Ambercon NW 2016 report
So this time of year came around once again. Once again, we travelled to Portland, Oregon. Once again, the long, long plane trip almost made us question why we did this to ourselves. But once we were there, it was good. We did manage to meet up with some people, but Louisa suffering a migraine for much of the first week - even a relatively mild one for her - meant that we couldn't travel to see people before the con.
Still, we did manage to catch up with people we see but once a year, and had a lot of fun.
Slot 1: Tir-na-nog'th is Falling
This was a game where we were mostly* playing the sentient ghostly survivors of a destroyed realm, looking for revenge and/or a way to return ourselves to full corporeality. With that in mind, many of us took... less than optimal characters, the standout probably being the ghost of a seven year old princess, now hundreds/thousands of year later, still seven. For my sins, I came up with a knight who had the (often involuntary) power of manifesting (mostly her) nightmares as the kind of reality that could hurt or even kill people. Mostly she replayed, over and over again, the night of the attack on Tir, the night she failed to save her lady love.
By the time the game started, her mind was more than a little fractured, to say the least.
The resemblance of these episodes to PTSD was not lost on the other PCs, one of whom decided that telling her living daughter (another PC, and the exception to the mostly ghosts rule) about the attack on Tir was vastly inferior to having her experience it, so pushed said daughter in my character's direction and told her to them about it. (Whilst she watched, because she'd heard about these reality twisting episodes, but she'd never managed to analyse one herself.)
No one ever claimed that all of the PCs were exactly nice people.
Anyway, secrets were uncovered, artefacts retrieved and Tir was eventually made whole again. In the process, it was discovered that my 'lady love' was actually my character's mother, who was actually still alive, having been in another realm when the shit went down. Also that the realm in question had been the kingdom that had attacked Tir in the first place, the kingdom whose army my character had been fighting the phantoms of for the last thousands of years. Oh yes, and also my father was a prince of said realm.
Mixed feelings. Distinctly mixed feelings.
Still, at least I didn't take the GM up on the option to have transferred my affections to the princess I had sworn to serve - she turned out to be my (younger) half sister. *That* would have been more than a little scarring. (If not totally out of place in an Amber game.)
All in all, a good game - a lot of fun.
Slot 2 and 3: Beyond the Wall
In a complete change from normal Ambercon games, this was not only a diced game, it was not set in the Amber universe, something which certainly at one point was against the rules. Ah, well. It was a lot of fun anyway. Character creation was done on the day - a class was chosen, and various aspects of the character's history were determined by random rolls, which also prompted us to come up with people and locations in the village that we'd grown up in. And thence to a short adventure.
Character creation started off with us choosing an origin, which provided us with initial, fairly low stats, then each random roll provided us with some fact about our character and a bonus to certain stats. I chose a witch's apprentice, then asked the fateful question - what if I don't get any further bonuses to intelligence. Naturally this meant that I rolled pretty much every bonus to intelligence that I could get, to the point where I had to use my free 'choose one roll during character gen' to redirect my final roll, simply because I'd already maxed out my intelligence.
I wouldn't say that it was a deep game, but it definitely had it's charm and it was fun.
Slot 4: Babylon 5: Body of Evidence
As the name suggests, this was a game set aboard Babylon 5. Nothing to do with Amber, but it was diceless - an investigation into a murder of an ambassador of a Non-Aligned World aboard the station, during the start of season 2 when everything was influx. Independent investigators were pulled in from all over the place, mostly because of the recent upheaval in station security. I played a Narn xenospecialist doctor, who had left Narn since shortly after the first Centauri occupation had ended, spending her time travelling around mostly non aligned worlds, doing what she could to help with whatever emergencies were happening. She'd been adopted by a Centauri doctor during the occupation when she was very young as a project, and - although she had helped the Narn Resistance - this had left her feeling more than a little alienated by Narn society, so she'd left.
Naturally, this meant that she was sent to deal with G'kar at every available opportunity by the other PCs, because she was a Narn, right?
