Amber Diceless Role Playing Forum

Next up is the Amber Diceless Role Playing Forum which has been around since about Jul 27, 2007 and yet has only 599 posts with 140 threads and 84 members. Four of those members account for 471 of the 599 posts and 342 are by the Admin alone who has been a player of the game since 1993.

Roger Zelazny the author of the Amber books died in 1995 at the young age of 58 and Erick Wujcik the Father of Amber Diceless was a member of the forum until he  died in 2008 at the young age of 57. Two rounds of really bad luck on both counts. Amber Diceless was mostly written in the 1980's but it wasn't until Erick Wujcik formed his own company that Amber Diceless was published in 1991.

Were it not for these unfortunate occurrences this might be active and vibrant. The forum itself has an excellent layout and has every appearance of a forum that should be active and growing. So what happened? IMO the sudden illness of Erick Wujcik 6 months after the forum started and then his death 6 months after that, just sapped the energy out of everyone at the forum.

A year after Erick Wujcik died the forum Admin had this idea The Voice of Erick  in the thread the Admin says 

Pardon me if this seems creepy, but this is the Voice of Erick Wujcik. 

Erick joined this group a while back and posted occasionally, and I wish he would have been able to post more because of the unique insights he has offered to the gaming industry over the years.

Erick invented the "diceless" genre of RPGs with the creation of Amber Diceless (and perhaps even before that) and has proven himself repeatedly to be a true Master of this style of play.

Over the years I have had conversations with Erick through snail mail, e-mail, and on message boards. Sometimes I was in direct contact, other times he was responding to thoughts or questions that others had posed. As time passed I began to compile a Word doc that had all of the Q&A stuff I could find, and I was careful to copy-paste his exact answers from those boards and other sources.

My plan is to make use of some of these quotes, but not to post them as the Admin but instead as if Erick himself was responding. I thought about taking over his account, but just couldn't bring myself to mislead anyone that Erick was still posting when clearly he was no longer able. That's where my idea came about for The Voice of Erick. Kind of like a narrator in a play, I will speak with Erick's voice on these boards but in a manner to make it clear that these are his ideas and not mine.

I hope this is a plan which others will find to be acceptable and in good taste. I hope that The Voice of Erick will be able to keep his spirit alive and with us.

I do not find this a bit creepy, but it is brilliant and is IMO an excellent memorial to  Erick Wujcik. For reasons unknown the me, this never came to pass. The 27+ pages of materials would have been 500, 1000, maybe even 1500 posts of material not counting all of the discussion it would have generated. Had this project been brought to life this forum might have 20,000 or more posts and at least a few hundred members by now. 

Therefore my recommendation for this forum is that this project be revived and that all of those posts (question in one post and answer in the next post) be made. I would suggest a thread for each topic addressed and not one long Q&A thread, that will make it more user friendly.

In addition, the thread for The Amber Dictionary Project should be split to give a separate thread for each letter of the alphabet.

Since the product is out of print and unsupported, maybe a clone could be written so that compatible material could be produced similar to what is done for D&D. The Admin, appears to be qualified to write such a clone and IMO should.