(no subject)

[the_rck]

I have a request for the various creative people on my friends list. Basically, I'm pulling together ideas for a new Amber game, and part of that process is coming up with ideas for npcs. I'm a little concerned that all of my ideas are just variations on characters I've used before or are otherwise likely to be predictable to those players who know me well. To alleviate that problem, I'm asking that anyone who feels so moved suggest a character to me. I most likely won't use all of them, but the suggestions should get me thinking in new directions.

Due to the nature of Amber, characters can come from any sort of world-- High fantasy, cyberpunk, Victorian era, ice age, anything one can think of. I'm aiming at running a fairly political game, but I'd like to have some things coming out of left field, so I'm not just interested in political characters.

For those who do know Amber, I'm setting the game after the Corwin books and may pull some elements from the Merlin books (or may not). I'm open to additional children (and more distant descendants) of Oberon, people from the Courts of Chaos, people from the Golden Circle or Rebma and ordinary shadow dwellers. I'm playing fast and loose with the game rules and tend to tweak canon to make it more convenient for me.

I don't need a lot of detail for these character ideas, but I also won't object if you want to give it (as long as you won't get upset if I either don't use the idea or change it considerably before using it). We'll probably have a website for the campaign that will include game logs, assuming the game manages to get up and running, so those who contribute will have the option of tracking the game's progress.

If you have any questions about the plots I'm going to be using, please e-mail me. At least one probable player reads this journal from time to time, so I don't want to reveal too much here. (You know who you are! If you see this, I'm trusting you not to peek at the suggestions people have made. Assuming I get any...)

If you know someone who might be interested in doing this and who doesn't normally read my journal, please feel free to direct them this way.

Comments

Hmmm....

[(Anonymous)]

Have you considered using some of the quick on-line generators for anything? for example, you could probably adapt some interesting NPCs from the randomness of "They Fight Crime!"

http://home.epix.net/~mhryvnak/theyfightcrime.html

Re: Hmmm....

[the_rck]

Fascinating and, I suspect, quite usable. The generators a lot faster than I expected, too. I was expecting something more on the order of what the Central Casting books produce (And those books are far too much work for what I want).

[alessar.livejournal.com]

Here's a suggestion. Stop planning so many NPCs in advance. You tend to flood your campaigns with them. On the one hand that creates a rich background tapestry; on the other it seriously shifts importance from PCs (and I feel that the world really SHOULD revolve around my PCs). Only create NPCs as they're required for the NPCs. Viva Lost Vegas only had the following NPCs devised in advance: Nick and his evil twin Chretien who nobody ever met (but who was the ultimate mastermind); Brent; Tressa; Dante. Every single other npc was devised on the spot based on the kinds of interaction people were looking for, or based on descriptions in people's character history. (There were a couple who were "I need an X in this position" but they had their personalities evolve after being met by the players. For instance, the Toreador Trio never got any personalities but party-extra Severance became soooo important...) If you do need to recycle an old persona with a new name in order to fill one of those gaps, so be it. Nobody has to know. ~_^

[splash-the-cat.livejournal.com]

If you want, feel free to nab any npcs from my old games.

[the_rck]

Thanks! I'll probably do that.

[the_rck]

Thanks much! I'll take a look and see who I like for that.

[marith.livejournal.com]

Hmm. The "Amber High School" campaign I'm in is set before the books, while Eric is Regent and Corwin is missing. The PCs are all enrolled in Queen Faiella's Academy for Persons of Gentle Birth, all Amberkids, and all required to keep up with studying in between exploring the realms of Shadow (and smuggling kittens into the dorms).

Some of the more memorable PCs have been:

Justice, my princess from a Shadow where everything works like it does in fairy tales. She got fed up with being a pure amber-haired maiden who sat in her solar sewing while troubadors sang songs of courtly love and knights slew dragons for her but didn't let her have any of the action. So in Amber she's been arrogant and experimental, trying everything that's *not* princessy while not really knowing any other way to be, at bottom. Her erstwhile fiance, now heir to the throne, showed up as an NPC a couple of times.

Chloe, diony's character, is perhaps thirteen and comes from a world where everything is symmetrical. Almost Platonically perfect, if we understand her rather incoherent descriptions. (She keeps saying her grandfather went on a quest to find zero, so her people don't have to keep pigs anymore. We haven't deciphered what that means yet.) She is charming and childlike and very useful - send her to converse with someone and they'll be so bemused they generally do whatever she wants. She has a twin (presumably in mirror symmetry) whom she misses very much, and it worries her that they're having different experiences now and thus no longer identical.

