![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Erick Wujcik
Jun. 10th, 2008 09:18 amThis Sunday games designer Erick Wujcik died from cancer.
I suspect most of you reading this have no idea who he was. While he worked in the roleplaying games business for a long time, he never really had any successes that reached outside the hardcore gamer market. His ideas tended to be offbeat and interesting rather than mass-market-appealing. The game of his that people are most likely to have seen is his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game (which predated the first TMNT movie by several years).
But the one that made me notice him, and which eventually led him to visit my flat in Linköping, Sweden, was the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game. It was based on Roger Zelazny's Amber books, and at least for a certain kind of player an amazing amount of pure undiluted fun. The game is very light on rules, extremely high-power (for example, a private universe for your character is a very cheap item and pretty much an expected accessory) and hugely slanted towards rewarding creative players. From 1993ish and on, I got badly hooked on that game, and we spent a silly amount of time playing it. I also got involved in the nascent Internet-mediated gaming community, and it was via that that my flat eventually became one of Erick's stops the summer he travelled all over Europe. About a dozen people had gathered in my living room, and he ran a short ADRPG scenario for us. I was impressed that he actually managed to GM for that many people at the same time. After the game, he hung around for a while and talked (among other things) about ideas he had for other games. I've never seen any of them published, which is a pity. Some of them were very original.
Well. I guess they have a blast of a day in the Summerlands now.
I suspect most of you reading this have no idea who he was. While he worked in the roleplaying games business for a long time, he never really had any successes that reached outside the hardcore gamer market. His ideas tended to be offbeat and interesting rather than mass-market-appealing. The game of his that people are most likely to have seen is his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game (which predated the first TMNT movie by several years).
But the one that made me notice him, and which eventually led him to visit my flat in Linköping, Sweden, was the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game. It was based on Roger Zelazny's Amber books, and at least for a certain kind of player an amazing amount of pure undiluted fun. The game is very light on rules, extremely high-power (for example, a private universe for your character is a very cheap item and pretty much an expected accessory) and hugely slanted towards rewarding creative players. From 1993ish and on, I got badly hooked on that game, and we spent a silly amount of time playing it. I also got involved in the nascent Internet-mediated gaming community, and it was via that that my flat eventually became one of Erick's stops the summer he travelled all over Europe. About a dozen people had gathered in my living room, and he ran a short ADRPG scenario for us. I was impressed that he actually managed to GM for that many people at the same time. After the game, he hung around for a while and talked (among other things) about ideas he had for other games. I've never seen any of them published, which is a pity. Some of them were very original.
Well. I guess they have a blast of a day in the Summerlands now.
