Dworkin/Pattern/Unicorn and Suhuy/Logrus/Serpent

[Arref]

If you thought I was entirely refuting your post, you were mistaken.

Purely off the top of my head, the damage to the Primal Pattern was reflected throughout Shadow, yet none of the "big three" Patterns showed any direct signs of it. Laying aside the most likely reason (that Zelazny probably hadn't conceived of the Primal Pattern when he wrote Nine Princes) we can explain this by saying either that because the "big three", together with the various broken patterns, are already diminished, damaged versions of the original (albeit that the flaws in the contral Patterns are too slight to be readily detected) they did not exhibit further damage. They exist as poor reflections of a perfect whole, and damage to that whole does not entail further damage to the copy.

That doesn't quite wash. We could go there, but then most of what the books lead to as an ending says that everything reflects throughout shadow. A better point might be that members of the family are portable Pattern augmenters and since they cluster in Amber and Rebma, those Patterns were weakened slowly because the center was reinforced and defended.

No discussion was made of fixing Dworkin to fix the Primal Pattern because the cuase of the shared damage was the stain on the Pattern and not direct damage to Dworkin. Talk of fixing Dworkin without repairing the Pattern is akin to talk of sewing up a wound with a broken arrow still trapped inside. It treats the symptom without touching the disease.

It is Dworkin who says, "I am the Pattern." Your analogy doesn't come close to encompassing this statement. My point: you could fix the damage from either direction Pattern > Dworkin < Pattern if they were so linked.

The existence of a link between Pattern/Unicorn/Amber and Dworkin at no point requires the immediate, or even eventual public acknowledgement of such a link by other parties, including Oberon. That Oberon did not imediately adopt the Unicorn as the sign of Amber does not mean that no link exists.

Right you are.

More generally, your comment that "In fractal truths, all the little parts echo the big parts." is not so much a refutation of my suggestion "[n]either the creatures or the sigils are senior, but instead that they are simply different representations of their underlying concept." but rather a restatement of that claim. Their is an underpinning unity in the actions and apparent purpose of Pattern/Unicorn just as with Logrus/Serpent. Dworkin and Suhuy play into this in a less obvious, perhaps less partisan but certainly no less significant way.

Well, if you are making the point that these things are not the same but on the same side, I agree. They are twined in some sort of alliance.

That's very different from the simple picture of them all being welded together.

Amber genre loves cabals. This is just another magnitude.

[crafty]

Something that dawned on me while reading the thread, if Dworking/Pattern/Unicorn/etc (just looking on one side here, but it applies to the other as well) is a cabal by choice, and the Pattern is indeed sentient as represented in Merlin, then perhaps the only reason that non-amberites are not permited to walk the Pattern is due to the "agreement" Dworkin had made with the Pattern and that the Pattern may not always this unspoking agreement, so it could be that some of those who walked the Pattern may not have been Amberites, but well liked by it.

Further, if I were Corwins Pattern, and bore his imprint, I wouldn't want Fiona walking me, which seems to be the sticking point of only Corwin's children being able to do so.

Or maybe I have a damaged Pattern imprint and have gone made from it, weirder things have happened.

[jibbajibba]

You could take a whole other approach.

Everything is made of shadow stuff, including the Amberites, Chaosites etc. The Pattern and the Logrus are just two methodologies for manipulation of this shadow stuff. Shapeshifting is maniplution of the shadow stuff you are made of and Trump is a method to access the substrate of the shadow stuff move through it communicate and in fact even define objects with in it. In this way the Pattern is an abstract trump of the Universe and the Logrus is another, albeit one drawn in another style.

The argument is supported by a number of elements.
* All Amberites can shapeshift. Their ability to heal is just an innate ability to manipulate the shadow stuff of which they are made. You can grow back your eyes, arms etc.
* Pattern / Logrus ghosts are just the two methodologies manipulating pattern stuff to create more versions of the various exisiting forms that exist.
* The act of walking through shadow is really just external shapeshift. You shift the shadow stuff arround you not the stuff that you are made up of. We all know you can actually combine the two and take shadow stuff from the environment and absorb it into your own form if you so wish so the two must be analagous.
* When Brand becomes the living trump, first chronicals version not that daft well of worlds malarcky, he is accessing the substrate of reality and so can move at will through the shadow stuff.
* We know the pattern is drawn by Dworkin. The only other stuff that is drawn are trumps so is it possible the two get their power from an underlying source?
 

