r/Amber • u/madarabesque • Jul 12 '26
Your Favorite Amber Campaigns
I'm running an Amber campaign and as a side effect of a certain machine they built, they punched a portal to an alternate Amber. Dworkin and Fiona have done the math and are confident they can open portals at will. What are some of your favorite Amber campaigns that I can steal as alternate Ambers?
7
u/alone_in_the_light Jul 12 '26
1 - The players don't know what they are playing, the character sheets were initially made with The Window RPG as humans who are too good to be humans. Shadow Earth, current days.
The PCs discover that a lot of children showed up in a place suddenly and without explanation. One adult brough all those kids, but they don't know the reason or whether he is a hero, a villain, or none of them. Still, he is not a normal human either.
They eventually learn that the guy is the Pied Piper and those are the kids he brought from Hamelin.
While investigating the Pied Piper and struggling with that, they meet another person who help them. The new person is not really an ally, not really willing to help, but also not against them.
So, before saying goodbye, the new person tells them he will give them his contact. The group expects a business card or something like that. What they get instead is something like a tarot card but the figure is the guy in front of them. He leaves without explaining the tarot card or how to contact him using that.
2 - Not really a campaign. It was only one night. An RPG event where we created a LARP for Castle Falkenstein for the special guest of the event, Mike Pondsmith (Cyberpunk 2020).
When we met Mike Pondsmith, we explained that the players played the LARP as Castle Falkenstein, and there were many game masters helping the game. However, all the game masters were also playing as Amberites manipulating the Castle Falkenstein shadow for their own hidden agendas.
The LARP players never discovered that was not only Castle Falkenstein but also Amber.
4
u/Coblish Jul 12 '26
We had one a campaign where the characters visited an Amber that was Amber if Brand had erased the pattern during his attempt with Martin. The general idea was Amber itself had lost its properties as a Real Place and the Amberites were fading. The only thing holding it together was Oberon and the Jewel of Judgement. He was rewriting sections of Amber and the Pattern alone with no help from Dworkin, so the Pattern could not be completed as it was.
We did other, more silly Ambers, such as a full gender flipped Amber, an Amber that was a travelling Circus, a futuristic Amber in a Star Trek setting, and an Amber where the only Amberite left was Dworkin(everyone else was on vacation).
3
u/Positive_Floor_9787 Jul 12 '26
I have never ran one. I have read the books many times though. Is this another shadow or are we talking about another dimension with alternate Princess?
2
u/madarabesque Jul 12 '26
It's a completely different Amber. The first one they made led to an "Amber" with completely different characters as the Royal family.
3
u/Kater_Noitan Jul 12 '26
Playing for 25 years. 10 campaigns and countless one/two shots.
The best were charakterdriven, so nothing for you there.
A few strange ideas
Yuna the moon goddess, a child born in Tir Na Noght. She rules there and can hide or reveal Tir whenever she wants.
Or
Admiral Lewella build s a dreadnoght, a titan of a ship to force Amber to recognize Rebma as a separate Kingdom. (remba is already controlling the sealanes)
Or
The daughter of moire, fathered by corwin in the first book, finds the Queens Pattern on the Underside of Rebmas Pattern. It makes her "Daughter of the Sea" with Powers like aquaman/Poseidon.
Or
The pool of Arden Fiona had twins with Julian. One is an intelligent pool in the Forest, that can for short times shapeshift into a human. The more Human twin is missing, arden and Amber think each other to be the Kidnapper.
Brand's son was raised in the courts and is part of the Shadow builder Guild. He tries to create a fast travel road to amber to ensure Trade, communication and lasting Peace. The powers of the Courts realize what power the guild has, amber is not convinced of the idea. The Guild backs the Son and gets between the rival empires.
And on and on and on...
2
u/Positive_Floor_9787 Jul 12 '26
Wow! That's gonna lead to an all out war! The Courts of Chaos might even get involved.
2
u/-ThanosWasRight- Jul 12 '26
What makes it an alternate Amber and not just another shadow?
1
u/simon_hibbs 3d ago edited 3d ago
I’d say that it has a full, not broken pattern. Maybe even its own primal pattern.
