yacoob
tl;dr: Interesting, but not earth-shaking. Can kill your pleasure drawn from reading of Amber cycle. Useful RPGing bits.I wanted to read this for so long - and I finally did. I guess that has build up the expectations quite high, and the book failed to match this. The noble goal of rooting out dice obsession from RPG succeeded in Amber only partially - you can never ever underestimate the will of people to moan, complain and argue about things with GM. Having said that, the manual actually gives a useful advise on how to resolve those kind of conflicts. There's also fair bit of general roleplaying info, although sometimes it borders on armchair psychoanalyst manual :)The actual setting (Roger Zelazny's Amber) is... abused, so to speak. Even though there are very few tangible properties you describe your character with, the meticulous descriptions of all major characters from the books seem tired and dull. I have a general problem with RPG systems based on pre-existing lore - they tend to cannibalise and nitpick on prose, on something that - most likely - hasn't been designed to survive this. Amber RPG fuels my prejudice without a miss, giving all important story plots realistic and “quantified” description. The fact that Amber's world is base for this RPG wasn't a surprise for me :) but I've seen far better treatments of prose for the purpose of making an RPG out of it.
tl;dr: Interesting, but not earth-shaking. Can kill your pleasure drawn from reading of Amber cycle. Useful RPGing bits.I wanted to read this for so long - and I finally did. I guess that has build up the expectations quite high, and the book failed to match this. The noble goal of rooting out dice obsession from RPG succeeded in Amber only partially - you can never ever underestimate the will of people to moan, complain and argue about things with GM. Having said that, the manual actually gives a useful advise on how to resolve those kind of conflicts. There's also fair bit of general roleplaying info, although sometimes it borders on armchair psychoanalyst manual :)The actual setting (Roger Zelazny's Amber) is... abused, so to speak. Even though there are very few tangible properties you describe your character with, the meticulous descriptions of all major characters from the books seem tired and dull. I have a general problem with RPG systems based on pre-existing lore - they tend to cannibalise and nitpick on prose, on something that - most likely - hasn't been designed to survive this. Amber RPG fuels my prejudice without a miss, giving all important story plots realistic and “quantified” description. The fact that Amber's world is base for this RPG wasn't a surprise for me :) but I've seen far better treatments of prose for the purpose of making an RPG out of it.