Dab on them haters; The Sabbat Worlds Crusade by Dan Abnett

DESCRIBE WHAT THIS IS

For anyone who doesn't know what this is;

For twenty years and fifteen novels, Dan Abnett has been writing the 'Gaunts Ghosts' series, set in a particular segment of the Warhammer 40,000 galaxy; the Sabbat Worlds.

And not just a particular segment of space but a particular segment of time, about 250 years before the current 'now' of the 40k reality.

All of these stories take place in an area called the Sabbat Worlds and over the novels, short stories and various other entries, a handful by other creators, the history of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade has deepened and extended.

This Crusade, as a pseudo-historical event, got a background book back in 2005, told from an in-world voice.

Now its 14 years and several books later and Games Worship is BANGIN' with money, so Dan Abnett gets to make a new background book for the Sabbat Worlds Crusade, except this time its hardback A4 with gold goddamn leaf on the spine and loads of new art and maps, and a ribbon. This one is also written from an in-universe voice, and as it takes into account all the stuff that has happened in the last 14 years worth of novels, its written from an imaginary date several years on from the last book.

Being a shameless wehraboo, I ordered this as soon as it became available and Black Library were actually terrifyingly efficient and got it to my door incredibly quickly.

Considering that this shit is my jam, I own remarkably few highly-diegetic pseudo histories, I think this and the Gloriana book are the only ones that go this deep into it

My tldr review;  I have a few quibbles but essentially the only thing I would ask for is more.




DIAGEIS OF THE TEXT

That's; "how deep did they go on this in trying to make sure the whole book really feels like it comes from inside the imagined world."

The answer is; slightly imperfect but honestly pretty fucking far.

The only references to the real world are Dan Abnetts name and Black Library on the cover and an ISBN & Credits page at the back.

The book opens with an Inquisitorial investigation. This particular text was created on the world of Urdesh specifically to commemorate its liberation (as seen in the latest books) and draws information from a wide variety of sources.

Unfortunately for Garnyme and Brothers Printworks and Bindery, Strallent Street, Great Eltath Municipality (who have their own pseudo-publishers page at the front) and Ludovik Dypole, Emeritus professor of Military History Scholam Univeritariate of Ghreppan, Urdesh (who has his own author page), in interviewing a bunch of people and clawing sources from everywhere they have regrettably put CHAOS STUFF and SECRETS in here, which is one thing you are absolutely not meant to do, so now they are going to get a visit from the people Nobody Expects.

And it seems the book has been pulped and only this copy has been retained for study. So in the strange relationship of reality between our world and 40k, your copy of the book, the one you are holding, is the Only Copy.

Tanks with legs! Only dangerous in fiction, which, unfortunately for that Guardsman, this is.

ABNETTS HISTORYVERSE

The Gaunts Ghosts series  is a mad Collision of different kinds of stories - even within Abnetts main series,  the opening ones are very genre and pretty much 'Sharpe-In-Space', then they develop into this chimeric pseudo-militarism.

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(WHAT I MEAN BY CHIMERAE)

Most fantastic paracosms, especially science-fictional ones, are chimerae of the structure of an imagined future and the elements known to the present.

There's a William Gibson view that Science-Fiction is really always about the 'now'. This gains credence when you look back at old science fiction because it utterly reeks of its specific decade and time.

I believe that most (good) science-fiction is about the interrelationship between an imagined future (or just an imagined other) and the present. Most functional science-fictions concepts, be they machines, social systems, aesthetics, worlds, environments or whatever, are chimerae made up with the shape, form or blood of the future, but with the scales, feathers and claws of today.

So everything you sense of the Other comes in the clothes of the Now.

Then you can understand it.

And then once its dead or old and someone looks back at it, it seems almost like a ridiculous costume of the Now.

But they are never just symbols for known events or current things, and rarely are they pure dreams of the Other.

They are complex living relationships formed of an exchange of energy between the two things and explaining the nature of one with the matter of the other.

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One of Abenetts greatest strengths in these stories has been his ability to comprehend and accumulate vast and (relatively, for a genre writer) deep awareness of different kinds of warfare over a huge number of fields and to incorporate that into active pseudohistories which involve wildly different scales and forms of technologies, and to incorporate those with solid, animated, visceral and sympathetic characters so that you feel the characters and you feel the world they are moving through.

I've really taken to writing long sentences recently, no idea why.

He is really really good at making these fields of conflict, which are truly more like dreams, because if they were considered coherently; well the delta v for orbital war doesn't work, the titans will sink up to their knees, the space marines can be taken out by hordes of suicide bombers who cost 1 per cent as much as they do, whoever has orbital control essentially rules a world, the ammo logistics don't work, etc etc etc.

