Hmm... Wonder Why I Did That?

[Uncle Twitchy]

I started my new campaign last night, and ran the players through the introduction/initial problem that I'd set up (all the elder Amberites seem to be scattered or gone -- the PCs are the only Amberites in Amber at the moment), teased the main adversaries (a group of Chaosites who've figured out how to manipulate mirror travel a la the sorcerer from "The Shroudling and the Guisel" and "Coming of a Cord" -- and not the cause of the elders vanishing), and let the players begin their investigations, and it was getting late so I was looking for a good cliffhanger, and a couple of the players decided to go to the Pattern room for some reason (I didn't hear the discussion that lead to this decision -- I'll count on reading about it in somebody's journal).

And in the grand tradition of Roger Zelazny, I heard myself telling the players that the Pattern was now glowing lime green instead of its traditional electric blue.

I have no idea what this means or what the cause is or what the consequences are.

I do know that whatever it is, it's going to be separate from what caused the elders to disappear and it's not related to the Chaosites.

So: any ideas why the Pattern changed color and what the consequences are?

[Croaker]

It might be infested by a kind of parasite. A cthulian parasite

It might be kind of "shedding its skin"

It might be a kind of protection, or maybe a prison, blocking amberites from asseying it.

It might be that the PCs crossed to a parallel Amberverse. Hum... A negative universe maybe? Or it could just look this way into the mirrorverse?

It might just love the new look

[jibbajibba]

Depends how big a thing you want it to be I guess...

Big could be assault on the Unicorn or the Unicorn in distress; death of an Amberite (maybe it always reacts when an amberite perishes), affect on Ygg changing the balance point between Chaos and Amber, A new Pattern, Corwin's ? somewhow affecting the ballance

Smaller stuff might be - experiments in Tir or Rebma on their patterns, some sort of castle warning system that pre-empts the arrival of the hall of mirros or another castle phenomena  (one that opposes the mirrors ?) , the arrival of one of Oberon's siblings, the destruction of a broken pattern...

[Nihilistic Mind]

Ooh, those are neat suggestions.

During my last throne war, someone walked the Amber Pattern as its blue glow turned to black mist and a dark grey glow. The memories that were triggered involved seeing worlds they had visited before and realizing that those worlds were dying - abandonned or apocalypse/armageddony - where all life was coming to an end.

I think messing with the color of the Pattern is a great way to cause alarm in the players and they probably will try to figure out how/why it happened...
Sounds like a great campaign start to me

[Uncle Twitchy]

They're all good suggestions -- and I think I may use a number of them as symptoms rather than the cause, and let the players themselves "figure out" what the cause is. I like doing that -- present some weird situation and have the players, in their deliberations and investigations, "discover" the source and "figure out" the solution when in effect they're writing the story for me. Hit on this style of GMing when I realized that one of my players, a consummate "gamer" GM in his own right, had a tendency to overthink all the possible solutions to any problem I presented to him (usually hitting on the one that I'd come up with right away and then talking himself out of it). I discovered that just as often, he or the other players, in their brainstorming, often came up with a better story than I had originally conceived.

I really like the imagery of someone walking this green Pattern and having black, oily smoke roil off it rather than the sparks...

And I think I'll have carrion birds start showing up as a recurring motif. Buzzards, crows, ravens, vultures...

[Croaker]

An undead pattern?

[Nihilistic Mind]

Yeah! With undead worlds, an undead cast of elders... Sounds like Marvel Zombies. Who could possibly complain about that?!

But seriously though. I know I shouldn't steer the subject too far so I'll add this: I like to run with an original idea, let my instincts do the thinking and let the players figure it out for me as well. In a game as open as Amber can be, one needs an open storyline.

I used to try to anticipate a lot, if not all of my players thoughts and directions, but I find that it is much nicer to keep the plot loose. I have plot points, themes and a general idea of what I'd like to see happen, but if a cool idea hits me or if the players mess with the storyline in a major way, I let things happen and adapt.
You gotta keep things fresh, you know what I mean?

[James McMurray]

Some sort of attack by Corwin's Pattern or agents thereof (possibly including Ghostwheel if you want lots of book references).

