop roleplaying usually thought about everything from the purpose of play to the technical relationship between the GM and players, this isn’t a bad book at all for a cogent summary. It doesn’t really answer my questions because I’ve detached from that tradition, so this Robin’s Laws style analysis (a decade before Robin’s Laws, for those keeping count) of how to GM for different player types doesn’t really help me figure out how to approach Amber, but it is what it is.
A couple of notes on the game mechanics
I don’t have much to complain about Amber’s game mechanics, but I might as well note a couple of details-fixes that I’ve been considering. I’m no Amber scholar, but I do know that fiddling with the auction rules is a favoured pastime for veteran Amber GMs, so why not.
Attribute Auction bid maximum: You should only be able to raise your bid up to double your prior bid at once, instead of going 1->50 and such. The same player cannot bid twice in a row, so you can only keep escalating as long as you have a rival to compete with. The hoped for effect of this small change is that it makes opportunistic low-balling less attractive, including in the sealed bids. It’s not much, but you do actually have to bid a bit to remain at striking distance of wherever you wish to end up.
Attribute Caesura: After the attribute auction, the GM can define a “caesura” in each attribute ladder, placed between the ranks where the points cost between ranks is largest. For minor attributes (those with a total points investment <100 across the group) the caesura is instead set immediately above the 1st rank. The significance of the Caesura is that any attribute ranks above it are considered “Elder”, distinguishing from ranks below the caesura, which are “Young”. (This can be helpful for task resolution; the caesura may be considered a major rank step in contrast to the minor steps of the numbered ranks.) Campaign NPC attribute ranks are determined in ranks relative to the caesura (or Amber rank, for weaker NPCs) rank, rather than in points, which has mathematical issues. Corwin, for example, would have Endurance at rank Elder +2, rather than a points value.
Secret Attribute bids: Secret bids should carry a minor surcharge (5 points for the privilege?) for going over the bid maximum of double your public bid, suggested above. (So if your public bid is 10, you can go up to 20 in secret without paying the extra surcharge.) Also, it seems to me that a player should be allowed to opt to secretly “cripple” their character in a stat after the auction: you regain half of the points invested in the attribute, but drop down on the attribute ladder to the highest rank your crippled points investment buys. Crippling doesn’t affect the attribute ladder itself, and a crippled attribute is considered “rank-” at its new rank, same as when purchasing into the rank from below.
Consistent rank seniority: Whenever two characters exist at the same attribute rank for whatever reason, they stack by seniority in the rank, with whomever arrived at the rank first considered just a bit better. The rules text likes to call this “.5” rank, but I’d rather call it just “-“, implying less of a difference. So rather than rank 3.5, I’d rather call it 4-. Or just plain list everybody at a given rank in order of arrival.
Extended attribute ladder: The attribute ladder extends above Dominant Rank, but the rules do not say how. Here’s one draft. I’m using the term “rank” only for the Numbered Ranks, calling the other attribute ladder steps “tiers”. Less confusing that way.
| Tier | Cost | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Human | -25 | Average mortal, the practical bottom of the tiering system. One tier above is consistently superior in an attribute contest, winning almost always; two tiers above wins any comparison instantly and effortlessly, like adult against a child. (That does hint at what the tiers below “Human” would be: “Slob” and “Child”.) For practical reference, Human tier Strength lifts 100 pounds. |
| Chaos | -10 | Peak mortal, movie protagonist tier. Chaos tier attribute performs casually at the highest level possible for a mortal, and can stretch that a bit when Pattern isn’t looking. Chaos tier Strength lifts 400 pounds, 600 when cheating reality (or when “putting your heart into it”, whatever). |
| Amber | 0 | Casually superhuman. Amberites are cosmologically definitionally-perfect, so they’re sort of as high-performance as the idealized human form can be, in any possible universe. This is usually, in most shadows, imagined as similar to lower-end street level superheroes, or heroes of ancient sagas, so don’t oversell; Amber fantasy is aesthetically not as high-powered as many modern fantasy settings. An Amberite will scale to local physical law of a shadow that allows for a “human” to be still greater, though. Amber tier Strength lifts ~1000 pounds, half a ton, in Amber. |
