A hybrid campaign created by Fred Wolke

Deck of picture cards - check. Powerful characters moving from world to world - check. Legendary city thought to be the center of a multiverse - check. A game system designed to emphasize role-playing and narrative flow over mechanics - check.

One almost expects both Everway and Amber to have a vice president named Johnson.

In Amberway, these two taste treats of rules-light role-playing come together in a play-by-mail campaign using Everway rules with an Amber setting. It's long after the end of the Patternfall War and to the people of the Thousand Worlds Amber is nothing but a myth - a legend that the man who calls himself Stranger hires a band of heroes to find...

Everway player characters...

...are called "heroes" whether they deserve it or not. Their attributes are the four alchemical elements - Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Each player assigns his character a Fortune from the fortune deck: one card each for Virtue, Fault and Fate.

Among the gifts of the Gods (one of whom is apparently Lévi-Strauss) to the Thousand Worlds is The Tongue, a common spoken language that evinces no slippage. That is, the meaning and syntax do not change over time or vary from place to place. If you speak The Tongue, you can be understood anywhere in the Thousand Worlds. So common nouns do for names. The Gods have names that are not common nouns - they're gods after all. But mortals with such names (e.g. "Fiona") are understood to be either suffering from hubris or from a cursed realm. Like Amber, where hardly anyone has a sensible name. Note that the common noun rule applies to the names of all mortals in the Thousand Worlds, not just PCs and not just adventurers.

See the Everway Characters page for a full account of character creation.

"Brand sits as straight as...

...his back will allow, his face passive.

'How do you plead?' says the Herald.

'To the counts of all but regicide, guilty. I never knowingly killed any member of the family.'

'Then you deny that you were the cause of the deaths of King Random, Prince Caine, Prince Bleys, and Prince Benedict?'

'I do. Prince Caine died in battle, as all should know, and...' "

from the campaign record by GM Fred Wolke

The four guilds...

...listed at left officially control all means of spherewalking in the Thousand Worlds. The Rogues control the underground gates that compose the Grand Tunnel; the Navigators, the sea passages; the Wizards the mysterious rune gates; and the Knights the moon paths of the forest.

In vanilla Everway there is only one kind of gate between the worlds, one that most resembles the Amberway campaign's rune gates - both open only for those with a Water score of 5 or higher. Amberway's fourfold system of gates constitutes a significant change to the Everway mythos: in Amberway each of the four elements corresponds to a type of gate.

Hawkeye's story is only partially known.

Everway and Amber...

...are the poles of the Amberway cosmos. Everway is sprawling, vital, urban and urbane. Amber is pinched, decaying, feudal and isolate. And yet Amber holds the Pattern, a source of power even with Amber hemmed in as she is. And Everway and the rest of the Thousand Worlds may be nothing but a hastily slapped-together prison for Prince Brand. Now that the Thousand Worlds hold Brand no longer, some in Amber seek their destruction.

Meander gave the spheres and the campaign Prince Kingfisher Gauntson, familiarly known as Fisher. Delve hails from Urth. Gleamingrose is the city nearest the Rift, the one breach in the barrier between Amber and the rest of existence.

A selective, and we do mean selective

set of links - cool Everway pages, cool Amber pages, cool related or relatable pages by our participants.