But you rarely feel these things in the best of Abnetts work because the of depth, coherency and selection of detail and his creation of a mosaic of details drawn from all over military history, here’s a bit of Stalingrad, here’s a bit of the Iraq war, here's a 20th century air battle at a scale at which those battles almost never took place, here's some 21st century tank fights but also giant robots stamping about, here's an early 21st century special ops team fighting their way through an early 2oth century trench war etc etc.

Militarism I would say. not militarism as absolute chauvinism or love of warfare and killing for itself, but militarism love of, and interest in the military and military things as and for themselves. Which is parallel to, but not the same as, the love of war for wars sake, (not always the same people at the same time).

40k warfare through Abnetts eyes is to me, very much a crazed fever dream of 20th century warfare, swollen to enormous scale and delivered calmly. Militarism as as art.



THE ROLE OF GOD IN ABNETTS HISTORYVERSE

Well there are literal diegetic gods in the setting, and there is literally a god of Fate, and the duelling prognosticator thing that we have in the Heresy books.

A pretty strong developing theme in a lot of Abnetts warhammer work is of these forces beyond time and space 'picking up' individual characters and in a sense moving them around, or presenting them challenges and opportunities, and preparing them for conflicts with each other.

The way characters respond to these challenges, whether they succeed or fail, can differ. I get the sense that there is some level of individual choice or low level randomness, so even the gods don't know exactly what’s going to happen in any individual circumstance, or which particular playing piece will make it to the end.

But there is a strange relationship here between the will of the Emperor and the desire of the writer to make a good story.

It seems like the one thing the Emperor and the Chaos Gods agree on is that things should play out in as dramatic and high-risk a way as possible, with as much as possible riding on a small handful of people and choices over a limited period of time.

Which, as it happens, is also the substance of a plot for a really good book.

So Abnett and the Emperor both have an interest in the plot being good. The Emperor Protects, he protects your fanbase and your book sales. Ave Imperator.




BRIEF BREAKWAY HERE ABOUT HOW THIS ACTUALLY MIMICS THE LIKELY STRUCTURE OF WAR

I've often thought that if genuine chaos (small-c chaos as in Randomness) were a force in human affairs then it would be almost impossible for a structural historian to see.

I do think large events can turn on very small incidents, especially in war, and bits and pieces of military theory do seem to suggest that many battles and encounters are essentially decided by a relatively small number of people who are willing to do very extreme high-risk things with a great majority of people behind them following along and being more systematic and sensible.

So is Abnetts pseudo-historical fate-influenced 'heroverse' in some ways a reasonable image of what history might actually look like? No idea.



CONFLICTS BETWEEN ABNETS HEROIC STORYTELLING AT THE LOW LEVEL AND PSEUDOHISTORY AT THE HIGH LEVEL

Abnett loves ice-cold REALISTIC pseudo-histories and really HEROIC characters.

In the Ghosts books, the Taniths super-duper badass scout mkoll kills a chaos dreadnought with a grenade and some plants (thanks 1d4 chan) out-stealths a magical space elf from the stealth dimension, and most recently, defeats a warp-empowered chaos ultimate bad guy by shoving a det charge down his gob.

Its fun in the moment, and it gets a little silly considered as a whole.

That's an extreme example but tonalities of that are written throughout all of Abnetts work. He is perhaps the least 'dark' writer of the Dark Millennium (except for Sandy Mitchell).

The two don't go together well, except they kinda do but just awkwardly. In this pseudohistory 'good' commanders who try to do the right thing get shitcanned for political reasons and end up shooting themselves, innocent worlds are left to burn, purges take place and lots of random military stuff happens which inevitably leads to completely, or largely, innocent soldiers getting screwed.


In the _novels_ all the same stuff happens, just less of it and less often to 'our' characters and our characters aren't the ones who do it and so on and so on.

So its a very Dark Millennium but if Gaunts Ghosts are involved in your million-to-one last stand theres a nine out a ten chance that you will win.

This seems to me part of the books old DNA, going back to Sharpe, which is a tough-guy edgier Hornblower, and back to Hornblower who I think may have started the 'paragon-military-dude-in-an-unfair-world' genre

This hardly hurts the book, its probably part of the reason it works as a whole.




IS THE ART ANY GOOD?

