Amber related, life related, you name it, we've got it. Welcome to the Lost and Found.

 

WISH 73: Player-Driven Shifts

What’s the biggest PC-driven shift you’ve ever experienced in a campaign? If you were a player, what made you feel like you could successfully change the GM’s world? If you were a GM, was this planned or something the PCs surprised you with?

The only thing that springs to mind is the Evil Party D&D game I was in. I think the original "plot" was for the good and evil parties to eventually meet - but then the good party game folded. By that point in the game, we had destroyed (by fire) two villages and an inn, ambushed either two or three caravans, and left a trail of corpses pointing in random directions with the symbol of Lloth carved into them and the words "Underdark this way" written in the dirt beside them. Add in a noble who was less than pleased with our activity and had a useless son-in-law he wanted to send to the Sword Coast, and the GM had Instant Plot ("Now with more noodles! Tastes great!" :) ). The GM was pretty laid-back about everything, so it was almost an anything-goes atmosphere the entire time.

Lost and Found tends to be about half and half - I know where they're going to end up, but how they get there (and what they make their handbasket out of) is up to them. If I think I can get away with it, the larger plot will drop in unexpectedly - the rest of the time, I just go with whatever smaller plot is happening. And actually, at this point, the larger and smaller plots tend to meet up without my intervention, which is rather gratifying and looks rather more like planning than it actually is.
posted by sandrayln at 2:46:00 PM ( )

 
I have vague thoughts about Chaos floating around in my brain at the moment, sort of as a sequel to this somewhat confused commentary on first series purism and Chaos.

It's an interesting culture that creates worship chapels to their conquerers, if you believe Merlin's account.

Dara's chapel to Corwin contained a Ways to his prison. Jurt had a chapel to Brand; someone probably has a chapel to Deirdre. "Seek him in the Abyss," Dara said about Corwin - and Brand and Deirdre are in the Abyss.

How did Jurt find out about the Keep of the Four Worlds, anyway? Did Julia tell him, or did he already know? (For that matter, how did Jurt and Julia meet? Was it over a late-night attack on Merlin? Or did Jurt come to the Keep and try to take it from her?)

Corwin's prison can't be the only one along the darkest reaches of the Abyss.

I wonder if Jurt's chapel had a Ways in it (besides the entrance)? Merlin didn't mention it - then again, Merlin was worried about Werewindle and the fact that Jurt's entrance made him trip.

I wonder who has a chapel to Deirdre, and if it has a Ways inside it.

After all, there's only the possibility that they died in the Abyss, right? I mean, the thing about Chaos is that nothing's certain, right? And the Abyss is Chaos.

(Incidentally, that last is why Deirdre is alive in Lost and Found - I'll post the full story when she tells it, but the gist is that when the Unicorn took the Jewel of Judgment from Brand, She separated Brand and Deirdre. Deirdre's fall eventually ended on an island in the Abyss. Brand continued to fall and bleed.)

To wander a little further, I would be tempted to base Chaos on some of the more esoteric concepts of tribal African religions. I'm not sure how I'd work that - I'd need to brush up on my African supernatural beliefs specifically - but I know there were a few that were extremely odd to my particular Western mindset and would work well as a platform on which to base further descriptions of the society. Hmm... Gonna have to think on that one.
posted by sandrayln at 1:13:00 PM ( )

 

WISH 72: Character Interruptus

Talk about a few characters you had to stop playing before their stories felt finished. Where do you think they would have gone?

Heh. Well, since as far as I can tell, the game for Oriana has changed status this week from "on hiatus" to "defunct," I guess I'll start there.

There are too many dangling threads of plots for me to be sure where she'd go, to tell the truth. Who hired Hunter, where Hunter's gone off to, what the deal with Dane is (probably including killing Dane), the Hounds, the possible cousin that's a sorceress and her companion... After she resolved some of those... I suspect that, with time, she'd grow a little more insular (especially if people she knew in one Shadow kept turning out to be from another Shadow entirely and/or hired to spy on or kill her...). I suspect she'd eventually apply herself to seafaring, after her friends passed on and she couldn't stand to stay in her Shadow and play hockey any more. She'd want to spend time with Caine, trying to get to know him better, once the rest of the family knew about her. Beyond that, I'm not sure. (I really hope I'm wrong and that the game isn't dead, but the GM gave me a rundown of his personal issues of the last five months or so, and none of the options he's looking at for the future sound hopeful for the game.)

The evil party D&D game was the victim of a GM who just couldn't get (and keep) his act together, but my mercenary Alexandra really didn't feel like she had an unfinished story. She didn't have enough depth.

