Questions and Answers

I'm horrible with names, but I remember that the guy who was smuggling food down to Corwin in his prison cell was a bard. Seems like in the absence of high-tech, Amber is all about the oral tradition.

Though, I'm not sure I can accept a total lack of tech in Amber. The non-sorcerous people of Amber would have, in millenia, figured out ways to do a lot of stuff with Amber-specific tech, or magic. Just compare the Amish communities with the high-tech types around them... now try to get your heads around the idea of the government of the UN being limited to hand written messages and using horses for transport (except for the 20 or so who can use trumps... but they're limited to talking to each other). Now that Corwin has brought shadow firearms in... I can buy that his short furry guys are zealous enough that they wouldn't have allowed any of the ammo to make it into people's hands, so they could reverse engineer it. But just the knowledge that it can be done is going to drive people to figure out how... from scratch, if necessary.

Though, I'd at least expect there to be a HUGE import market on manufactured goods from shadow coming into Amber. Canned food and hand powered can-openers. Machine-cut stone and sheet-rock, construction tools and supplies, and then all human powered building of modern houses inside Amber.

Gawd, it's like having Parliment at the Rennaissance Faire.

His name was Rein who was later mande a Lord.

I would expect a number of things to be imported from Shadow into Amber. I always worry about the economy of the Golden Cirlce as I assume that Amberites can just ccreate the local currency to pay for things. Does this mean that the presence of Amber naturally causes inflaction?

As to being able to create some tech in Amber it really depends on a few things really, though Fergus will be trying to explore that at some point when he gets a chance. The biggest problem is the lack of electricity .... but he has had it confirmed that Lightning exists in Amber so technically electricity is possible. Having said that there are still a number of barriers in the way of it actually working but Fergus has some ideas.

Zelazny explicitly said electronics don't work in Amber. He did however say steam-based machinery would.

I think there's a psychological factor in all this. We expect people to think like engineers and scientists because that is how our world works. But that has not been the norm. Ancient China had gunpowder yet never saw its military applications--this, in one of the most literate and sophisticated civilizations in human history. The Roman Empire--that did look at the world with an engineer's eye--nevertheless did nothing with the steam engine (yes, they had them). Likewise the Mayans, whose observations allowed them to create a calendar of extraordinary accuracy, viewed the wheel as a children's toy. Even consider Easter Island--what do you suppose they were thinking when there was only one tree left on the entire island, yet they chopped it down anyway?

Applying modern models of thought or social dynamics to other societies is often invalid. Amber's Golden Circle for example enjoys considerable trade but in what goods? And at what cost? In what quantities? Part of all this relies on population densities. Me, I think the capital city of Amber is probably no larger than Shakespeare's London. No doubt its power and prestige comes from its royal house who demonstrably possess impressive magical powers! Including the ability to find all sorts of rare goods in various Shadows and create trade routes for them. Which makes Amber a kind of Hong Kong/Constantinople/Panama Canal really.

Even if you solve the puzzle of how to get electricity to work there, you'd have to deploy the new tech across the real Earth. Laying cable, or fiber, or whatever it ends up being. Mass-building computers would be crazy... right now, they have electronics testers in the manufacturing plants... as soon as the board or circuit is done being made, they plug it in and run some logic tests, etc. If the stuff has to be transported to Amber before local physics allow it to work enough for a test to be valid, the logistics of building then testing gets crazy.

Corwin took a HUGE risk trusting to his memory of what the right mix of jeweler's rouge was when he had all of his ammo created. If he had the mix off slightly, he'd have shown up with his guys and the ammo would be useless.

But back to your electronics plan... without some kind of ubiquitous combustion to generate massive power, you're not going to get high-tech rolled out to Amber in any kind of useful scale. You might get Amber-tech solar panels to power your own computer for personal use, but that's about it. Powered by Trump, maybe? The CPU cooling properties of a substance that is perpetually 48 degrees should be really pursued, after all.

Side note: is Amber's Earth a complete planet? They talk about Kolvir, the oceans at the base, and then Arden. Arden is already a bit into shadow... Corwin & Random's car still worked for a good bit of the ways through Arden, after all. So I was never really sure if it was simply a city on a mountain that bled into shadows right away, or if there really was a whole world there that nobody really cared about because they could so easily walk into shadow anyway. Are there rivers in that world? Could hydro-electrics be used instead of some kind of combustion? If there's no planet, do the sun and moon actually orbit around Kolvir? How do tides work, if our basic shadow-earth physics paradigm doesn't apply?

Hrm. Now I see why you made Fergus so tech-saavy. There's a whole world of puzzle to play with here, and you don't even have to talk to anybody.

