Amber-Wiki

[weilide]

I've just added "all known characters" and "all know places" pages to the Amber-Wiki. Hopefully, these can serve as quick-and-dirty jumping off points from which to quickly start populating the wiki with entries.

[Ivanhoe]

I thought about the canonical/non-canonical problem. I am not sure that making separate categories will help or be very practical, as things like "geography of amber" could contain canonical elements but almost has to be filled with non-canonical elements.

This wiki allows to have separate page groups, so there could be a Canonical.AmberGeography and NonCanonical.AmberGeography. I'll try to look into it ASAP.

Right now here is my proposition : pages from the canonical facts only contain such facts, pages from the non-canon contain both and use bold style to indicate canonical facts.

[weilide]

Well, one could have canonical / extrapolation sections within pages where both seem to apply.

[Ivanhoe]

I wonder about the usefulness of the 'Canon' section. I mean, usually GMs have read the books, they know who the princes are and if a detail is missing, the rulebook is here as a reference.

Here is a proposal : let's make this wiki non-canon by default. If someone adds a canon fact, let's do that in bold and go on by adding interesting twists anyone can add to a campaign.

I could see this as a two steps process : first let's add all the possible ideas that were suggested on this forum. For instance, on the mysterious character of Osric. We could suggest the following mutually exclusive hypothesis :
* Osric was killed by Benedict a long time ago
* Osric is alive and hidden from Oberon, thanks to Benedict
* Osric is a disguise of Oberon

Normally we should have several such things for almost every element of the Amber universe :-)

On the second step, people would propose compilation of such hypothesis to propose complete, deep and coherent Amber universes, ready-to-use for GMs wishing to immediately immerse their players in a world deeper and denser than the books'.
"Osric is alive and kept hidden by Benedict who think he could be a meaningful counter-power to Sand, who also...etc..."

What do you think about it ?

[weilide]

I wonder about the usefulness of the 'Canon' section. I mean, usually GMs have read the books, they know who the princes are and if a detail is missing, the rulebook is here as a reference.

Here is a proposal : let's make this wiki non-canon by default. If someone adds a canon fact, let's do that in bold and go on by adding interesting twists anyone can add to a campaign.

I could see this as a two steps process : first let's add all the possible ideas that were suggested on this forum. For instance, on the mysterious character of Osric. We could suggest the following mutually exclusive hypothesis :
* Osric was killed by Benedict a long time ago
* Osric is alive and hidden from Oberon, thanks to Benedict
* Osric is a disguise of Oberon

Normally we should have several such things for almost every element of the Amber universe :-)

On the second step, people would propose compilation of such hypothesis to propose complete, deep and coherent Amber universes, ready-to-use for GMs wishing to immediately immerse their players in a world deeper and denser than the books'.
"Osric is alive and kept hidden by Benedict who think he could be a meaningful counter-power to Sand, who also...etc..."

What do you think about it ?

Well, I think you make a fair argument but it seems to me that this is one of those subjects on which reasonable people can differ.

Here is my take: to my mind, the "canon" section is really the heart of the enterprise. I agree that most any GM is likely to have read Zelazny's books as well as the ADRPG sourcebooks and of course they'll have an awfully good idea who all the princes are and so on. But then, that's common knowledge. Nobody needs a resource for that kind of thing anyhow, just as nobody would consult Wikipedia to see who the current US president is or how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The thing Wikipedia--or any encyclopedia--is good for is trivia, those titchy little details that nobody knows offhand: when was Larry Bird's NBA draft (1978), how long is a furlong (1/8 mile), who starred in B.J. and the Bear (Greg Evigan and Claude Aikins), etc? Likewise, I'm not likely to look up "Corwin" or "The Courts of Chaos" because I know the broad strokes already. However, when preparing a game there are all sorts of things I can't recall but would want to look up quickly: Bill Roth's wife is named Alice, they have a son named Bill Jr. and twin grandsons, for example, or Merlin's full title in Amber is "Duke of the Western Marches and Earl of Kolvir," and so on, and so on.

That's the kind of thing Krulik's Complete Amber Sourcebook should have been: a comprehensive listing of all those tertiary characters and minor locales that nobody would know without having the entire ten book series memorized. Unfortunately Krulik decided to flesh out his sourcebook with entries that gesture toward something in the original series but then are filled with invented details, so one can never be sure what was Zelazny and what was imposed by Krulik and others. In the end, I feel that's what wikis are best at: they should be collections of facts that represent the consensus (or near-consensus at least) of an informed community of "experts." There are no more Zelazny books forthcoming, and while there are limitless answers to the question of who was the "true" hero of the Patternfall War or what were Dworkin's motivations for replacing Coral's eye with the Jewel of Judgement, there is, from a canon standpoint, an answer to the question of the name of Bill Roth's wife: it was, is, and always will be "Alice." It is in, in other words, fixed.