The artists list at the back reads like a 'whos who' of warhammer art; David Alvarez, John Blanche, Luke Blick, Daniel Bolling Walsh, Alex Boyd, George Brad, Da Yu, Paul Dainton, marta Dettlaff, Tomas Duchek, Johan Grenier, Aaron Griffin, mark harrison, Ralph Horsley, Akim Kaliberda, Dave Kendall, Nuala Kinrade, Vladimir Krisetskiy, karl Kopinski, Anna Lakivosa, Clint Langley, Phil Moss, Nicotene, Filipe Pagliuso, Grzegorz Przbys, Fred Rambaud, Mikhail Savier, Lie Setiawan, Evan Shepard, Adrian Smith, Raymond Swanland, Jason Rainville, Thomas Rey, Adam Tooby, Tiernan Trevallion, Wayne England, there's a LOT, and it all comes from different origins, different books and publications over the last twenty years

For Nu-Warhammer, its good.

I don't think Nu-GW can be as good as the best of the old stuff

Firstly, we are comparing a wide range of current stuff with the very best of the old stuff.

Second, while you can do a lot with digital, in the final analysis for me its highest reaches simply can't compare with the base-reality texture and feel of fully-physical art.

In some ways I think it might be better for GW to just completely forget John Blanche because no-one can do what he can do and trying to imitate him just produces lesser things. If they broke free from him they might be shit for a while but then maybe produce entirely new stuff?

I can't tell if that's a radical statement or not.#

Kylo Ren baby! Somtimes you gotta talk about breaking free from the past but then don't.

There's a strong RPG-art influence, which is mixed, it does give us an interest in portraiture and human character which hasn't been a big element of 40k stuff previously, it also has the slight blandifying effect of most rpg art

However,

this volpone blueblood;

Its an RPG style but its pretty good

The shiniest possible guns for my men!

and this portrait of macaroth

Millennial Warmaster

Are both really good and good examples of the new style

And this Slaydo portrait in the older style

Gen-X Warmaster

There are some images in here which were in White Dwarf and, in my opinion, should not have been cut down to A4 size as it made them look more stiff and rubbish than they are.




DIAGESIS OF THE ART

Like the rest of the Diagesis, its slightly imperfect but a damn good effort. All the art as these little 'museum tags' giving an in-universe origin for them. Like;

"(right) Engraving of Kolstec infantry and Prefectus officer at Lyuobhive."

Often with little micro-histories which work really well, especially with the chaos stuff which is all from creepy images recovered from enemy strongholds, or seen in obsessive dream-visions by madmen, and which are inevitably haunted. And there's a note at the end saying 'yeah we had to inquisition and/or destroy this one because fucking ghosts kept coming out of it'

(Will ghosts come out of my copy of this book Games Workshop? And if not, why not?! I demand actually literally haunted images for the third edition!!)

Which leads us back to the Inquisitorial Statement at the front of the book and an in-universe account for writing a 'True History' in a universe where, famously, no History is True.

There are some fun bits when a picture is very clearly from some other 40k book and entirely different conflict and the in-world description is "possibly mis-labelled" or "likely a generic image of war later filed with the Sabbat Crusade section" or "likely done from descriptions of the event much later".

There is an attempt with some of the newer stuff to do a kind of version of 8th and 19thC British Imperial war images in which someone defends the gates of khatmandu with a pistol or cradles their dying general while blasting away at the French/Colonials/natives with a Brown Bess.

It’s sort of successful. The arrangements of the figures in the images seems about right and the quality ranges from high to ok but they are still digital images and very clearly not the oil paintings they are simulating.

Points for effort!

Also I thought the Sabbat Worlds crusade was browner than this? I got the impression that the Vervunhivers and Belladon may have been non-white? But not sure where I got that from or if its accurate as I don't have the books. There's a few dark-skinned people in this but less than you would see walking around Nottingham today.



STUFF WHICH DESERVES A MENTION BUT WHICH I RAN OUT OF STEAM BEFORE MENTIONING

MAPS - Francesca Baeralds multi-page fold-out mapi is really beautiful and a very classy thing for GW to include in the actual book (so thanks).

The quation as maps in fantasy books as tools and art and storytelling devices and global forms of organisation for world and play information is a whole world of criticism which I will hopefully one day have the energy to address properly.

EDITIONS – The first version is also an in-world text which by a different in-world character. This new edition is an in-world text by a Historian who has read the first edition (probably he got it off eBay).

So when a third edition comes out, as I am sure it will once the series ends. (And like Sharpe, the series end will probably not be the actual end), but that in turn will be an in-world text by someone. Will they have got their hands on a copy of this redacted history? Will they be writing post-Nihilus?

This combination if diagetic analysis does allow Abnett the possibility of doing some crazy in-world out-world shit where you have to read all three editions to get it, which is something very few writers actually get to do.





INTEGRATION WITH THE CURRENT 40K META

I hope there isn’t any?

I don't hate Nihilus , and there are some interesting questions about whats gonna happen to the Sabbat worlds in about 250 years when the supercell hits.

