Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game - History

History

The original 256-page game book was published in 1991 by Phage Press, covering material from the first five novels (the "Corwin Cycle") and some details - sorcery and the Logrus - from the remaining five novels (the "Merlin Cycle"), in order to allow players to roleplay characters from the Courts of Chaos. Some details were changed slightly to allow more player choice - for example, players can be full Trump Artists without having walked the Pattern or the Logrus, which Merlin says is impossible; and players' psychic abilities are far greater than those shown in the books.

A 256-page companion volume, Shadow Knight, was published in 1993. This supplemental rule book includes the remaining elements from the Merlin novels, such as Broken Patterns, and allows players to create Constructs such as Merlin's Ghostwheel. The book presents the second series of novels not as additions to the series' continuity but as an example of a roleplaying campaign with Merlin, Luke, Julia, Jurt and Coral as the PCs. The remainder of the book is a collection of essays on the game, statistics for the new characters and an update of the older ones in light of their appearance in the second series, and (perhaps most usefully for GMs) plot summaries of each of the ten books. The book includes some material from the short story The Salesman's Tale, and some unpublished material cut from Prince of Chaos, notably Coral's pregnancy by Merlin.

Both books were translated and released by French publisher Jeux Descartes in 1994 and 1995.

A third book, Rebma, was promised. Cover art was commissioned and pre-orders were taken, but it never arrived. Wujcik also expressed a desire to create a book giving greater detail to the Courts of Chaos. The publishing rights to the Amber DRPG games were acquired in 2004 by Guardians of Order, who took over sales of the game and announced their intention to release a new edition of the game. However, no new edition was released before Guardians of Order went out of business in 2006. The two existing books are now out-of-print, but they have been made available as PDF downloads.

In June 2007 a new publishing company, headed by Edwin Voskamp and Eric Todd, was formed with the express purpose of bringing Amber DRPG back into print. The new company is named Diceless by Design. In May 2010, Rite Publishing secured a license from Diceless by Design to use the rules system in the creation of a new product to be written by industry and system veteran Jason Durall. The project uses the patronage business model and is called "Lords of Gossamer and Shadow". The project was still pending completion as of Mar 2011.