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Read this first. You do not need to have read the Amber novels to play. You do not need to know the rules. This page covers everything you need to make a character and start posting.
In Strange Courts is a play-by-post political chronicle set in Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber. You play a young immortal — a child or grandchild of the royal family of Amber, or a noble of the Courts of Chaos, or someone from the realms between them.
A war just ended. Amber won. Nobody signed anything. King Random needs a treaty before the peace falls apart, and he is sending people who can walk into the Courts of Chaos and survive the experience.
That is you.
The chronicle's central question: What does loyalty mean when your king's enemy is also your ally?
You are not a random adventurer who wandered into a job. You are part of a delegation Random is assembling, and you are there because of who you represent.
Any treaty between Amber and the Courts of Chaos redraws the map for the realms in between — the Golden Circle on Amber's side, the Black Zone on Chaos's. Those are the places where trade routes, borders, and protection actually get contested. Each Golden Circle kingdom holds its own separate treaty with Amber. The Black Zone holds the Courts' client states and the manpower their armies are drawn from.
Negotiate over those realms without them at the table and you get a treaty nobody honours. Random knows this. He is not being generous — he is being careful.
You have a constituency. Somebody sent you, or expects something from you, or will be affected by whatever gets signed. That might be Amber itself, a Golden Circle throne, a House of Chaos, or a Black Zone realm that survives at the sufferance of a Chaos lord.
Your constituency's interests may not match the mission. Random wants a treaty. Your people may want a specific treaty, or no treaty, or a delay. Working out what you do when those diverge is the game.
Nobody starts knowing each other. You were assembled, not gathered. The first adventure is partly a shakedown cruise, and everyone knows it — including you.
💡 Before the Attribute Auction, decide two things: who your character represents, and what those people actually want. Everything else follows from that.
Amber is the one true city. Everything else is a reflection of it, or a reflection of a reflection.
The Courts of Chaos sit at the far end of existence, at the edge of the Abyss — the place where creation is still happening. Chaos is vastly older than Amber.
Shadow is everything in between: infinite worlds, each one a variation. Earth is a Shadow. So is every other world you can imagine, and every world you cannot.
The two Powers:
Members of both royal families are effectively immortal, heal from almost anything, and are far stronger and faster than any ordinary person.
Trumps are hand-painted cards depicting people and places. Concentrate on one and you can speak to that person across any distance — or step through to them.
In a conflict, the higher-ranked character wins — eventually and reliably, unless circumstances, preparation, or cleverness change the situation. This is the whole system.
What that means in practice: you cannot roll well and beat someone stronger than you. You have to change the terms of the fight. Choose different ground. Bring an advantage. Make it about something you are better at. Get help.
Good play is not good luck. It is good positioning.
| Attribute | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Psyche | Mental force, magical power, will. The most important attribute in this chronicle. |
| Strength | Raw physical power, crushing grip, endurance in a grapple. |
| Endurance | Stamina, resistance to damage and fatigue, how long you last. |
| Warfare | Tactics, weapons skill, command, strategy — all combat judgment. |
Ranks: Anyone in the game is superhuman by Shadow standards. What matters is your rank relative to other player characters and to the NPCs you meet. Being ranked fourth of four in Warfare does not make you bad at fighting — it means three people you know are better.
Everyone starts with 100 points.
The four Attributes are auctioned one at a time, openly. Players bid points. Highest bidder gets first rank in that Attribute, second-highest gets second, and so on. You pay what you bid.
This is the most important part of creation and it is done together, in public. It determines the pecking order of the entire cast.
Bidding advice for new players:
💡 Psyche matters most in this chronicle. This is a game of courts, negotiation, sorcery, and psychic confrontation. Warfare matters, but you will talk far more than you fight.
