Shadow profiles.

[jibbajibba]

I have mentioned this before but I am interested in getting new feedback

I had this idea years ago. In fact back in 88 a mate and I were working on our own Amber Game. Interestingly enough it was also diceless, maybe proof that ideas have their time (this was long before we had heard anything about a game coming out).

Because of our natures our games was diceless and complex as opposed to diceless and simple. I beleived then and I still do to an extent that a complex system if well understood allows individual actions to be simply adjudicated. So I would prefer a complete system for combat 'stunts' as opposed to a list of combat feats or a stong solid magic system with complete rules rather than a open ended exercise in handwavin  

Anyway, in this Ambergame we started working on Shadows had profiles there were digits in a profile and an Amberite chould change digits based on their Pattern skill. So you moved from a 111111111 to a  211111111
The idea came from Traveller's description of plannets and solar systems out of the systems building guides.

So the profile would be

Flora, fauna, environment, physics, civilisation, History, Technology, Magic, Proximity

These are all obvious apart from proximity which went from 0 for Amber to 9 for Chaos (the card game I am currently working on uses elements of this). Now you have to realise that when I started on this I was at Uni doing a degree in Geography and Anthropology so its passes through that filter.

The idea was that shadow movement would be diceless but well defined so we could resolve chases and movement through shadow easily. You have 10 skill in pattern you can move the shadow 10 digits in a single shift.

Now we hit a snag because whilst we had hoped Chaos could be 999999999 and Amber could be 000000000 in reality they have a lot in common, breathable air, similar magic and tech limits a shared civilisation and a similar level of magic. So they looked more like 335455540 and 44755579 . The result was that the extremes of the scale were never used and the thing was therefore overly cumbersome.

Then RL, miniature wargaming, cyberpunk and girlfriends intervened. A couple of years later the ADRGP showed up and that was that. As I noted I kept a few ideas for an Amber card game I have been working on for a while.

So the point of all this is how do you all cover travel through shadow? How do you decide how long to get to Chaos from Amber. How long to go from Amber to Avalon? Does anyone have a house system that defines adjacency? to get from a weird shadow like Ghostwheel's to Earth do you have to get nearer to Chaos? What about arriving in Amber via a series of water worlds can you end up arriving in Rebma?

[Croaker]

Now we hit a snag because whilst we had hoped Chaos could be 999999999 and Amber could be 000000000 in reality they have a lot in common, breathable air, similar magic and tech limits a shared civilisation and a similar level of magic. So they looked more like 335455540 and 44755579 . The result was that the extremes of the scale were never used and the thing was therefore overly cumbersome.

I don't know.

This seems to me to describe shadow pretty well: There are shadows out there when amberites don't go, because they're too far out or too extreme, or too improbable to reach.
Since Shadow is based on the Amber/Chaos dynamic, it stands to reason that most shadow would be similar to these, and that, the farther you go from it, the more time it takes to travel.
Think how, in standard ADRPG, you can spend more time in Shadow, searching for something, than traveling from Amber to Chaos. This is similar.

Really, this doesn't strike me as odd, on the contrary.

So the point of all this is how do you all cover travel through shadow? How do you decide how long to get to Chaos from Amber. How long to go from Amber to Avalon? Does anyone have a house system that defines adjacency? to get from a weird shadow like Ghostwheel's to Earth do you have to get nearer to Chaos? What about arriving in Amber via a series of water worlds can you end up arriving in Rebma?

Travel through Shadow? This takes *time*. More or less. Yes, I handwave a lot, save when people search for something specific.

Amber to Chaos? As in the ADRPG, about a week when hellriding, 6 if walking

Amber to Avalon? Never used that one.

Adjacency? Well, if they're similar, they're close?

Ghostwheel to earth: No need to get closer to Chaos is Earth is closer.

Amber via Water Worlds: Yes, in fact, it's been done in my games

[flyingmice]

Your idea works fine if you drop the idea that Amber and the Courts are "endpoints of a line" and replace it with "foci of an ellipsoid"

-clash

[boulet]

A few years ago I thought of a similar (but less player friendly) system of amberverse coordinates.  

