Arref has a Mystery of Amber/IMC about where the populace of Amber comes from. Or more specifically, the cagey and crafty Arref tells us where they did not come from. And so it is my turn...
I've talked about this a bit in my cosmology page. At least, I've addressed the origins of Amber and its Patterns.
But I've never really talked about the people, the hoi polloi, the populace of Amber and its environs. To do that, let me focus in on what the universe was like before the Pattern was created.
In those times (I call the Age of Chaos), The Courts were the single pole of the universe, the center of its array of shadows. To be precise, the Abyss itself was the actual geographical center, the ultimate milestone and reference point, even in its own bottomless. Shadow extended outward in all directions from the Courts. The Logrus and the Courts acted as the still center of it all, and also as the template all other shadow was based upon. As you can imagine, this made for a rather unstable set of shadows. And as one drew further from the Courts, the stability and integrity of the framework of shadow is less stable.
A little digression is in order. The framework of shadow can be thought of, in my mind anyway, as one of two metaphors. The biological metaphor is the actin filament-microtubule model. Undershadow acts as the frame on which shadows lie, arrange themselves, and relate to each other just as the components in a cell do. In this metaphor, the nucleus is the Courts of Chaos, and various cell organelles are primal and lesser shadows. However, with just Chaos as a center, the integrity of this framework becomes less effective as one goes further from the nucleus. Shadows become more random, there are gaps in reality, sudden islands in the sea of night.
The cosmological metaphor deals with dark matter. It seems, according to current theory, that there is a lot of matter in the universe that we just don't see. This dark matter does exert gravity, however, and it is this "weight" that allows things like spiral galaxies to form. Thus the Chaos universe has the Courts as the hot, bright center, with other shadows arrayed as one progresses outward from that center. And galaxies tend to lose some of their definition at their farthest edges.
Anyway, Dworkin and Oberon fled the Courts, be it nucleus of the cell or center of the galaxy, and found themselves a primal plane in the middle of nowhere, on the periphery of the universe.
It is there that they two created the Pattern.
Certainly there were shadows in the vicinity of the Pattern, shadows which predate even the Logrus. Primal shadows, primarily. When the Pattern was created, it not only created shadows and aligned them to itself as a pole, but it "edited" these pre-existing shadows.
The shadow around the Amber Pattern, what we call Amber today, was devoid of human inhabitants. Oh there were an Arden, its not the first forest for nothing. But there were no people. No retainers or followers.
Oberon and Dworkin used several methods to populate Amber. Immigration from the nearby shadows. Importing people from more distant shadows. Who would miss a small village, farming community or hamlet? Oberon and his father also experimented with other ideas, uplifting native animals and polymorphing them into a human form.
(The early scenes in Willey's A Sorcerer and a Gentleman capture this well, I think, the populating of new, virgin land by Prospero).
It wasn't until one of the attacks of Chaos upon Amber that Oberon was able to flip some of the Janissary troops of Chaos, and turn them to his side that he found a population to inhabit Rebma.
But, while I am not likely to do a game a la Bloody Grievance, the early history of Amber HAS played a part in its latter history, and has influenced SB. So I've definitely given it considered thought.
Posted by Jvstin at October 21, 2003 11:15 AM