It turned out to be a fun, competent little investigation game (not that I'd expected anything else, knowing the GM) and my character even got to drop Vir in trouble, revealing that he'd chopped up the murdered victim and fed them into the waste disposal. (He'd thought that Londo had something to do with the murder, and had taken it upon himself to dispose of the evidence.) The actual murderer was a Narn, which left my character with distinctly mixed feelings about her place in the investigation, but hey ho.
This might be a continuing game.
Slot 5: Return to Arcadia
Ah, yes. The return of Nadzieja, one of the more screwed up of my characters, despite the heavy competition. Certainly one of the most explored by this point. Ten years has passed in game since the last session, and she now has two children - a twin boy and girl. She has spent much of that time being terrified on one level or another that what happened to her - in short, she has a mental connection to the city which various powerful personages used to repeatedly psychically violate her when she was a teenager - would happen to them. She also has a husband, their father, a deadly fighter, who she mostly likes, may even love a little - but she married him because of the safety that he provide, that she fears could be taken away at any moment if she does the wrong thing. And the same propensity for deadly violence offers her safety is also something that she is keenly aware could be turned against her, if he so chooses at any point.
It isn't as though she doesn't have power herself, but her helplessness before the powers of the city, learned brutally over and over again as a teenager, has been so ingrained that even now there is a part of her that whispers she can do nothing against them. It doesn't help that the father of her husband is one of these personages, his brother another.
On the bright side, there have been some murders over the last ten years, and some of the people that abused her the most ended up dead. During the game, the semi-sentient power source of the city - someone she insists is fully sentient, given that she can talk to her, and considers her a sister (given her father created it) - was tapped as part of a great ritual to reshape reality. Nadzieja was less than pleased, and - after recovering from a panic attack after one of her dead abusers tried to contact her - helps the rest of the PCs track the offender down. Even worse, the person who did this turned out to have mind control powers, something that freaks Nadzieja out because of her history, and got somewhat close to using them on her husband. So - after the woman had been taken down and rendered temporarily unconscious - Nadzieja quietly murdered her.
It was surprisingly easy. She's still not quite sure what to make of that.
Slot 6: A Death in the Family
This is actually a game we ran. Basically, a death in the power structure of the Courts of Chaos presented... opportunities, and - as it turned out - several of the outsider factions decided to open negotiations amongst themselves to try and take advantage of this. Well, some of them were more concerned with the undead starting to invade the fringes of the Courts. One faction of the undead presented themselves to this negotiations with their own needs and wants - and just by accepting their presence, the Church of the Serpent would doubtless consider all parties heretics.
The game had a somewhat mixed reception. On the one hand, the players all seemed to enjoy the political negotiation with occasional skulduggery aspect of things. On the other, two of the players had - through their background - included things which could have cosmic implications if followed through completely. Before the political side could really reach a satisfying conclusion, the game became bogged down by potential cosmic changes and due to how those shook out, no one really left the game feeling satisfied.
Definitely something to consider for the future.
Slot 7: New Heaven, New Earth
Traditionally, slot 7 games have a lower energy level to them. Everyone has been playing games since Thursday evening, and it's now Sunday.
The character I played in this game was anything but low energy.
In a game where the other PCs were FBI agents, PIs, actors and defrocked priests, I played a highly energetic, very bouncy, too smart for her own good seventeen year old college student. Now I generally speak quickly - sometimes to the point where my wife of over 11 years has problems understanding me - but I really managed to turn it up to eleven for this character, and managed to maintain it for pretty much the entire game. Apparently at points my wife wondered when I was actually managing to take a breath throughout all the babble.
Thankfully - despite making my wife feel *old* - I somehow managed to play her as someone who amused the other players, whatever their characters thought, rather than annoy them, for which I am grateful.
Much of the game was spent scratching the surface of the hidden world - it was a game set in a slightly variant, slightly darker 2020 - but by the end of it, my character was cheerfully bouncing along, having discovered that she can travel places with Princess Power! (Apparently she is of the lineage of ancient princes and princesses who had the affinity of the power of creation.) Most of the rest of the PCs had Pointy Eared Power - their talents came being descended of fae.
