Broken Artifacts

[Nihilistic Mind]

Oh, not this again.  I do wish the mailing list archives still existed so this didn't have to keep getting debunked.  Wujcik said a lot of things about the scions of Amber that are not even remotely attested to in the book.  I don't know why he did so, perhaps he felt it made things more gameable.  The car lifting happens in a Shadow where "there's something funny about the gravity", and the Kolvir thing has more to do with Corwin's First Rank Endurance than anything else.  Cf. also Thermopylae, Battle Of and every Crusader castle ever built.

What I love about the books is that YES! the amberites do some awesome stuff! And half the time, it surprises them! They CAN lift half a car, bench press a harley, etc, but it's still fucking heavy to do so. They just find that "They CAN". That's typically the measurement for amberites in my opinion: rather than them being superheroes and lifting a full-grown man above their heads without adjusting their weight or breaking a sweat, they work hard at it, the dude is still heavy, but they can do it. Stats therefore determine how easily (or not) they can.
They can push themselves beyond shadowfolk limits.

I'm pretty sure we're all in agreement here. Amberites are not superheroes. Nobody is rehashing that thread.

[jibbajibba]

I would handle this differently.

First off I do tend to agree that if you defeated Murok the Mad Bull after a terrifying battle and next session he is back because points that is a little weak.
However, the items and creatures that an Amberite has spent points on are important becuase you can whizz to a fast timeline and make stuff just as effective in game for almost free, the points have to mean something.

So this is how I do it.
If a creature or item is destroyed the player has 2 options they can allow it to lapse and 'absorb' some of the points back over the next few experience upticks (I check for Xp after each session based on player and plot goals that have been achieved). Typically I return 1/2 the points rounded up.
They can relocate it through in game effort - effectively half the time it would take to Logrus search, shadow walk or conjure said item. In this case it if one of the infinite copies of the thing in shadow. this means that sentient creatures and things might have personality changes or minor differences the new Morganstern might be Blue and Yellow for example.

Now you will note that getting the item back is the best option. This is because the item is part of the character archetypal myth. Arthur without Excalibur was a character change, Zeus without lightning bolts, Osiris without his ankh. So I want the players to want to recover stuff so I make that more attractive. Items that are recovered aren't just shadow items that loose potency when you move through shadow they are as real as the PCs themselves.