My Yearly AmberconNW Post
So, unsurprisingly, the yearly con in Portland, OR did not happen in the year of the COVID. But they did manage to scrape together a virtual con across the same dates. A little compressed because they've got a UK contingent (including us) so they didn't want games running on too late given the eight hour time gap, but still. One four hour slot of Thursday 7-11pm, and two four slots on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, running from 5pm-2am were a lot of fun and a needed break after this year. We were still feeling fatigued after COVID, and given the limited time, we really didn't feel up to running anything this year, alas.
Maybe next year.
Slot 1 - Stealing Corwin
This was a fun little way to start the con. We were agents of another power, tasked with stealing a member of the royal family who had recently been imprisoned and blinded for attempting to lead a coup. Because, you know, politics, which we didn't really know or care about. If there's one criticism I had, it's that the GM allowed us a little too much time to plan the early stages of the heist, which meant that the heist itself was fairly rushed. My character was a snakewoman telepath who also had a few other useful talents for communication and travel, which honestly ended up being more useful. I do feel like I probably took a little too much of the spotlight in this game, but then again I was quieter in other games. Hopefully it evened out.
Slot 2 - All The Lies That Are My Life
In this game we were playing younger members of the family who all attended regular meals on a version of Earth with a more senior member of the family, Princess Florimel. This meal, unsurprisingly, went rather wrong when first said senior member was missing from her house. And then members of the Lizard Bureau of Investigation turned up and started asking questions, and some of the PCs found the stables wrecked and a blood trail leading... elsewhere. It turned out that her brother Bleys and sister Fiona had kidnapped her, accussing her of using us as hostages against other members of her family, as part of a plot with her brother Corwin. Also, they claimed that various PCs actuallyhad other parents to what they thought they had. Skepticism was high, shall we say, not helped by my character finding the king unconscious in their basement in the same room as Flora. There did seem to be something leeching the energy from him, which they claimed wasn't them, but there was a certain amount of stabbing on various sides before things calmed down.
My character was a shapeshifter in this and, as I think I've mentioned before, I have a lot of fun with shapeshifters, and that was true here as well. None of the claims reallly bothered her, since, well, her father was already dead and a traitor besides, so... But she wasn't really the stabby sort, and she managed to get a lot of scouting done, so I was relatively happy with this game.
Slot 3 - Exeunt Florimel, Murdered by Fire Angels
This game was also set on Earth, and we were also children of the elder amberites who Flora was keeping an eye on. DIfference being, we didn't know what we were, and we were a lot less powerful. But someone's sent some powerful beasties that can cross worlds to kill anyone of our heritage on this world, and Flora was their first victim. Without her, the organisation she'd set up was kind fo floundering and hoping to use us to prop themselves up and rid the earth of these beasties, all of which they pretty much bluntly told us. My character was Kalliope, daughter of a naiad with a member of the royal family, and generally a huge misanthrope. Flora has decided about twenty years ago to start doing something about long term problems like environmental damage, since she quite liked the place and didn't want to see it trashed in a relatively short amount of time, and Kalliope was a big fan of that, given water pollution had killed her mother. So she's spent the last twenty years working for the organisation, killing people who were standing in the way of the new agenda.
Unsurprisingly, there was a lot of planning about how to kill the beasties, but they ended up hunting us down while we were trying to finish off a lightsaber (which could penetrate their armour). One PC kept one working on the lightsabre, three PCs ended up focus firing on one of the pair of the beasties and my character - who had described her specialty as killing things and also water control - ended up taking the other by herself. Apparently when in air breathing form, it might have a lot of armour, but get a few gallons of water into its breathing hole at shotgun speeds (thank you water control) and then repeatedly shotgunning the water within its lungs tended to offend. Eventually, but it was pretty incapacitated before then.
Following instructions, we then contacted one of the few members of the family who was supposed to be safe, who also coincidentally lived in an underwater realm. With non-polluted water. Needless to say. Kalliope has abandoned Earth without a second thought and is currently planning on making that realm her new home.
