I think one of the big bugbears for me in re: sorcery in Amber Diceless is that it’s so disjointed, so bland – almost like it was an effort to include sorcery because it has such a big part in the Merlin books, but with no real conviction behind the action.*

This is not to say that I want all sorcerers to be casting the same magic – flavor is good. But there’s no underlying structure. “Here, have some spells, and some ‘microspell’ rules that should help you create new spells but really doesn’t,” is not structure. Throwing things at the wall until something sticks shouldn’t be published as a finished system component.

I want a genuine cosmology, something that basically hangs together anywhere you go. I want realistic levels of sorcery (High Compelling is a joke) that demonstrate why some characters can cast sorcery anywhere and some are limited to certain Shadows.

* My full opinion on how much effort was actually put into Shadow Knight and other Merlin’s-books-inspired material is best saved for another time, but can be best summed up with, “writing about how little you wanted to do this book in the introduction was a really asinine idea.”

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