I'd like to be clear: I consider the material that Ivanhoe refers to in his posting (i.e., the myriad possibilities for game interpretation, etc) to be equally valuable as the material I have just described but it is a fundamentally different creature: that kind of stuff works best in forums like these, where it can develop over the course of rollicking give-and-take. It's constantly in motion.

So, there's my answer in a nutshell: canon material works best in a wiki, where it be fixed, polished, and retrieved; expanded universe material works best in a forum, where it can grow and explore. Make of that what you will.

[Ivanhoe]

You make good points, a list of all the trivia on the various characters and places in the canon would indeed be quite valuable. I am not sure I'll have a lot of time in the next weeks, but if I have one or two spare evenings, I'll quickly go over the books (of the Corwin serie, I don't own the Merlin's) and add all the small trivia I can find on the wiki.

So, there's my answer in a nutshell: canon material works best in a wiki, where it be fixed, polished, and retrieved; expanded universe material works best in a forum, where it can grow and explore. Make of that what you will.

Well, I am a bit of a angry forum user. Why, oh why on hell, did nested discussion forum disappeared from the face of the Internet ? I don't feel that forums are usable for a lot of things and I really think that while discussions can still occur on a forum, wikis can be used as a way to structure or sum up discussions and arguments. See for instance what happens on the wikipedia on hotly debated subject (like Israel-Palestine conflict or 9/11 conspiracy theories) In this case, the wiki are not used to state a demonstrable objective truth (like the atomic weight of carbon) but can be used to list arguments and theories.

Anyway, ok, I'll leave the canon section in the wiki, there really seem to be a use to it.

[Spike]

Y'know, I think the wiki I saw was the actual Wikipedia entries for Amber... rather than 'All Amber, All the Time Homebrewed Wiki'...

...and which brings to mind the question: what's wrong with using that?

[Ivanhoe]

Y'know, I think the wiki I saw was the actual Wikipedia entries for Amber... rather than 'All Amber, All the Time Homebrewed Wiki'...

...and which brings to mind the question: what's wrong with using that?

I thought I remembered, when some people begin to create dozens of pages around the Starcraft universe, that a discussion arose to regulate this kind of use but apparently, it was finally decided it is valid content. Great! Background articles about Star Trek, Middle Earth or many fictional universes abound. I think that the Wikipedia is clearly a good place to document the canonical view of the Amber Universe.

I see however three disadvantage :
- The Wikipedia doesn't like trivia lists and prefer that articles focus on big facts. They will prefer to have an account of the Kolvir battle on the Corwin page than the annotation that he wrote the song "Auprès de ma blonde" during his amnesia. However, we have a good justification for having such trivia list facts and WP content policies are very flexible.

- Non-canonical elements, however (those that made me want to start a wiki) will probably get deleted quickly. While being tolerant about the facts that are noteworthy or not, the wikipedia crowd is usually merciless against facts that can't be proven by a citation.

- The wikipedia aims at being an encyclopedia, not a RPG sourcebook. So discussions about Powers rules, attributes of various characters and so on, will not easily be accepted there.

Anyway, last time I looked for Amber on the WP the article was a bit slim (and it is still a bit light : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:The_Chronicles_of_Amber_characters). I'll try to find the time to add a legal licensing snippet in amberpedia in order to be able to swap content with the wikipedia legally.

[Nihilistic Mind]

I think that a serious AmberWiki would really benefit from canon, non-canon sections clearly defined, because I'd love to refer potential players to it and tell them, "read only the canon stuff", and myself as a GM, use the non-canon creativity of other GMs to fluff my own Amberverse as I please.

It becomes a wholesome tool this way, don't you think?

The next step is finding people ready to write some great informative articles and use quotations and printed material as resources. I'd be happy to help with some of the canon stuff since it probably needs to be the backbone of the AmberWiki, and I'd love to see it grow beyond what WikiPedia currently has.

[weilide]

Another good resource is Alexander Michailov's quite comprehensive Amber Dictionary (http://www.stwing.upenn.edu/~avm/Amber.shtml). I'm not suggesting his entries be imported wholesale (he's clearly done a lot of work and it wouldn't be right to just take his stuff without acknowledging it) but if nothing else his page serves as a good list for people looking for characters that may have fallen through the cracks.

[Trevelyan]

I'd be happy to write articles about any number of aspects of the setting, in particular those aspects which I feel the ADRPG doesn't cover accurately

[weilide]

That's great! It's open to all comers in any case…

[gabriel_ss4u]

Ya know what else would be cool.
If all the Amber GMs wrote their own sourcebooks and put them on-line for reference.
non-profit, just request kudos on ideas, there are alot of good ones out there.

[Nihilistic Mind]

Yup. And that could easily supercede and surpass anything Amber RPG 2nd Edition would cover...

[RPGPundit]

Yes, in all likelihood it would, if someone were to compile in some great Amber project, all the setting and system material people have written and posted to the countless webpages dedicated to Amber over the years.

I think that's an erstwhile cause.

RPGPundit