A week ago, the gaming community received word that game designer Erick Wujcik was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and is dying. I sat in front of my computer kind of numb when I heard the news. As it sank in, I came to realize that Erick’s work has had a large impact in my gaming life, and that I wanted to dedicate a post to thank him for what he has done for me as a gamer and how my own gaming style was forever changed….

A Bit Of History

My own origins of gaming started with the infamous Pink Box D&D, around 1980; however, I quickly moved beyond D&D and started buying and playing other RPGs. By my freshman year of high school, in 1986, I was invested in a number of RPGs and was an avid comic book collector. A friend of mine told me about a role playing game based on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic books. I was a big fan of the Eastman and Laird comics (not that stupid cartoon show or the mind-numbing movies) and was curious to play a game in that setting. There was not a gaming store in my hometown, so I was not able to run out and get the game, I would have to wait….

Turtle Power!

One summer vacation I visited my father who lived in Florida just down the road from an awesome game store. I did not have any money, but I talked my Father into getting me a copy of TMNT for babysitting my sister. From the get-go I loved the TMNT role playing game. I read the book in two days and spent the next week making one mutant animal after another. Without anyone to play with on vacation, I played the game alone, trying out the combat system and battling my Wolf Pack against the Terror Bears and Dr. Feral.

A few weeks later I arrived home and recruited my friends to play TMNT. I was the GM, and soon we had a Mutant Ninja Bear, a Flying Ace Bobcat, a Machine Gun toting Caribou, Twin Martial Art Eagles, and a Techie Raccoon. The group’s first outing was a disaster, a bungled hostage rescue at a high school, but in the weeks to come the adventures got better and better.

We loved our TMNT game; we played every Friday after school into the wee hours of the morning. It was one of the focal points for our social group. We spent our weekdays recounting stories about past sessions, reading supplements, and making up house rules. We played TMNT for three years. Several times I had to reboot the campaign because I would burn through stories too fast or incorporate too many other Palladium rulebooks and topple the campaign under too many options, powers, and magic, but it was always fun.

I learned from TMNT a great deal of things, but most of all, I learned that the most important part of a role playing game was having fun with friends. We cheered when someone rolled a Death Blow and grimaced when someone’s hit points reached 0. No one cared how badly I stole plot ideas from movies and books. No one asked questions when the Space Marines recruited the PCs to fight aliens or when the Intergalatic Kumate came to Earth and forced the PCs to fight. It was fun, and that was what mattered the most. Those campaigns have become some of my most fond memories of my high school years.

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Dice

During the years I was running TMNT, I had a subscription to Dragon Magazine. I was not playing a lot of D&D at the time, but this was before the Internet, and Dragon was how you stayed in touch with what was going on in the gaming world. Every few issues I would see an ad for a game called Amber: Diceless Role Playing, and from its name I gathered it did not require any dice to play. I would stare at the ad and try to think how it was possible to play a game without dice. That ad and the name lurked in the back of my mind for years.

Jump ahead a few years, and once again vacationing in Florida, visiting my father, I was in the gaming store looking for some Shadowrun supplements for an upcoming cyberpunk game I was planning on running, when I came across a copy of Amber. Suddenly the ad came back to me, and I bought a copy curious to see how role playing worked without dice.

I read that book in two days, and it was as if my whole understanding of gaming had been torn down and re-formed. I started to plan an Amber game to run for my friends, and when I came home from vacation, I canceled my cyberpunk campaign, and started my first Amber game. Since none of us had ever read the Amber Chronicles, we had to rely on the summaries in the book to get us by in the early days of the campaign. We later went out and bought the paperbacks and read them.

I ran that first Amber campaign twice a week for three months straight. I worked on that campaign every waking moment of the summer. The campaign was incredible. I had never run a game with such intensity, nor was I able to draw from my players such emotion and excitement. It was the most intoxicating role playing experience I ever had. The campaign ended with the summer, and I went back to college where I started working on my next campaign idea.

The next summer (1994), I ran my second Amber campaign for the same group of friends plus a few new members. One of the members of the group was an artist, and before we started playing, he had created a set of illustrated trumps for each member of the group. The trumps were large in size, and were laminated color copies of the master set. They cost a small fortune to make, but it was representative of the intensity that Amber brought out in us. That second campaign lasted the entire summer and was also excellent.

That fall I moved away from my home in southern New York to Buffalo for grad school. It did not take me long to find a new role playing group, and within a few weeks I introduced them to Amber. That campaign was one of my hallmark campaigns. It lasted for a full year, running weekly. That was 3 times longer than any other Amber campaign I had ever ran. I was working on it so hard, that I almost failed out of grad school one semester. When that campaign ended, with the destruction of the Primal Pattern by the hand of one of the players, the emotions were so high that every player in the campaign was effected by the event. Some cried, others were angry, some were speechless; none of us were the same afterwards.

I credit Amber with expanding my ideas of the role of the GM. Before Amber, I though that the GM was the guy who knew the rules and ran the adventures in a sort of “out to get the players” sort of way. After Amber I came to realize that the GM is the navigator of a collaborative story, that through the use of NPCs, descriptive storytelling, and imagination an intense and personal story can be brought to life between the GM and the players. That expansion of thought lead me to continually strive to be a better GM. I would never approach a campaign the same way again.

Meeting The Master

In 1996, after having ended my last Amber campaign, I attended GenCon (along with some of the members of my last Amber campaign) for the first time. While there, I attended a three part game design seminar given by Erick. The seminars were excellent, and afterwards we had a chance to meet Erick and tell him about our campaign (terribly fanboy, but sometimes you just have to do these things). Erick was gracious, listening to our stories, and even signed one of the hand-made trumps, as well the player journal from my last campaign.

During the course of the seminars, Erick also mentioned a small card game that was premiering at the Con, called Lunch Money. He had a number of good things to say about it and encouraged everyone at the seminar to go to Atlas Games’ booth and check it out. On Erick’s recommendation, we went out and tried the game, fell in love with it, and we all bought it. We played Lunch Money the whole time at GenCon ‘96, and countless times afterwards. It is the card game of choice for my group of friends at GenCon.

Ten years later, I had another chance to meet Erick. He was at the Palladium booth, and I went over to say hello. Soon Erick and I were talking about various games, and he the idea on which he was working at the time. I stood listening to these great ideas in awe of his creativity with settings and mechanics. When we were done I walked away thankful that Erick would stand and talk to me for that long. I have no doubt I was not the only person he talked to like that during GenCon, but that did not diminish the experience. Rather, it showed just how passionate Erick is about gaming.

Sitting here now, re-reading what I just wrote, I realize just how many of my friends were affected by Erick’s work… how many memories and stories we have because of his work… how one of us, who had given up on gaming, came back and has never stopped gaming because of memories of Amber… how I went from grudgingly being the GM to striving to be the best GM I could be. I want to thank you Erick for your brilliance and passion all these years, and I promise to keep that passion of gaming that you awoke in me and keep creating worlds and stories.