The Golden Realm of Amber!
The creation of Roger Zelazny: stories about the one True Center of all Existence and Shadows it casts from the source of the Pattern, and the people who walk therein.
To say that I am a fan of Amber and of Roger is probably an understatement.
I was a fan of the series since the first few books of the first series were published many, many years ago. (I was in college then: I will leave the calculation of just how old I am now for the reader.) I read each book as it came out, and I still have them, the original paperback series in their black covers and the second series, also in paperback. I was a member of an Amber fan club and later collected a number of Amber fanzines and even wrote a couple of fan stories myself. I was involved with the playtesting of the Amber Diceless Roleplaying system and played in a number of campaigns and convention Amber games. I even have several of the illustrations from “The Visual Guide to Castle Amber” hanging on my walls at home, including the trumps of Fiona, Ghostwheel and Llewella and the Lighthouse of Cabra.
And I should note that the preponderance of Amber material on my website here is due in part to my propensity for writing but largely due to the fact that the Amber system and philosophy is very much a story-based system and written stories and supplementary material about the Amber characters not only lends credence and stability to their existence within the campaign but also can add to their story outside the actual campaign sessions. In other words, these stories and materials add to the character development in ways more under the control of the player, assuming the gamemaster accepts them. (From my experience, those gamemasters I’ve played under all enthusiastically enjoyed and accepted what I wrote for the characters.)
The Fan Connection
When I first started attending MediaWest*Con in Lansing, I discovered a group of people who also appreciated the Amber series as much as I did. Over the coming years, we met at the convention and published four issues of the club fanzine Shadow Shiftin’. The club president even got permission from Roger to establish the club and make use of the characters and property, and sent him copies of everything we did (which would be of serious import, in the next section.) It was all great fun while it lasted.
As part of our participation, each member wrote a piece for the newsletter which identified the character they most identified with. For me, that was Merlin, the son of Corwin that he never knew about until the later books. Plus, we all described ourselves, and I told how I was a programmer. (This, too, is important: see the next section.)
By the way, if anyone knows where I can find copies of the club fanzine, I would really appreciate it! I loaned my copies to Erick Wujcik (see below) and he lost track of them. They had some of my first writing, especially a story that I may have a copy of on an old 5 1⁄4″ floppy somewhere.
The Merlin Connection
When the first book of the Merlin series was released, I reserved a copy through the library and so I had not read it by the next MediaWest*Con. When I got there, the Amber fan club president spotted me and asked if I read the book yet, I admitted that I hadn’t.
“Merlin’s you,” she replied. “Merlin’s a programmer.”
Sure enough, Merlin was a programmer. (Nowadays we’d call ourselves hackers but same difference.)
(I look nothing like Pierce Brosnam: that is, however, how the character was described to the artist by Roger.)
But there was more: I wrote a Merlin story for the fanzine, where I took the scene where he first encounters his father and wrote it from his perspective, and then carried the story on back to the repercussions of his actions back in the Courts of Chaos.
The question is, though, was I the (or maybe part of the) inspiration for Merlin? I will never know, as I never got the opportunity to ask Roger that question. He was to be the Guest of Honor at GenCon in (was it really that long ago?) 1995, and Erick Wujcik (see below) organized a reception for him and invited his Amber players to attend, but Roger died earlier that year: Roger, being the private person he was, never told anyone about his illness. It was a great loss for the SF and Fantasy community.
However, mindful of that connection, I have the Trump of Ghostwheel (which was Merlin’s sentient Trump computer creation) from “The Visual Guide to Castle Amber” hanging on the wall at home.
The Wujcik Connection and the GenCon Amber Campaign
It was at a GenCon in 1986 (MECCA in Milwaukee) when I noticed a hand-printed sign that stated someone was looking for people to help playtest a roleplaying game based on the Amber novels. I, of course, could not resist, and that is how I met Erick Wujcik. To say that Erick was a genius at RP gaming was putting it mildly. He was massively and inventively creative, and the ground-breaking concept of an RP game without contest rolls was truly innovative. It was truly role playing at its core and was immensely fun. Through this connection I learned a great deal about role playing on both sides of the table.
That playtest campaign (Erick’s second such group) became the GenCon Amber campaign, of which much has been written in Amberzine, usually from the perspective of Bronwyn (Carol Dodd’s character). Needless to say, what she wrote is very much from that character’s viewpoint, and Damarian (my character) might have a few things to say about certain events from his perspective.
