Amberway II for Everyone
Ethos and Ethics
The stereotypical Everway campaign might be said to consist of spiritually-grounded third-world peoples striving to bring harmony to the cosmos one realm at a time. Contrariwise, the stereotypical Amber campaign comprises Machiavellian first-world peoples striving to claw their way to Ultimate Power, or at least King for a Day. So what shall it be in Years Have Passed in Amber? Cooperation or Competition? Pale faces or dusky? The Cosmic All or the Main Chance?
It's substantially up to the players. The GM's cosmology, backstory and nonplayer-character conceptions make a kind of box. Into these I will toss the player characters and see what happens. I feel no special need to "teach" the PCs to be more or less trustworthy or trusting, more or less spiritual or worldly, more or less heroic or villainous. (The campaign world may have its own ideas.)
One Important Restriction
PCs as initially conceived must want to reach Amber enough that they would cooperate with someone they didn't much like to get there.
Premises and Biases
Amberway II is a "snooty first-series purist" campaign. Nothing that appears exclusively in the Merlin saga should be assumed to obtain. The backstory of Years Have Passed in Amber makes the events of the second series impossible.
Do not look for talking Powers, broken Patterns, the Keep of Four Worlds, or spikards. If anything like Logrus should appear, expect it to be different than Merlin saga Logrus. Forget API teleport. I highly recommend Tom DeMayo's 'Logrusless Chaos' article, though the Amberway II cosmology differs somewhat from his.
Here follows a brief list of common ADRPG assumptions not to make:
- "Chaotic Shadows" lie on the Chaos side of Ygg - We see very little of the far side of Ygg because Corwin teleports over most of it. What little we do see is a good deal less strange than some of the places he passes through on the "Amber side" . . .
- The Ways of Chaos are made of linked shadows - a pure second-series concept. Definitely not the case in Amberway II.
- Hellriding involves focusing on one item and changing everything around it - an invention of the ADRPG. "Motion and temporary bafflement of the senses," Corwin tells us. "That was what it took."
