The Cool Shadows Thread

[RPGPundit]

This is where we talk about cool Shadows that you or your players have come up with over the years.

There were, for me, a couple of very memorable shadows that my players had designed. One was Thorfir, a Norse shadow; the other was one who's name escapes me right now but everyone just called it "the Seventh Sea", which was a mostly watery shadow with a ring of islands.  Both were particularly cool mainly because of the amount of effort their respective players put into the worlds, with full colour maps, heaps of notes, etc etc.

Anyone got any that are cool because of how unusual they are?

RPGPundit

[weilide]

I really dig the "blending disparate elements" mode of shadow creation: Civil War-era America with an overlay of near-Eastern Buddhist culture, ancient Greece with Lovecraftian horror entities, and the London of the roaring 1920’s combined with a punk rock sensibility are all fun possibilities to my mind.

[RPGPundit]

Yes, awesome!
What other combinations do we have out there?

RPGPundit

[Ivanhoe]

One of my player just went with Arrakis, from Dune. It is his soldiers-breeding shadow. The most elite units are trained in the "holy weapons" that is, weapons that are known to work well in most shadows : bows and blades.

Another one had a shadow (I don't remember the name) that had a steampunk level of technology : no electricity nor powder but steam and zeppelins. Can only be accessed from an altitude of 3000 meters, from pattern.

I frequently use a shadow named Dale, located in the Golden Circle, as a typical 7th sea archipelago. It is a realm of small islands. We were close to a diplomatic accident when the players heard about their king : Brand of Dale. Fortunately, it is just someone with the same name. Gerard spends a lot of his free time sailing around there.

[Malleus Arianorum]

This is meta-cool, but I had a virtual shadow that I bought as a collection of shadowshifting merfolk. The idea was that they could effortlessly swim between the seas of infinite shadow so their domain was a quiltwork of portions of shadows. My plan was to use this quiltwork as a sort of intershadow transportation network.
 
Sadly, the GM flip-flopped and twenty miniutes into game I was informed that all of the merfolk had been slain by one of the PCs and that I was now the proud owner of 24 points of good stuff. Later in the game, the player re-created my idea with a Deep Space Nine theme but it got blown up too.
 
In terms of pure style though, my personal favorite was a Greek citystate in the golden circle. It was a quick and easy way to bring in some diversity but fun because the engineers could use monster bits to power their simple machines. A sort of non-spell based magic.

[Trevelyan]

One of the PCs in a game I ran had a high tech shadow the name of which escapes me. The shadow was like an idealised furturistic version of Manhatten or the Canary Wharf area of London - lots of soaring glass skyscrapers set alongside clear, blue water with electric cars and monorails, etc. One of the dominant companies contributing to this utopian society was Bariman Enterprises, the channel through which the PC introduced technological advances from nearby shadows which could be made to work with the minimum of alteration and boost the quality of life in his new home.

The collective PCs soon came to use the shadow as a comfortable rest stop, enjoying the finest things that a multibillionaire lifestyle as members of the extended Bariman family could provide.

[Warder]

This is more like an idea of what do do with a Shadow of desire; two self-aware Shadows that compartmentalized their dimensions into two gentelmen in suits glowing with embedded galactic nebula appear before the PCs doorstep one day. Their heads are geometrical figures made from unknown metals. They can only be hurt by ,,power''. Do they have a agenda involving liberating the PCs Shadow of desire? Making them self-aware too? They might be shadow rights activists.
Or agents of the enemy distracting the PCs in a crucial moment. Or actually, they might want the PCs shadow to move. Like, somewhere else. The revenue just isn't well placed in the current vicinity of other neighboring shadows.
So what, there just not wanted in the neighborhood? Who can help in such a situation? Theres only one hope. Luke.

[MoonHunter]

Thread Necromancy happens. Sorry.

World Construction is one of my favorite things to do.  In the Amber campaign I played in, we focused on Shadow Earth, reflections of Shadow Earth (I.e. worlds that were based on Shadow Earth), The Fairy Lands, and that was about it. Most of our campaign dealt with Court, Golden Zones, and trying to keep Merlin off the throne.

In the Amber campaign I had planned, but never executed....

The Great Kingdom - Sphere:  Imagine China taking over the world. Very, very, very little has changed from 200 AD.

Nihon - Sphere: Plague eliminated most of the world, only isolationism and someone's interest left Japan (and other isles left alone).  Samurai.