I have two theories as to why electronics don't work, though I need to establish this in character as there are some critical pieces of evidence that Fergus needs to talk to Fiona about.

As with all things an Amberite can potentially wreck any shadow world that they go to and economically is just one of these. Most of the Amberites probably would not do this for the sake of it, but they could. The potential for mischief is quite vast but wouldn't really benefit Amber except in using it as a threat.

Gotta point out Random's car changed quite a bit en route to Arden. It might well have had no electronics by the time it arrived.

It was a 70s car to begin with. I assumed no electronics. But the combustion engine depends on some kind of gasoline being able to burn quickly process that obviously doesn't apply to Amber itself. But it did apply to the far side of Arden.

I guess there's still a battery sending an electric spark to the gasoline inside the engine bit. Maybe that's what broke down, not the gasoline burning? (But since gunpowder doesn't work in Amber, I assume that the combustion bit is really the main factor... that is a leap on my part, I guess.)

Kierenne wrote:Though, I'd at least expect there to be a HUGE import market on manufactured goods from shadow coming into Amber. Canned food and hand powered can-openers. Machine-cut stone and sheet-rock, construction tools and supplies, and then all human powered building of modern houses inside Amber.

My suspicion was always that Oberon probably had a prohibition on certain tech being imported. It also makes sense that the Golden Circle was limited in physical laws function similar to Amber, and anything from beyond the Golden Circle became very expensive to import. Thus I would expect complex mid-tech, like typewriters and mechanical printing presses, to be worth importing, but other things like sheetrock and canned goods to be simply not worth the effort to import.

It seems to me to be an important point that Oberon did not short-circuit Corwin's plan for firearms, even afterward during the short time when he was back in power until his death. With the Jewel and/or Dworkin's cooperation and his own skills it seems he could have re-altered reality just enough to render the firearms useless again...but he did not. Not sure what that really means.

And it has been said that we may be giving Roger too much credit. He admitted in interviews that he wrote a lot off-the-cuff and sometimes inconsistencies were just that - things he did not bother to rationalize, or forgot about.

Yeah, but now that we're playing in his sandbox, we have to fill in these gaps. Either by overruling canon, or by finding weird reasons for his off-the-cuff stuff to be true anyway.

I really love the second approach, myself. Though, it may be that if we take stuff far enough, we can prove that in Amber 1=0, and the whole universe vanishes in a puff of logic.

Well just my 2 ohms here One reason that electronics might not work (or electricity as we think of it for that matter) could be the ability of electrons to move from one atom to the next. If there is more resistance in the materials copper/silver/gold that right there would prevent electricity as we know it to work in modern electronics gear. Of course there are some reactions in organic beings that require those elements also so how that would effect the metabolism of natives would be an interesting biological question. Lightning because of the enormous voltages involved could still overcome any extra resistance or possibly still work because Nitrogen it not significantly different from our world. (I have had enough Electrical Engineering to be dangerous, but stayed clear of organic chemistry.) Modern gunpowder could also be useless with a similar increase in resistance in the active elements.

I think I can resolve alot of the issues in character as to why it doesn't work, so I'll restrict myself currently to making the obvious statement.

Certain chemical reactions do not work in Amber. Mainly I believe this is hydrocarbons failing to ignite, hence why Gunpowder, Petrol and Natural Gas don't work in Amber. This prevents pretty well all the current fuel sources from working. Corwin's "blue powder" had a different chemical formula hence why it worked, but I can appreciate why a GM would want to keep the existance of such a thing beyond the players.

This was Fergus' theory as to why Photography didn't work in Amber and he spent the best part of the week finding a formula to get a film that would react to light in the correct way. i.e. It was the chemical reaction that no longer worked, but that if a suitable alternative could be found then you could get something to work.

I have a feeling that the problem with electricity is actually something different to the above and potentially not solvable, though it may lead to an alternative interesting line of enquiry.

David wrote:Zelazny explicitly said electronics don't work in Amber. He did however say steam-based machinery would.

I think there's a psychological factor in all this. We expect people to think like engineers and scientists because that is how our world works. But that has not been the norm. Ancient China had gunpowder yet never saw its military applications--this, in one of the most literate and sophisticated civilizations in human history. The Roman Empire--that did look at the world with an engineer's eye--nevertheless did nothing with the steam engine (yes, they had them). Likewise the Mayans, whose observations allowed them to create a calendar of extraordinary accuracy, viewed the wheel as a children's toy. Even consider Easter Island--what do you suppose they were thinking when there was only one tree left on the entire island, yet they chopped it down anyway?