Abnett has worked in the Kinebranch, who I think are the alien race from the start of the Horus Heresy (so are the Sabbat worlds the place where all that started?)

(And also I lost track of where exactly the Sabbat Worlds are. Are they on the Happy side or the Doom side?)

But I really don't want the Sabbat worlds to be 'explained' from the pov of later 40k

I quite like the 'Age of Man', that period from the Guilliman entering his stasis field until the big storm hitting and him waking up where the only Primarch you would see is the occasional demon one on an Epic scale battlefield.

I liked that it was all up to humanity, and I liked that it was much more Alan Bligh influenced pseudohistory rather than primarch ping-pong 'everything is the heresy' stuff, and I liked that it felt deep, it felt like there was time there and the galaxy had a sense of scale

I don't hate the new stuff but I was actually looking forward to GW forgetting about those intermediate 10,000 years, then nerds could have it and do interesting stuff with it.

So not only are the Sabbat worlds old Kinebranch territory, but there’s a mcguffin, the 'eagle stones' written in some ancient alien language, which everyone is chasing

And goddamn it better not be Horus's shopping list or a REFERENCE TO HORUS RISING.

DON'T DO IT ABNETT, LET IT FUCKING LIE.

Grieving for Demon Tits

First they came for the nipples of the Keeper of Secrets.

And I said nothing, because I was not a Slaaneshi sex daemon.

Then they came for the nipples of the Sororitas Repentia.

And still I said nothing, for I was not a BDSM Space Nun.

But then, they came for my nipples.....




Ok, Games Workshop has not actually come for my nipples. And they didn't really take them off the Repentia, just made them put their tops on [BORING]. And the Slaaneshi six-titted sex-horses still have nipples.

(Which just makes it weirder in my opinion, like thats ok but not on the space nuns?).

Also the sex-horses only have four tits but that's less fun to write.

Also the new Keeper of Secrets really is much, much better than the old one, and still feels really pervy to an extreme degree.

Still, I feel aggrieved. When I was a young man, the world was a simpler place. You could wander into a Games Workshop store with your packet money, and come out with a metal-cast Keeper of Secrets model with one highly exposed and I think pierced nipple. You could throw in a squad of bald screaming space nuns wielding two-handed chainswords and wearing nothing but strips of parchment listing their sins.

It was a golden time, and a more innocent age.

Remember this Jes Goodwin you dammed COWARD?

We live now in an age of shame.

In todays aesthetically crippled moral universe, we are supposed to feel bad if a female Inquisitor puts high heels on her science-fictional power armour, we're supposed to feel bad about ritualised female secondary sexual characteristics replicated in servo-activated ceramite.

Yes, Xenocide, Genocide, auto-da-fe's and infinite pauldrons are fine, but heaven forfend you wear jimmy choos' on the battlefield, because that would be wrong.

Why? I honestly don't know. But the emotion is a strong one. People really, really really don't like this stuff. It upsets them. I think, to them, it seems dirty.

Its not too late to go back to a simpler time...

I would ask for reasons but I don't think and can really be given. Not true ones any way. It is a matter of feeling and moral intuition and the engines which drive these are always hidden from us, though blathering socio-political claptrap will aways present a series of rather tiresome arguments based on half-occluded facts which rest themselves upon awkward piles of assumption and ever more-occluded facts, all of them wrapped up in gloss and presented as 'common knowledge'.

In this fallen world, everything we know will eventually be taken away from us, demon nipples, Marneus Calgars dinosaur writing desk, the concept of the bolter round as a self-propelled micro-projectile, all shall pass.

All we can do is grieve for the demon nipples of our youth...

OSR Witchfinder

DO NOT TALK THEORY TO ME, I AM THE WITCHFINDER

WHOEVER FIRST SPEAKETH IN THE FORKED WORDS OF GAME THEORY - THEY SHALL BE BURNT

Seriously, please comment and please comment with actual comprehensible situations describes in natural language and without use of game theory jargon. Brendan, you can say 'orthogonal' once, because I know you need that.

And me calling myself a Witchfinder is me being ironic and edgy, the fact that I have to explicitly say this is slowly killing me inside. Please do not actually witch-hunt anyone.


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Scrap ran this thread about assumed OSR game elements and that, along with Ben Miltons discussion of the new 40k game a bunch of other things, made me start, or continue, to think about Storygames and what they are.

Everyone has a good idea about what storygames are and none of those ideas are the same ideas.

So here are my thoughts. If you add your thoughts then we can start to agree about what we disagree about.

