Quote from: ColonelHardissonA classic D&D-style dungeoncrawl might work once, but could get really boring.

I'm not entirely convinced that is anything rules dependant.

Quote from: blakkieI'm not entirely convinced that is anything rules dependant.

No, it's not. Any given type of adventure can get tiresome if used too often. And yeah, I get what you're saying - it's more about the DM than it is about the type of adventure. It's just that Amber, the book series, was about a broad range of adventure types. Corwin had an adventure in just about any adventuring environment you can come up with. That's what I'm getting at. Amberites, by their very nature, can't be "tied down" to a specific location for very long except under extraodinary circumstances. Doing so would tie the campaign down, which goes against the grain of Zelazny's stories.

I love dungeoncrawls, don't get me wrong.

I'd be interested in at least seeing the original reprinted, although I'd - sorry, Pundit - probably end up running the game in a somewhat different way from the basic assumptions of the game. (Specifically, the assumption that the PCs are going to be eclipsed in power by all the elder Amberites from the books - I'd ditch those jerks, have the PCs be the real kids of Oberon, and run from there. Nothing against the original characters, it's just that if I'm going to run Amber, I want to run Amber, not Amber: the Next Generation or Amber: Some NPCs Overshadow You All The Time.

Quote from: blakkieI'm not entirely convinced that is anything rules dependant.

Quote from: WarthurI'd be interested in at least seeing the original reprinted, although I'd - sorry, Pundit - probably end up running the game in a somewhat different way from the basic assumptions of the game. (Specifically, the assumption that the PCs are going to be eclipsed in power by all the elder Amberites from the books - I'd ditch those jerks, have the PCs be the real kids of Oberon, and run from there. Nothing against the original characters, it's just that if I'm going to run Amber, I want to run Amber, not Amber: the Next Generation or Amber: Some NPCs Overshadow You All The Time.

No need to apologize, that's one of many legitimate ways to run Amber for sure.  That said, I think its very interesting to have the NPCs, which provide a lot of the colour of the game, and to start the players out as basically the kids who are overwhelmed by their mighty elders, to slowly growing into their own.

I mean the way I see it, Amber is one big metaphor for a very dysfunctional family and for dealing with family relations.  Just like in real life we eventually get disillusioned about the wonderfulness and powerfulness of our real parents and older relatives, in Amber the characters are meant to inevitably realize that their "elders" aren't all that they thought they were, and start learning through some very very harsh lessons how to be able to outwit them at their own game.

After all, they're learning from the masters.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPunditNo need to apologize, that's one of many legitimate ways to run Amber for sure.  That said, I think its very interesting to have the NPCs, which provide a lot of the colour of the game, and to start the players out as basically the kids who are overwhelmed by their mighty elders, to slowly growing into their own.

True, but Oberon and his wizened friend (whose name I can never remember) can handle the "mighty elders" role perfectly adequately on their own, and the Amber novels themselves didn't bother with a slow "growing into their own" segment. Bam! You're an amnesiac! Bam! Here's the guy who did it to you! Zap! You're a demigod!

Maybe I have read too many brick-sized fantasy novels where the author takes entirely too long covering the protagonist's agonisingly slow struggle towards relevance, but I really appreciated Zelazny's no-nonsense approach there.

Question

Would the Amber rules set work for a campaign in which the players played the roles of Demon Lords vying for power in the lower planes? The cosmology would be a mix of the D&D cosmology and Dante's Inferno. I've been wanting to run a game like this for a long time, but d20 really slows down at higher levels.

Yes, they would work very well for that kind of thing.  The Courts of Chaos aren't really that different from most infernal cosmologies in D&D.

Personally, I plan to use Amber rules when I run a D&D Immortal-level Mystara campaign sometime in the near future.

RPGPundit