Amber for Everwayans

Bye-Bye Thousand Worlds

Somewhere in Infinite Shadow may lie the Thousand Worlds, linked by their gates, traveled by spherewalkers and having at their center the realm of Roundwander with its capital of Everway. But if so, it is an insignificant part of the cosmos as a whole.

Hello Amber

The cosmos has two poles. At one end, the Courts of Chaos on an island in the Abyss, the pit of Absolute Nonbeing. At the other - well, for the longest time the Royal Family of Amber thought it was their own city, the One True City on the One True Earth. In the basement of Amber castle lay the Pattern, a fiery design inscribed into the dungeon floor. Walking the Pattern gave the Amberites the power to move among Shadows, their name for the infinite "imaginary" worlds (such as our own) accessible to the Pattern Masters. Anything can be found in Shadow - any world, any technology, any art, any diversion. Infinite shadows where you join this campaign, as many more where you stop reading this and log back on to Napster.

The first five of Roger Zelazny's Amber novels (the only ones considered here) tell the story of the exile, return and education of Prince Corwin of Amber. It begins as a war of all against all for the throne, and ends with the feuding princes and princesses united in a narrow victory against the Courts of Chaos and their ally, the Renegade Prince Brand. The question innumerable Amber campaigns have sought to answer is, "Then what?" The end of the Corwin saga suggests that the Amberites have come to see their earlier ethic of constant conniving as cosmically unsustainable. Can they find a new modus vivendi? Will the next generation of Amberites succumb to the same temptations as the last?

You really should read the first five of Zelazny's books and the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game too. Even though we are not using the ADRPG for this campaign, it remains perhaps the best-written RPG book ever (by Eric Wujick) and is full of good background information. The supplement, Shadow Knight, contains precis of all ten novels. In the meantime, try Jeremy "Bolthy" Zimmerman's Amber pages for a painless introduction to the background. (Historians note: "Bolthy" played the character Behemoth in Amberway I.)

Contributions

An ADRPG concept we will carry over to Amberway II is player-character contributions. Things you do for the campaign above and beyond the call of duty get you extra character-generation points. Contributions include, but are not limited to, original art for the website; writeups of shadows; diaries or quote pages; completed character quizzes and more. See Character Creation for more details.