Omar was, everyone thought, the illegitimate younger son of a desert chieftain. His life revolved around camels, trading, a little illicit sorcery, and a lot of being kicked around by his family and treated like dirt. As a good Muslim, he keeps his faith central to his sorcery, and any magic he does has to be religious-oriented. (We had great results getting him to bless swords before combat.) Everywhere we went he was alive to the opportunities for commerce. His trading network would probably have spanned every shadow we visited by now if he hadn't been struck down by vampires. Now he lies in a magical coma, somewhere in Fiona's care. His sweetheart still hasn't forgiven us.

Hamilton was a scion of the Kennedy family with the serial numbers scrubbed off, circa 1950s. Wealthy, very well bred and with an eye for the ladies, he took Amber and shadows in stride and was always on hand to explain to us what a train was and how matches worked. Also a Machiavellian schemer and power-monger. Justice rather liked him, but he was flirting with the princess of a Golden Circle kingdom for purely political reasons.

Tia, daugher of Deirdre, is a horrible immodest heathen bloodthirsty Aztec proto-goddess of her warlike Azteclike tribe in the hot, humid mountains. As a Jaguar Princess, she has very distinct spots on her skin (but pretty ones) and a direct attitude towards sexuality and world conquest. She and her people do blood magic - it's very powerful but requires bloodshed commensurate with the level of the spell. When the PCs first visited, a ritual sacrifice was prepared in their honor. Justice took violent exception to this and charged the altar. (She hasn't been asked back since.) The Xocolatls make a mean hot chocolate with death peppers, hold their monarch personally responsible for making the sun come up in the morning, and throw atl-atls with great accuracy. Their elite force of Jaguar Knights and a cadre of priests have been helping us liberate the shadow of Charter (see below). But...Tia and her people have every intention of absorbing Charter into their empire and converting its populace to their bloodthirsty religion, and Justice doesn't think they should. Power struggles ensued.

(Goodness, that's a lot of babbling. I hope LJ doesn't eat it.) Charter in second comment.

[marith.livejournal.com]

Ooof. Well, it's not an NPC, but I thought it was really neat anyway and Chisber the GM would not, I don't think, mind if you used it.:


Charter (named for the first city we came across). Fiona gave us a trump as a present, noting that time works differently in this shadow and it might be convenient for studying. And so it is: you can't use Trump in Charter at all at night, but the hours of night pass in an instant as far as Amber is concerned. So you can trump into Charter before sundown, study all night, Trump back at dawn....and it'll still be before sundown in Amber.

Unfortunately the place was overrun with vampires. Empire-building vampires, expanding eastward and slaying everyone in their path or sending them back home to be cattle. It doesn't take much to become a vampire in Charter: you die and nobody burns your corpse. No biting necessary. But that wasn't the scary part.

The scary part was they were tool-using vampires. They built all sorts of machines in their demonic forges, from siege equipment to what looked like modified agricultural equipment to warbots. The closer we got to their home city, the better-designed and scarier their machines were (they'd been improving over time). Each one had a sigil carved into it somewhere that allowed it to be remotely controlled; a vampire would dig itself underground and lie catatonic while its spirit controlled the Harvester Of Doom or whatever. Destroy the sigil and the machine stops.

The people of Charter (the city)were a bunch of milksops in Justice's opinion. They knew they were on the edge of vampire territory and h ad been slowly fleeing over the generations till only a remnant of the city's population remained. They didn't take well to Justice's plan to Crusade and Save teh World at all at first. She had to do some aggressive recruiting and enlist an old holy order to create some new knights. Even then, well, it was better to let Tia's Jaguar knights be in the front lines.

[space-parasite.livejournal.com]

I believe the idea for the Shadow of Charter originated with Earl, but I don't know if he ever did anything with it. If he did, it probably wouldn't have been much like Chrisber's implementation. And I'm sure he wouldn't mind someone else using the idea either.

Amber High School!

[space-parasite.livejournal.com]

I wrote up a whole bunch about Tia (http://www.idiom.com/~trip/gaming/ahs/tia_fate.html) and her homeland Xocolotl (http://www.idiom.com/~trip/gaming/ahs/xocolotl.html), because I'm a huge freak.

(The stats probably won't make any sense, because we switched from variant Amber to FATE (http://www.faterpg.com/) so we could be as cool as these people (http://www.iago.net/amber/kings/sessions.shtml). I don't think it's actually worked.)

Alexis might not have been memorable, but his cult of squirrels was! I'm not sure what to say about Cloud or Alex, and Daireen was before my time.