| Ranked Amberite | auction | The named and numbered peak performance elite of the Amberite nation; any Ranked tier individual relates to baseline Amberite like the Chaosborn do to mortals. The Ranked tier itself breaks into numbered ranks that express minor performance advantage within this tier; it usually only has direct task resolution significance when challenging another Ranked individual. Ranked tier Strength lifts maybe a ton in Amber. |
| Dominant/ Monstrous | auction | The winner of the attribute auction, the character ranked 1st, gets an entire tier of superiority over other Ranks. “Monster” grade talent, capable of surpassing the usual Amberite limits in particular situations, performing “impossible” feats. Best in a generation. Triumphs handily against any Ranked individual, and is not challenged by the average Amberite at all. This would also be the default tier for superhuman monsters such as dragons and whatnot. Dominant tier Strength lifts several tons, individual feats varying widely with an open-ended cap. |
| Elder | +10 | This tier cannot necessarily be reached in character creation, but it’d be the next step for a character who is Dominant among their generation, yet still attains a higher tier. In the Amber setting this would presumably only be attained by an exceptional breakthrough or timeless ages of maturing on the part of an Amberite approaching their true nature. The practical level of performance is only incrementally better than Dominant, and mostly differs in consistency; this is as strong as Amberites get. There could be some Attribute Potential or Powers that require true consistent peak performance to attain, though. |
| Elder Ranked | auction | Elder tier characters cannot attain the next tier until they have ranked first among the Elder tier. The rank ladder here consists of every single Elder-ranked character in the campaign, PC or NPC. I imagine that the auction is more of a race, in the sense that it occurs during the character development cycle. There is no Dominant rank at the top of this rank ladder, only the need to surpass everybody else to be able to take the next step. |
| Exalted | +25 | Surely the highest tier of Attribute attainment. The achievement probably doesn’t even affect the real feat limitations of the character, it just plain exists as an emergent contest meta that enables asserting dominance over other Amberites. Asserting that you can become Superman by enough body-building doesn’t seem supported by the setting. |
The above table interacts with my notion of the attribute “caesura” specifically in that the caesura shows the ranking spot that the Elder tier shift takes: for an attribute that has a caesura the elder tier itself doesn’t exist, or the rank immediately after the caesura is renamed the Elder Tier. What this means is that depending on how the attribute auction goes, particularly attribute-eager characters might already begin the game at Elder tier. Think of this “minor/major attribute” business as modeling the idea that the PC Amberites can only attain Elder tier might by having strong rivalries among themselves; if the players don’t put in the points, even the Dominant among them will end up short of the Elder tier.
Just some random mechanical dross here, I don’t particularly expect this to mean anything unless you’re studying Amber as well.
Coup de Main in Greyhawk
We haven’t been playing over the holidays, but maybe that’ll change now. The game’s open to visitors, newcomers, inexperienced players, cats and dogs.
Sunday Basic session #9 was scheduled for tonight, but I hear that Teemu the GM is down with something covid-ish, so the session’s aborted. Next week!
Monday Coup session #113 is scheduled for tomorrow, Monday 2.1., starting around 16:00 UTC. We haven’t been playing for a couple of weeks due to the holidays, but I’m feeling like this time it might happen.
And, the session notes from the distant past of 2022. Seems like I’m about 23 sessions behind right now, so this stuff happened last summer, more or less.
Coup de Main #90
Tuomas was again away, so we continued developing the on-again, off-again Castle Greyhawk Elfquest: Frida the Teenage Witch was seeking the Oracle of Zagyg, an artifact or enslaved spirit of some sort that the Mad Archmage possessed. The Oracle could instruct Frida on the fate of the distant and ephemeral elven princess “Sarana”, news of whose fate would surely be of great interest to various factions of elvenkind in their ill-understood astral politics.
Over the spring months, in the occasional sessions at Greyhawk, the adventurers had met some Castle-dwelling elves (at Lil’ Menegroth, their magical home-away-from-home) who claimed to have once met the Oracle and known her to pass by the name of Doraldina. So apparently more person than object? The elves didn’t know where Doraldina might be now, but the dearly departed prince Viusdul Daro had thought to seek her among the personal items of the Mad Archmage, and while the Castle elves weren’t willing to reveal outright secrets of the Mad Archmage upon whose goodwill their lifestyle depended, they didn’t outright deny it either. And Frida’s Psychometric gift, the Touch of Ages, kept hinting towards the Castle rather than the deep dungeons underneath.