When I started running Amber I thought about some method to measure distance and time of travel between shadows. I ended up with a very obtuse set of n dimensions like proximity to Amber/Court of Chaos, local time flow, environmental magic, substance (i.e. Earth is pretty substantial, some random shadow much less). There might have been more. On top of that I had an esoteric function to compute the damn travel time. It wasn't horrible because I had an excel file with formulas that computed all for me using said "coordinates". Travel time was affected by a coefficient reflecting the difference between hell riding and sight seeing. Potentially I could arbitrate between two characters racing from A respectively B toward C. A bit like those trains math problems... Never got the use of it though. Boy was all of this unnecessary... And miles away from ADRPG philosophy.

At least with JibbaJibba's system it's easy to decompose a ride in several "leaps" and it's obvious how far the character is from her destination. My system was just cumbersome... there was even some logarithmic bits in the formula somewhere... sigh

[jibbajibba]

A few years ago I thought of a similar (but less player friendly) system of amberverse coordinates.  



At least with JibbaJibba's system it's easy to decompose a ride in several "leaps" and it's obvious how far the character is from her destination. My system was just cumbersome... there was even some logarithmic bits in the formula somewhere... sigh

Whle i was doing geo/anth you must have been doing applied statisitcal algorhythms in n-space

And Clash that was basically what we did and it kind of works with the two poles of a magnet but still a lot of the numbers don't get used.

[Stormwind]

@jibbajibba: I love the idea of shadow profiling, and your suggestion is relatively clean and simple, however it seems to have limits in that how would you 'profile' the following:

• the Abyss
• A shadow where one or more parameters is constantly changing
• A shadow where one or more parameters does not exist

Note that the non-existence of a parameter is different from the absence of a parameter. For example one might conceive of a shadow with no technology, but this is different from a shadow where even the parameter for technology does not exist (perhaps the Abyss?). The essential difference being of course that a shadow with no technology might develop some, but the shadow where the parameter does not exist can never do so.
I would suggest the following:

Definition
A Shadow profile is composed of 9 ordered characteristics {flora, fauna, environment, physics, civilization, history, technology, magic, proximity} ranging in value through the following enumeration {0..9, *, _}
where
   0..9: indicates the range of a parameter
      *: indicates a unstable, changing parameter
      _: indicates the non-existence of a parameter


(Yep, I have a long background in theoretical mathematics )

[Croaker]

Note also that, say, tech 3 may mean 2 things:
- The shadow is currently at tech 3, but may go farther. An exemple is how Shadow Earth went from prehistory to middle ages to us.
- The Shadow is currently at tech 3, but can't go further. An exemple seems to be Amber, were most technology doesn't work (Ok, there are those pesky guns... )

Of course, it also works for magic

[jibbajibba]

Note also that, say, tech 3 may mean 2 things:
- The shadow is currently at tech 3, but may go farther. An exemple is how Shadow Earth went from prehistory to middle ages to us.
- The Shadow is currently at tech 3, but can't go further. An exemple seems to be Amber, were most technology doesn't work (Ok, there are those pesky guns... )

Of course, it also works for magic

Well the tech and magic levels were supposed to represent the max tech that would work in a shadow not the current tech which was based on the civilisation stat. So Shadow Earth might have a tech level of 7 where energy weapons and power armour, could work but do not currently exist. So lightsabres a tech level 8 item and time travel tech level 9 item wouldn't work but it does get subjective which was one of its problems
It's like triffids are flora level 8 and that plant woman from Farscape would be a flora level 9 9though at the time we did this first time round she didn't exisit)

[boulet]

I'm 95% sure that what matters isn't to build some kind of hyper coherent "geographic" coordinates that would evolve with whatever might happen to a shadow during play.

Why did JibbaJibba turn out with 9 axises to define a shadow position? Why did he fucking bother to have so many?

• There's no amberverse explorer who's going to draw a map for us. And you can bet Zelazny didn't care how to make shadow travel time/itinerary computable. Thus we have to rely on other data to locate one shadow in this imaginary space.
• Why not tie the coordinates with the content, aspect, general properties of a specific shadow? After all if you come from shadow A and look for a shadow mostly like A but with just a bit more magic in the air, it shouldn't be very far to travel, right? The way Zelazny described shadow travel lead us to understand that proximity between shadows is tied to proximity between their content or nature.
• If you use too little dimensions to characterize shadows and deduct coordinates from them, you will end up with quite different shadows apparently being very close to one another.