There is a chance that we'll get to play these characters again next year, which should be interesting.
Slot 4 - Stairway to Anywhere
Another heist, to retrieve an artifect that had been bought by the guy we were working for. Unsurprisingly, that didn't go quite according to plan - the merchant claimed that he'd had a better offer, and there were dodgy people watching his warehouse. Likewise, we were allowed a little too much time to plan, though I'd say that the pacing was a little better in this, and the thing that was really rushed was the return journey, though that was helped somewhat by the overplanning.
My character is this was a chaos theoriest with distinctly practical uses for her theories, able to invoke Murphy's Law in really rather concrete ways. It helped a little, but this was definitely one of my quieter games I'd say.
Slot 5 - Ashes and Gaslight - Choices
This was my one continuing game from last year. Previously, my drug addicted PI had agreed to give birth to alien ghost bee babies in human form to save them from the collapse of their universe. (Thankfully not in a dramatically physical way) This year was basically the wrapup of that plotline, with us having to petition the local friendly gods to help shield our reality from the aftermath of said collapse. Also my character actually did do the birth thing over the course of a week, and now has 19 children who looks like 4-5 years old, and basically have the physical characteristics of the children from Village of the Damned.
Luckily no creepy speaking in unison or psychic abilities yet, but doubtless the latter will come.
It was honestly surprisingly wholesome, all things considered.
Slot 6 - The Shadows Know
Okay, the plot of this one was a little complicated. Each of us was hired independently by someone we'd known for several years who was our exact physical duplicate to go to their very rich family weekend getaway in upstate New York. There were, unsurprisingly, complications. For one, we were each given a factsheet about who we were imitating, and the other members of the family. Problem is, some of that information was wrong, with various family members having similar but different names to what we'd been told. Secondly, two of the player characters looked like the same person, though they'd been different names for that person. Thirdly, once we actually compared notes, we found out that we each thought we were in a different decade, from the 1930s in one case, to my character who was from the 2010s.
Shit, as they say, was weird.
What's important for figuring this out is that members of the Royal Family of Amber can travel through infinite worlds. And they're also sufficiently real that they cast imperfect reflections of themselves in nearby worlds. Not that our characters knew this, but we were obviously fairly distant reflections of the members of the royal house, who'd recruited us to act as catspaws and sent us all off to a different world to investigate what was going on. What's different about this game is that the people who sent us were also reflections, albeit close enough ones to have enough power of their own to send us across worlds to investigate. Hence two of one character.
Once we compared notes even more fully, the only person who was the same for all of us was Brandon, aka the guy who in the books tried to rewrite the universe in his own image. So we tromped off to find out what the heck, and he told us that he'd this place up as an experiment to find out which of his siblings was most likely to poke into his plans to kill his father. So all we were was just experimental data. He did promise to get us home, but was drunk and ended up depositing us in different worlds. My character was by herself, the others had decided to stick together, but still. Wrong.
One of the fun things about this game is that the other players in the game didn't have much experience with Amber as a game or as a series of books. One of them really dived into playing her character though, and was way better at being social than the rest of us and was a lot of fun to play with.
Slot 7 - The Moonroses of Avalon
From the name, you might be able to guess that this is an Arthurian romantic take on the Amber game. It's... well, lightly supported by canon, but the GM took the brief mentions and ran with them portraying a world that had fallen from its golden age a couple of centuries ago, and now faced being poisoned by unknown forces. So the characters gathered and started on a quest to investigate that ended up bringing the true queen of Avalon, Gwenyfar, back from her thorn entangled castle, where she had been missing presumed sleeping or dead for these past centuries.
