Editing Diners of Amber (section)

====<u><big>'''A slight detour into cosmology and the Symbiotic knowledge in the Gamer Worlds'''</big></u>====
One of the things I have found in connection to the [[Travel Guides]] is that there is a wide swath of what are called <span style=color:darkgreen>'''''Gamer Worlds</span>.''''' We also call them the '''''<span style=color:darkgreen>Stone of Skulls'''''</span> worlds. You'll find the Stone of Skulls on card 55 below.  Good luck with it.

These are worlds that are somehow connected in a symbiotic relationship, one shadow usually urban and high tech while the other of a wide range of descriptions. The connection being that certain individuals in the Gamer Worlds seem to be the objects of observation by people in the observer worlds. Call the Observers Players and the objects of observation Characters. There is a game 'Master' who has a wider connection to specific worlds and when a dizzying number of changes and actions occur the Game Master knows of it. Its questionable which way the power flows.  The paradigm of Urban & Diverse is not the only format this relationship comes in but it pops up a lot in relation to my family.  Mystics and madmen, Bards, authors, and sages. Dreamers and the damnedly imaginative often have similar powers of observation and share their visions to wildly different audiences.  But for the moment lets look at the paradigm of <span style=color:darkgreen>''Gamers''</span>.  ITs their method of observation that scares many in my family the most because of their ability to know such secret knowledge.

To say this gives me the heebie-jeebies is a vast understatement. Caine and I once found large collections of 'fiction' novels that outlined real and imaginary details of all of our lives. It seems that there may be people in shadow able to know our darkest secrets and most private joys and crimes simply by the agency of letting themselves open to the operations of the game.

Do the math.

There are an infinite number of shadows divisible. I have been assured by Dworkin that a full set of infinity can have boundaries, Like Chaos or the Abyss, or Amber. Arguing the illogical nature of that is pointless, hard on the peace, and hard on the furniture. In these urban worlds are groups of people who meet as regularly as clockwork to 'play' these role playing games. There they believe they haul us about on strings and make us dance to their music, whatever cacophonic forms it takes, and in fact do seem to view into the lives of the characters on the Gamer Worlds. A nearly limitless number of people on vast numbers of urban worlds viewing the actions of a eclectic variety of shadows.

These shadows often have certain similarities that bear considering. Many have an 'unfinished' feel to them as if the Game Master didn't have the time to figure out a better way for people to get water than to carry it in buckets. They have a weird collection of technologies. Barbaric splendor worlds with flush toilets, public transportation, knights on horse back while the population ride bicycles, and magical entertainment devices like televisions, as if the GM-''Game Master''- can not conceive of a world with out such conveniences. It tends to be confusing.

Life is cheap on these worlds and justice is swift as a sword but you can never seem to kill the big bad guy no matter how many of his henchman you stab, shoot, scorch, or vaporize. Women tend to dress smuttier then in real worlds and that gives one a tantalizing guess as to the proportion of male gamers to female gamers!

One assumes that the degree of detail in the world, and the vast number of everyday activities that never reach the perceptive threshold of the GM, tell of the creative abilities and vision of the GM and the players.  Or, the limitations of the need of the GM to oversee his "game" means he slides shadows down to finding the one that fits into the dimensions he imagines.  I'm not sure which is scarier. 

Or they may all be spies. Voyeurs into the actions of others, dice falling to illustrate the actions broadcast from the unfinished reaches of shadow.

I have played these games, and though they may be insights to the actions of my enemies I shall heretofore avoid playing them because the thought of someone over my shoulder, dangling and plucking my strings is at once fearsome and tantalizing.

Again, heebie-jeebies.

Why, you ask, do I go on so?

The '''Stone of Skulls''' resides in just such a world. The card for this world comes after this conversation so bear that in mind as I go on.  This conversation was originally part of the description of this card but I thought it needed highlighting.   

Men wear the badly preserved skins of animals they hunted with bows despite the fact that a worm in that world exudes a nylon silk that is woven into a Gore-Tex-like fabric that the commonest peasant uses to keep warm. Knights and warlords ride horses while merchants direct spoke-wheeled wooden wagons propelled by magic and everywhere bicycles are available. Terrible menaces to the universe in the forms of evil sorcerers, liches, lycanthropes, Ork-kings, thief guilds, and cruel gods are regularly and competently slaughtered by groups of 'adventurers' of the strangest combinations one can imagine.

Powerful magics are as easy to acquire as touching an item to a big rock with a candle-topped skull.

Now to our great joy, most of what appears in these worlds is limited to these worlds. Universe-devouring god-slugs can only attempt to chew up tiny sections of shadows before sword wielding knights, and wand wielding mages come striding up and kill them. Undead kings that seek to conquer all the multiverse, rarely get far beyond a single shadow. Powerful magical items that can change the tides, mutate the races, or etch the moon, are useless outside a shadow veil or two of their points of origins.

There are exceptions. The Stone of Skulls is such an exception.  So let us look at this realm's card.