But that doesn't mean those coordinates are meant to describe those shadows, like a numerical encyclopedia. It's just a trick to build a quick and easy pseudo geography.

[jibbajibba]

I'm 95% sure that what matters isn't to build some kind of hyper coherent "geographic" coordinates that would evolve with whatever might happen to a shadow during play.

Why did JibbaJibba turn out with 9 axises to define a shadow position? Why did he fucking bother to have so many?

• There's no amberverse explorer who's going to draw a map for us. And you can bet Zelazny didn't care how to make shadow travel time/itinerary computable. Thus we have to rely on other data to locate one shadow in this imaginary space.
• Why not tie the coordinates with the content, aspect, general properties of a specific shadow? After all if you come from shadow A and look for a shadow mostly like A but with just a bit more magic in the air, it shouldn't be very far to travel, right? The way Zelazny described shadow travel lead us to understand that proximity between shadows is tied to proximity between their content or nature.
• If you use too little dimensions to characterize shadows and deduct coordinates from them, you will end up with quite different shadows apparently being very close to one another.

But that doesn't mean those coordinates are meant to describe those shadows, like a numerical encyclopedia. It's just a trick to build a quick and easy pseudo geography.

I actually have a thing about 9s I ahve aan expansivfe CCG set arround Kabals where a deck has 81 cards there are 9 grail clues you have a hand size of 9 there are 9 defined Kabals 9 world regions etc etc

But you are right its just meant to give a feel in game space for how to get from A to B.

In the Amber card game I thinned the profile  down to proximity, tech and magic. Proximity becuase in a card game with armies marching on amber you need some sort of progression techand magic because an army recruited in shadow b might be useless in shadow c and I wanted to have all sorts of gonzo troops from stormtroopers to Cavement from Confederate infantry to Knights of Dark Reknown but I wanted to empasise that tower tech and magic troops were the most preferable as they were the most adaptable.

[maxcreigs]

You are explaining simply for the shadow view but there is one problem for that view is appear there are shadow  by convincing parameter but it will not give extent image in real location There's no amberverse explorer who's going to draw a map for us. so we have to rich to other location for shadow image.

[warp9]

Anyway, in this Ambergame we started working on Shadows had profiles there were digits in a profile and an Amberite chould change digits based on their Pattern skill. So you moved from a 111111111 to a  211111111
The idea came from Traveller's description of plannets and solar systems out of the systems building guides.

So the profile would be

Flora, fauna, environment, physics, civilisation, History, Technology, Magic, Proximity

These are all obvious apart from proximity which went from 0 for Amber to 9 for Chaos (the card game I am currently working on uses elements of this). Now you have to realise that when I started on this I was at Uni doing a degree in Geography and Anthropology so its passes through that filter.

The idea was that shadow movement would be diceless but well defined so we could resolve chases and movement through shadow easily. You have 10 skill in pattern you can move the shadow 10 digits in a single shift.

Now we hit a snag because whilst we had hoped Chaos could be 999999999 and Amber could be 000000000 in reality they have a lot in common, breathable air, similar magic and tech limits a shared civilisation and a similar level of magic. So they looked more like 335455540 and 44755579 . The result was that the extremes of the scale were never used and the thing was therefore overly cumbersome.

I like this general concept.

Although, I'm not sure about your choice for some of the factors, and  I think that some of the factors would have more weight than others.

For example (in the books) it seemed like vast changes in things like flora were pretty easy to achieve, but if there was a big gap in the Proximity factor, that would represent some real distance between Shadows. I suppose this could also be done by giving factors like proximity an extra digit. So that the max difference in flora would be 0 to 9, but proximity would range from 00 to 99, allowing for much more distance in that case.

[RPGPundit]

I too like the concept of this, and how it can be used to aid the "definition" of shadows. But to make it into a mechanic as such seems a bit too regimented for my tastes.

RPGPundit