(Clearly, as I read back through this, I am describing a pattern of thought and a culture that goes way beyond just 'story games' and also clearly I can't defend most of this on rational grounds. This is not me making an argument that all of these things are story gaming but describing the idea cluster in my head that comes up in relation to that phrase.)



NARRATIVE CONTROL

If it has has narrative control elements where, to paraphrase Zedeck, 'you play as a screenwriter writing your character, instead of as your character', then that's a story game.

In D&D my OSR witch-finder brain will allow this only through occasional magical effects, only in an alienating and slightly upsetting fashion and only in an irregular and unpredictable way.

Anything where this kind of thing is regularised is storygamey to me.

Apocalypse World, in my mind, must absolutely be a storygame, and if it is, then is seems impossible that anything drawn from its engine might not be.



IT TELLS YOU

If a game outright says that a *primary* purpose is to produce a story then that increases the storygameness.

However, a lot of modern D&D language, especially post critical-roll (role?), is about adventures as a 'story' and that the purpose is 'storytelling'. But under the hood it is very much the same old structure with a complex arrangement of character, challenge based, narrative and other elements all jammed together and which you can play in a variety of ways.

So perhaps the gaming 'culture' is storygamy but the actual system, and much of the play, is not.

I would say self-declared statements in the game text about being a story-generation machine are not themselves enough.



CHARACTER BASED

You begin the game caring a lot about your character in a very particular way. Identification is immediate, or quick. They are special now. They have a role and a meaning in the 'story'.

Their emotions matter directly now and very often their emotions are directly mirrored or described or measured in the ruleset.



PERSON TO PERSON

They tend to be good at, and focused on, modelling complex person-to-person interactions. More so than modelling peson-to-space or person-to-world reactions.

If a game has a large cast of PC's largely interacting with each other more than with the world around them and if it has rules governing those interactions, then I am likely to think 'storygame'.



LAW OVER CHAOS

The players have to be protected from power abuses and that protection must come though explicit rules that make it almost impossible for the GM to be 'abusive' (however the designer defines that) if they are running by the written rules.

The benefits from strong protective rules are considered much more imporant than the possible benefits of unpredictable, and potentially unproductive chaos.

This can be extended into the political/social realm as well. That Baker-influenced lego robots game has, I think, a bit that explicitly tells you not to play if you are Fascist. Since everything is political, and since Fascists might like the game, then failing to explicitly tell them not to play is the same as writing a potentially Fascist game.



PLAY & DESIGN CULTURE IS CENTRE-LEFT TO FAR-LEFT

So far as I know there is absolutely no-one associated with storygames in any way who could be described as 'conservative' or right wing in their political leanings.

Conversely the OSR has a wide range from lefty nutters to right-wing whackjobs to whatever the fuck Pundit is.

So this entirely left/liberal and usually metropolitan play culture is something else I associate with something being 'storygamy'.



CHALLENGE

'Because I want you to feel successful'

You might not be able to absolutely win, but you can lose. You can die. You be unable to solve a problem. Not every problem exists 'to be solved. If you fail to solve something then the world doesn't necessarily push back, morph to provide another option or to provoke a response.

All of these are strong suggestions to me of 'not a storygame'.

Storygames to me are anxious that nothing too bad can happen to your character or you. [EDIT - see comments below & on G+ for view on how storygames actually really like some 'bad' things.] Challenges will almost always be solvable or something you can go around. You will be given many chances.



BENDY WORLDS

I imagine OSR-iy games to minimise the extent to which things are moved around 'behind the scenes' and, though they both use complex and somewhat flowing world-generation techniques, I think of storygames and being bent *towards* a flowing or shifting world behind the scenes more than OSR-ish games.



SOMEHOW ASSOCIATED WITH THE FORGE

I barely ever got through a thread on there because it was written in Crazy but something being from the Forge, or a designer being from there or someone referencing the Forge, always makes me think of storygameishness.



AGREEABLENESS

So, from Wikipedia; "Agreeableness is a personality trait manifesting itself in individual behavioural characteristics that are perceived as kind, sympathetic, cooperative, warm and considerate."

......

"The lower level traits, or facets, grouped under agreeableness are: trust, strightforwardness, altruism, compliance, modesty, and tender-mindedness."

To me this fits almost exactly the personality type I personally most associate with the cluster of ideas around 'Storygames'. Except for trust, because they seem to prefer strong rules to interpersonal power arrangements, and for strightforwardness, because they tend to back away from and skirt around arguments.

So when I meet people like this, I think 'storygames', and when I think 'storygames', I imagine people like this.

And this personality cluster is very different from the people I tend to be drawn towards, get along with and who's work I am interested in, who very often are difficult, spiky, awkward, disagreeable, antisocial, strange and very straightforward with it.