Last time at the Castle, in session #87, the party had followed their half-assed intuitions (that’s what I mean when I say that the “witch used psychometry”, they’re basically letting the GM flip coins over what they should do) to the location they’ve been calling the “burned library”. It’s apparently some kind of wizard basement long picked clean of anything of value, but there’s these doors there that have been just tough and stuck enough to resist half-wit murderhobos without any real tools, so it’s taken a long time for the party to get anywhere further there. Last session they managed to break through some of these bronze doors, only to encounter a sort of double-door situation: behind the stuck bronze door, a second one decorated real wizard-like, and magically locked!
Many parties might be forced to give up here, but not Frida: she outright rigged together a Knock spell over a couple of days of downtime, readying it for tonight’s expedition. There’s various philosophies on how flexible magic-users should be in D&D, but I think I like this kind of operational flex: you’re 2nd level, you have the time and the particular requirements of your magic system, you go ahead and develop some dinky specialist concern spell that you need for some tailor-made obstacle. Characters being able to bullshit this stuff mid-expedition would be too much, but them not being able to research needed spells at all (the default position) would be too little, I think.
So anyway, back to the dungeons beneath the Castle in the usual manner. Disaster struck on the way to the burned library: storerooms gnolls had been getting a bit big in their britches after the adventurers had vanquished the kobold Old Guard from the level weeks ago. Their manic laughter rolled through the corridors, their torches glinted in the distance, and while the party was careful, they were nevertheless flanked by a small but dangerous gnoll maneuver!
Opioid the wizard went down under the axes of the gnolls, but his last act was releasing the spell he was holding, and that was enough to break the cohesion of the gnoll war party, allowing the party to escape from the gnolls. Opioid himself had taken an arterial injury and quickly bled out before Frida could do anything.
Less one party member, the adventurers decided to keep going, and ultimately did indeed manage to breach the door from the burned library into the summoning chambers of the Mad Archmage. Therein, they found what had been sought so long; the Oracle of Zagyg, Doraldina! The room was some kind of summoning or conjuration work space for the Archmage, clearly, and while it was otherwise ominously empty, the Oracle was just sitting there in an alcove at the side of the room.
Doraldina was a mysterious artefact puzzle the adventurers interacted with carefully. Kinda intuitive that it’s some kind of frivolous Zagygian horror-show thing that entraps a magical spirit forced to play along to a mechanical contraption, a sort of Mechanical Turk solution to providing a fortune-telling machine with general intelligence. That part wasn’t tricky, but learning to operate it, and deciding what to do about Doraldina herself (the genie trapped in the machine) was.
The adventurers quickly learned that Doraldina was a combined slot machine and oracle: you insert your Gold Pieces, the reels spin, and depending on the combination you might get a few GP back, or win some other exciting prizes, most of which seem to be mysterious weal/woe/what oracular pronouncements that Doraldina (who is either a puppet moved by a spirit, or a puppetized spirit, locked in the glass box in the machine) pens down in response to being fed with Gold. Truly, the Oracle is a wizardwork worthy of praise!
(I’m particularly fond of Doraldina because unlike most of the material we’ve been playing, she’s my own devious creation. I’ve got careful rules and tables for how Doraldina works, she’s been sitting in my prep for like a year by this time.)
Getting into the swing of gambling with Doraldina, the party convened around her and started keeping careful notes of the reels and how the machine behaved in different reel positions. So far so good, I was kinda hoping when creating Doraldina that this would be one approach to her that the players might choose to consider. I was, after all, modeling a reels machine here. A devilish reels machine, so understanding exactly what it does and what the odds are would pay off in the long term.
Notably, and perhaps ominously, the Oracle Reels seem to have a distinctly positive payout ratio: while many spins did nothing but give out a few GP, those seemed to be so common that the adventurers ended up making a slow, modest profit on the reels as they spun.
Lucky drops of oracular action gained the party some general answers over Frida’s immediate priority, the fate of the elven princess Sarana: as we knew on the player level, Sarana was a grey elf princess from the Astral Elflands, who’d been kidnapped by a red dragon back around session #35, over 50 sessions ago. The local adventurers never really got involved in any of that, except for a short and decisive encounter with the astral red dragon in question, called Grand Meshashole; the elf-kidnapping part happened as a consequence of choices made by Nold the Warlock, a hostile second-party PC visiting from our Sunndi campaign fork. So the players kinda already knew, and now the characters did as well: princess Sarana had been captured and imprisoned by a powerful red dragon by the name of Grand Meshashole, according to the Oracle!
