You are some of the mightiest people in Shadow. Think Aragorn, Elminster, Xena, James Bond, Beowulf, Siegfried, Galadriel. (Gerard runs about 300 points. Suhuy runs about 400 points.) One parent is an Amberite. You are either a valued child in training or hidden away for safety, or you were abandoned, rejected or never known to your progenitor. You may not be aware of your heritage but the spies of Amber or Rebma are. Regent Gerard has read your file and has some reason to believe that you would be of use in the war with Chaos.

ATTRIBUTES

NOTE ON PSYCHIC COMBAT: It requires a solid, sustained touch or sustained eyelock to enable a try. Then think of it as the equivalent of Melee, with Full Defensive, All Out Attack and so on. You can strike each other with rage and hate or grapple and try to crush. Strength and Warfare are faster, usually. Mindraping is rather like beating information out of someone, one painful question at a time.

POWERS Major powers work everywhere. Magic works most places but varies in strength.

10     Walk through Shadow towards simple, concrete goals. Mildly dangerous. Very dangerous for passengers. Sense shadowwalker trails and Shadow Paths..

        +5     Add the ability to hex things and people. Very effective against spells and high tech gadgetry.

                +10      Shadowwalking now reasonably safe for groups of 20 – 30. Add Broken Pattern Sight.

        +10 Power Words     5 Words for 10 points.

SHAPESHIFTING

25     Basic Shapeshifting     Combat Form, SS Wounds (equivalent to good first aid), SS Animal Forms, SS Features & Parts (difficult to maintain), Automatic. THERE IS NO AVATAR OR PRIMAL FORM. [A really fast change (humanform >< demonform) takes 10 – 15 seconds.]

        +5    Increased Mass and Strength (+15) in Combat Form

        +5     SS Disguise   Features & Parts at useful, maintainable, levels.

        +5     SS Internal Structures & Regeneration   (Regeneration involves trancing out for several hours/days.

                +10     SS Blood & Others Make creatures out of your blood. SS others, which involves feeding them some of your blood, and includes the ability to heal                              them via Regenerative trance.

        +10     SS Aura & Persona Does not let you mimic Powers or change Attributes.

        +5     SS Animal Abilities

                +x     SS to one particular Creature of Power  A reasonable creature of power. Cost varies according to the particular creature. [Example: common                              unicorn – Engine Speed, Mold Shadow Stuff (neutralize poison), Double Damage horn, Shadow Paths = + 9 points.]

shapeshifting variants:

15     Were Shapeshifting     One Combat Form and SS Wounds (= good first aid), like a werewolf or werepanther.

        +5    Increased Mass and Strength (+15) in Combat Form

15    Blood of the Beast Initiation  As Were Shapeshifting

        +5         Regeneration     Must trance out.

                +10     Shapeshift or Heal Others    Must feed them some of your blood.

                +x     SS Creature of Power      As above.

25     Trump Artistry Sense, ID, make Sketches, make Trumps, expert Trump usage. No Defense, no Trump Artifacts. Trumps are tougher than they should be. Sketches work once. Trumps take 1 day to make on-site, or 3 days off-site.

        +10     Trump Tricks Gate, Jam, Spy and Trick Trumps. There are no automatic Trumps because they require willpower to function.

                +10     Trump Memory

MAGIC Spells or enchantments are easily twisted or disrupted by Pattern (probability control), Logrus tendrils or Broken Pattern hexes while being cast. Set magic, especially permanent enchantments, take more time to foul up. Simple magic works most places.

5/ 10/ 15     Sorcery Minor/ moderate/ major power spells. Hanging a major spell takes about 3 hours and considerable effort. Moderate spells take 1 hour to hang, minor spells take 10 minutes. Invoking a spell without hanging it takes 1/6 the time. Standard Spell Racks hang 12 major spells, or 3 times as many moderate ones. Major spells drain lots of Endurance to cast.

5/ 10     Conjuration 1-point/ 2-point Qualities & Powers – with the usual (see below) A&C limits. Conjuring stuff out of nothing only works in Normal Magic or better Shadows.

MINOR POWER SOURCES All MPSes give a modest benefit and work cross-shadow. For example, bonuses to types of Magic (fire, air, transformation, healing), the ability to make friends with animals, amazing sexual appeal (only a mild effect on people with Powers, alas), and things like that.