Review of Amber Diceless

Amber Diceless is one of the most interesting games I've read. It has a highly original and distinct self and a powerful, coherent and forcefully presented point of view on what a game is and should be.

I had an equally powerful reaction to it. I was deeply impressed by large parts and almost revolted by others.

It is a very primal game. I'm not deeply read enough in RPG history to say this with absolute conviction, but, based on what I do know, Amber seems unlike anything that came before it and seems to have had a huge influence on many strands of thinking that came afterwards.

A big fat game from the 90's golden age of big fat original ideas, it stumbles into our Age of Rust like a charismatic megafauna into a rotting theme park.



COMPLEXITY

Nothing is ever simple.

Amber has 4 stats, 3 kinds of universal magic power, no dice and it takes 250+ pages of US Letter Size to tell you what to do with them.

One of interesting the ways it does this is with an extensive range of typed 'actual play' dialogue segments. I have never seen them used with such frequency in anything else. Few pages go by without a living example of the rules in the text. I think some elements of the rules might show up *only* in these actual plays. This this continual flow of imagined social interaction becomes something like a rules-chourus textual system. Like a proto-Youtube, text mimicking neo-orality.

(Like almost all examples of this kind, these sections are not actual actual play, but imagined actual play. Though likely based on situations the creator encountered in playtesting.)

There are few diagrams, simple layout, some images, but usually general idea-pool intensifiers, rarely examples.

The playtest and development environment for Amber (from what I can infer) also comes from that misty golden age of no internet, stable social networks, long, looooong persistent play groups and educated people having plenty of free time.

Development seems to have taken about 5 years (!), with Wujicik saying he read the full Amber series about 40 times, and ran multi-hour sessions weekly with a stable coterie of players for all of that time.

I'll start by talking about two of the harder elements, the opening Auction and the Combat, and how they interrelate with and express the games general conception.



THE AUCTION

So far as I know no-one has used the attribute auction system before Amber and no-one has used it since. (Corrections in the comments as usual please.)

There are four Attributes which decide conflicts between players and between players and NPC's;

Psyche - Brain Stuff and SUPER MAGIC.
Strength - Strength.
Endurance - Keeping going.
Warfare - All Fights Ever.

Each player starts with a character concept, which the rules tell them to work out in detail and picture clearly before starting, and 100 points to fulfil it.

Points can be spent on various powers, objects and pocket realities, but the main thing they buy are those four Attributes.

If two players come into conflict with each other, depending on its nature the conflict will be based on one of those attributes. Whoever has the higher attribute wins.

(It's more complex than that but we will get into that in the combat system below.)

So Attributes, particularly having a higher attribute than another player, particularly having the highest attribute of all players, is vitally important. To a large degree it lets you decide how the game goes.

Players can get more than 100 points by 'selling down' Attributes below zero, but I think once you do that spending those points in the same attribute you just sold down is pointless so its effectively a transfer system of a kind.

The Auction starts with a written bid from each player. Then open bidding. Then finally it closes.

Notable things about the Auction in play;

- It creates PvP conflict right from character generation. Everyone has a character concept which they are meant to have worked out in advance, and which is VERY IMPORTANT since, as the game repeats many, many times, your Character is more important than the rules.

So probably no-one will get exactly their desired character and probably this will be because they got into a conflict with another player.

- The bitterness of this is deepened as points can't be taken back. So if you get into a bidding war with someone and both of you break away from the herd, and the other person wins, that makes you permanent Second Best at that particular thing and you arguably 'wasted' all those points.

- A BEST PERSON is always produced and whoever is best at a particular attribute is clear, known to all and cannot be subverted by any means. So everyone knows who is the strongest or the best fighter or whatever. This sets up known unbeatable situations.

- The hierarchy below this is occluded. Everyone can see what everyone else bid, but after the bidding is done players can use remaining points to secretly buy their way up the ladder. The only rule is that a player can't become the BEST via this process.

So everyone *thinks* they know where they are relative to everyone else but no-one can be absolutely sure, other than they know for certain who is the best.

- Those who are willing to take risks in bidding and *roll deep* show up right away, conversely so are those who plan carefully and delegate resources conservatively. (Patricks and Brendans)

- The main SUPERMAGICS that PCs use to navigate around the multiverse which makes up the play space are very powerful, available from the start and cost a LOT. Pattern Imprint is the standard power and costs 50 points. Logrus is a secondary power and can't be used without Shape Shifting, together these cost 80 points.

And Wujcik turns up, in a special little box, to say this -

So you can have any character you want but in fact the system is carefully weighted towards a certain kind of character.