It was a fun romp, those times maybe once a year at GenCon or Ambercon (and, if fortunate, both) when we were all able to get together for another session. Several of the characters (including Damarian) were developing in interesting ways, especially Bronwyn, and we were all very interested in seeing what would develop and what Erick had in mind for us. But, alas, there was never a resolution to the many and varied plot lines. Erick found a job teaching game design in China for several years, not returning to the US, then, upon his return, was told he had cancer. He turned his projected six weeks into six months, that being the person Erick was, but eventually he was lost to the gaming community.
The Wisconsin Connection
It was at a GenCon long ago, where Erick hosted an Amber party instead of running his GenCon Amber campaign on Sunday afternoon. It was at that party when I asked if he knew of any Amber campaigns in Wisconsin. You see, I was working at the time on a contract job in Appleton, Wisconsin. There was nothing going on in Appleton. To get an idea of the size of the town and local community, the population of the entire metropolitan area of seven little towns all next to each other was about 75,000, a quarter the population of my home town of Fort Wayne, and half the population of the nearest big city of Green Bay.
Erick directed me over to a guy sitting by the window, who said he ran a campaign every other weekend, and he was living in Neenah at the time. Neenah, being the next town over from Appleton. I said I was interested in playing Amber and later gave him a copy of the character I wanted to play. That character was an extension of a superheroine named Changeling, who as a Champions character possessed powers and abilities that almost directly translated into Amber stats and abilities, including shapeshifting, magical-based psychic powers, and an uncanny luck. This is what she looked like:
(The lovely artwork of Brigid as a superhero above is by artist Heather Bruton and became the image for her Trump.)
He agreed and over the course of driving down from the Appleton area (which is located at the north end of Lake Winnebago) in a van with several other of the members of the campaign to the site where the campaign was run (across the Illinois border at a small town’s community center) he introduced me to the campaign, and, later, when we arrived, introduced my character to the campaign.
Now, the character as I described her had a mysterious past, and upon arrival, found the beginnings of her past. She was a child of the Fae, one the ancient magical beings who stood apart from Amber and the Courts, yet she was also a child of Amber. Furthermore, the campaign already one such character, Ombra, the Grand Duke of Amber (Dworkin’s son by the Unseelie Queen of the Fae) and the Unseelie Prince. As it would develop, Brigid was the Seelie Princess, the exact opposite of Ombra. (And, of course, she loved her cousin dearly.)
What are the odds? Just how unlikely would be to find a campaign where my character would fit so precisely, in such an out of the way location? Suffice to say that this sort of thing has happened in my life more than once. That campaign lasted through the game master and the rest of the local players (but not the other players from the Chicago area) moving down to Milwaukee, forcing me to drive down to the game myself every other weekend (and yes, it really was that dead in Appleton that made me welcome driving for several hours on a weekend to attend) then me moving back home, where I kept in touch with the game master through email.
The AmberCon Connection
AmberCon is a convention devoted to playing Amber (and then other diceless RP systems and other innovative roleplaying games) originally organized by Erick Wujcik in 1989, two years before the Amber Diceless RP game book was published. It was first held in a location called The Lighthouse Rec Center on the river, a dusty and cobwebbed old lighthouse that was now part of the public park system. Later it was moved out to a hotel in Livinia.
For many years it was one of my regular annual conventions. That is where I played in the “New Courts” campaign by Scott Whitney in 2000, for which I wrote ‘Seduction of the Guilty’, and “The Great Game”, a steampunk-flavoured Amber campaign run by Scott Acker in 2001 for which I wrote ‘Brigid’s Diary’. I was also involved with the “Pattern Magic” campaign run by Erick Wujcik and Cliff Winnig, and several one-shot games, playing characters as diverse as Morgaine, a Chaosian noble with hidden Amber blood; E‑Man, the energy superhero; and Coyote the Trickster.
Quotes, Quotes and More Quotes
To quote Groucho Marx, “One more quote and we’d have a gallon.” One of the most amusing elements of any AmberCon is the record of what players said and did during their games. For example, this link from AmberCon 2000 has several quotes of my own, and even one from Erick about my character Damarian. The quotes from the other years are equally amusing, and can be fund at this link.
Amber Fiction
One of the things Erick got permission from Roger to do was to publish character journals and fiction based on players’ Amber RP characters in a private publication named Amberzine. I was fortunate to have two such stories, ‘Catfight’ and ‘Seduction of the Guilty’, published in the final edition, and I got paid for it, too. (Well, not much, but its not every author, even professional authors, especially professional authors, who gets paid to write in Roger’s sandbox.)
