I can shed some light on the matter, as I wrote the
Rebma sourcebook for Phage Press.
We don't have all that much canonical information about Rebma as a place. What do you guys make of it?
Is Rebma a carbon-copy of Amber only with seashells, or is it more than that?
Aside from Moire, are there any Rebmaite natives? Can full-blooded Rebmaites survive for unlimited times out of water?
Is the whole place very alien and different and nautical themed, or is it just a regular place with an undersea twist?
How important is Rebma really?
And why on Earth did Erick originally want the first non-series-related sourcebook for his game to be Rebma?
RPGPundit
The Rebma I designed was much, much more than Amber with seashells. It was the undersea counterpart to Tir-na Nog'th, and as such had a great deal of importance. Moire was apparently powerful enough that she could offer sanctuary to Amberites fleeing Eric's wrath, and that says something about her importance.
Rebma had its own weird sort of magic based on mirrors, its own royal family and twisted history that had nothing to do with Oberon's family.
Since the city of Amber is approachable through two paths - land and sea, it would make sense that Rebma is as important as Arden in considering the defense of the realm.
Your mileage will vary about how important that stuff is.
It was never, never, ever planned as the first non-series book to be published by Phage Press, and what I pitched was only half the book I wanted to write.
I'd co-established (with Cort Odekirk) a fanzine called
Trump Call that was the first such 'zine about the
Amber DRPG.
I pitched Erick a book called
As Above, So Below that would have been a flip-book covering Tir-na Nog'th and Rebma. Erick wanted to do the Tir book himself, so I did Rebma.
While working on
Rebma, I got pulled off when the original manuscript for
Shadow Knight proved unpublishable, and I worked on several pieces of it. Other
Amber books that were in the works before I'd even heard of the ADRPG were as follows:
- The Engines of Bright - Erick's "Corwin's Pattern" campaign book
- The Beyonders - Don Anderson's huge campaign setting
- Not the City of Brotherly Love - a city of Amber sourcebook
- The Amber Master's Guide to Trump - written by Michael Kucharski, which was to be the first of many such guides about each power
- Chaos Rules! - Erick's alternate core book based on the Courts of Chaos
- Carol Dodd's Golden Circle sourcebook
- A Castle Amber sourcebook (to wash the stain of the Visual Guide out of people's brains)
- A sourcebook about the block city of Heerat
- A collection of adventures
- A Texorami sourcebook
None of those books (except for maybe Don's and Carol's) were ever completed. There were a few others that came up as well. I was the only author of that whole batch to turn in a publishable manuscript.
On
Trump Call, we did six big issues, before Cort published an article about using playing cards in character generation. Even though it was written by a guy who was a part of Erick's gaming circle, Erick called Cort up on the phone to yell at him about publishing it, saying it was a violation of everything that diceless gaming was all about. Cort shut down the zine with the next issue, and refunded all subscription monies.
Once I finished
Rebma, Erick changed his mind utterly about what he wanted from the book, despite having approved the manuscript and having seen it come in week after week. (He'd assigned it to a different editor, who was working with him.) Erick told me later he'd even laid it out, then decided that he just wanted something different. There was some other rough stuff going on in his life at the time (the death of a beloved aunt from cancer, if I remember correctly), and he just couldn't work on Phage Press stuff any more. Erick apologized at least a hundred times for never publishing it, but at least he paid me some (about half) of what I was owed.
I've still got a file with all of the art done for
Rebma, containing some new Kucharski Trumps, some stuff by Matt Howarth, another author whose name I didn't recognize, and stuff by the
Shadow Knight comic strip artist/writer.
I admired Erick greatly, and considered him a friend. He was, and will always be, one of the great RPG designers, and a hell of a great person to be around. I learned a ton from working with him, and in a way he mentored me in the pen-and-paper industry, but in all honestly, he wasn't the easiest editor to work with. He drove me crazy with back-and-forth rewrites, and needing stuff added and rewritten at an insane rate. I was literally FedExing floppy disks of material I'd written for
Rebma overnight every other day while it was in final development for a MUST BE OUT THE DOOR BY THE END OF THE MONTH deadline. This was previous to Erick having email (he wouldn't get it), so I was sending these disks full of revisions and new stuff 3-4 times a week for what must have been hundreds of bucks a month in fees (fortunately, I was using his account). I kept saying "Erick, you're a computer guy through and through... why not just get email?" but he didn't want it. So I have sheafs of typed letters from Erick from those days.
When I hear horror stories about bad freelancer experiences at Palladium, I get a curious sense of
deja vu.
I know that's not likely a popular opinion to voice here, but I can only speak to my own experiences.