- Wujcik also advises the DM to tell first time players that each power they bid on is the most important, without reference to the others. I have no idea if this is intended to be taken seriously but if it is its Gygaxian Riddlemaster bullshit to a high degree.

- You can get points for doing session reports in character (I bribe my players with XP for this).

- You can also get points for taking 'Bad Stuff', which is luck, or fortune, or randomness. The results of potentially random situations are essentially a resource in the game, which you can pay for. 'Good Stuff' makes you perennially perma-lucky.

The DM is advised that the amount of Bad or Good stuff directly effects the way in which the world is described to the *player*. It effects the emotional tonality of what they see, the general heuristics of what they expect to happen or intuit from NPC's, it puts the DM in a slightly, but fundamentally different relation with the player.

This is only one of a wide range of ways that Wujcik puts the DM in a *very* complex relationship with the player and PC. Many of the other elements of the game are based around the DM carefully allowing and expressing some things while almost hiding others, and this shifts according to circumstance and event.

All this while also telling them - page 229, Rules of Engagement, Rule *1* - "Senses and memory must be truthful."

- There is also a bunch of other crap you can get, most of it relatively cheap compared to other games. A basic Amberite with Pattern but with no bids on any Attribute is essentially a god or demigod compared to any normal human.

..............

There are some powerful polarities or paradoxes here that show up throughout the book. It is in some ways a very 'soft' game. Its about Character and expression and the char gen is literally an adversarial competition.

Two Wujciks collaborated to make this game. Original Wujcick was kinda crafty and dirty and into numbers and systems and being clever, and he did a lot of the original work on the bones of the game and put in a lot of the cheeky, slightly nasty and manipulative stuff. Ascended Wujcik, after he has played for several years, is way past anything to do with competition and will directly tell you through the book that Amber isn't a game, its a tool for producing story and embodying Characters, which is the real, most important thing about it, the 'game' part of RPG can just be thrown out. They made Amber together, collaborating across time, and neither of them could have made it alone.



An aside - PvP

The characters are expected to be much more powerful than the worlds in which they adventure. Only a handful of super special NPCs can really threaten their lives. And family members and, of course, other PCs.

Is Amber, in some way descended from a PvP mindset? Like a dark distant ancestor whose bones are in the attic that no-one talks about directly?





COMBAT

Few things could be more elegant than Ambers combat system, but it only works because it is a vehicle for defeat rather than death, and for story rather than.. whatever the 'other' or opposite to story is. It is entirely a matter of description and 'fictional positioning' (not a fan of that phrase) mediated by the DM.

Victory is certain from the first contact, if things proceed, and the DM knows at all times who will win in any particular circumstance

So what is fighting in Amber?

- An experiment or game, or bluff, to find out how good someone really is.
- A trick, a PC intends to set up the use of some other element, either prepared or improvised.
- A Drama engine - all deaths have consequence, usually social consequence.
- Possibly a contest of thought and invention - if both have a complex mixture of close qualities.
- A testing of the wills of the PC (are they willing to get hurt?) and the players (are they willing to get their PC hurt?)

This means each duel or fight is like a complex game of exchanged description in which people likely approach each other slowly, aiming to find out as much as they can before they put themselves in danger, and usually pretending that they are more or less powerful, are another identity, have other motives or something else. Paradoxically, it has a *sense* of lethality and real danger. If someone has a higher attribute than you, they can simply kill you.

This is compared to D&D's actual, real unpredictable danger where a Goblin can maybe knife you at level one but which often feels like knockabout fun.

So people in Amber duels, which are often non-lethal, act a lot like people in real duels, feinting, shifting, being conservative, while people in D&D, which can kill you, act like mad tank people (sometimes).

And again, this puts the GM in a highly complex perceptual and moral position in relation to both the players and the PC's. The GM could be trying to accurately represent someone who is very effectively lying and bending the PCs perception based in their levels of Good or Bad stuff and doing all of this while trying to make sure that senses and memory are accurate and true.

So everything is thrown onto description and 'fictional positioning', in this its a lot like some OSR-esque rulesets like Into the Odd where much of the complexity is meant to come from placing yourself in the world.

The combat rules are 20 pages long, describing likely manoeuvres, tactics, common fencing or duelling ploys, as well as contextual elements like the meaning and results of any combat in the wider game. I would recommend that any game designer read it.

And all this delicate, precise fluidity is born of the absence of death.

Well, you *can* die, it's hard to. Even though Amber doesn't have hit points it does effectively have a wound system - being of a certain kind gives you what are essentially chances not to die

Amber rank is 3
Chaos Rank is 2
Human is 1, or zero

So the scum still die just not the reals. Should a Goblin have a chance to kill you? - is a question we all have to answer in our own way.

