ACUS 2005 (pt.1)
I've known of Ambercon for about fifteen years, but never actually got it together to attend until this year. Since getting back into gaming after years of not (the dot com days included many dot com nights), it seemed like a good idea. I had played Amber in a weekly campaign for about four years when I was living in DC back in the mid nineties, but here in San Diego, I couldn't find any other players, or anyone to run a game.

So make the reservations, sign up for games, get the results back, and get slammed by the need to come up with characters for eight games in a few weeks. That's one thing I didn't really expect, how hard it was to come up with the characters, acording to a range of guidelines and point costs. In the end I needed characters for six games, and to flesh out a skeleton of a partial pre-gen. One of the games (Undertow) seemed much more character driven, so naturally I put that one off 'til last.

Two of the games were a ressurection of the character from the campaign game: Margaret, a straight spoken, goal-driven seeker of novelty and a bit of the bull in the china shop. Still, I spent three or four hours reimagining this character I haven't really thought about for almost eight years. I realized that I could use the same character in two other games, both were monster-movie inspired, so it seemed reasonable. I had a name, Malcolm, but couldn't really get anything to gel together.

And then there's the big Saturday game, which generated a huge amount of email before the con even started. I'm just blanking here, 'cause it's the second episode of a serial con campaign, the background is superficially not that far from canon Amber, but there's a lot of hints of lots of unsaid stuff going on. There's a fair amount of writeup from last year's game, but that only makes things more confusing. Just what's really going on and how does a new character fit into it? I manage to come up with an idea, mostly by by taking the easiest way out and partially inspired by the offhand mention of the name of a co-worker's nephew, Aidan. Ok, it may be a half-assed character, but at least it's something. Malcolm comes together on the plane, a rebellious son of Fiona who has rejected magic and all such power that is commonly attributed to the "redheads," even to the point of dying his hair. (An idea stolen from Rachel, one of my fellow slot eight zombie fighters.)

Slot one: Godzilla vs. the Pattern Monster
(Quotes provided by Ian Ng via the Amber mailing list)

A shadow called "Super New Neo Tokyo" is on the far side of a Golden Circle shadow. Together they come to Amber looking for help for a 400' lizard that has risen from a hole in the ground, and is on a course straight through Super New Neo Tokyo, the Golden Circle Shadow, and Amber . As explained in the game: The history of Super New Neo Tokyo

"Tokyo was destroyed by a band of psychic teens and we rebuilt it as Neo Tokyo. Neo Tokyo was then destroyed by a giant moth monster, which we rebuilt as New Neo Tokyo. Then there was a small matter of a tentacle invasion... They tried to kidnap all of our young women." - Professor Satsu

The group splits, some going to explore the hole in the ground, the rest to see what can be done to power the 400' humanoid robot that SNNT considers their ultimate defense system. There's a little uncertainty as how to proceed then one kit_kindred observes, "The city always gets destroyed." So the giant robot, piloted and powered by the scions of Amber, battles the giant lizard.

"The orphanage is destroyed, and right behind it is an oil refinery that
hasn't been touched yet." - GM

The other group explores the hole, which is an off-shoot of the Abyss, and finds Brand and a zombie Dierdre are down there. They actually take care of business, and the rest of us just claim the glory by laying waste to Godzilla (and the rest of SNNT.)

Ok, I've left out a whole bunch, but as a first ever Ambercon game, it was great fun, especially as I had no idea what I was getting into .

Slot two was the first of two episodes of princejvstin's Tales of the Regency. Small game, just three players (which seemed to raise a little concern from the GM) but it worked out just fine. Jvstin's take on these games is here. I liked the smallness of the game, it gave a little more time to get up to speed of the game and character. And the three of us seemed to really pull together as a team.

Slot four was the second TotR game, and while I played the same character, the game was completely different. Two high powered sorcerers, including egwenna's fabulous Illlisandra, who was the perfect counterpoint to the thrill-seeking Margaret. Steed and Duncan rounded out the party. In a plot inspired by marthawells's Wheel of the Infinite, we have to fight off unnumberable creatures, a high-powered Lord of Chaos, and keep a shadow from falling apart until a group of monks can hurridely rebuild a giant mandala that defines that shadow's existence. This is actually the first time I've run into one of the common criticisms of Amber I've heard over the years, that the PC's get too powerful. A shadow is literally falling apart, and a Chaos Lord is after us at the same time. Somehow, while staying in character and using powers and spells defined earlier in the game, we're able to pull it off.

Slot three was mcurry's kill puppies for satan/Amber game, "Nine Losers in Akron,"which I signed up for because it seemed appropriately absurd. The source game isn't what it sounds like; yes, the setup is pretty much what you'd expect, but there is very much an awarenes and undertone to the game that the actions the characters engage in is not a suggestion on how anyone should actually behave. And then the game itself is done is just wonderfully done. (But then anyone who's actually reading this almost certainly knows this already. So much for writing to your audience.)
This was just an absolute trip. If the quotes for the game ever get online, I'll do my best to write it up in more detail. But it was a real group effort, mcurry ran the game with the style and tone it needed, and all of the other players dove right in and took the game at face value, white trash losers living on the wrong side of the tracks in a dead steeltown, who can't even effectivley serve the big S. Oddly enough, the language stayed pretty clean --- odd considering how much vulgarity is used to help shape the tone of kpfs and the writeup of the game in the Ambercon game book.

Since that's half of the game slots, I'm going to chop here, and finish up later.