Of course its not perfect its just an idea. The Pattern/Dworkin/Unicorn and Logrus/Suhuy/Serpent relationships I haven't really tried to fit into this model. I might be that Dworkin formulated the Pattern methodology and Suhuy the Logrus, as such the two would be tied to each other but not indivisible in the same way that an idea becomes independant once its been expressed. I guess Ghostwheel could be a junior version of a new methodology (kind of Pattern=rationalism and Logrus=Chaos theory and Ghostwheel=exestentialism) but hey it might just be that Zelazny thought it would be a good story:-)

[Trevelyan]

but hey it might just be that Zelazny thought it would be a good story:-)

I always consider that Rule #1 when theorising about Amber

[gabriel_ss4u]

I've never seen trump as a power in itself. Merlin makes it clear that it's just an application of basic principles underpinning Pattern and Logrus.

This is definitely a good place to brainstorm.

Yes, it is.

On this one, we must remember that Merlin is a youngster, albeit a powerful one.
He doesn't (in my perception) understand the nuances of Trump as, say, the elders who have it at exaulted levels and can do unimaginable things.
Lemme see, a power that can peer into possible future events and feed clues (however hard to read) to the characters who may be clueless - or not.
this sounds like an edge I'd love to have.
I haven't finished the Bentencourt books, (just read the 1st 2)... but i was happy to see Oberon's sister with the Trump abilities. I really need to get back into gaming this awesome story-scape of the ADRP system.
I miss it.... sniff.

[Trevelyan]

I haven't finished the Bentencourt books, (just read the 1st 2)... but i was happy to see Oberon's sister with the Trump abilities.

La la la... I'm not listening.... la la la. Besides, I don't believe that Betancourt ever wrote those books. It's just one of those vicious urban myths like the one about a sequel to Highlander.

[gabriel_ss4u]

Ya sea... eyes gets me Amber fix anywayz I kin.

arghhhh....

Where are all the new "hyped" Amber writers @ now? I wish I were a bard with resources, I'd scour net for talent and compile the greatest Amber stories....
Say, Why hasn't Amber been written about thousands of times by all those published writers of Dragonlance and TSR and Whitewolf, and Highlander, and ....

oh yeah....

no one can compare to Roger.

I guess I'll go read the Merlin Series again....

How many times is it for you?

[Trevelyan]

How many times is it for you?

A gentleman never tells, but it would require removal of my shoes and socks to count them all.

[Uncle Twitchy]

The previous Amber campaigns I've run have all pretty much ignored the Pattern/Logrus thing -- I don't like the idea that the Pattern and the Logrus are sentient, and I'm guessing that since each book peeled away another layer of the onion that is the Amber cosmology, had Zelazny lived to write the third series we would have, by the end, seen a drastically different concept than the one to which Merlin comes to the conclusion of understanding in his series.

So, for my upcoming campaign, which is the first one I've ever run that incorporates the events of the Merlin books, I'm taking the attitude that Merlin is not so much a journalist as a storyteller, and that a lot of what he says has been refuted by those whom he claims would corroborate his story. Sentient Pattern and Logrus? Mandor says Merlin came to him with that nonsense, but he doesn't believe it, and he never heard the the Pattern or Logrus "speak" to him. Dworkin put the Jewel of Judgement in Coral's eye? Not according to Coral -- she doesn't know what Merlin's talking about.

Negotiating the Logrus does drive one mad, after all... so, basically, in my campaign, Merlin's slightly schizophrenic.

[Nihilistic Mind]

The previous Amber campaigns I've run have all pretty much ignored the Pattern/Logrus thing -- I don't like the idea that the Pattern and the Logrus are sentient, and I'm guessing that since each book peeled away another layer of the onion that is the Amber cosmology, had Zelazny lived to write the third series we would have, by the end, seen a drastically different concept than the one to which Merlin comes to the conclusion of understanding in his series.

I like to theorize that if Zelazny had written yet another series involving the vast universe of Amber, he would have gone back to his throne plot gone epic adventure panning over many important shadows, and put the theology and cosmology on the back burner... After all, why explain himself twice. Merlin's series did a lot of 'splainin'. Too much, some might say.

Negotiating the Logrus does drive one mad, after all... so, basically, in my campaign, Merlin's slightly schizophrenic.

This seems to be a stance many GMs have taken. I personally tend to ignore the facts altogether and use the characters in brand new storylines.