But in Amber I think you can push so much of the context for what happens in a fight onto the DM because it is not a field of lethal competition. D&D has hard, obvious rules because you can die.

".. there is a drawback to a purely just game. It tends to kill characters.

...

"That kind of mortality, where Amberites rarely die, should be true in role-playing Amber as well. The players investment in their Amber characters is just too great for them to die easily. It just doesn't make any sense for someone to put in two or three (or eight, or eighty) hours into a character, and have it wasted on a whim.

....

"As a Game Master you will sometimes be faced with a choice. Whether to run things justly, or whether to warp things to allow players to survive. Stick on the side of mercy, and, just to keep things "fair" give the same mercy to the non-player characters."

Combat as war.

Combat as sport.

Combat as story.



NO.

While I think that Amber is absolutely a brilliantly made and groundbreaking work, fully deserving of being included in the RPG hall of fame (despite not being a 'game'), I also dislike large parts of it.

I'll start with the first, most reasonable dislikes and then move onto to the formless Reaction.



GYGAXIAN DICKERY

Wujcik has a bad habit of manipulating people through play, this comes out worst in page 230 "Create Good Role-Players".

The way you 'create' them is to put them in holodeck episodes that teach handy little moral lessons.

Monster Bashers are to be tricked into killing innocents through limiting description of the event.

Rules Lawyers - "its important to side-step their rules and concerns", and in the example given, this isn't done through an out of game conversation but by literally shifting the reality of the game away from a testy but reasonable rules question.

"Why didn't my psychic cat notice this threat?"

Honest answer - "That's actually my fault, I forgot about the cat, we can rewind if you like or I can improv something from this point."

Wujciks answer -"It did! You just didn't *notice* it noticing!

Indifferent Players - Let them role play through ordinary shit to form an emotional connection and then the rush of power helps them get attached?

Ok, that might not be terrible but it is odd.

There is also one element of the book where Wujcik comes up with a bit of time-bending player dickery to nerf the power of the Trump deck because it makes players too powerful. Yes, an unstated in-world piece of manipulation to limit the power of a rule he himself created.

I think I can argue robustly that this is Bad Stuff regardless of where you stand on role playing.

We will now move on to...


FORMLESS REACTION

This is stuff I just strongly dislike but I don't have a deep intellectual reason I can give for hating it so stop reading now if you like.


CHARACTER OBSESSION

Stuff about playing in Character, i.e. not 'hearing' stuff if your PC hasn't heard it is ok. Stuff about 'Live your character' - "Don't be afraid of your characters emotions" - ok, not my cup of tea but I can deal.

"Love Your Character

...

Loving your character is really the main point of Amber, both the books and the role-playing.

Making a character come alive is an act of faith..

Waling down Baker Street in London with a thirteen year-old, we noticed a memorial placard. Like thousands of others scattered all over the historical city, it announced the famous former resident of the building. "Sherlock Holmes, Private Investigator," it said.

"Sherlock Holmes isn't real!" said my thriteen-year-old friend, "is he?"

"He's real to me," I said. "I believe he's real."

We had quite an argument my friend and I." - END QUOTE

You didn't need to bother, the kid was right.

There is also stuff after this about stuff that modern storygamers would call 'bleed', which I also generally don't like.


STORY

Yes the purpose of Amber is to MAKE A STORY.

Did you know that stories have beginnings, middles and ends? That the end of a story should be foreshadowed by its beginning? Why not retrofit world elements to make a better story?


CHARACTER INVESTMENT MIXED WITH CHARACTER SUFFERING

So you are meant to REALLY INVEST in your dude in Amber. And killing them would be unpleasant. So instead they suffer. Recommendations are Imprisoment & Torture, Destruction of Trust, Death of Comrades and Friends, Hatred, Fear and Loathing and Guilt.

All for this person where you are meant to be really FEELING what they FEEL.

I don't like this, it seems decadent and wrong to me.


WHY NOT THROW OUT THE RULES ENTIRELY!!!

"Ultimately. I hope you can toss this book.

The best kind of role-playing is pure role-playing. No rules, no points, and no mechanics.

If there is such a thing as an 'improved' version of Amber, its something that goes straight for the story-telling."

This is the later Ascended Wujcik speaking at the back of the book. What follows are suggestions for dumping, respectively, the Character Generation, the Points, the Magic System, the Rule and the Games Master.

So at this point you are larping, except larps actually have rules.


..............



Alright, that's all I got and its getting dark. Despite me kicking off on it at the end its still something you should read if you are deep into RPG's. It's an excellent book despite it being essentially the Liber Chaotica of all the things I hate about storygames.