Hey, sorry that I've been silent for the last week or so. Christmas was busier than I expected and now me and the family have come down with nasty colds. Hopefully I'll be posting more often next week.
You've got a name! Got an Idea what the game is about?
The name was just something I came up with that sounds Greekish but I am not sure how it will be incorporated into the game. Or I'm not telling what it means just yet.
I suppose it would be best to let all the players decide where they want to start the game and from that the power levels will be decided on. If you all have ideas for different worlds and different technology levels then we would need to have a bit more invested in travel powers so you could meet up with eachother at some point in the future. If you think to all start together then one or none of the players need to invest in the power. I would recommend that evryone have some sort of travel power so the PC won't be dumped off in random worlds without anyway to escape. Wrathful elder gods might enjoy tossing away youngsters who interfere with their plans.
Starting point wise I think the rules 100 level is good to start with. It's too low in Amber since Pattern is a whopping 50, but with the three travel paths split to lower cost then a 20 for travel, 15-20 for other powers, 60-65 for attributes sounds about right. I was thinking of handing off the immortality power for free to start unless you were coming up with plans for gaining that boon.
So 100 points should allow everyone to get some useful powers, lay some good bids in the auction, maybe spend points on a world or items, and even take an extra 6 points by buying an enemy. There will be bonus points for background and other contributions but I will hand those out during xp awarding time which means the firt award will include all the background writeups. Maybe someone is willing to writeup a campaign log or encyclopedia of people and places or have other bonus xp ideas? If there is only the log and encyclopedia maybe you can rotate the responsibility around so everyone gets a shot at the bonus?
Courtly intrigue? Combat heavy? Emphasis on the martial or the magical? Modern times? Classical antiquity?
I think it will be action filled. Or maybe confrontation filled would be a better way to describe it. Too often these pbp games fall into a rut of endless discussion which is great at the table but with the slower posting rate a discussion can last months realtime. I was in a game where my PC had discussions with an important NPC then another PC and by the end over 3 months had gone by. That's not neccessarily a bad thing but both time were in the safe confines of a castle so the odds of some sudden action sequence breaking out was slim. If, on the other hand, the characters were travelling through a dangerous area while having the discussion some sort of surprise could have popped up to give a little break in the talking. So longer discussions, even if they are sueful and important to what plot we come up with, I will try to interrupt with something new.
So there will be physical and magical combat, weird magic from the elder gods, intrigue, cabals, sudden reversals in alliegence. Not much of the standard mystery type plots as I've found that they almost always are poorly done and the players get more annoyed than interested. The GM doesn't have the same control over the story as an author and can't fairly hand out the clues and also expect the players to keep track of all the fiddly bits of information neccessary for a good RPG mystery. Some of you may disagree.
So expect mysterious foes making the PC lives hell, ancient powers rising up from the depths of Hades, depths of the seas, and from above the skies, a collection of gods, demi-gods and godlings that may not always have the PCs best interests at heart.
There will be travel among the worlds in all ancient and modern times, some places decidedly not Earthlike, so feel free to start your characters anywhere you like even in Olympus, Atlantis, or Underworld.
So really what I have so far is some plans and starting points for the other NPCs and how that will relate to your PCs will partly depend on the type of characters you create. One thing that can help me decide is to have a goal for your character that I can incorporate into the game. Accomplishing this goal would be worth some extra xp then hopefully lead to another goal. Say, as a quick example, a PC with high Might attribute may want to defeat the other strength aspected gods in wrestling to prove that he is the mightiest of the gods. If they can win against all the other PCs that would be worth a couple points, all the other demi-gods would be worth more, then defeating Heracles or Typhon would be worth much more (and be close to impossible without cheating unless we keep this game going for a very long time!)