Startos - Sphere: A world of "bubble cities" and humanoids that live in a total nanite driven paradise, that they are slaves to the central computer creating things for it.

Morr's World - Sphere: A warm world, with lots of shallow seas. It is a jungle world with cat people. The Cat People are mostly intense martial artists, who see physical perfection as the road to spiritual perfection.

Aldos - Sphere: Your typical fantasy world ripped straight out of a DnD game, complete with Evil Dark Lord. The Dark Power is an Chaos Courter having fun.

Pados - Place: A pocket stop where the light is twilight, the sky is a light purple, and the grass on the rolling hills are magenta.  It is a peaceful wonderful place full of deams. However, the grass starts showing up in other places (shadows). The grass is nearly impossible to destroy (cockroach kudzu to extend the metaphor) and is nearly inedible to most creatures. The best part, it lets of hallucingenic spore and a telepathic vibe. Thus you are in a mind of dreams fairly soon. If it shows up, the shadow is pretty much doomed in under a century or so.

[weilide]

The resurrection of this thread reminded me of something I've been thinking about recently: namely, the limits of shadow walking. (I know this crops up somewhat in another thread but as long as this one is back in action I'll just comment here). Specifically, I've been considering whether it's possible to "time travel" through shadow. Here I don't mean actual time travel in the sense of travel backward in a given shadow's timeline but rather a kind of "poor man's" equivalent. In other words, should it be possible to walk to a shadow that is completely identical in all respects to, say, the Shadow Earth of 1901 or what have you? There was time when I would have said, "yes, of course," but I've been starting to feel that Amber is more interesting when there are real limitations to shadow walking. In support of this I suppose I would refer to points in the books: first, Corwin is unable to return to an Avalon identical to the one he once knew. What's lost is lost. Second, at one point he claims that the one thing that one cannot shift for in shadow is personality.

What do the rest of you think?

[RPGPundit]

I think the point is that you can't go back to the same shadow, you can create an almost-exact simulacrum of a "lost" shadow, but you know it won't be the same.

RPGPundit

[weilide]

I guess it depends on how shadow walking really works. It certainly appears from the early descriptions that you can only shift the visible elements around you, which would seem to preclude fine-tuning an entire to one's liking, but then again there are numerous exception to that rule: finding objects of destiny, manipulating time, etc. It is a pickle and no mistake.

[MoonHunter]

You should be able to go back to a world that is similar, but not the same. As you can't control every variable/ aspect of the shadow you enter, it will be close but just different enough to be a bother. So while you can re-experience a Shadow Earth that is just now experiencing the day/ era in question, you won't be able to go back and find people and things in the exact same place. This prevents you from finding "the clues" that you might of been searching for.

Of course the inability to control all the variables does mean that shadows have an independent existance from Amberite experience.

Of course, we have fast shadows where your amber relative time is compressed, one day there is about 45 second on Amber. Given an infinite multiverse, anything is possible. So, reverse time flows? If you travel far enough into Chaos, you have to find a world that runs in time reverse of normal flow. (or worlds where you have time travel... and are not shadow shifting to a linked alternate). You could do the time travel thing, using shadow shifting. However this is so difficult to do, that nobody "normally" does it.

[Croaker]

Of course the inability to control all the variables does mean that shadows have an independent existance from Amberite experience.

Or that your subconscious plays a part in a shadow's creation.

[MoonHunter]

Or that your subconscious plays a part in a shadow's creation.

I tend to reject that on a general scale, as there isn't enough symbolism and mind challanges in the shadows when they arrive. And not enough nightmares out there.  

Now the subconcious does do most of the processing for shifts and such and some of it could slip in.

However, the travel metaphor would be different if they weren't independent to some degree.

[darciesdaddy]

On of my characters was very non-traditional. He spontaneously evolved when a Chaosite, wounded badly during the Patternfall War, left a lot of blood behind in just the right shadow. The shapeshifting properties of the blood allowed it to survive and grow, eventually achieving sentience. Part of it split off to become humanoid (my player), and the other part just kept on growing, absorbing everything in the entire Shadow, becoming an infinitely large organism, with organs the size of planets and a brain the size of a galaxy.  This was my character's 'brother' and personal Shadow.

Later on, I learned that my character was just a mobile construct created by the Shadow, and, in fact, the Shadow was actually my character.