Off: Zelazny

[Andrew A. Apold]

>Andrew A. Apold writes:
>
>The first Amber books kept the magic technologies linked to a vaguely
>definded ability to walk through parallel worlds and this was limited to
>the Amber world being more "real" than the others. The cards were also a
>neat device to keep the political plotting going while providing little
>extra power than teleportation.

Oh, but they do follow the same framework.  About the only development I
really disliked was the sentience of the pattern and logrus.  Kinda took=
 some of
the...  innocence (i know, odd for Amber) of the universe off the scheme
of things, even the idyllic wanderings through bright shadows and stuff
like that has a kind of underlying sinister tone to it in that light...

As for stuff like Ghostwheel, the font of power, Merlin's sorcery, stuff=
 like
that, it holds pretty consistantly...


>hehe :-)
>
>I'm not a great fan of roleplaying. I always thought that Amber would
>make a great board game if someone put in some good design effort.

How can you make a board for an infinity of possible shadows?
It is perfect for an RPG, and it was a pioneer in "DRPG", diceless
rpg's...


>I also think they could have made a lot of cash by selling an Amber deck
>of cards with some kind of rules for a card game. There must be SF
>artists out there who could do some incredibly tasty designs for this.

There is a deck of Amberites as Tarots available in France, there is a link
from the Zelazny page (do a net search, it pops up...).  Anyways, most=
 people
who play the DRPG make up trump decks of their own, and many of these
people like to put them on the net.  A good set can be found at

http://www.phlab.missouri.edu/~c642985/amber/trumps/trumps.html


>What we really want though is a "Live Chronicles" type Hawkwind album
>based on the Amber books. Maybe if we write some lyrics and send 'em to
>Brock...

Ah, don't tempt me...   but such a matter would have to be with permission
from the Amber corporation, which holds his copyrights.  I have no idea
what whoever controls it now would feel about such a matter...

I often tried to set up the elder amberites (the 9 princes and the 4 women)
as being part of an enseble band of sorts, and trying to figure out what
type of instrument each would play....  this is a list our group came up=
 with:

Random - Drums (of course)
Corwyn - Lead guitar
Eric - Lead guitar (yes, they fight over it)
G=E9rard - Bass
Julian - Horns
Benedict - Violin
Brand - Keyboard, (mellotron?)
Bleys - Sax
Caine - Concertina (yeah, he needs something darker...)
Florimel - lead vocal (and a tambourine on occasion)
Fiona - Flute
Diedre - Acoustic guitar
Llewella - usually resuses to play, when forced to uses a triangle.

+---------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------+
Andrew A. Apold, aka                        "I was corrupt before I had=
 power!"
Roger Shrubstaff                                 - Random, upon being=
 accused
Chancellor                                            of being corrupted=
 since
Barony of Silverwater                             becoming King....
Kingdom of the Burning Lands                (Roger Zelazny, d. 1995)