Oh geez, this one is gonna get us some letters. Lemme just warn you in advance if you’re as hot on this property as everyone on the internet seems to be for Moorcock stuff, you might wanna just go check out a Movie Mastery or something. Otherwise, welcome to Amber Diceless, a game that has rules it would probably just be better off without.
Announcement Mastery
Eventide!
Available today on DrivethruRPG: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/359061/Eventide
How and why the world as we know it came to be changed forever has long been forgotten.
It’s been hundreds – maybe even thousands – of years since anyone even spoke of the Cataclysm or the time that came before, and the memories of that world that once was, faded into dust.
To the people inhabiting the world of Eventide, this isn’t a post-cataclysmic world, it’s just the world that is. And the world that always was, as far back as anyone living in it can remember.
– From Frenzy Kitty Games, the studio that brought you KARMA, Something Wicked, and Children of the Fall comes EVENTIDE, a game of apocalyptic survival horror in the wasteland.
- Fast and dynamic rules for roleplaying in the apocalypse
- Robust classless character-creation
- Optional Tribe Creation rules for group play
- Full campaign setting including many detailed settlements and NPCs
- Dozens of inspiring adventure seeds
- 17 Tribes complete with unique beliefs, structures, affiliations, and NPCs
- A bestiary containing 35 ruthless and terrifying enemies
- Hardcore Mode: rules variants for brave players in search of a brutal challenge.
- Lone Wanderer: Solitaire rules for solo adventures in the wastelands
- Apocalypse Toolkit: Tools and generators to assist GMs in running their games dynamically
System Mastery 
Is your next episode on Lords of Gossamer and Shadow, which takes Amber Diceless and replaces both the setting and the writer with ones more friendly towards actual gameplay?
It sounds like the most interesting campaign in this setting would be having your party go find the god of the world and beat their ass for constantly fucking with them. I guess that’s true for a lot of these GM vs Player type games, but the players could believably do it here.
You didn’t review the system, you reviewed the book.
I really want to see Kane as Santa Claus now
Hi! I discovered your podcast last week and listened to the two D&D review episodes (4th and 5th Ed, the former insightful, the latter spiteful). This episode I quit listening to once you mentioned that you didn’t actually read any Zelazney or much Fantasy in general (“Alan Dean Foster is ok”).
Amber Diceless is a game for people who read Amber when they were 13 and thought it was the best thing ever. Lots of people in my country had this experience (because of the limited availability of translated Fantasy in the 80s) and I think that explains why it appealed to a certain niche of roleplayers. Like VTM, it rewards setting mastery (which reading the books gives you) – the entire game is basically setting mastery, emotional investment and submission to the GM’s loving authority. No wonder D&D loyalists called the VTM/Amber crowd a cult.
Amber was the pulpy crap Zelazny wrote for a paycheck, and one of its quirks was actually a LACK of thee thou bullshit even if it was juxtaposed with cosmic fantasy weirdness. Corwin’s inner monologue just sounds like a hard-boiled detective most of the time
Your review was absolutely spot on. You even missed that of the four stats, in the end, only Psych and Warfare actually mattered. However, Dotan Dimet’s comment above was also correct that if at least one player read the series at 13 and loved it like a second home, then the game was a perfect immersive experience. That one player was enough to walk the others through the lore and legend and share the immersion until the others read it too.
Regarding the status auction, most groups only use it first time but for that one time it is brilliant because it sets the players with enough grudge to enjoy scheming against each other without actually being enough to trigger full on PvP. This is full immersion for those who read the books and did its job very well, even for those who did not.
Looking at the game from the outside in terms of RAW, your assessment was perfect and I completely understand why those not fans of the books would be right to wonder why anyone would play this clunky game.
I laughed my head off listening to your astute review and enjoyed it thoroughly.