More Amber Pulp!

Jvstin of long-time Amber DRPG fame just finished up a pulp-Amber game using Spirit of the Century at “The Black Road” Amber-con. Details at The Children of Amber in… the Machinations of Duke Icarium.

I like the implementation — unlike the very detailed complete rewrite of the rules I’ve seen elsewhere, his implementation changes relatively little in the core rules themselves: renaming a couple skills, dropping Science and just leaving the Medicine aspect of it, and breaking Riding out from Survival (which I didn’t do simply because Riding just seemed too narrow a skill to me, in comparison to the rest of the list.

All in all, it totally works: I think TCoA is more of a traditional Amber setting, so dropping stuff like Science makes sense, as does lumping all Vehicles into one gestalt skill (though again that makes Riding seem kind of narrow) — for NPiP, I’m injecting a lot of non-canon technology, weird science and pulp trappings, as WELL as the pulp ‘feel,’ so those differences are understandable.

Either way, it demonstrates that Amber/SotC is an easy-peasey hack.

I like his take on Art as both the core skill behind a “Trump Artist” stunt (which I’m doing in my NPiP game) and the idea that the art skill also equates to a USER’S level of skill with interacting with Trumps (which didn’t occur to me); that’s kinda hot. Daddy like.

All in all, great stuff — I’m looking forward to finding out how the session itself ran.