Tips for Amber Games

So, somehow or other, you ended up looking at my "Amber Tips" page. And now you're probably asking yourself, "What the hell is this?"

What this is?

These pages are a fairly sizable body of my thoughts on how to go about GMing an Amber DRPG game. They're aimed at a GM, not a player, and they're aimed, further, at a GM who doesn't have a whole lot of experience with Amber, at least on the GM end.

Amber's an unbelievably cool game, and it's one that's unbelievably scary to GM. I love Amber. It's far and away my favorite roleplaying experience, and I want to encourage people to play and GM it. Thus, this page.

Disclaimer Time

I'm only human. I have my biases and my assumptions. One of my big assumptions is that 1. You're primarily interested in GMing Amber so that you can, to a greater or less extent, recreate both the world and the mood of the novels, and 2. That you agree with me as to what the world and mood of the novels is.

If you want to run Amber as a Hong Kong action movie... Well, I still think that this page can help you. But it won't help you nearly as much as it would if you wanted to run Amber as a moody epic fantasy. If you're a player, not a GM... I still think you might find this page interesting. But not as interesting as if you were a GM. And if you're an old hand at Amber... I think you'll still find some value in what I've got to say. But not nearly as much as you would if you were still struggling with some basic concepts.

This page won't be all things to all people. I've received some praise for it, and some flak for it. I hope it helps you.

Layout

There's a lot of material here, but I'm trying to keep it accessible. That's what's with the frame over on the left. If you find frames morally objectionable, you can use the list below. Sometime soon, I'm even going to come up with a way to get around the pages entirely without frames. Because I'm just that nice a guy.

I've tried to keep things in a logical order of when you'll need them. You could do worse than to start at the top and work your way to the bottom.

Talk Back!

I like it when people acknowledge my existance. Even when such acknowledgement comes with a whole bunch of criticism. Tell me what you think -- I'm msulliva@wso.williams.edu. I don't promise to agree with everything you say, but people have induced me to change this page before, and I hope they will again.