Applying modern models of thought or social dynamics to other societies is often invalid. Amber's Golden Circle for example enjoys considerable trade but in what goods? And at what cost? In what quantities? Part of all this relies on population densities. Me, I think the capital city of Amber is probably no larger than Shakespeare's London. No doubt its power and prestige comes from its royal house who demonstrably possess impressive magical powers! Including the ability to find all sorts of rare goods in various Shadows and create trade routes for them. Which makes Amber a kind of Hong Kong/Constantinople/Panama Canal really.

Well said, and well said again. We assume so much in our own modern worldview that we become blind to the worldview of others. We assume because the modern world is so tech-savvy that that's the best, smartest, and most effective way to be. Yet people use the tools they have; when your tools are politics, you become very very good at politics; without such, we would never have Shakespeare or Machiavelli or the Roman Empire. That is, by comparison modern politics are often actually gentle and unsophisticated.

I am sure Oberon and Dworkin would have surveyed a lot of shadow and like any other Lord of Chaos would want to design their realm their way. Science and technology shift and redistribute power; they would not want that.

There is also something to be said for the mystical worldview (in Amber) being the underlying truth. If you live in a world where there are no "laws" of physics except what some superior being chooses, where the "laws" are temporary and chaotic because of the turbulence of the nature of the multiverse itself, then real science becomes something closer to art and achemy than engineering. Thus the adapters and improvisers, those opportunists who can shape or make reality as they wish it, inevitably stay ahead of the engineers. Engeering and science depend on immutable laws that can be discovered. Many moder Amber players naturally assume there are underlying meta-laws of chaos, order and shadow. What if there are not?

I am deliberately trying to keep Winnow's worldview premodern, for example. He believes, and I the player believe about Amber, that a scientific worldview about the Amber-Chaos multiverse is actually and factually erroneous and illusionary. Investigations and establishment of "facts" will inevitably fail, because things will change. Genuine causality is an illusion. Chaos mandates that there are genuinely uncaused events, like quantum physics at the particle scale. There are rules of thumb and reasonably dependable judgments, but certainty is impossible. Thus he views the scientists' investigations as at best limited in usefulness, at worst inherently foolish and doomed to fail, even destructive.

He considers mystics one order of magnitude smarter than the scientists, because they are developing skills and abilities that enable them to take advantage of the chaos, to shape it and adjust to it, rather than looking for underlying causes. He still would question the real value of constantly fighting to shape world as one wishes (a Western, scientific worldview) and ideally believes, even if he can't always follow the ideals, that a zenlike blend of finding the Way, harmony, resolute action and acceptance of the inevitable is the only sensible way to look at the world. Kind of a blend to Taoism, Zen and Musashi.

If anyone has read Taleb (The Black Swan; The Impact of the Highly Improbable; Fooled by Randomness) this will resonate even in our own world.

Winnow wrote:
It seems to me to be an important point that Oberon did not short-circuit Corwin's plan for firearms, even afterward during the short time when he was back in power until his death. With the Jewel and/or Dworkin's cooperation and his own skills it seems he could have re-altered reality just enough to render the firearms useless again...but he did not. Not sure what that really means.

And it has been said that we may be giving Roger too much credit. He admitted in interviews that he wrote a lot off-the-cuff and sometimes inconsistencies were just that - things he did not bother to rationalize, or forgot about.

I love the point about short circuiting the firearms. I thought the same thing when I read it. It was always one of the things I really wish Oberon did. Guns are such an easy way to kill people. Not much fun. I preferred the Amber of no guns.

And you're right about Roger, I know Amber was one of the only things he wrote without notes. It was all in his head. Easy to make a mistake that way.

I never bothered trying to apply the whys and wherefores side of it before. Roger made a world, with a certain set of rules, that made an awesome story. My take on why is:

Dworkin made the pattern, he carved some "stability" out of chaos*, he made reality there. He chose that particular area in shadow (which became Amber) for those exact purposes, with those exact traits, known only to him. When he Patterned, it stayed the way he had it. It became the center or "True" place. He could have gone further into Shadow to find a place where things went boom. For Zelazny's purposes though, this sufficed. We don't know if at the Primal Pattern things went fwoosh or boom though. It was never explored.


*We'll overlook that Amber is much MUCH more chaotic then the so called "Courts of Chaos" which are highly regimented and stable.

Kierenne wrote:Side note: is Amber's Earth a complete planet? They talk about Kolvir, the oceans at the base, and then Arden. Arden is already a bit into shadow... Corwin & Random's car still worked for a good bit of the ways through Arden, after all. So I was never really sure if it was simply a city on a mountain that bled into shadows right away, or if there really was a whole world there that nobody really cared about because they could so easily walk into shadow anyway.

