Erick Wujcik, Creator of the Amber RPG, Died Last Week

I just saw that Erick Wujcik died last week, of pancreatic cancer at the age of 57. Wujcik created the Amber diceless roleplaying game, which is based on my favorite series, Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber. The published material for the game consists of two manuals, Amber and Shadow Knight, and a related fanzine called Amberzine. The game itself is revolutionary — a diceless pen & paper RPG that emphasizes acting and improvisation over maps and stats — but even if you have no interest in gaming the books are well worth reading just for their close textual analysis of Zelazny’s saga as well as for the thoughtful meditations on the art of storytelling. The books also contain portraits of all the major characters in the Amber universe, which greatly enhanced my enjoyment of the series and also made it a heck of a lot easier to keep everyone straight. I’ve probably spent hundreds of hours poring over those gamebooks. They’re always floating around my living space, and I often thumb through them just to scan the illustrations or to peruse the little excerpts from Zelazny’s work. I never met Wujcik, but I did write him some fan letters — I think the only fan letters I ever wrote — and he was nice enough to write me back with personal, full-page responses, and he even included some of the artwork from the then-unreleased (and agonizingly long-delayed) Shadow Knight. There were supposed to be other Amber DRPG supplements — I remember talk about books dealing in more detail with the Courts of Chaos and/or Rebma and/or the environs of Amber. After so many years I wasn’t exactly holding my breath, but I did sort of hope someday to see Wujcik write more about Amber, and it’s sad to think now that that’ll never be, especially coming as it does just weeks after the death of Robert Asprin, who held a similarly exalted place in my youthful pantheon. At least with writers the work is always there, and you can open a book and hear the author’s voice. If you ever come across Wujcik’s Amber gamebooks — especially if you’re a fan of Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber — read them. They look like this: