Is Amber a planet?

[DaltIsKing]

Hi All, I'm new to the forum. Taking the Chronicles for a second spin, and thinking of looking for an Amber campaign. I started thinking about the kind of campaign I would run and what shadows it would center on.

Serious thought about Shadows and Amber implies to me that Amber itself is not a planet. In fact it seems to be only a few thousand square miles, if that. It shades of into Arden and the Valley in a day's ride and other shadows in the Golden Circle are a similar distance by boat.

What's your opinion?

[Nihilistic Mind]

I agree, I don't consider Amber a planet, and IMO Shadows in general are not planets either.

Shadow Earth, for instance is a planet. Some other Shadows out there are planets, but for the most part, a planetary Shadow is unnecessary to Amberites, and is only a local cultural or scientific consideration that pertains to a certain Shadow or group of Shadows.

I mean, I don't want to be paranoid about what they taught me in school or anything, but as far as I'm concerned, the Earth could be flat and only display the illusion of being a planet, atoms may be elements of fire, air, earth, water and aether... etc. Things still work the way we expect them to according to local laws of physics etc...

[Trevelyan]

First of all, Amber is the name of the city and not the wider shadow in which it is situated. Corwin refers to the land surrounding Amber as the real earth.

Beyond that, we simply don't have enough information to categorically say whether or not the shadow in which Amber can be found is an entire world. There is no particular reason why it shouln't be, and if you decide that the world has limits then you'd need to decide also what happens to a non-Amberite who goes on an extended trek and cannot shift shadow as he moves - does he reach the edge of Arden and fall off? Yet equally there is no reason why it should be a planet as we understand it, perhaps it is possible to sail through an endless sea if you sail without shifting shadow.

[Nihilistic Mind]

Umm, no they wouldn't fall off (interesting thought though )... Some Shadow paths are well established and can be traveled without the ability to shift...

A planet is a scientific concept, therefore can be subject to local speculation.

The 'real earth' doesn't need to be a planet...
I prefer to think of Amber as the real earth, or the First Shadow, rather than just the city, etc.
You can run your Amber however you like, it's not going to bother me one bit (even if I were a player in one of your campaigns, it's your Amber too!). I used to think of Amber and every Shadow as planets connected via Shadow paths, but I changed my mind about that years ago. I just don't feel that there's a need for a planet classification for all Shadows. That's all.

[RPGPundit]

I think that Amber is a sort of world, but it is so far from the rules of our own earth physics that it doesn't actually resemble a planet as we would imagine it. when you go too far off into the the sea or the forest that surround the area of the Kingdom of Amber, you eventually find shadow paths that lead you away to other shadows, and it would be very hard (but not impossible) to keep in Amber itself without shifting along a shadow path.  That said, I think you could do so, just like you could keep travelling through the mountains or the vast valley that form the other two borders of the kingdom, but these geographical landmarks go on essentially forever, Meaning that Amber is really more like an infinite flat (or curved) plane, not a spherical world. For the most part, travelling through any of these regions without shifting shadow would just be endlessly monotonous, though who knows what ancient places or dangers you might eventually discover if you went far enough...

RPGPundit

[RPGPundit]

Oh, and welcome to theRPGsite, Daltisking! i look forward to hearing more about your ideas and questions regarding Amber.

RPGPundit

[jibbajibba]

I would tend to agree in the curved plane theory. I would say as you leave the real world you wander into shadow but the reverse is not true once you wander off into shadow it is imposible to find your way back to Amber you are then in which ever shadow you ended up in and you can't return.
The one exception to this would be trade routes. These are land and sea based though mostly sea based and are the established routes from the Golden Circle Kingdoms back to Amber. You can walk them if you are experienced and have been shown the route by another and knowledge of the routes is a definite boon to any inhabitant of the kingdom.
I also have a group of Amberite troops, the Kings Messengers who are in fact Amber's spy network and they have an intimate working knowledge of all the pathways between Amber and the Circle kingdoms.

[DaltIsKing]

Wow, it's great to see an active place to discuss Amber. Thanks for all the replies. And thanks for the welcome RPGPundit.

Generally, I agree with Nihilistic Mind that many if not most Shadows are not planetary. In fact, I've always wondered wether the stars in the sky of Amber have planets around them or are they only points of light?

Although, Trevelyan makes a good point about the edge of the Real Earth. Does one fall off? RPGPundit neatly solves the problem and possibily opens up a lot of interesting territory. But being a planet would do the trick as well.

My opinion is that the Real Earth is very small. Supposing that Arden and the Valley of Garnath are seperate Shadows (and most people seem to assume that), what's always bothered me is that you can apparently see Kolvir and Amber City from the forest. You could argue that one has already passed into the Real Earth at that point, but I see it differently. The only way you could see those landmarks is if the Shadow path between them is very large. The entire border that Arden shares with the Real Earth is one huge, unvoidable Shadow path. The same would be true for the Valley one oceans as well. I think this would make me closer to jibbajibba than anyone.

[RPGPundit]

I believe that Arden and Garnath are both supposed to be part of the Amber world. In the novels it describes Arden as the beginning of Amber, not a separate shadow.

RPGPundit

[DaltIsKing]

I believe that Arden and Garnath are both supposed to be part of the Amber world. In the novels it describes Arden as the beginning of Amber, not a separate shadow.

RPGPundit

That's certainly reasonable. I've been reading too many campaign diaries to keep everything straight. :-)

[pathar]

This came up in a recent Amber game I was running - one of the characters was of scifi shadow origin, and was asking a bunch of questions along these lines.  The decision we wound up arriving at in this particular Amber was that it was really quite moot.

Is Amber on a planet?  Hard to say, because walking somewhere puts you in the Golden Circle kingdoms, which are part of Shadow.

So what about the stars - are they far of suns blah blah blah, or just points of light?  Well, who knows?  We haven't been there.

So why haven't you been driven to explore and created the technology that will get you to that level?  Well for fuck's sake, isn't that what Shadow is for?

I think in part it was a collective decision to blow off the questions, because the player asking them tends to fixate on things like that and probably could have gone on for hours if we'd indulged him, but the more I thought about it, the more I really liked those answers.  It seems like the inhabitants of Amber really don't know that much about it, so questions like this aren't easily answered - and in a setting where so much of reality is based on subjective thought, that seems like an answer in an of itself.

[DaltIsKing]

Hi Pathar, that's a neat point about the limits of Amberite knowledge of their home. After all they haven't really been living there all that long. Also, most of their problems could be considered inter-peosonal rather than resource oriented. So exploration isn't their first priority.

@ RPGPundit about the nature of Arden: Thinking about it I still believe that Arden is a separate Shadow from Amber (the 1st Shadow). In 9PIA Corwin drives a car (albiet a modified one) through Arden and Random shoots at Julian with a gun from Shadow Earth. Neither of which should work in Amber proper. Of course Corwin is an unreliable narrator at that point and maybe doesn't know where he is, but then Julian would be out hunting in a Shadow himself. Of course I don't think Zelazny had everything worked out at that point so perhaps a little flexibility is called for?

[RPGPundit]

The thing is, there is Arden the forest in Amber, and then there's "greater" Arden, which are all the forests in shadow paths that lead to Arden. Its obvious that in 9 Princes, Julian had gone out into one of these shadow-forests connected to Arden to stop Corwin before he entered Arden proper.

RPGPundit

[RPGPundit]

The thing is, there is Arden the forest in Amber, and then there's "greater" Arden, which are all the forests in shadow paths that lead to Arden. Its obvious that in 9 Princes, Julian had gone out into one of these shadow-forests connected to Arden to stop Corwin before he entered Arden proper.

RPGPundit

[Croaker]

Yup, I also have Arden as being cross-shadow.
More so, the arden near amber is is fact a collection of linked shadows, like named and numbered ones.
So, you can both be in Arden and Amber, and in Arden and not in Amber.