This was my 18th AmberCon NorthWest (ACNW), at the same location, but with a new board lead by Eleanor taking over from founder Simone Cooper.
GM Craig Johnson
Thursday - 7pm to midnight
This wasn't originally on my choice list, but the game I was in was cancelled, and I was assigned to this as a late substitute. It was billed as a "archeological" mission by Amberites in the time before the first novel, centered on Corwin's son Merlin.
The plot was directly assigned to us as a quest by King Oberon. There were six possible fabled locations for a gravesite that contained items supposedly very dangerous that Oberon needed. We went to the first location -- "Devil's Tower 1970". This lead us to a secret cave with traps and an altar that took us through multiple layers of shadow, eventually getting us magic items but not the end. We then used the items to directly scry out the location of the grave at the sixth location -- the "Isle of Fynn" in the Abyss.
The other players made classical Amber characters, who were disdainful of Shadow beings. I made a character who connected into the Indiana Jones theme, named "Marius Bradley" as a play on "Marcus Brody". He was a shapeshifting expat Chaosite who was friends with Merlin. He was inspired the lie when Indy said "Marcus knows a dozen languages and has friends from here to Cairo. He'll blend in and disappear - you'll never find him." So my character was a seeming bumbling academic who can shapeshift and literally blend in.
The GM worked out many details for the plot, and had pictures of actors for the many NPCs shown from his laptop, along with details. I felt like this didn't completely gel, though. The difference of my characters and the others meant we didn't establish good connections. Also, the challenges in the quest weren't hard for our characters. We were never significantly wounded or drained, or faced with tough choices. I didn't even use my shapeshifting or had to fight until the epilog after we finished the quest. We had gotten our rewards, and Oberon told Marius he had Amberite heritage - and ordered him to walk the Pattern. I shapeshifted to slip away, but I was found by an NPC (Gerard) and brought to complete it.
GM Hanju Kim
This was my run of the published game by Andrew Peregrine, a fantasy adaptation of St. Trinian's -- a delightfully silly comic and movies from the 1950s about the worst girl's school in England. The girls are over-the-top troublemakers, to the point that the local police run and hide when they come through town. The classic scene is the field hockey game where there is a line of stretchers for the opposing team, and when the whistle is blown, the St. Trinian's girls all ignore the ball and just blatantly attack the other team with their sticks.
The RPG adds in witchcraft and weird science to the mix, at St. Erisian's School for Young Ladies, but the spirit is the same. My love of this game is that the players don't just disrupt plots - they create plots. In this game, the players and their characters were:
The plot (such as it was) eventually revolved around the girls arranging a dance with a nearby boys school, that eventually got attacked by their rivals, who had acquired a mounted machine gun. That turned out to be useful in taking down a horrible demon that was summoned in the middle of the dance.
GM Ben Bernard
This was a non-Amber game where the PCs were Native Americans taken in infancy to a fantastical version of 18th century Paris, and raised as wards of the court. We were asked to each pick one of six briefly-described archetypes for our character, and then elaborate with name and background. The player, archetype, and characters were:
One interesting step of character creation was connections. We had a list of about a dozen NPCs. We each picked one as our positive connection and one as our negative connection. In the diceless resolution, having a connection to one of them seemed to affect how we dealt with them. I think it was interesting to establish an early relationship map, but we didn't know much about the NPCs we were connecting with, since it was a quick info dump at the beginning.
The plot started from a scheme of ours to steal money, since our adoptive mother was poor and we longed to get out on our own. This went horribly wrong and brought out our latent psychic powers. The others tried to cover while Fleur stole some jewels in court, at a performance that also had a bunch of African people on display. When news of trouble came out, the Dauphin suddenly jumped to screaming orders to kill all the Africans as well as us. Our adoptive mother then unleashed psychic powers and killed dozens of people in the court, though the Dauphin survived. We escaped and eventually learned that she had only adopted us to drain our massive natural psychic powers in an effort to kill the diabolical Dauphin.
This was all about racism, and was engaging as we struggled as a made family to deal with the mystery and then the betrayal. There was a big rift between Mike S (as Fleur) versus Jen and Kath (as Secadi and Laide). As I saw it, the player rift wasn't over strategy but rather attitude. To some, Fleur seemed too casual about the violence.
Ultimately, this was
GM Michael Sullivan
This was a noir-ish game about a magical circus, set in the American South in 1922 West Virginia. The players and their characters were:
The centerpiece of this game was collectively planning and executing a themed circus show that would generate emotion from the audience, which gave us magical power to use.
GM Hanju Kim
This was my adaptation of the recently-published novel "The Bone Orchard". It was the debut novel of Sarah Mueller, who is a regular at ACNW whom I played with a number of times. I liked the novel and thought it would make a great setting for a game.
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AmberCon Northwest remains one of my favorite conventions. I was a little less satisfied with some of my game choices this year, but there are still a lot of great GMs and players.