My character was a child of Avalon and the werewolves that had invaded two centuries ago. Torn between both worlds, she was cautiously looking for a way to allow her and her fellow younger werewolves who had been born in this realm. to make peace with the humans and join the realm properly. One of the other PCs was also a half-werewolf, but his father had been this big traitor who we thought had blighted the other werewolves with his betrayal. Sadly, we didn't really have time to explore that dynamic in the slot - by the time that my identity as a werewolf had been revealed, we didn't have a lot of time left - but the game was a lot of fun.
Maybe next year.
Slot 1 - Stealing Corwin
This was a fun little way to start the con. We were agents of another power, tasked with stealing a member of the royal family who had recently been imprisoned and blinded for attempting to lead a coup. Because, you know, politics, which we didn't really know or care about. If there's one criticism I had, it's that the GM allowed us a little too much time to plan the early stages of the heist, which meant that the heist itself was fairly rushed. My character was a snakewoman telepath who also had a few other useful talents for communication and travel, which honestly ended up being more useful. I do feel like I probably took a little too much of the spotlight in this game, but then again I was quieter in other games. Hopefully it evened out.
Slot 2 - All The Lies That Are My Life
In this game we were playing younger members of the family who all attended regular meals on a version of Earth with a more senior member of the family, Princess Florimel. This meal, unsurprisingly, went rather wrong when first said senior member was missing from her house. And then members of the Lizard Bureau of Investigation turned up and started asking questions, and some of the PCs found the stables wrecked and a blood trail leading... elsewhere. It turned out that her brother Bleys and sister Fiona had kidnapped her, accussing her of using us as hostages against other members of her family, as part of a plot with her brother Corwin. Also, they claimed that various PCs actuallyhad other parents to what they thought they had. Skepticism was high, shall we say, not helped by my character finding the king unconscious in their basement in the same room as Flora. There did seem to be something leeching the energy from him, which they claimed wasn't them, but there was a certain amount of stabbing on various sides before things calmed down.
My character was a shapeshifter in this and, as I think I've mentioned before, I have a lot of fun with shapeshifters, and that was true here as well. None of the claims reallly bothered her, since, well, her father was already dead and a traitor besides, so... But she wasn't really the stabby sort, and she managed to get a lot of scouting done, so I was relatively happy with this game.
Slot 3 - Exeunt Florimel, Murdered by Fire Angels
This game was also set on Earth, and we were also children of the elder amberites who Flora was keeping an eye on. DIfference being, we didn't know what we were, and we were a lot less powerful. But someone's sent some powerful beasties that can cross worlds to kill anyone of our heritage on this world, and Flora was their first victim. Without her, the organisation she'd set up was kind fo floundering and hoping to use us to prop themselves up and rid the earth of these beasties, all of which they pretty much bluntly told us. My character was Kalliope, daughter of a naiad with a member of the royal family, and generally a huge misanthrope. Flora has decided about twenty years ago to start doing something about long term problems like environmental damage, since she quite liked the place and didn't want to see it trashed in a relatively short amount of time, and Kalliope was a big fan of that, given water pollution had killed her mother. So she's spent the last twenty years working for the organisation, killing people who were standing in the way of the new agenda.
Unsurprisingly, there was a lot of planning about how to kill the beasties, but they ended up hunting us down while we were trying to finish off a lightsaber (which could penetrate their armour). One PC kept one working on the lightsabre, three PCs ended up focus firing on one of the pair of the beasties and my character - who had described her specialty as killing things and also water control - ended up taking the other by herself. Apparently when in air breathing form, it might have a lot of armour, but get a few gallons of water into its breathing hole at shotgun speeds (thank you water control) and then repeatedly shotgunning the water within its lungs tended to offend. Eventually, but it was pretty incapacitated before then.
Following instructions, we then contacted one of the few members of the family who was supposed to be safe, who also coincidentally lived in an underwater realm. With non-polluted water. Needless to say. Kalliope has abandoned Earth without a second thought and is currently planning on making that realm her new home.
There is a chance that we'll get to play these characters again next year, which should be interesting.
