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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kookalouris" data-source="post: 4514972" data-attributes="member: 23872">As usual, time is suddenly against me.  I am putting a rough draft of a post up that I hoped to have done yesterday.  If the draft is incomplete or unclear, I will edit it as soon as I can.  But y'all deserve a response.  This is where you think about who your characters were (and might be again)...My apologies for not writing for a bit.  Let's get to a fun post now. The earlier post was about what we had to decide in common.  But here you get to be as self-indulgent as the game will allow.   This post is about your characters in general (next will be the actual character creation details).  At game start, your characters believe themselves to be young adults, the orphaned children of unknown parents.  If you choose,  your character could actually be an adolescent, raised from a newborn to a teenager.  But I think most players will choose to play a much  more powerful and older character reduced by necessity to an unknowing teen.  So before deciding who you are, let's think about who you  were and might be again...  Perhaps the most powerful beings in the Amber setting are the members of the Royal Family themselves.  Arguably close would be  some of the most powerful Lords of Chaos (for example, Lady Dara).  As far as I am concerned, you can be ANY of Zelazny's characters  without really altering game balance as this game deals with only the short period of time when all PC's are have a relatively small and  similar amount of power (innately or reduced by powerful magics).  I expect most players will be of the blood of Amber, which means that ultimately Dworkin was your ancestor, no matter how many  generations removed.  If you want to speculate a non-canon family line, I'm hip.  Through Dworkin, there was Oberon and then his many  children.  You can play or be descended from any Prince or Princess of Amber as far as I am concerned.  Due to the differing timeflows in  various shadows, you can be of the first of the thousandth new generation.  This can allow you to be descended from two or more of the  Royal Family without necessarily invoking Oedipal overtones (for example, Merlin is the great-great-grandchild of Benedict and the son of  Benedict's brother Corwin).  At this point, let me mention the John Gregory Bentancourt books, which are continuations of the Amber Chronicles authorized by  the Zelazny estate.  Whatever their merits, these books are controversial as Roger Zelazny expressed his desire that no one else write about  Amber after his death.  I don't know enough about them to have a real opinion, I do know that they are prequels, dealing with the early life  of Oberon.  Being of the Amber bloodline will give the power over Pattern, which will let you walk Shadow, be immortal, and have a score of  scheming relations.  However, being of the blood of Chaos will give you power over the Logrus as well as immortality as well.  You may even  have some of both bloodlines, similar to Merlin.  But your character doesn't have to have these (or any other) supernatural bloodlines, they  can be a merely human friend of the Amber orphans.  This will mean your character will be far less powerful and capable than those of  Amber or Chaos.  Still, it is an option for those who want it.  In addition to the blood of Amber (or whatever), there is also the blood of your other parentage.  Llewella, for example, takes after  her mother in many ways.  You are free to choose any other parent, from any real or imagined world, that can be worked into the plot.  I  ask for no actual historical figures, but shadow copies of historical figures are fine.  This is a bonus to my players, you can bring one of  your favorite characters into the game history.  Don't forget, though, that this game has to focus on Amber and your alternate lineage really  just adds character to your character.  Here are some possibilities Zelazny might have liked: Shadow Historical Ancestor:  Hamnet Shakespeare, the son of William Shakespeare.  Hamnet only died young in our Shadow.  I will assume  he was as talented as his father, the Bard of Avon, and turned the head of one or more Amber Princesses. Fictional Shadow Earth Ancestor:  Morgan Le Fay was all about raising new royals to depose of old royals by any means necessary.  She could  so easily be talked into an alliance with a Prince of Amber.  Although I don't need to know the details now, if you are a Amber noble, try and think of a trump description, colors and a personal symbol. Inhuman Ancestor:  Rhanda, Merlin's playmate, was a Shroudling which is a kind of vampire-like being.  Had circumstances been different,  the two might have had kids and family dinners might have been challenging.  Then again, you might simply have a 'mundane' human partner for your Amber parent to focus on the Amber side of the family.   While I assume that most folks with Amber blood are made (ahem) the 'old-fashioned' <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f631.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":o" title="Eek!    :o"  data-smilie="9"data-shortname=":o" />way, there is always cloning, homoculi, blood babies,  shadow copies, pattern-ghosts, and blood transfusion recipients among other methods of getting Amber DNA into your character.</blockquote>

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