This is intended to be a continuing game, so it'll be interesting to see where Jessica goes from here.
Still, we did manage to catch up with people we see but once a year, and had a lot of fun.
Slot 1: Tir-na-nog'th is Falling
This was a game where we were mostly* playing the sentient ghostly survivors of a destroyed realm, looking for revenge and/or a way to return ourselves to full corporeality. With that in mind, many of us took... less than optimal characters, the standout probably being the ghost of a seven year old princess, now hundreds/thousands of year later, still seven. For my sins, I came up with a knight who had the (often involuntary) power of manifesting (mostly her) nightmares as the kind of reality that could hurt or even kill people. Mostly she replayed, over and over again, the night of the attack on Tir, the night she failed to save her lady love.
By the time the game started, her mind was more than a little fractured, to say the least.
The resemblance of these episodes to PTSD was not lost on the other PCs, one of whom decided that telling her living daughter (another PC, and the exception to the mostly ghosts rule) about the attack on Tir was vastly inferior to having her experience it, so pushed said daughter in my character's direction and told her to them about it. (Whilst she watched, because she'd heard about these reality twisting episodes, but she'd never managed to analyse one herself.)
No one ever claimed that all of the PCs were exactly nice people.
Anyway, secrets were uncovered, artefacts retrieved and Tir was eventually made whole again. In the process, it was discovered that my 'lady love' was actually my character's mother, who was actually still alive, having been in another realm when the shit went down. Also that the realm in question had been the kingdom that had attacked Tir in the first place, the kingdom whose army my character had been fighting the phantoms of for the last thousands of years. Oh yes, and also my father was a prince of said realm.
Mixed feelings. Distinctly mixed feelings.
Still, at least I didn't take the GM up on the option to have transferred my affections to the princess I had sworn to serve - she turned out to be my (younger) half sister. *That* would have been more than a little scarring. (If not totally out of place in an Amber game.)
All in all, a good game - a lot of fun.
Slot 2 and 3: Beyond the Wall
In a complete change from normal Ambercon games, this was not only a diced game, it was not set in the Amber universe, something which certainly at one point was against the rules. Ah, well. It was a lot of fun anyway. Character creation was done on the day - a class was chosen, and various aspects of the character's history were determined by random rolls, which also prompted us to come up with people and locations in the village that we'd grown up in. And thence to a short adventure.
Character creation started off with us choosing an origin, which provided us with initial, fairly low stats, then each random roll provided us with some fact about our character and a bonus to certain stats. I chose a witch's apprentice, then asked the fateful question - what if I don't get any further bonuses to intelligence. Naturally this meant that I rolled pretty much every bonus to intelligence that I could get, to the point where I had to use my free 'choose one roll during character gen' to redirect my final roll, simply because I'd already maxed out my intelligence.
I wouldn't say that it was a deep game, but it definitely had it's charm and it was fun.
Slot 4: Babylon 5: Body of Evidence
As the name suggests, this was a game set aboard Babylon 5. Nothing to do with Amber, but it was diceless - an investigation into a murder of an ambassador of a Non-Aligned World aboard the station, during the start of season 2 when everything was influx. Independent investigators were pulled in from all over the place, mostly because of the recent upheaval in station security. I played a Narn xenospecialist doctor, who had left Narn since shortly after the first Centauri occupation had ended, spending her time travelling around mostly non aligned worlds, doing what she could to help with whatever emergencies were happening. She'd been adopted by a Centauri doctor during the occupation when she was very young as a project, and - although she had helped the Narn Resistance - this had left her feeling more than a little alienated by Narn society, so she'd left.
Naturally, this meant that she was sent to deal with G'kar at every available opportunity by the other PCs, because she was a Narn, right?
It turned out to be a fun, competent little investigation game (not that I'd expected anything else, knowing the GM) and my character even got to drop Vir in trouble, revealing that he'd chopped up the murdered victim and fed them into the waste disposal. (He'd thought that Londo had something to do with the murder, and had taken it upon himself to dispose of the evidence.) The actual murderer was a Narn, which left my character with distinctly mixed feelings about her place in the investigation, but hey ho.
