Well, my Amber game is continuing. It’s a little bit difficult because my players are completely new to the setting and I’m not sure I have done a good enough job of explaining it all to them beforehand. The dynamics of the family are a complicated thing, when you get down to it.

I had thought that it might be simpler by my choice of running a pre-Chronicles era game, but I’m now seriously doubting that decision. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s not the case. The problem is that some of the characters are fairly (on the order of a century) old, and so should be reasonably well versed in how everything works in Amber. But if their players are not, it makes for awkwardness. And I’m not sure whether the best thing to do is to go extremely slowly, explaining everything in a sort of tutorial type way, or whether to just proceed and let things fall where they may? The latter approach seems like it’s likely to have a lot of potential negative outcome, and so I’m inclined against it, but the former seems like it would just be… painful. I’m guessing there must be some kind of middle path, but I’m not sure what it is. I certainly don’t want to end up doing retcons, although I’m already dangerously flirting with having to do one as it is.

So what do I do? That is the question.

This of course doesn’t even get into the questions about the actual game, which are a completely different matter