True Fortress Ameritrash Confessions

Confession - Besides Trashfest NE, I still haven't taken Repoman up on his offer. This must change!

Mr. White wrote: Yeah, what happened to that dude? Why'd he pack it in?

I don't know if that has anything to do with it, but for a while last year LDSDBomber was in a pretty dark place and it seemed he had something against Shweig! and kept insulting him and piling it on pretty heavily...might be, might not.

I miss Simon.

I may be going off the deep end over a game design for a game that will never be published. 3/4 of a lifetime ago, I bought a weird-looking paperback at a book sale. It was The Guns of Avalon (Avon '74 edition), the second book in the Amber series. It had knights monsters, demons, swordfights, guns, dimensional travel, and a Machiavellian family of immortals. I eventually read all ten books in the series, kept hoping for someone to publish a card game or board game that did justice to the books. There was an interesting diceless rpg published in the early '90s, but that was too dependent on GM fiat and tended to fall flat.

After studying four other design attempts that I found online, I finally felt inspired to rip off a few of their ideas and put together my own Amber game. The Zelazny estate has made it clear that they won't be authorizing a game based on the series, so this will just be for fun. I need to spend some time on components but should have a working prototype in a month, and I will do some playtesting to tweak things like hand size, combat, and victory conditions.

Here is the crazy part. I found out that there are maybe a half dozen annual conventions dedicated to this series, and one of them takes place about 12 miles from my home. Although this convention is primarily focused on the diceless rpg, there are sometimes other activities there. So I am seriously considering paying the $160 to attend this year. It's four days and three nights, with hotel room and meals included in the $160. They are always looking for more people to run events, and my game can scale up to ten players, so I am thinking of hosting a game every day of the convention. Hopefully I will also connect with some local fans of the series, so I can play my Amber game more in the future.

^^Me too.

I played something similar to that. It's called Heroscape.

I do hope you get what you want, though, brother. All the best to ya!

Oh no, Amber has a whole different set of cirumstances in it than Heroscape. There's a Game of Thrones aspect to Amber and a method of moving through different worlds. A game that addresses those political and maneuver aspects along with the more brutal combat possibilities would be very interesting. I'd be looking real damn hard at it. Amber was a great little set of books.

And by the way, $160 for three nights room, food and convention? God almighty that's one hell of a deal. It cost me more to do one night at WBC and I shared my room with a family of mice (who didn't pay). From now one it's small cons for me or nothing.

S.

I would be highly interested in purchasing your Amber game off Artscow when/if it's finished. One of my favorite series.

When I finish playtesting my Amber game, I will pass on copies of the rules and information about how to assemble your own copy. The short version is that you will need a full Badger deck, about 100 tokens, and enough card sleeves to handle another deck of around 100 cards. Or you could do that deck via Artscow. Since I am shamelessly ripping off an author, multiple artists, and a couple of other game designers, I feel that all I can take credit for is a good synthesis of ingredients.

I have the rules and the structure of the game all worked out, and now I just need to work out a good balance between cardflow, combat, and victory conditions. And then I probably need to pull out some of the chrome and either put those rules on specific cards or change them to optional rules. The biggest challenge was to figure out the right level of detail for the game. Too detailed, and the game becomes infinitely large and open-ended, with more components than all of Arkham Horror put together. Too abstract and then it doesn't feel like Amber at all.

I have no information about the West End prototype from the '80s, save that the playtesters loved it but it had an extreme quantity of components that made it too expensive for the boardgame market at the time. I have also studied four previous attempts at Amber games online. The european one turns Amber into a boring abstract with nice art. The warpspawn design only captures the first two books of the series, and is an odd combination of take-that cards with simplified character sheets. The one by Ken St. Andre uses a tarot deck, and like the warpspawn game, reduces all locations to just two: Amber and Shadow. The Badger design at BGG is the first one that actually makes location matter, and his concept of the relationship of Amber, the Courts of Chaos and Shadow matches my own. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem interested in AmeriTrash, so his victory conditions amount to boring card set collection goals.

Just now, I went looking again for any info at all about the West End prototype for Amber, and discovered something maddening. The design team was made up of the same people who designed Dune and Cosmic Encounter. Argh. That could have been an awesome game.

Shellhead wrote: Just now, I went looking again for any info at all about the West End prototype for Amber, and discovered something maddening. The design team was made up of the same people who designed Dune and Cosmic Encounter. Argh. That could have been an awesome game.

Or it could have Borderlands/Gearworld.

I actually am a crayon that has escaped from a crayola factory after they retired my color. And while my name here claims to represent all colorcrayons, my real name is "Green Blue".

I just found out that Jeb is no longer my FB friend and I'm genuinely hurt. Wadudeyedoo?

I think that Andy is still mad at me. I say we make it a fucking duel! Choose your weapon Sir!

I look exactly like my avatar. No joke.

I believe that Mike Barnes is a modern day mythological creature- like a jackalope, or a unicorn.
has anyone here actually SEEN Mike Barnes in person?
I rest my case.

This is the first time I've posted in, like, a long time.

Oh, and fuck Josh Look.