Given the strangeness of stars and sky in other shadows, I always figured that neither Amber nor Chaos constitute complete universes. In my games, Earth is the equator between the poles, and thus has the optimum balance between Order and Chaos, and its universe is actually the most complete, scientific and orderly. Toward Amber things get more arbitrary and static (Rebma is how Rebma is) and toward Chaos things get more mutable.

Kieran wrote:


*We'll overlook that Amber is much MUCH more chaotic then the so called "Courts of Chaos" which are highly regimented and stable.

True on so many levels.

In the first 5 books it seemed Amber was apart from the rest. In the Merlin books though, the Golden Circle and other nations are mentioned.

Maybe, they all exist on the same "plane" or world that Amber exists on, meaning you need no shadow walkers or such to travel there. Amber to Rebma or Tir-na as examples. They were on the same world.

This is just off the cuff thinking.

Kieran wrote:


*We'll overlook that Amber is much MUCH more chaotic then the so called "Courts of Chaos" which are highly regimented and stable.

I think this makes perfect sense - in Chaos, order is imposed by tradition and social law. There has to be order or everything falls apart. In Amber, where the local "plane" is immutable, Chaos (change, creativity) comes from the lack of tradition and lack of social law. Oberon was apparently very laissez-faire about his family, beyond "do what I say."

And "No! You can't marry your sister!"

Karlsen wrote:And "No! You can't marry your sister!"

When she's wearing the mask, she's not my sister.

I think of Amber and its environs as rather like an island in the middle of a vast ocean. Surrounding it are clusters of other islands and archipelagos, most of whom are their own but adjacent "realities" and from which one finds the bulk of the Golden Circle. Actual 'paths' or 'ways' through Shadow can be forged by enough journeys along the same route--hence the creation of those trade routes which form the basis of the Golden Circle's wealth. Mind you, I also think some Shadows have naturally thin 'walls' which has little or nothing to do per se with any proximity to Amber.

Amber itself seems to be accessible to Shadow most easily from the east (Arden) and west (the sea), both of which contain extraordinary defenses (including Rebma). Invaders out of Shadow probably come from more erratic areas north and south. Topography and the like probably make those areas less easy to predict where intrusions might occur. But I picture Amber isn't so much a complete world as a portion of what would be a complete world, with rather fuzzy edges the further away you traverse from the Pattern.

Kieran wrote:

Karlsen wrote:And "No! You can't marry your sister!"

When she's wearing the mask, she's not my sister.

Can't marry yourself either.

David wrote:I think of Amber and its environs as rather like an island in the middle of a vast ocean. Surrounding it are clusters of other islands and archipelagos, most of whom are their own but adjacent "realities" and from which one finds the bulk of the Golden Circle. Actual 'paths' or 'ways' through Shadow can be forged by enough journeys along the same route--hence the creation of those trade routes which form the basis of the Golden Circle's wealth. Mind you, I also think some Shadows have naturally thin 'walls' which has little or nothing to do per se with any proximity to Amber.

Amber itself seems to be accessible to Shadow most easily from the east (Arden) and west (the sea), both of which contain extraordinary defenses (including Rebma). Invaders out of Shadow probably come from more erratic areas north and south. Topography and the like probably make those areas less easy to predict where intrusions might occur. But I picture Amber isn't so much a complete world as a portion of what would be a complete world, with rather fuzzy edges the further away you traverse from the Pattern.

Yeah, I have always pictured it the same way. Not a planet but a vast city with lots of land.

Winnow wrote:

Kieran wrote:

Karlsen wrote:And "No! You can't marry your sister!"

When she's wearing the mask, she's not my sister.

Can't marry yourself either.

Who said anything about marriage?

Hey David, should I be metagaming more or if there something I missed in a backstory post? Judging from the way Mint and Aiden were driven to my ship and the way you laughed when I didn't have any questions, you intended this to link to Triton's story. I apologize but I am not seeing the link from the character's point of view.

Triton is tasked with taking Sister Mircalla home safe and finding out why the merewives are fussy. Pirates showed up with a crimson unicorn. Triton has never encountered this flag and has no reason to suspect it of any connection. The pirates talked to Mircalla about her family. Mint is in negotiations to get information about the crimson unicorn. Again I don't see how Triton links either of these to the merewives.

Nimue is the Dworkin of Rebma and she didn't know what was going on with the merewives. I can't see Triton believing that simple pirates, even one with the pattern, are going to have more information than her.

So unless I start playing off the fact that our forum is called the Crimson Unicorn and pretend Triton knows that is mega important, I'm not sure how you want me to proceed.

Again, I am sorry. What did I miss along the way that would have made my character chase this plot?

I'm also sorry to Mint and Aiden and anyone else involved in my story if my ignorance is getting in the way.