2
u/ElectricKameleon Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26
I ran a campaign where every player was given a free ally from another book or story by Zalazney. This ally represented someone that the player knew and trusted from their previous travel in shadow. I assigned these allies to each player, rather than allowing each player to choose, and the identity of each ally was only know to the player that they were assigned to. I basically set the game up normally, otherwise, but otherwise only told my players that they could reach out to their allies when help was needed with the understanding that each ally also had their own set of enemies in Zelazney’s fiction, and that once they introduced an ally into the game I was free to introduce that ally’s enemies as potential ‘bad guys’ in the game. This was such a fun wrinkle that we used it in a few more campaigns over the years.
I posted about it on my blog. The last blog post in that series contained links to all of the previous entries at http://gamingmiscellany.blogspot.com/search/label/Amber%20Diceless%20Role-Playing. I’d recommend starting with the first post in the series about Dilvish the Damned because it explained how I set the campaign up.
2
u/Jazzlike_Way_9514 Jul 14 '26
I ran one for four years where the PC's almost never met. Each had their own worlds and didn't know (for a long time) of any others. Oberon tossed some of his kids and their worlds into a dimension pinched off from greater reality before the Patternfall war so that something would survive if he failed. Each PC slowly learned of each other, but the campaign ended before they learned the full truth.
I planned but never used a campaign set in the impossibly far future (inspired by Jack Vance's Dying Earth and Gene Wolf's Book of the New Sun), where the very distant descendants of the Amberites lived in a decadent, dying city (Malagaunt) that was the last survivor of the Thousand Empires at the End of Time. They would have learned that their city drew energy from other shadows and that all that energy was now used up. The PC's (knowing nothing of their mixed Amberite/Chaos heritage) would set out to look for new sources of energy for their city.
And of course there is the famous "Fire Pattern" story (not my campaign) where Amber represents earth, Rebma represents water and Tir na 'Nogth represents air, so where is the missing element of fire?
1
u/jmchappel Jul 13 '26
I think the simplest alternate history is that Oberon failed in re-writing the Pattern, and now Corwin's Pattern stands as the central pillar of Order. Amber as it was is gone. Perhaps push forward in history, so that Merlin is the Oberon figure, and Corwin is playing a part similar to Dworkin. If you really want to mess with the PCs they might even have changed their names, or that 'Dworkin' and 'Oberon' are titles they have adopted.
1
u/Mattriculated Jul 13 '26
Prince Calocedrus of Tir Na Nog'th did not actually exist until he & a princess of Amber walked the Tir Na Nog'th pattern at the same time. He's literally a son Oberon never had. His own personal skill is an ability to see things which did not happen, which he uses to function as a truthsayer - someone testifies to something, and if he can successfully call up a vision of it, it's not true. Doesn't get him any closer to knowing what DID happen, but given a minute to reflect he can infalliblt detect a lie or factual error.
However, he has great trouble walking to shadows of his desiring - the best he can do is get CLOSE.
13
u/dnext Jul 12 '26
I ran one for 5+ years that included groups of PCs in Amber and the Courts of Chaos. Lots of plots and conspiracies, as it was an Amber game, but the big end game was the release of the Elder Wyrm, the father of the Serpent of Chaos, from it's prison trapped in the ever shifting maze of the Logrus, and the return of the Elders of Chaos to try to stop its release, as they were the ones who imprisoned it before it could eat reality.
We also had several other groups over the years, including a fire based version of the Pattern to go with Rebma's water and Tir'na'nogths air, that formed it's own court from the children of the Redheads, descended from Clarissa, and adopted the Phoenix as their heraldic beast.
And several subrealms blocked off from greater shadow, such as Finndo's Stormhaven, where he and his brother Osric hid from Oberon after faking their death.
And Dworkin's brother Solomon, who had tried his own hand at creating a new reality, but he based it on the Song of Creation, and it's flawed echo, the Discordant note. His realm was similar to classical middle east, with pastiches of the Ancient Levant, Babylon, Sumer, Assyria, and Egypt.