Post some cool Shadows you've come up with.

[Brent Not Broken]

Go on; I'll start us off.

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Utufel, the glittering ocean, is a Black Zone Shadow comprised of endless sea, without any landmasses. Its habitable area is a massive sea-station built and expanded by House Hrab. Utufel is the name of this station as well as the name of the Shadow as a whole. The station Utufel is taller than it is wide or long, a chain of hard, transparent bubbles that stretch from the sea floor to the surface, a distance of many miles. These bubbles are large enough to hold farms, libraries, conference halls, residential barracks, and other vital features, all connected by elevator tubes.

The ocean itself is a cruel, heartbreaking blue, bright and peaceful at the surface and shading quickly down to impenetrable blackness as depth increases. Monstrous shapes glide silently by on the other side of the station domes, just slightly too dark and too far away to be seen clearly.

Publically, Utufel is a House Hrab research station for the study of marine life. It is overseen by Hrab researchers and crewed by amphibious servants House Hrab has engineered for the purpose. Upper, more scenic levels of Utufel are open to all Chaosians (accessible through a Black Road that spans a long corridor built for this purpose), but the bulk of the station is blocked off by locks and retinal scans, restricted to those with high security clearance, reserved for House Hrab's private research and presumable xenobiological skunkworks.

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The Restless Hills are a collection of giant, drifting boulders which float through space in a long stream. Some are the size of small cities while others are the size of large dogs, and many bear soil, plant life, and even animal life. Homesteads and fortresses are built on many of the larger rocks, built sturdily and largely sunken into the ground as a protection against accidental collision.

This is a high-magic Shadow. The entire Shadow itself is a Deep Magic power source involving the weightlessness of rock. Native human sorcerers, called Stone Shepherds, tap this source to levitate and move boulders. Stone Shepherds do their best to prevent serious collisions, steer smaller rocks like ferryboats between settlements, and aggregate smaller and more dangerous free-floating rocks into larger, more stable boulders suitable for building on. Ancient local religion venerates the rocks and treats Stone Shepherds as holy servants of the Great Stones, seeing Chaosians as unfavored by the Stones, unbalanced outsiders. Members of the Courts who take any interest in this Shadow discourage the old religion, but tolerate the Shepherds because of their usefulness in navigating this region.

Gravity here is very low, and even without the help of Shepherds, the intrepid and clever can often navigate the rocks with well-timed leaps or human-powered flying apparatus. This does little to protect against a looming impact or a crushed limb caused by mistimed leap, however.

[jibbajibba]

Hugo's Retreat

Hugo's personal shadow is not really a shadow at all. Its a trump construct. Inspired to some degree it must be said by Seven No trump, the best of the 2 Amber Choose your own adventure books, Hugo created The Retreat as a place to plan, devise and lay low. It also acts a trap for the unwary.

It appears as an adobe ranch house on a desolate wind swept beach. A tattered dingy sits drawn up on the sand and dunes stretch out of miles in each direction.

The house itself is well proportioned a kind of mix between Californian Ranch , a beach house in Malibu and a Morrocan town house.

The central area is a sheltered garden with yukkas. Off of this are 3 large bedrooms with modern sanitary facilities and power showers; a large and airy artists studio and a comfortable open plan living/dining cookiong space. The living room has an excellent sound sytem and AV equipment all  linked to the Office.
The Kitchen is well stocked and equiped with top end food and wine.

The Office is a base for a dozen high powered UNIX workstations and a Cray super computer from here Hugo works on the control interface, known as The Matrix (this was designed in 1992 so apologies for the name), for the Maelstrom. The Maelstrom is a demi shadow that contains an immense  Shadow Storm  powered by Primal Chaos. The only thing that can contain it is Trump so Hugo has encased it in a Trump cage that is generated and maintained from the Retreat and connected to The Maelstrom through a sorcerous thread.
Hugo hope to make the Maelstrom mobile and controlable through a Trump interface. He has already tested it in Tir and thinks it has the power to destroy Primal reality vis a vis Amber.
The Retreat has a large generator but the fuel needs to be delivered by Hugo fairly regularly.

Access to the Retreat is heavily restricted. Pattern andLogrus have no effect here for this is not shadow it is Trump. Access is via one of Hugo's personal Trumps of the place or through the Traps he leaves to tempt the unwary. Hugo likes to play with people especially his siblings and their spawn so he places trumps of The retreat at various locations his favourite being in his own belongings left in places where the nosey are bound to take a peek and in the Library where they are disguised as abstract trumps.
Once in the Retreat there are 2 exits. The first, the safe one is to trump out, and Hugo can notch that up if he wishes to restrict it to Advanced Trump. The second rather more foolish route is to follow the Sorcerous powerline. A reasonable decent sorcerer, certainly one with a little too much imagination, can take the connection and force it open a little to allow then to string a teleport link down it. The effect of such an action is of course to deposit the unwary magician into the Maelstom.

