CHARACTERS

Veteran of two different Amber campaigns, Laughter cannot be explained, only experienced. Jason once asked me if she was a sign that I was secretly dangerous-- "It worries me that your alter ego, who is so like you in so many ways, is also a genocide... that worries me."

Defining quote: "I've got no plan, but I've got things to do."

Gwynwyfhar

Are you willing to use the power you have in the service of what you believe?

Created for Julie's Reflections in the Mind's Eye campaign. Her site is here. Gwyn was an attempt to play a character with a code of morals with almost no compromise. This managed to extend to the rest of her life-- she never compromised on anything a day in her life. A convenient tool for the GM-- once convinced of the rightness of an action, she would drag the whole cast along with her (much to their chagrin).

Defining quote: "I have a belief I can talk my way out of anything, and if not, I will go to heaven."

Mythos

Created to be the opposite of virginal, ascetic, morally steadfast Gwyn for Julie's follow-up to Reflections, A Tapestry in Shades of Gray. I think I succeeded-- Mythos is mad, bad and dangerous to know.

Defining quote: "[I] smiled recklessly and welcomed the noise."

Stormfront

Stormfront was a game I created with the intention of making a simple plot and simply ending the game when the whole thing was done. In some ways this was good-- the thing didn't drag on endlessly for years, characters warped and unrecognizable. In some ways this was bad: my NPC's didn't have a lot of interest in anything outside of the plot, and all of the detailed cosmology and religious history I worked out went to waste. I'm especially proud of the three "books" that I wrote for this game: The Book of the Unicorn, which fully explicates why nine is a sacred number to this version of Amber, what relation humans and demons have to each other, and the way the Unicorn stole the Serpent's Eye; The Book of the Serpent, which creates a mythos for Chaos parallel to that of Amber; and The Book of Saints, which was the basis for the religious movement in the Golden Circle that took up the entire first arc of the game. The other things I am proud of for this game: the way the PC Joaquim related to his brother, Keir; the amazingly bad accent I made up for Rufus; how badly I tortured Elaine with her slacker boyfriend, Harlan (her diaries are a study in the a-word-- uhm, that's "angst" in case you were wondering); and having one of the PC's be the Unicorn in disguise. It was also for this game that I made up a method of Trump scrying based on the Celtic Cross method for tarot reading, here.

Forever Far From Home

The notion for this game came about during a conversation with Dwinn. The premise is simple-- what if Brand's death curse at the end of the Patternfall War rewrote the last few pages of Zelazny's books? What if no one could return to Amber, and no one knew if it even still existed? With that in mind, I constructed a couple of free-flowing, open-ended plots, thought up a stupid new magic system, and recruited players. I think it's going well. Nothing truly brilliant or original has flowed forth from it yet, but we're all pretty entertained.

Magic

Jason and I ran a modified versino of White Wolf's magic system in our Dark Patterns game, but hell if I know where those rules are nowadays. In any case, it worked out ok, but it wasn't much better than the ADRPG's system in some ways. In fact, it made magic too free-form and abusable. So, I designed the FFH System, which is, I've found, absolute nonsense unless I can explain it in person. Even then, it takes all of my magic-using players working in concert to make sense of it. Use at your own peril.

Trump Scrying

The two versions I made for this, Stormfront Scrying and FFH Scrying differ only slightly. I like this way of scrying because it's soooo fraught with possible meanings. Scrying is probably something that didn't need to be improved upon, but it was a fun exercise.

Don't Start

This last theory is something I didn't come up with-- it's all my friend J. And yet, in spite of the sad amount of Amber that I do play, that I have played and that I probably will play in the future, I have to say I do, by and large, concur that Amber Must Be Destroyed.

Pattern Perilous

I've run this one three times, possibly four (the memory fades after a while) with reasonable success each time. It proved less frustrating over all than my similar game, Scylla and Charybdis. In any case, Wendi Strang-Frost helped me develop it and helped me run it the first two times.

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