Slot 4 - Stairway to Anywhere
Another heist, to retrieve an artifect that had been bought by the guy we were working for. Unsurprisingly, that didn't go quite according to plan - the merchant claimed that he'd had a better offer, and there were dodgy people watching his warehouse. Likewise, we were allowed a little too much time to plan, though I'd say that the pacing was a little better in this, and the thing that was really rushed was the return journey, though that was helped somewhat by the overplanning.
My character is this was a chaos theoriest with distinctly practical uses for her theories, able to invoke Murphy's Law in really rather concrete ways. It helped a little, but this was definitely one of my quieter games I'd say.
Slot 5 - Ashes and Gaslight - Choices
This was my one continuing game from last year. Previously, my drug addicted PI had agreed to give birth to alien ghost bee babies in human form to save them from the collapse of their universe. (Thankfully not in a dramatically physical way) This year was basically the wrapup of that plotline, with us having to petition the local friendly gods to help shield our reality from the aftermath of said collapse. Also my character actually did do the birth thing over the course of a week, and now has 19 children who looks like 4-5 years old, and basically have the physical characteristics of the children from Village of the Damned.
Luckily no creepy speaking in unison or psychic abilities yet, but doubtless the latter will come.
It was honestly surprisingly wholesome, all things considered.
Slot 6 - The Shadows Know
Okay, the plot of this one was a little complicated. Each of us was hired independently by someone we'd known for several years who was our exact physical duplicate to go to their very rich family weekend getaway in upstate New York. There were, unsurprisingly, complications. For one, we were each given a factsheet about who we were imitating, and the other members of the family. Problem is, some of that information was wrong, with various family members having similar but different names to what we'd been told. Secondly, two of the player characters looked like the same person, though they'd been different names for that person. Thirdly, once we actually compared notes, we found out that we each thought we were in a different decade, from the 1930s in one case, to my character who was from the 2010s.
Shit, as they say, was weird.
What's important for figuring this out is that members of the Royal Family of Amber can travel through infinite worlds. And they're also sufficiently real that they cast imperfect reflections of themselves in nearby worlds. Not that our characters knew this, but we were obviously fairly distant reflections of the members of the royal house, who'd recruited us to act as catspaws and sent us all off to a different world to investigate what was going on. What's different about this game is that the people who sent us were also reflections, albeit close enough ones to have enough power of their own to send us across worlds to investigate. Hence two of one character.
Once we compared notes even more fully, the only person who was the same for all of us was Brandon, aka the guy who in the books tried to rewrite the universe in his own image. So we tromped off to find out what the heck, and he told us that he'd this place up as an experiment to find out which of his siblings was most likely to poke into his plans to kill his father. So all we were was just experimental data. He did promise to get us home, but was drunk and ended up depositing us in different worlds. My character was by herself, the others had decided to stick together, but still. Wrong.
One of the fun things about this game is that the other players in the game didn't have much experience with Amber as a game or as a series of books. One of them really dived into playing her character though, and was way better at being social than the rest of us and was a lot of fun to play with.
Slot 7 - The Moonroses of Avalon
From the name, you might be able to guess that this is an Arthurian romantic take on the Amber game. It's... well, lightly supported by canon, but the GM took the brief mentions and ran with them portraying a world that had fallen from its golden age a couple of centuries ago, and now faced being poisoned by unknown forces. So the characters gathered and started on a quest to investigate that ended up bringing the true queen of Avalon, Gwenyfar, back from her thorn entangled castle, where she had been missing presumed sleeping or dead for these past centuries.
My character was a child of Avalon and the werewolves that had invaded two centuries ago. Torn between both worlds, she was cautiously looking for a way to allow her and her fellow younger werewolves who had been born in this realm. to make peace with the humans and join the realm properly. One of the other PCs was also a half-werewolf, but his father had been this big traitor who we thought had blighted the other werewolves with his betrayal. Sadly, we didn't really have time to explore that dynamic in the slot - by the time that my identity as a werewolf had been revealed, we didn't have a lot of time left - but the game was a lot of fun.