Hugo loves to allow the curious to be the agents of their own demise.

[RPGPundit]

Great stuff so far, keep it up!

RPGPundit

[Evermasterx]

Well, my players didn't know they were offspring of some Amber prince. In a complicate plot, they arrived to a shadow which was like mithyc Greece. There the Great God Pan guarded a Broken Pattern and teach them how to use it and Magic and Trumps and Conjuration. It was an excellent place where to test their new discovered powers:
- they killed Medusa
- fought the Minotaur in his labyrinth
- defeat the Hydra in its swamp
- use a conjurated ship to travel from place to place
- won Olimpic Games
- go to Delphi (and had a prophecy from the Pitia and Apollo)
- attend in a battle between spartans and argives
- fought against a towering cyclops in Sicily
- one of them was nearly slain by a manticore
- and much more!
It was a lot of fun.

[RTrimmer]

Shadeeza.
Shadeeza went through a horrific worldwide wizard war over a thousand years ago. There are glass deserts, demon-cursed aquifers, deadly fungus forests, jungles full of nasties such as spider monkey-sized and -smart venomous spiders, and ship-smashing megafish.

Brand found the place when he was out looking for some new and interesting poisons, drugs and such. Also girls; he hooked up with a pair of hot bff conjuror/ herbalists in Shadeeza (the city) while there. They claimed he'd knocked them up but he didn't believe it; this was prior to Martin walking the Pattern in Rebma and so far as he knew all of Oberon's spawn were sterile. One of Brand's two sons is a PC.

The place is mainly interesting because the PC became interested in helping his maternal relatives out and bought it, with Control of Contents. IMC CoC effectively makes you Numbah One in the use of Pattern and magic; the world cheats for you. And the player is an engineer. So he's the baddest small 'g' god  in Shadeeza (Pattern, Sorcery and Conjuration) and he's fixing it. Which has forced me to make up more and more details, societies, npcs, dilemmas and so on.

He could just change it with CoC but in this campaign there's no omniscient Pattern entity keeping track of details for the Pattern users. Change a world and you keep only the people/details you personally know about from going away, causing your friends and acquaintances there to lose most of the people they know and maybe go nuts since so much of what they know isn't true any more. And there's no reset button so it can't be fixed. Besides, this is more fun. One of the cool ADRPG-specific thangs is being a god in your own world. What will you do?

So Shadeeza is a river port in a tropical west Africa-esque area. The river is pretty free of threats because intelligent, sorcery-using, omnivorous, oversized hippos rule it and they like humans; humans are harmless, funny looking and can supply some variety (grains, fruits and such) to their otherwise monotonous diet. Also trade items from Elsewhere, since Shadeeza was on a secondary House Feldane trade loop. The PC has established to the hippos that He Is Boss Now, continue to go about your business.

The PC has allied with (expressed approval of and helped out) the ~mid-Eurasian~ somewhat Mormonesque nation busily greening a pretty badly blasted portion of the continent.

He's made friendly contact with/established divine oversight over part of the western continent, and over the pantheon there. Several maritime states with Greco-Romano-Venetian like culture holding their own on the not so messed up west and south coast.

He's stealing Vaults of Ancient magic, weapons, records, treasure, plagues, etc. from the southern continent (20 years into a religious war -- a god absorbed too many other gods and portfolios and split into Five Faces. Hilarity and wars of religion ensued.) and teleporting them to his fortress in the Glass Desert, with their guardian monks, with an eye to installing them in the Arctic continent.

He plans to set up a planetary trade network using Shadow Paths.

We haven't got to the Sky Pirates yet.


Also there's Earth. It's 1978. Florimel and her PC Earth-born daughter share control of the planet, quietly. Flora had a mostly 'hands-off, let's see what they'll do next' policy. (Outside of influencing women's fashions and preventing nuclear war.) Her daughter is out to make improvements. Flora is OK with that; she's sort of tired of Earth after almost 200 years.

Lots of fun stuff you can do with 1978 Earth. For example, the Lamborghini Countach just came out. Flora bought two. They leave each other notes about how fast they got from point A to point B and try to one-up each other.

[Panjumanju]

One of the best shadows I've heard of was a shadow with increased gravity, such that anyone who entered it with less than Amber level strength was immediately on the ground. Brilliant idea for someone 1st in Strength.

//Panjumanju