This might be a continuing game.
Slot 5: Return to Arcadia
Ah, yes. The return of Nadzieja, one of the more screwed up of my characters, despite the heavy competition. Certainly one of the most explored by this point. Ten years has passed in game since the last session, and she now has two children - a twin boy and girl. She has spent much of that time being terrified on one level or another that what happened to her - in short, she has a mental connection to the city which various powerful personages used to repeatedly psychically violate her when she was a teenager - would happen to them. She also has a husband, their father, a deadly fighter, who she mostly likes, may even love a little - but she married him because of the safety that he provide, that she fears could be taken away at any moment if she does the wrong thing. And the same propensity for deadly violence offers her safety is also something that she is keenly aware could be turned against her, if he so chooses at any point.
It isn't as though she doesn't have power herself, but her helplessness before the powers of the city, learned brutally over and over again as a teenager, has been so ingrained that even now there is a part of her that whispers she can do nothing against them. It doesn't help that the father of her husband is one of these personages, his brother another.
On the bright side, there have been some murders over the last ten years, and some of the people that abused her the most ended up dead. During the game, the semi-sentient power source of the city - someone she insists is fully sentient, given that she can talk to her, and considers her a sister (given her father created it) - was tapped as part of a great ritual to reshape reality. Nadzieja was less than pleased, and - after recovering from a panic attack after one of her dead abusers tried to contact her - helps the rest of the PCs track the offender down. Even worse, the person who did this turned out to have mind control powers, something that freaks Nadzieja out because of her history, and got somewhat close to using them on her husband. So - after the woman had been taken down and rendered temporarily unconscious - Nadzieja quietly murdered her.
It was surprisingly easy. She's still not quite sure what to make of that.
Slot 6: A Death in the Family
This is actually a game we ran. Basically, a death in the power structure of the Courts of Chaos presented... opportunities, and - as it turned out - several of the outsider factions decided to open negotiations amongst themselves to try and take advantage of this. Well, some of them were more concerned with the undead starting to invade the fringes of the Courts. One faction of the undead presented themselves to this negotiations with their own needs and wants - and just by accepting their presence, the Church of the Serpent would doubtless consider all parties heretics.
The game had a somewhat mixed reception. On the one hand, the players all seemed to enjoy the political negotiation with occasional skulduggery aspect of things. On the other, two of the players had - through their background - included things which could have cosmic implications if followed through completely. Before the political side could really reach a satisfying conclusion, the game became bogged down by potential cosmic changes and due to how those shook out, no one really left the game feeling satisfied.
Definitely something to consider for the future.
Slot 7: New Heaven, New Earth
Traditionally, slot 7 games have a lower energy level to them. Everyone has been playing games since Thursday evening, and it's now Sunday.
The character I played in this game was anything but low energy.
In a game where the other PCs were FBI agents, PIs, actors and defrocked priests, I played a highly energetic, very bouncy, too smart for her own good seventeen year old college student. Now I generally speak quickly - sometimes to the point where my wife of over 11 years has problems understanding me - but I really managed to turn it up to eleven for this character, and managed to maintain it for pretty much the entire game. Apparently at points my wife wondered when I was actually managing to take a breath throughout all the babble.
Thankfully - despite making my wife feel *old* - I somehow managed to play her as someone who amused the other players, whatever their characters thought, rather than annoy them, for which I am grateful.
Much of the game was spent scratching the surface of the hidden world - it was a game set in a slightly variant, slightly darker 2020 - but by the end of it, my character was cheerfully bouncing along, having discovered that she can travel places with Princess Power! (Apparently she is of the lineage of ancient princes and princesses who had the affinity of the power of creation.) Most of the rest of the PCs had Pointy Eared Power - their talents came being descended of fae.
This is intended to be a continuing game, so it'll be interesting to see where Jessica goes from here.