[gabriel_ss4u]

Wow, I love this...
Uncle Twitchy, don't be at all hard on yourself for your decision, I love it, look at all the wonderful ideas that came from it.
I love them all.
I especially like the Zombie one as IMC the Abyss is the undead realm so to speak, and this is a cool visual for the effect on the multiverse if the Abyss somehow infected the Pattern, (which IMC is one of the keys that hold back to powers of the Abyss and it's minions.)

I wanna play!  I wanna play!

seriously, some of my best GMing is done by the seat of my pants.
Good players will always have a positive symbiotic relationship with the GM concerning the storyline.
An excellent cliff hanger indeed.

PS.
Here's my deviant website - full of other people's art that is idea-invoking of my Amber/Chaos campaign.
http://gabriel-ss4u.deviantart.com/
(please don't knock me for the few poke'mon pics, I like 'em.)
If you browse "My Favorites" on the page, you'll get visuals on Chaos, Amber, and Beyond.
Lemme know what ya think or if anything that I consolidated helped in your campaign. ( in the DbyD post.)

[Uncle Twitchy]

Oh, don't worry -- I'm not being hard on myself about this at all. I love it when a random thought pops into my head and I integrate it into a game, only to find out later, by the player's actions, what it means.

It is, after all, how RZ came to write Amber in the first place. The way I understand it, he just at down and started writing Nine Princes and just let it fall from the page before he actually started paying attention to it. I've heard that he was halfway through the first book before he started actively shaping the plot (which may be why the second half of the book feels like a rewrite of The Count of Monte Cristo).

[Uncle Twitchy]

Figured out what is going on with the Pattern, what they can do to fix it, why it happened and who is responsible. If anyone's remotely interested, feel free to PM me -- I don't want to say it openly on the off-chance that some of my players might stumble upon the forum.

But it was one of those "lightning-bolts-to-the-brain" epiphanies that utterly defined every single thread in the campaign that I've thrown out there so far, weaving all those threads into a tapestry with a clear image.

I love it when that happens.

[Tom B]

I love it when that happens, and it usually leads to some of my best sessions.  I often toss out off-the-cuff details like you described in the OP.  I usually have no idea what it means at the time, either.  If it's going to take awhile before they can do anything about it, then I just sit there and listen to their theorizing...take the bits I like, and go with that.  I've gotten a lot of good ideas just listening to them try and figure out something  that I set up on the fly.

[eeach]

An undead pattern?

This sent a bolt of lightening down my spine. I don't know why, it just scared the shit out of me.

[Sargon]

lime green.. that's a scarey color. *shudders*.  

That said, it makes me think ROYGBIV.  green is one color lower than blue on the spectrum, perhaps the pattern turning green represents a ratchetting down of it's power for some reason.   maybe over time pattern will be progressively less powerful as it turns a pale yellow, then a washed out orange, then finally an ever dimming red color...

personally i'd have the two events ( mising elders nd wonky pattern( related, but indirectly.  perhaps the elders went misign investigatign the  pattern issues, or maybe the pattern is dimming because no one is performing the proper rituals with the jewel of judgement.

if you wanted to be extra nasty nasty, maybe the color change represents the pattern being affiliated with a DIFFERENT bloodline, such hat if an amberite walks it, they will die.

[Uncle Twitchy]

What I ended up doing with it was making it "reverse" the effect of Pattern -- in that if you attune to the green version of the Pattern, while in Amber you are bombarded by all of shadow overlapping itself, making it easy to accidently step into shadow; the farther you go towards Chaos, this effect is lessened, so that shadows appear as ghostly curtains you can chose to step through. Blinding yourself (even blindfolding yourself) nullifies this effect in Amber itself (as the one player who dared to walk the green Pattern discovered, so she then went off and studied for years under a blind martial arts master in a fast-time Shadow so she could master the art of fighting and maneuvering in the dark).

Now, of course, anyone attuned to the Jewel of Judgement can simply walk the Pattern while holding and focusing on the Jewel, and that will clean it off. But the players inadvertently lost the Jewel while dealing with the sorceror from "The Shroudling and the Guisel", so Random's gone off to Undershadow to find it.