Chaos Diceless

I knew. From snatches of legend, bits of family gossip, and from a general feeling which came over me, I knew the place to which I had come. It was with full certainty as to identity that I raised my eyes to look upon the Courts of Chaos.

(Prince Corwin of Amber in The Hand of Oberon, Roger Zelazny)

File:Diceless chaos.png

About the project

Chaos Diceless is a project related to Amber Diceless Role-Playing Game (ADRPG). ADRPG is a narrative role-playing game written by Eric Wujcik], based based on Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber and depicting the power struggles between god-like princes of a magical realm, as well as their wars against the enemy realm of Chaos, the ultimate price of which being the control over all of Shadows. That is, the whole of existence.

In the game, players take the role of such god-like princes and take a part in the royal family's intrigues and squabbles. While the foremost members of this royal family are described at length in both Roger Zelazny's novels and ADRPG, the equally important -- and equally playable -- Courts of Chaos stay unknown and remain to be invented by players and Game-Masters alike, as well as the Courts of Rebma, the Golden Circle, and possible important worlds

The objective of Chaos Diceless is to explore possible versions of Chaos and other Courts. Do not expect to find one single canonical official version of Chaos. What you will find here are ideas to be taken, left or adapted. Rumors. Several hypothesis for each place, each organization, each character, each event. Food for inspiration.

The idea for this project originated on Guardians of Order's Amber Forums.

The Courts

Courts of Chaos

• The Courts of Chaos
• History and events of the Courts of Chaos
• Figures of the Courts of Chaos
• Places of the Courts of Chaos
• Things, artifacts, familiars, armies and trinkets of the Courts of Chaos

Courts of Rebma

• The Courts of Rebma
• History and events of the Courts of Rebma
• Figures of the Courts of Rebma
• Places of the Courts of Rebma
• Things, artifacts, familiars, armies and trinkets of the Courts of Rebma

Contributing

How to contribute

Please first manifest yourself in the Chaos Diceless organization thread. This is not a strict obligation but this might help people to describe their intents and coordinate efforts.

Otherwise, this is a Wiki, using Wikimedia's engine and Wikipedia's conventions. You will need to learn how to use these tools.

Content should be added under 'The Courts' section, and the pages reachable from that section. Please prefix any new page with CD:, to avoid confusion with other projects hosted on this Wiki.

Guidelines

Objective of the project

The objective of this project is not to produce a definitive guide to any place or any population, nor an extension module. Neither is it to produce a compatibility layer between campaigns, nor a collection of campaign logs and NPCs. Rather, as in the original ADRPG, we wish to present well-constructed hypothesis on each place described, based on Roger Zelazny's work whenever that work is available. In particular, each place and each character shall be described (at least) three times, based on three different hypothesis.

Everything is optional. Worse than that -- everything is inspiration-fodder. Nothing is canonical per se.

Extent of the project

The original idea of the project is to focus on the Courts of Chaos. Descriptions of other Courts (e.g. Rebma, Kashfa) and places (e.g. The Fountain of Fire, Yggdrasil, Amber City, Corwin's Pattern) are also welcome. Completely invented Courts (e.g. The Empire of the Gleaming Banner, The Court of Ys) have less priority than Courts mentioned in the novels and in the game, but are welcome nonetheless.

You may introduce new rules, especially new powers. However, the objective of Diceless Chaos is not to discuss rules, so keep it short.

Sources

We attempt to stay compliant with all the novels and short stories of the Chronicles of Amber, as well as with the ADRPG book. This is, however, not a strict obligation.

Where we contradict or ignore them, we should mark this clearly. We accept versions of Chaos based on either first series, second series or short stories, as well as from your imagination, provided they are clearly labelled as such.

John Betancourt's prequels to the Chronicles of Amber may also constitute interesting sources. In this project, they are, however, considered less important than Roger Zelazny's work.

Quoting

Short quotes of Roger Zelazny's (or other author's) works should be acceptable under most country's laws, provided the work is correctly attributed. Indeed, the usage of such short quotes are encouraged. To the best of our knowledge, there is no commonly-accepted limit to the size and number of such quotes. Use your intelligence to draw boundaries.

You are also encouraged to invent quotes from non-existing books, so as to provide "in-character" descriptions, provided you attribute these quotes to the appropriate author (i.e. you).

Experience of Amber

Having read the Chronicles of Amber and played ADRPG are not prerequisites but are encouraged. If you have never read the Chronicles of Amber or played ADRPG and if you have interesting ideas for Chaos Diceless, please consider reading the novels and/or asking for opinions on the Chaos Diceless organization thread.

Tie-ins

You are encouraged to add links between your contributions and those of others. Maybe your NPC and that other NPC are lovers (according to rumors or Merlin's understanding) ? Maybe some battle introduced by another contributor took place, but didn't end as she pretends.

Be creative !

Licenses

All the content of the Chaos Diceless project is available under two licenses.

• The Attribution-ShareAlike license (see Project:Copyrights), as per the rules of RPGnetWiki. In summary, it means that you can contribute, use everything you want for your personal use and redistribute Chaos Diceless provided you attribute the work to the authors and keep everything unchanged.
• A special license granted to whoever holds rights of publication of a role-playing game based on Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber

(currently, to the best of our knowledge, this is true only of Guardians of Orders). This second license is written in the hope that some or all of Chaos Diceless may be, one day, published as a part of a new edition or a supplement of ADRPG.

Should you contribute any content to Chaos Diceless, that content will be implicitly considered released under both licenses. Please make sure that you have read and understand these licenses.

Chaos Diceless Publication License

(draft)

In the following, "The Editor" represents any person, institution or company holding rights of publication for a role-playing game, a role-playing game supplement, either on paper or on any other medium or a computer or video game or computer/video game supplement based on Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber. The Game represents any role-playing game or role-playing game supplement or computer game, video game or computer/video game supplement based on Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber and published by the Editor. "The Authors" represents all the contributors to Chaos Diceless.

Only the content of Chaos Diceless which has been created by the Authors is covered by this license. In particular, this does not contain Wikimedia's or RPGnetWiki's tools.

The Editor is allowed to reproduce Chaos Diceless in its totality or in part, to integrate it in the Game and to modify it as necessary for such integration. Such permitted modifications include but are not limited to extraction of quotes, extraction of subsets, adaptation of style, spelling, contents or typography, modification of names of places, characters or events.

In counterpart, the Editor must attribute the work on Chaos Diceless to its respective authors, for instance by listing the names of all Authors or all Authors having contributed to the section of Chaos Diceless used in The Game, in a credits page. Whenever the name of an Author prove unreasonably difficult to find, that Author's RPGnetWiki's User Name will be considered sufficient. Additionally, whenever modifications to Chaos Diceless have been effected by the Editor during the inclusion in The Game, these modifications must be briefly summarized.

Authors

If you have contributed something to Chaos Diceless, please inscribe your User Name here.

• Yoric, project initiator