Editing Character:Evangeline di Borgia (section)

== Commentary ==

Okay, raise your hands if you haven’t read Roger Zelazny’s <i>Chronicles of Amber</i> series.  First of all, shame on you.  Go read them, right away.  (In fact, you might want to wait to finish this article until you have done so.  I will do my best, but I can’t help spoiling them just a little here.)  Second, be prepared for some confusion.  The world of <b>Amber</b> is extremely complex, and the <b>Amber Diceless Role-playing Game</b> does a wonderful job of evoking that world, bewildering complexities and all.

Still, let me explain as best I can.  Imagine, if you will, and endless, shapeless Chaos, around which flickers of awareness came and vanished from existence in an everchanging, unchanging dance.  Imagine that one of those flickers grabbed hold of its awareness of self and held on, carving a Pattern – a sigil of Ultimate Order – out of the Chaos, transforming undefined potential into a multi-universal continuum that spanned the immeasurable gulf between Form and Formlessness.  Imagine that our universe – that <i>every</i> universe – was nothing but a Shadow of the One True Reality, called Amber, where the Pattern lies and the descendents of that betrayer of Chaos now rule as the Princes and Princesses of Amber.  Imagine that the residents of Chaos, now tainted (however slightly) with Order, can no longer gain and lose their existence at the whim of improbable tides, and instead work to overthrow the power of Pattern and undo the existence of existence; imagine, too, that the sons and daughters of Amber scheme endlessly with each other to carve out a path to rulership over all that is, all that ever can be.  By walking the Pattern or mastering other arcane arts, the scions of Amber gain power of Shadows, able to literally shape universes to their will, to bring into existence any possible world; and yet they struggle endlessly for control over the only thing that is truly real: Amber.

Yes, it’s confusing.  Trust me, the full version is far more so.

Nevertheless, it is this milieu that the <b>Amber DRPG</b> attempts to emulate, and it does it with astonishing effectiveness.  One of the most important aspects of the <i>Chronicles of Amber</i> is the scheming, constant, ceaseless, that surrounds the Children of Amber.  Betrayals are common and everyday things; plotting and surprise reversals happen with almost artless casualness.  As the main character puts it once, when explaining things to a distant cousin: “Never trust a relative.  It is far worse than trusting strangers. With a stranger there is a possibility that you might be safe.”  Set against this understanding of unreliable alliances is the rock-solid awareness that one among the family is absolutely unbeatable in a given area of endeavor: Benedict, the eldest surviving brother, is absolutely unbeatable in any form of hand-to-hand or large scale military conflict; Gerard, one of the younger brothers, is the Strongest One There Is.  Since no one family member is unbeatable at more than one thing, however, every conflict between them is shaped by an attempt to shift the area of dispute from an opponent’s strength to their weakness, or to your strength, or preferably both.

It may seem strange for an RPG, but <b>Amber</b> deliberately sets out to encourage this air of backstabbing and jockeying for position, in order to recreate the feel of the novels, and succeeds with incredible flair.  The key lies in two elements: the diceless nature of the game, and the character creation system.  The former is easier to explain in terms of the latter, so let’s start with chargen.

<b>Amber</b> describes everything in terms of 4 Attributes: Psyche, Strength, Endurance, Warfare.  There are no skills – you are assumed to be skilled at basically anything appropriate to your character concept, and the question of “how skilled” is settled via reference to one of those four Attributes.  In order to make a character, every player begins with 100 points; these points are assigned to the various Attributes, <i>but not directly</i>.  Instead, <b>Amber</b> characters are created via an Attribute Auction, where players bid for relative rank in each of the four Attributes.  Being first rank in a given Attribute means that, where conflicts of that Attribute are involved, you are simply unbeatable.  (At least among members of your generation.  The game assumes that you will be playing the children of the Princes and Princesses of Amber, but this need not be the case.)  Benedict, as mentioned earlier, is first-ranked in Warfare – no one beats him, with a sword or an army.  Ditto Gerard and Strength.  So the players bid for the right to be the Benedict or Gerard of <i>their</i> generation; and already, you can see the interplayer rivalries being developed.

In order to make this character, then, I needed bids, so I solicited random numbers on my LJ.  The reponses I got became my fellow bidders, giving me a framework to make my character in.  With five replies, there were 5 bids in each category, so my “bidding” was against those numbers.  Also, note that the Auction strongly encourages large groups, which is further enhanced by the player vs. player mentality of the game.  I won’t consider running without 6 players, and 8+ is ideal.

Once the characters are made, however, a few other tweaks can occur.  Say, for example, that the final bids for Warfare looked like this: Agatha Rank 1 (74 pts), Bernard Rank 2 (73 pts), Celeste Rank 3 (60 pts), Diarmid Rank 4 (29 pts), Evangeline Rank 5 (4 pts), Fernando Rank 6 (1 pt), Gillette Amber Rank (0 pts), Homer Amber Rank (0 pts).  (Note: Characters begin at Amber Rank in all Attributes, which is “average” for residents of Amber and superior to the maximum potential for ordinary humans.  There are two lower ranks: Chaos Rank (-10 pts), equal to an average resident of the Courts of Chaos or the maximum human potential, and Human Rank (-25 pts), which is human average and really, really pathetic by Amber standards.)  When the Auction was done, then, all the players would know where each character stood in relation to the others.  <i>After</i> the Auction, however, any player but Agatha could spend additional points to buy their way up to the next Rank (though not any more or less) – so, for example, Celeste might decide to spend 13 points to get Rank 2.5 (the Rank-holders at the end of the auction are assumed to have the slightest of edges over every one else with the same point total, in order to make sure that you can’t just “stealth” your way into good Ranks with no penalties after the Auction), or 14 points to get Rank 1.5 – actually surpassing Bernard!  Thus, just because you know where you stood at the end of the auction does not mean you know where you stand as the game begins.

Moreover, the GM will award XP as the game goes on – but s/he does not tell you how much!  Instead, you give him/her a prioritized list of stuff you want to spend XPs on, and he/she works down the list until you run out of XP – so even you shortly have little or no idea what your stats are.  Thus, the uncertainty means that only the Auction winners can guarantee their safety – anyone else can be caught and manhandled at any time.  Note that the actual resolution of conflicts in Amber is extremely straightforward – barring set-ups, whoever has the higher number wins.  Period.  However, it is possible for someone with the higher number to either a) fail to capitalize on their superiority because they don’t realize they’re better, b) to overreach and lose anyway, not realizing that their advantage was a relatively small one and being overconfident, or c) to get suckered through a trick that changes the battlefield in a way that even their superior skill cannot handle right off.

All in all, <b>Amber</b> is one of the most creative, unusual, and fascinating RPGs in existence, and I really doubt I will ever actually have enough interested players to either play or run a game.  (sigh)  Still, just talking about it and making a PC is enough to give me a little twinge, so that will have to do for now.

(creation time: n/a)


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11 years is a long time.  The Internet never seems to lose anything.  In working on my current Amber game, [[Jeweled Amber]] i ran across this character concept.  At first i was attempted to add a trump i thought fit her.  Instead i think a shadow of her may turn up in my game.  With regards to her listing here, well done.