Keyword of the day is Stupidity.

The bit that I found, I decided to post on the Amber Mailing List. I was roundly and decisively criticized far faster than the nazi-conspiracist ever was for his babble. Deservedly so.

I managed to get everyone to agree on the AML...and that's an accomplishment. Unfortunately, the agreement is that I am an ass.

I have a paranoid, pessimistic but undeniable sense of worry about the Con now, all of a sudden. I hope that this whole flap dies in a month...or that it doesn't cause the Con committee to revoke my membership.

Found an interesting bit on alt.books.zelazny the other day. Not sure if I should post it here because it is of dubious legality, although I did send it to a mailing list--it is an introduction to a "choose your own adventure book' set in Amber called Black Road War. In the intro, Zelazny clears up some of the inconsistency of the family tree that cropped up in the novels.

I won't change the SB family tree, though. After all, I have a couple of elders in there Zelazny never heard of.

Oh, and by the way, just to make it clear from a couple of days ago. My reference to Jack Gulick was referring to his excellent Nine Princes in Hong Kong scenario...which recasts Hong Kong as the Eternal City. You can see that good stuff right here.

Game Idea (with apologies and nod to Jack Gulick for the style)

Nine Princes in Memphis.

It is Amber, but it is not the Amber you know. It is Amber as it might have been if Roger Zelazny had infused his ideas with the Middle East, and the romance of Ancient Egypt.

Here, now, the Eternal City sits on the River Nile, the center of all life in the Eternal Kingdom. It is the one city, the true city all others are just shadows of. And it is here that those of the royal family, and perhaps others with the strength of will, master the power of the Pattern, and play their deadly serious game of power and control over the most powerful Kingdom in all shadow.

The Eternal Kingdom stretches from Alexandria and the Mouth of the Nile, down along its length, to the second cataract. To the East and West are deserts, beyond which, those who can walk in shadow can find lands beyond...Carthage, Babylon, and Arabia. Across the Mediterranean, into the seas of shadows, lie still more worlds, to those who know how to navigate to them. Crete, Greece, Sicily, and beyond.

And to the South...along the eternal river that snakes into Shadow itself, lie wonders and worlds unexplored and unimaginable.

I came up with this idea, thinking a while ago about Rivers and the lack of a "mythic one" in Amber. This Amber would definitely place great importance on the Nile, the Eternal River...and it would snake through shadows like Tethys does in the Hyperion/Endymion novels by Dan Simmons.