I can't begin to imagine where Faline would have gone - she was hard to pin down until she did stuff. It would have been fascinating to see her mature a bit; it would have been creepy to see her turn Unseelie. I can see a story in the way she fastened on to Groth, and another in the way she was determinedly trying to keep him from falling to Banality (Groth was a Grump, if I remember correctly, so he's kind of headed that direction anyway). I don't think the story was headed in a direction that would have tested either one of those (due to another player; long explanation), but without moving forward into either maturity, Unseelieness, or depression, I feel like all she is is a piece of fluff. She wasn't a bad shot for my first long-term character, but I want to move her beyond what she was. But with the GM half an hour away and carless, one player an hour away and carless, and the other player besides myself four hours away, the game is pretty much dead in the water.
posted by sandrayln at 4:22:00 PM ( )

 
Oh yeah, and I updated quotes for sessions 57 through 59 last night on the Lost and Found page.
posted by sandrayln at 12:36:00 PM ( )

 
I've been keeping an eye on the IMC stuff as it comes around, and I usually don't participate, mostly because I'm never quite sure what I'd say. But I can't resist a few words on this one about Chaos.

Okay, I honestly don't see where first- and second-series Chaos are mutually exclusive. To me, it's all tied back to the narrators - Corwin and Merlin.

It's a matter of wonder.

Corwin sees the wonder in things. Remember his reaction to the Unicorn? How about the woman who hands him the silver rose as he nears Chaos? Seeing Dara walk the Pattern? The drive through Arden with Random? Remember his reminiscences of Amber as he walked the Rebman Pattern? Perhaps it's better to say that Corwin recognises the magic in the world around him.

Some of that is Corwin being a poet and composer, yes. But contrast it with Merlin.

Merlin sees the science of things. Now, don't get me wrong - there's wonder and magic in science. But I don't think Merlin recognises that. Merlin only experiences wonder in a handful of situations - in Corwin's room while Jasra questions the ty'iga in Sign of Chaos, when he calls for a horse and gets Tiger in Prince of Chaos, and once or twice when he finds Grayswandir. The rest of the time... well... Let's just say he's lacking in reverence and fond of the gritty details of things. "Oh, gee, look, my brother has a chapel to Brand in his closet - and he designed the entrance crappily," Merlin essentially tells us. Or "Huh. Brand's sword. It sounds like someone dropped holy water on a demon when I draw it. I'll just give it to Rinaldo."

(My boyfriend claims that Merlin's trip through Shadow with Julia counts, but I disagree - it didn't stay a wonder long enough. He was already regretting the experience before it was over.)

I find Merlin a dubious narrator because of his lack of wonder - his is a cold world, an analytic world, a world where clarity and simplicity are irrevocably linked. And that ties back to Chaos (wondering, weren't you?): I think Merlin drastically oversimplified and altered his descriptions of Chaos to have it make sense to his father.

We know Merlin's audience was Corwin - he tells us that much in the last chapter of Prince of Chaos.

We can make a reasonable guess that Merlin didn't know Corwin very well. Yes, he heard Corwin's entire story - but Merlin is, at best, clueless when it comes to observing the intimate details of other people's personalities. Merlin also tells us that Corwin vanished shortly after Oberon's funeral. I think he just didn't have the time to get to know Corwin; there are too many moments in Merlin's books when you can almost taste the awkwardness between the two of them (or between Merlin and Corwin's Pattern ghost, which is funtionally the same thing).

What that leads me to is this: Merlin might think that Corwin wouldn't understand the actual sociopolitical processes in the Courts. It's not unlikely that he had attempted to explain to one of his aunts or uncles, and found that it was easier to relate it to something they already knew.

We know that Corwin told Merlin about the relations between the children of Oberon, so Merlin knows Corwin understands that system. Merlin could further guess that Corwin knows the monarchy systems of Shadow Earth, Avalon (which seemed close to the Amber/Earth model), and possibly Lorraine.

But Merlin couldn't know if Corwin was familiar with any other type of monarchy system. Corwin's Avalon is long gone, and unless he visited Lorraine, Merlin would have very little detail about that Shadow's ruling system. How much Merlin knew about the Shadow Earth system depends on whether he had to take World History in college, whether he looked it up himself, and whether he talked to Bill about world history.

So the most sensible thing to do (to Merlin) is to relate everything in Chaos to Amber. Even if doing so means he's grossly oversimplifying. After all, Merlin is a computer engineer, not a composer/poet. The simpler he can make a thing, the more efficient it is - and simple things have less chance of going wrong.

(Well, simple things have less chance of minor problems - they go more for the catastrophic failure route.)

(I'll just pass up talking in-depth about how well "catastrophic failure" and Merlin go together, shall I?)

So yes, first- and second-series Chaos don't look the same - same name to the place, but the surface and contents look different. And it's all Merlin's fault.

But mutually exclusive? I'm not so sure about that.

I don't think Merlin's tales are completely without the weirdness Corwin leads us to expect in his chronicle. Merlin gives us tiny snatches of what I'd call the true face of the Courts: the idea of the Ways, the stray currents of magic from the Abyss (see Merlin and Corwin's Pattern ghost's discussion when they're trying to rescue Corwin), the pit-divers, the etiquette of shapeshifting and the dislike of the human form (Merlin and Dara's lunch and Merlin's confrontation with Dara and Mandor, respectively), and the wearing of red at the funeral of Swayvill. It wouldn't be too hard to turn that small amount of information into something weird and alien without discarding the entire series.


(All that said, I have to admit that I just used the version Merlin presented when I started Lost and Found - mostly because I'm lazy. I've got an idea or two now, though...)

posted by sandrayln at 11:52:00 PM ( )