The major Powers and roughly what they cost:
| Power | Points | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Pattern Imprint | 50 | Walk Shadow at will. Find anything. The Amber birthright. |
| Logrus Mastery | 45 | Extend into Shadow, retrieve things, sense magic, sorcery framework. The Chaos birthright. |
| Trump Artistry | 40 | Create working Trumps. Communication and travel. Rare and valuable. |
| Shape Shifting | 35 | Change form. Chaos-native. |
| Broken Pattern | 25 | A degraded, dangerous version of Pattern. Available to Shadow-dwellers. |
| Conjuration | 20 | Create objects out of Shadow-stuff. |
| Sorcery | 15 | Prepare and cast spells. Does not require Pattern or Logrus — but you need somewhere to hang your spells. |
| Power Words | 10 | Single-word effects, fast and limited. |
You do not need Conjuration to take Sorcery. They are separate.
Points can also buy Artifacts (magic weapons, useful items), Creatures (allies, mounts, servants), Personal Shadows (a world of your own), or Constructs (like Merlin's Ghostwheel).
Cheapest useful items start around 1–2 points. A one-point Personal Shadow can be as detailed as you like — put as much into it as you want.
Points left over become Good Stuff. Luck tilts your way. Strangers are inclined to like you. Coincidences work out.
Spend more than 100 and you take Bad Stuff. You get more toys, and the universe develops opinions about you. Things go wrong. People distrust you on sight.
Both are legitimate choices. Bad Stuff makes for lively play if you want it.
You do not have to use these. They are starting points, sorted by origin. Nobody starts knowing each other — the prologue is where you meet.
Each concept lists a capability and a problem. The problem is the more useful half — a character who can only do things has nothing to play.
📝 Black Zone players: if you would rather have access than standing, you can arrive as part of the Chaos envoy's retinue instead of as an independent delegate. You carry less formal weight — but you hear what he says when he thinks no Amberite is listening. Tell the GM which you want.
The Diplomat's Apprentice — Raised in Castle Amber, trained in protocol and languages, sent because you are useful and expendable in that order. High Psyche, low Warfare. Your problem: everyone assumes you are exactly what you appear to be, and you have not decided whether that is an advantage.
The Ranger — One of Julian's, or trained by his people in Arden. You know forests, tracking, and how to survive things that hunt you. High Warfare or Endurance. Your problem: the Courts have no forests, and everything you are good at works differently there.
The Bastard — Acknowledged but not celebrated. You walked the Pattern to prove something. High Endurance, Bad Stuff optional. Your problem: you have something to prove and the Courts can smell it.
The Trump Artist — Rare, valuable, and immediately of interest to everyone in the Courts. High Psyche, Trump Artistry. Your problem: your cards reveal things about you to anyone sophisticated enough to read them, and the Courts are full of such people.
The Junior House Member — A noble of one of the five Houses, sent to observe the Amberites, or attached to them as a courtesy. Logrus, Shape Shifting. Your problem: your House has its own instructions for you, and they are not the same as the mission.
The Patternfall Veteran — You fought in the war and lost. High Warfare or Endurance. Your problem: some of the people you are now escorting killed people you knew.
The Exile — You left the Courts, or were removed from them, and you have been in Shadow ever since. Now someone wants you back. Your problem: you know why you left. Nobody else does.
The Sorcerer — Trained in the Ways, skilled and ambitious. High Psyche, Sorcery, Logrus. Your problem: sorcery needs a power source, and the good ones all belong to somebody.
The Golden Circle is Amber's alliance — Shadow kingdoms with individual treaties granting Amber's protection and privileged trade. Most are relatively close to Amber, though membership is a matter of compact rather than geography.
The Heir — Royalty of a Golden Circle kingdom, in Amber as a guarantee of your realm's good behaviour. Your problem: you are a hostage with excellent manners, and everyone at both courts knows it.
The Merchant Prince — Your family's fortune runs on the Amber trade. You are here because a treaty means new markets. Your problem: you are the only person on this mission who is thinking about money, and you are right to.
The Sworn Sword — A Golden Circle warrior who served Amber in the war and stayed. High Warfare. Your problem: you are loyal to Amber but you are not of Amber, and both sides will remind you.
The Broken Pattern Sorcerer — Somewhere in the Shadows near Amber you found one of the flawed reflections of the Pattern, and you walked it. You have real power and it is wrong in ways you do not fully understand. Broken Pattern, Sorcery. Your problem: both courts consider you an anomaly, and one of them may want to study you.
