I'm curious - are there any amber -to- heroquest conversions posted out there? It seems a natural fit for someone who wants a bit more system in their amber game.

-Jeff

None of which I am aware, but it should not be too difficult to convert. All characters would have a Heritage keyword, one or more Power keywords and one or more Occupations. It would be easiest to handle Occupations as abilities rather than keywords, otherwise writing up an Elder Amberite or moderately experienced player-character becomes cumbersome.

Heritages required would be Amber, Chaos and Mixed (or perhaps just a single Substance keyword), plus any of the funkier ones a narrator wants to introduce (Shroudling, Demon, Shadow, etc.). Powers required should be fairly obvious, and I would divide the major ones into several distinct affinity-like abilities with specific feats. The Pattern keyword might have Shadowshift, Pattern Lens and Alter Probability while the Logrus keyword might have Summoning, Combat and Sight.

It would be easiest to handle Occupations as abilities rather than keywords, otherwise writing up an Elder Amberite or moderately experienced player-character becomes cumbersome.

I think that's about what he meant. Note that they're essentially just Keywords that don't have any default Abilities listed. I say that because I would assume that an Amberite could still buy up narrow skills from these broad ones. Thus the Elite Combatant 5W2 could have theoretically purchased Swordfighting 5w4 up from there.

The more radical version is just to not allow narrow Abilities at all, saying that this represents the breadth of their Abilities. The problem with this is that, while it would reflect the Amber RPG pretty well, I'm not sure it really reflects the characters from the novels well. OTOH, that's a pretty subjective matter. Just do whichever seems to represent things better to you.

Note that this all scrambles up the rules for advancement pretty well.

Mike

Jaif wrote:

Player X wants his uber combat character to have fought under alex the great, caesar, saladin, napolean, lee, and patton. Rather than write up all the keywords involved, you just create an ability called "elite combatant", and let that augment any combat situation he finds himself in?

I would assign X's character a keyword Soldier, with abilities based on whatever background he outlined. To use your example, X's character might have WW2 Allied Tanker, Confederate Cavalryman, Macedonian Hoplite, Napoleonic Artillerist, Roman Legionnaire, etc. as individual abilities within his Soldier keyword.