This tidbit of information was technically sufficient for a lesser fulfillment of the Elfquest: Frida could take the information and travel to the Kingdom of Selene, probably the most feasible local means of contacting the Grey Elven mandala state that would ultimately need this information and be grateful to an Elf-Friend bringing it to them, thus fulfilling at least in part what prince Viusdul Daro had been questing for.
Or, Frida could seek to fulfill the Elfquest in a damn boss manner and seek to rescue the princess herself, of course. Wonderful how the game allows you these heroic opportunities.
While this was being considered by Frida, the other adventurers kept playing the reels on the principle that any further information would be valuable, and the Oracle seemed capable of “generalized divination”, so anything it could drop on the location of the Grand Meshashole’s lair, or the size of the dragon, or the wisdom of seeking to embroil oneself in the elf politics, or anything else the adventurers might want to know.
For instance, the question of how Doraldina herself might be helped; Frida’s a Good Elf-Friend, the exact sort of person who would be bedeviled by universal empathy, so I think she really did pick up on the clues to the idea that Doraldina was enslaved by this inherently evil oracle-machine arrangement and wanted to be freed from her tasking. (It wasn’t difficult, but players are often kinda murderhobo psychotic about NPC human rights, so I wouldn’t be surprised either if they took a hard-line antiempathy stance on messing with enslaved spirit beings.)
Problem was, the Oracle Reels are dangerous! A spin of the reels brought up a symbol not seen on prior spins, a 🧙♂️. This unleashed wild magic, literally a random spell (Mirror Image apparently) that seemed to cause Doraldina herself to freeze up amidst a light show. The adventurers seemed to get things to work again with a couple more spins, which itself surely was as much proof as anything about their being thoroughly hooked on the gambling here: the machine misfunctions, so hey let’s keep feeding coin into it. Interestingly enough Doraldina started working again after another unintelligible jerk of the machine.
I never, ever, planned for things to end up the way they did, but the procedure is ruthless: after a bit more gambling the Sigil of Zagyg came up again on the reels, for yet another random spell. This time it was 6th level… and none other than the Death Spell.
When a death spell is cast, it snuffs out the life forces of creatures in the area of effect instantly and irrevocably.
We worked this out quite carefully, but what can you do? It’s a major baleful magic unleashed upon a hapless low-level party. The spell specifically specifies no save. The only way for any player character to possibly survive it would be to have happened to not be convened close to the machine as it triggered, but unfortunately the positioning generally read more along the lines of “everybody’s hypnotically staring at the spinning reels” than the opposite, all told. Even the watchmen were positioned too close.
So yeah, everybody died. Frida and Saad Man were leveled and neatly positioned in their respective ways, too, so not an inconsequential loss by any means. Here’s Tommi, Frida’s player on this — he wrote an AP report on the unusually harsh events himself.
The campaign as a whole has sailed remarkably smoothly compared to my historical experiences, which I attribute to the players being ever more experienced and skillful. This was a remarkable setback of the sort we’ve been having at most like once every fifty sessions. Noteworthy for that alone.
I do hope that we’ll get to play more with Doraldina at some point, though. And maybe get back on track regarding princess Sarana’s terrible lizard-captivity. As always, depends mostly on what the players want to do.
Coup in Sunndi #64
Meanwhile in Sunndi, the Dhalmond bountyhunters had just been foiled in a job last time; Dandy Boy the international sabotagist had slipped their net. I think what happened next was just one of those random spin of the wheel kinds of things: the players had been taking turns over what adventures to tackle, which I was of course eager to encourage, and that meant going for something different now.
Specifically, Teemu happened to be playing a kungfu Monk originating at the Temple of the Seven Stars, this culturally idiosyncratic religious center in Dhalmond that had for the longest time been just this place on the northern part of the map. Kinda a space-filler “point of interest”, you know how those are in sandbox gaming. Just there, and the GM will talk your ear off about if if you ask, but really, you truly have other stuff on your plate, can’t be worrying about some old temple.
I’d introduced the idea of the 7⭐ (as it was spelled on the maps) institution way back, let’s see… it was in session #34, precisely 30 sessions ago, when the adventurers were actually traveling to Dhalmond for the first time. (That was a big session in another way as well, it was when Lokki the Warlock became a ye horrible awfulness by misuse of tiger steroids. Fun times.) As the session report attests, I’m pretty sure I just plain ad-libbed the 7⭐ into existence as backstory context for a randomly placed little cairn adventure. That entire thing with the martial arts gnoll outlaws grew to encompass a fair part of my sizable Dhalmondian sandbox prep when I actually sat to lay down material for Dhalmond.