PERSONAL SHADOWS

There’s no such animal, really. Control of shadows is limited to what you can do with Probability and personal effort. Powers, except for Magic, work everywhere. On the other hand the ability to seek particular people out in Shadow is extremely limited.

2 pts    Define an Extraordinary Shadow (fast, slow, high magic, high tech, shadow power source, major shadow path nexus…)

Limits: One- or Two-point effects only. No Transferal, Conferring or Implantation. Buying a thing means that you can find more, not necessarily get the original back, and not summon the thing to you. Only Pattern swords are summonable --- not that your characters know that.

The base mundane creature or item is free. (If you want a dragon, start with a tiger.)

VITALITY is relative to a normal animal of that size. A Double Vitality elephant is a scary thing.

MOVEMENT adding flight to an animal that normally can’t means adding Movement. Flight without wings – levitation – is half as fast as winged flight and will not work some places.

STAMINA is only iffy when you get to Endless, because it ain’t.

AGGRESSION gives, for one point, skill and speed equivalent to top of the line Special Forces – or better than that if it’s specialized. At two points you’re talking world-class or low-action-hero level skill and speed.

ARMOR, if it isn’t rigid, protects only itself. No armor spandex, please.

DAMAGE applies mainly to breaking through magical defenses, and to not breaking in combat. Greyswandir didn’t cut armor like cheese, so neither can your stuff. BUT you can define it as added energy damage to model flaming swords, freezing lances or electrical axes. Stamina defines how long it can keep flaming/ freezing.

INTELLIGENCE generally means there’s a bound spirit inside it.

PSYCHIC SENSITIVITY – there is no Danger Sense. Things can have magical senses of some, defined, sort instead.

PSYCHIC RESISTANCE even at the Barrier level, isn’t absolute.

SHADOW MOVEMENT is a Creature power, not an Item power. Both Trail and Path vastly increase the range of your sensitivity to Shadow Paths. Seek In Shadow is a very rare ability limited to some magical creatures like (not that your characters know it) fire angels and ty’igas.

SHADOW MANIPULATION is generally limited to one tightly defined effect, or two minor ones. Mold Shadow Reality is not Editing.

HEALING effects don’t work very well on Pattern Initiates

ITEM SHAPE CHANGING does not alter the item or creature’s mass. Magical Shape Changing is far more dangerous than Shapeshifting.

TRUMP POWERS you can forget.

MAGIC POWERS, outside of spell racks, are better bought as Shadow Manipulation.

 

STUFF Limit of 5 points Good or Bad. You can, if you want, be a Bad Stuff character with banked points for Pattern walking, Regenerating, etc. There is no limit on banked points.

BANKED POINTS No limit.

Golden Circle shadows are scattered all over, not just close to Amber. There are over a hundred of them but only 20-30 of them are important to Amber. Each Shadow Path will pass through a dozen or so shadows between each port of call. (Example: between GC Shadows Begma and Wandrei are a dozen shadow shifts to commercially unimportant shadows, one or more of which might contain a supply depot or port good only for food or water.) On top of that, Natural Shadow Tracks branch out erratically from most shadows. Rebma has a similar network of trade partners and Shadow Paths. It’s a big, tangled network and most of the users try to keep their trade routes secret.

Using a Shadow Path is mostly a matter of knowing that it’s there; magic makes it easier to find them and Broken Pattern makes it a lot easier.

Amber rarely bothers to govern shadow nations directly, though they have many enclaves (sort of like Hong Kong) and vassal kingdoms.

Numbers count. Corwin never played around when faced with groups of people waving sharp, pointy things at him and you can’t afford to either.

Despite keeping the traditional Human > Chaos > Amber > Ranked scale, the way I’m really looking at things is: -30 = zero. So if you have 30 points in an Attribute that’s twice as good as Amber level and three times as good as Chaos level.

Amber level Warfare is action hero territory. Cinematic Jackie Chan is up around 20 – 30 points of Warfare. Amber has a few soldiers or crown agents in that range. The entire royal guard, before they were posted all over the place for the war, was Amber+ Warfare and Chaos or better Strength and Endurance. The captains are better still.

All the Castle staff end up with Chaos Endurance.