Towards the beginning of 1997, my friend Rob started what was going to be a nice, sane (relatively speaking), normal (relatively speaking) Amber campaign. For awhile, it was. We all created the usual suspects; quirky, power-curious and power-hungry. There was Tyler, the incorrigable rake; Carolyn and her Trump-ring; Zakariahs, the Chaosian sent by Suhuy to study under Fiona; Sir Mandrian, the out-of-his-league knight; Nicola, the sad goth-girl and would-be sorcerer... I created Lucca, the investigator of weird, Pattern-based dimensional mathematics who later became too angst-ridden for me to enjoy playing. I ended up taking a break, retiring Lucca and turning to more pressing issues in life that began springing up. A couple other players left, some new ones joined, some players started new characters.

Somewhere along the way, the chronicle became silly. Incredibly silly. It might've started with the session where they managed to kill two or three elders off in a span of 24 hours. It might have been when they managed to invade Amber in a spaceship that worked in that realm. Things got out of hand, as they tend to do. And no one seemed to mind, though the idea of what they were doing drove me batty for a bit. (An Amber purist? Nah...) But then I saw how much fun throwing everything out the window could be:

This sort of thing was normal by this point. It was as if it had become one big collection of quotes (that I wish I had started recording!). So I ended up joining with a non-standard character of my own, and all was well, if not canonical.

The one character that wasn't "normal" when it all started was Nicola, la triste gothique femme, perhaps because Jen wasn't sure what to play or how to play it. She ended up taking a World of Darkness MUSH character she played -- a bumbling mortal witch-wannabe that couldn't cast a real spell to save her life, but thought she could because all the supernaturals had a running gag where they'd trick her into thinking she was competent by creating her "spells" when she was around with their own powers -- and adopted her to Amber. Nicola, the disappointing daughter of Brand and Jasra, lived on Shadow Goth, owned a nightclub where the vampires romped, learned Sorcery from watching The Craft 200 times too many, died her red hair black, wore fake fangs until Dworkin took them away... you get the idea.