So the Temple of the Seven Stars had been on the map ever since there was a map for Dhalmond, and it did come up regularly as a place in the remote northern part of the principality (deep inside the peasant rebellion area, as it were). I had an adventure germ of my own devising at 7⭐, but I wasn’t hooking it very aggressively, so other things were concerns until Teemu wanted to play a martial arts monk, which in Sunndi (fantasy India here) was certainly an option, but if you wanted to be local, you were extremely likely to be associated with the Temple, where all the cool kid martial artists of Dhalmond and probably most of the rest of Sunndi studied their arts.
Teemu’s character being from the Temple, I obviously unloaded a more intimate and clearly imminent version of my adventure hook on him: the Temple had been attacked by “werewolves”, and was in dire need of assistance. Teemu’s PC Monk was at loose ends, of course, having been on a training trip, and was now returning to Dhalmond. Nothing in the game is mandatory and railroaded, you can ignore that sort of backstory prodding, but I can see in hindsight why the players got into high gear about this Temple stuff soon after Teemu fielded this character. They just basically wrapped up the on-going adventure for which the character was introduced to begin with, and then it’s off to save the guy’s home temple from monsters.
(The obvious if-then of the adventure hook and player decision to actually follow the hook seems near predetermined in an explanation like this, but it doesn’t feel at all like that for the GM. I on my own part had known about the situation at the Temple for a couple dozen sessions of play, and as far as I was concerned I was just infodumping players on this and that and the third thing, as one does. You wanna play a 7⭐ acolyte, OK, here’s some stuff you know.)
So anyway, Teemu’s monk made his way to Dhaltown (I think the character was first introduced in our other campaign branch in Naerie, or something like that?) and caught up with the local bounty-hunters and convinced them to travel with him to check out the situation at the Temple, and so on. A bit of hexcrawling ensued; pretty tense, as Dhalmond isn’t the safest place in the world, and 7⭐ was at the time embedded within the openly rebellious half of the principality.
The party had a reasonably careful attitude towards the situation, and they had some luck gathering information from rural dwellers as they went, to piece together a picture of what was going on: apparently a well-known (bountied, in fact) band of highwaymen, the Ticotaco Bandits, were led by or associated with a filthy wererat monk going by the name “Stigu”. This Stigu had apparently led an assault on the Temple some months ago, and had taken the place over, such that the bandits were now regularly supplying some kind of garrison out there.
The party Ranger saved them quite some hassle on the way to the Temple by enabling them to avoid an encounter with a bandit supply caravan going that way, in fact. The party Monk, spying on the bandits, spotted somebody in the robes of his order among the bandits.
All in all, a tense situation was revealing itself here! What the adventurers were encountering was an adventure of my own devising, involving a frozen conflict between the bandits and the still-existent order of martial artist spiritual cultivators bunked down in the ruins of their monastery home. As the party had a monk of their own with them, they caught on quickly to the signs of the Temple still having some life to it; five of the seven “stars” (towers lit with great braziers that could be seen from afar) seemed to still be alight, easy to notice at dusk. Finding out more would require actually approaching the place and, well, finding out.
The party got first-hand confirmation of some sort of demonic influence being in play when they approached the front gate of the Temple and discovered that the gatehouse was infested with demon monkeys (these wacky friends seem to be somewhat common in the Sunndi region; we’d met them earlier at the Hollow Hills cursed mountain, too), something that was surely and certainly contrary to the teachings and values of the 7⭐.
State of the Productive Facilities
Rolling smoothly, overall! I’ve been getting some email tracking from DrivethruRPG over my Muster printer proofs, so I expect those to arrive in a couple of weeks. In the meantime I’m feeling unusually unburdened by unfinished projects, which makes for some pleasant freedom of thought; I imagine you’ll notice how my newsletter topics grow more frivolous by the week.
I hear from our local campaign secretary that we’ll be convening to talk about gaming plans next week, too. We ended our local Coup-in-Sunndi campaign fork in the late fall, and have been playing boardgames instead recently, so it’ll be interesting to see what direction we’ll take next. I do have some ideas in the pipeline myself, just need to find out what the others think of them.