Remember the intro to Forcebound, where I said I have this weird habit of adapting RPG systems to run Star Wars? Well, I also do that for Amber, the setting of Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber novels. And here again I do it with Kevin Crawford’s Godbound. Like its predecessor, Patternbound isn’t supposed to have any ultrainnovative material -- it’s more a quick and dirty (there’s that expression again) resource for GMs wanting to run Amber with Godbound. I do feel a little bit of pride in my system-agnostic Shadow navigation mechanic, though. Unlike Forcebound, this one got a little playtest in that I started a campaign a few weeks ago and tweaked the rules a bit as a result.

Although I mention Chaosians and even describe Shapeshifting as a Power, you won’t find Logrus Mastery here. I much prefer the Corwin cycle and started rereading it for the third time for this project. In that cycle, we don’t learn about the Logrus or much anything about the Courts of Chaos. Plus, I won’t be reading the Merlin cycle again for now and so wouldn’t be able to verify the info I remembered and the one I plundered from other RPGs. Maybe in the future I’ll do a Logrusbound.

Here, you’ll also find a link to an Excel spreadsheet called shadow_nav.xls. It’s a way to map the Shadows in your game that takes into account the four dimensions of the navigational axes (Magic, Tech, Time and Weird). It arose from the excellent advice my fellow RPGnetters gave me in this thread. Special thanks to Glyptodont, who inspired the final form of the spreadsheet.

Thoughout the text, I reference some sources. Here’s a key for the abbreviations: Godbound deluxe corebook (Gd), Non-Diceless Roleplaying in Limitless Shadows (Am). These will be followed by a page number.

Finally, there are spoilers in here. If you haven’t read the first five novels, I suggest you go do that before plunging into this file. Put together, the five books are about the size of A Game of Thrones, textwise (888 pages versus 807, respectively).

On the shoulders of hill giants
These notes are based on my Unisystem Amber conversion, which was itself based on the novels, Phage Press’ Amber Diceless Role-Playing, written by Erick Wujcik, and two unofficial GURPS resources: Non-Diceless Roleplaying in Limitless Shadows, written by Joshua Kubli, and GURPS Amber.

 

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Godbound copyright © 2017 Sine Nomine Publishing

Chronicles of Amber copyright © 2017 Roger Zelazny