I recently got a copy of Lords of Gossamer and Shadow and it is a wonderful and beautiful book!
I was wondering (since it is the same Diceless mechanics) about importing aspects of LoG&S into Amber...
I think of Eidolon Mastery and Umbra Master as aspects of the Pattern and Logrus, respectively - but they are not 100% the same and thus would be powers that non Amberites or Lords of Chaos could learn and develop (i.e. NPCs).
What are your thoughts or have you already done it?
The mechanics in LoG&S are very well written and are much more easily understood than those of ADRPG (as written by Mr. Wujcik).
Just thought this would be an interesting discussion.
Ps. the Blessings and Curses and the Empathy supplements are very cool to add just as is!
Eidolon and Umbra Mastery are weaker than Pattern/Logrus. If adding them, I'd lower the cost a little.
Great additions IMO: Invocation, Blessings and Curses (Yes!!), Empathy.
You should also really take a look at Lords of Olympus, if you haven't already. I find it to be the superior book, rules-wise.
tcabril,
I've been playing around with ideas for a crossover campaign, and I'll share some of what I've got so far.
Since LoG&S, ADRP, and LoO all share the same base, game system, there's no reason why one couldn't port ideas, characters, powers, etc. from one setting to another.
However, the big, greater powers like pattern imprint, eidlon mastery, and olympian magic don't cross-over well for me. These powers are specific to their home setting, and are hardwired to it. Eidolon mastery isn't Pattern imprint. They may share a common theme, most notably cosmic Order, but they are really very different powers. Umbra Mastery isn't just rebranded Logrus. It's like a mashup of Logrus, Shapeshifting, and Abyss Power all thrown into a single power.
Croaker is right, the Amber powers are far more powerful than the LoG&S versions. There are major game balance issues if you put all of these powers together. If you're going to use the greater powers, you're going to have to think about how they interact with each other outside of their original setting.
If you're going to do this kind of thing, I'd suggest picking up LoO. The mechanics are very well explained, in some cases better than LoG&S. Plus, LoO has a lot of very cool powers. One of my players took a modified version of sorcery, while another took a modified version of Elementalism. In gameplay, we found sorcery was meh compared to elementalism in terms of game enjoyment and balance.
I think the Amber setting and Olympus setting would work better as part of the Gossamer setting than vise-versa. Amber, Olympus, etc. could be written as primal planes with LoG&S' cosmos modifier (multiple worlds within worlds). What if one of the young Amberites discovered the Grand Stair, that their reality was but one multiverse within another multiverse? What if Dworkin knew this shit the whole time?
Another version of this is the idea of a linear timeline. What if the multiverse has it's own version of the Big Crunch and Big Bang? Amber/Chaos are but one version of a multiverse that has been destroyed and recreated countless times. With each destruction, part of the old multiverse survives and takes shape in the new mulitverse. If I did it would be something like this...
?----->Olympus----->Amber----->Gossamer----->?
Each Multiverse destroyed and recreated. Elements remaining. Timeless, forgotten mysteries and powers waiting to be discovered, or sleeping, soon to awaken and harass the hell out of the PCs. Fragments of the Olympian gods hidden in Shadow. Elder Amberites hidden in the Gossamer worlds. Something else.
That's it. Sorry for the rushed post.
While I think a "mega-world" blend of the various diceless RPG settings sounds interesting, I think that LoGaS would fit directly into an ADRP campaign with little effort on your part.
Consider a "Corwin's Chronicles" only game, and then expand it to include Merlin's books. We find out about a bunch of lesser powers that were never mentioned before, yet can have an impact on a storyline for the second series. LoGaS can be like that -- a bunch of powers not yet mentioned but out there waiting to blend themselves into an ongoing story.
While perhaps better explained, LoO is probably less useful in that particular instance as the Olympians are probably stronger than Amberites and the Olympians are more well known. Bringing LoO into your ADRP game may overshadow the elements of Amber.
In the next Amber game I'm running I plan to make all the powers of LoG&S available to players, except for the main two. Certainly the powers are better written and more internally consistent than those in Shadow Knight.
//Panjumanju
You've got LoO and LoGaS, huh? Its pretty much a golden age for Amber fans, these days, after such a long drought.