Erick Wujcik
Who Was Erick Wujcik?
Erick Wujcik was born January 26, 1951, in Detroit. He ran the gaming society at Wayne State University, wrote a computer column for The Detroit News from 1979 to 1981, and co-founded the Detroit Gaming Center with Kevin Siembieda. When Siembieda started Palladium Books, Wujcik was there from the beginning—a co-founder who could write fast, think structurally, and finish a project under pressure.
That speed showed early. In 1985, Siembieda acquired the license for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic but rejected the freelancer’s RPG adaptation. Wujcik redesigned the entire game in five weeks. TMNT & Other Strangeness became one of Palladium’s biggest sellers—fifty thousand copies a year at its peak. He followed it with After the Bomb, Ninjas & Superspies, Mystic China, and half a dozen Rifts sourcebooks. Within the Palladium ecosystem, Wujcik was the designer you handed a license and a deadline.
Then he found something at West End Games that changed the trajectory of his career. The company held an RPG license for Roger Zelazny’s Amber novels—the Chronicles of Amber, a series about immortal princes who walk between infinite shadow worlds, where reality itself bends to willpower. Wujcik offered to design the game. During playtesting, he discovered something unexpected: it worked better without dice. West End disagreed. Wujcik acquired the Amber RPG rights, founded his own company—Phage Press—and published the game himself in November 1991.
In his later career, Wujcik moved into video games—working for Sierra, THQ, and Ubisoft, serving as Game Design Studio Manager for Ubisoft China in Shanghai, and teaching game design at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He was diagnosed with pancreatic and liver cancer in late November 2007 and given six to eight weeks to live. He lasted more than six months. When EN World created the first ENnie Lifetime Achievement Awards in 2008, they gave them to three designers: Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, and Erick Wujcik. Knowing Wujcik’s diagnosis, they presented his award early—on January 26, 2008, at a gathering of family and friends to celebrate his fifty-seventh birthday. He died on June 7, 2008. Kathryn Kozora, his partner of over thirty years, was at his side.
Invention No. 1
The Diceless RPG — Amber Diceless Roleplaying (1991)
Confidence: HIGH Score: 9In Amber Diceless Roleplaying, there are no dice. No cards. No random number generator of any kind. When two characters fight, the one with the higher stat wins. Always. If your Warfare is 1st-ranked and your opponent’s is 3rd, you win a straight fight every time. The drama doesn’t come from randomness—it comes from everything surrounding the conflict. Can you change the terrain? Can you bring allies? Can you trick your opponent into fighting on your terms instead of theirs? Can you make the GM believe your plan is clever enough to overcome a statistical disadvantage?
The source material made this possible. Zelazny’s Amber princes are near-omnipotent beings who walk between infinite realities. Rolling dice to see if a god-prince trips on a rock would have been absurd. Wujcik leaned into that absurdity and discovered that without randomness, the entire social contract of the game changes. Players talk more. They scheme. They negotiate with the GM not about rule interpretations but about fictional positioning—the circumstances that might shift an outcome. The game becomes a conversation about leverage, creativity, and consequences.
An obscure Italian game called Holmes & Company (1987) was technically earlier—a detective RPG with no randomizer—but it was narrow, nearly unknown, and didn’t establish a genre. Amber was the game that proved diceless RPGs could work as a complete, commercially published system. Theatrix followed in 1993. Jonathan Tweet’s Everway in 1995. Rebecca Sean Borgstrom’s Nobilis in 1999. Jason Morningstar’s Lords of Gossamer & Shadow in 2013 carried the Amber tradition forward after Zelazny’s estate complications. Every fully diceless RPG traces through this one. Classification: INVENTED. Wujcik is both The First and The Best. The subcategory of diceless RPGs does not exist without him. Score 9: Subcategory Founder.
Invention No. 2
Attribute Auction — Amber Diceless Roleplaying (1991)
Confidence: HIGH Score: 6Character creation in Amber is a competitive event. Players start with a shared pool of points and bid on four attributes: Psyche, Strength, Endurance, and Warfare. Bidding is open, real-time, and non-refundable. If you bid 30 points on Warfare, that’s 30 points you can’t spend on anything else, and everyone at the table knows exactly where you rank. First place in an attribute means you are the best in the world at that thing. Second place means there is exactly one person who can beat you, and you know who it is.
The auction turns character creation into a social game. Players bluff, overcommit, sandbag, and negotiate before the first scene begins. Alliances and rivalries form at the table during chargen. No RPG before Amber had used competitive bidding for attributes. No RPG has replicated it as effectively since—Lords of Gossamer & Shadow carries the tradition, but adoption beyond the Amber lineage has been almost nonexistent. Classification: INVENTED. Genuinely unique. Narrow adoption limits it to 6.
Invention No. 3
BIO-E Mutation Point-Buy — TMNT & Other Strangeness (1985)
Confidence: HIGH Score: 6In the TMNT RPG, you build a mutant animal from scratch. Choose a species from fifty-eight options—each with a different BIO-E budget. Spend points to make your animal more human: upright posture, working hands, speech, a human-like appearance. Or keep those points and spend them on animal powers: claws, armored hide, venom, sonar. The system models a sliding scale between human and animal, and every point spent in one direction is a point unavailable in the other.
Gamma World (1978, James M. Ward) had random mutation tables for mutant animals, but no structured trade-off system—you rolled and got what you got. Wujcik replaced randomness with deliberate choice: how human do you want to be, and what are you willing to give up? The game sold fifty thousand copies a year and spawned After the Bomb, an entire post-apocalyptic RPG line built on the BIO-E chassis. But the system never traveled beyond Palladium. Classification: COMBINED. Point-buy existed. Mutation tables existed. The human-animal spectrum calibration was novel. Stayed within one publisher’s ecosystem.
What Those Things Built
There’s a single idea running through all three of Wujcik’s innovations, and it isn’t the absence of dice. It’s the insistence that players make deliberate choices with permanent consequences. In TMNT, you decide how human your character is, and you pay for it. In Amber, you bid on your attributes in front of everyone, and you can’t take it back. In the diceless system itself, you live and die by your decisions, not by the roll. Every Wujcik design removes a layer of randomness and replaces it with a layer of commitment.
That conviction—that games get more interesting when you take away the safety net—is what makes the diceless RPG more than a gimmick. It isn’t the absence of something. It’s the presence of something else: full accountability. Your character succeeds or fails because of choices you made, not because of a number that came up. For a certain kind of player, that’s terrifying. For another kind, it’s the only way to play.
Wujcik designed the game in 1991 and spent the next seventeen years running Ambercons around the world—conventions built entirely around the game and the community it created. He published Amberzine. He hosted games. He kept the subcategory alive as a living practice, not just a published product. When the ENnies created their first Lifetime Achievement Awards, they gave three: one to Gygax, one to Arneson, one to Wujcik. That’s the company he keeps.
Score 9. Three classified innovations. Portfolio: 9, 6, 6. Subcategory Founder. The designer who proved that removing randomness didn’t remove the game—it revealed it.