💡 Why this is a Golden Circle concept rather than a Black Zone one: Broken Patterns are reflections of the Pattern, and this chronicle uses the model Merlin describes to Jasra — they degrade with distance, the first nine workable in three tiers of three, with a wider chasm at each step. The usable ones are therefore the ones near Amber. Out toward the Courts you are at the far end of that gradient, which is the wrong end to go looking.
The Black Zone is Chaos's equivalent of the Golden Circle — favoured Shadows near the Courts. Trading partners, potential fiefdoms, and the raw manpower for armies. Just as Amber has Arden, the Black Zone holds private hunting preserves for the Lords of Chaos.
The Client-Ruler — You rule a Black Zone Shadow at the sufferance of a Chaos House. Your problem: your patron House expects reports, and your people expect protection, and the treaty may make one of those impossible.
The Pit-Diver — Ossary-born, or trained by people who were. You go over the Rim after artifacts of creation and you come back up, which is the part most people cannot do. High Endurance, and a steadiness that reads as recklessness to anyone who has never stood at the edge. Your problem: the dives have stopped. Whatever you are worth to these people now, it is not your trade.
The Hunt Servant — Raised in a Chaos lord's hunting preserve, skilled with beasts and terrain, elevated because someone noticed you. Your problem: you know exactly how the Lords of Chaos regard the people of the Black Zone, and now you are travelling with Amberites who regard you the same way.
Posting rhythm: aim for a substantial post every day or two. Quality over speed.
The 48-hour rule: on major beats, if you have not posted in 48 hours the GM will move your character defensively so the scene does not stall. You lose nothing permanent — the story just keeps moving.
Write what you do, not what happens. Describe your character's action and intent. The GM narrates the result. "I lunge for his sword arm" rather than "I disarm him."
Private threads are normal and encouraged. This is a game about secrets. You will have conversations the other players do not see. That is the point.
Your character does not know what you know. Reading another player's private scene does not mean your character heard it.
Pick one of these, or invent your own. The Golden Circle is explicitly a matter of compact rather than geography — a new member state needs no more justification than a treaty, so inventing one is entirely legitimate. Black Zone realms are similarly open.
These have real canonical texture and existing political conflicts you can be embedded in.
Begma — A major Golden Circle kingdom, agricultural and prosperous, directly south of Amber. Prime Minister Orkuz, his wife Kinta, and their daughters Coral and Nayda. Begma keeps an embassy in Amber. It has a long-running dispute with Kashfa over the duchy of Eregnor.
Playing a Begman: you come from a functioning bureaucratic state with real diplomatic experience. Your people know how treaties work and will expect you to protect their Eregnor claim.
Kashfa — A sword-and-sorcery kingdom, capital Jidrash. Recently came under King Rinaldo (Luke), son of Brand, with Coral as his queen. Luke intends to make Kashfa a major trading port and wants both a treaty with Begma and a resolution over Eregnor.
Playing a Kashfan: your king assassinated a Prince of Amber and Random knows it. Your kingdom is new to the Golden Circle, ambitious, and not entirely trusted.
Eregnor — A contested duchy between Kashfa and Begma, described in the sourcebook as "just barely within the Golden Circle." Claimed by both neighbours. Dalt's homeland — he sold his mercenary force to the locals on the promise of defending them from either claimant.
Playing an Eregnorian: your constituency has an unresolved problem before the treaty even starts. You are from a place two larger neighbours both consider theirs, defended by a mercenary with his own agenda.
Rebma is not a client kingdom and does not hold a trade treaty. It is Amber's reflection beneath the sea, with its own Pattern (reversed), its own sovereign — Queen Moire — and a relationship with Amber that runs through blood rather than commerce.
The history: Random was tried and sentenced in Rebma for his treatment of Moire's daughter Morganthë. His sentence was to marry Vialle, a blind Rebman noblewoman, and remain a year. The marriage outlasted the sentence. Vialle is now Queen of Amber. Martin, Random's son by Morganthë, is Rebman-born and of Amber's line.
Moire has historically been willing to hold Amberites accountable. Rebma is a sister-kingdom with a long memory, not a dependency.
Playing a Rebman: you have no obvious commercial stake in an Amber–Chaos treaty. But Rebma has its own queen on Amber's throne. You may be here as Vialle's eyes rather than Random's — which, given what Vialle has recently been divining about ancient powers, is a genuinely interesting position to occupy.
Real place-names from the books, but with little established detail. Build them out as you like.
Ghenesh — Home of the Moonriders, who invaded and were thwarted centuries ago; Benedict held them off at Jones Falls. Whether Ghenesh is a current Golden Circle member, a former one, or something else entirely is not firmly established. All the detailed material circulating online is fan campaign content.
Deiga — Appears in Amber reference material as a Golden Circle kingdom, but with little canonical detail. Competing fan accounts describe it as either a small island kingdom across the Eastern Sea with a formidable navy, or a crossroads realm where the shadow-paths converge. Pick one or invent your own.
⚠️ Do not confuse Deiga with Deela the Desacratrix — Dalt's mother, a militant religious figure, and unrelated.
Canon names essentially nothing here, which makes it wide open. What the sourcebook establishes is the function: the Black Zone holds the Courts' trading partners, potential fiefdoms, the raw manpower their armies are drawn from, and private hunting preserves for the Lords of Chaos.
The geography that matters: Black Zone realms do not sit on a map. They sit along the ways that lead to the Courts. Fire Gate is canon — a way-exchange in Shadow near the Courts, a high promontory of white stone beneath a black sky beside a black sea, two semicircles of pale flame bracketing the arrival point. Merlin faces the sea, counts to the fourteenth flickering tower on his left, and walks toward it. Numbered exits, converging ways. That is what the Black Zone is organised around.
⚠️ The four realms below are invented for this chronicle, built from canon function rather than canon names. Nothing about them is Zelazny. Modify freely.
Grew up around a way-exchange. Guides, brokers, translators, moneychangers, and the inns where travellers between Shadows sleep. Nobody rules Ghyre outright, because everyone needs it neutral.
Patron: Jesby, quietly. The intelligencers would naturally control the place everyone passes through.
Autonomy: High — Ghyre's usefulness is its independence.
Your problem: your realm's entire livelihood is knowing who went where and selling it. Now you are the one being watched, and you know exactly how good your people are at it.
Grim uplands under a permanently bruised sky. Corrash has supplied Hendrake with soldiers longer than anyone counts. Its nobility is the officer corps — a Corrashi child's rank is decided by which regiment their family serves.
Patron: Hendrake, totally.
Autonomy: Low. Corrash has no economy independent of war.
Your problem: peace is an existential threat to your homeland. If Amber and Chaos sign, Corrash's entire social order has no purpose. You may be the only person in the delegation who genuinely does not want the mission to succeed — and you may not admit that to yourself for several chapters.
Beautiful, forested, and owned. Sceld is a game park. Its people are permitted to live there and to serve as beaters, gamekeepers, and trackers when a Chaos lord comes to hunt. They are not permitted to hunt.
Patron: Sawall — or Chanicut, if you would rather keep Sawall uncomplicated.
Autonomy: Almost none.
Your problem: you are from a place your patron considers scenery. You were elevated because someone noticed you were competent, and you know precisely how conditional that is. You also know how the Lords of Chaos discuss Sceld when they think no Scelder is listening — and now you are travelling with Amberites who would think of your homeland the same way, if they thought of it at all.
Close enough to the Abyss that the sky is wrong. Ossary's trade is Pit-diving — descending beyond the Rim to bring back artifacts of creation. Dangerous, lucrative, and the only thing Ossary has ever been good for.
Patron: none formally. Ossary sells to whoever buys, which in practice means Chanicut handles the licensing.
Autonomy: nominal, and eroding.
Your problem: 🔥 the divers have stopped. For the first time in a generation, operations are suspended — whirlwinds in the depths, wings of fire, blasts of new-minted matter. Your realm's economy has collapsed and nobody in the Courts has noticed or cares. You are here partly because you need someone powerful to care.
💡 GM note: Ossary plugs a player directly into the chronicle's deep layer with an entirely mundane motive — they are not chasing cosmology, they are trying to get their town working again. The suspension of Pit-diving is canon, unexplained, and happening right now in the timeline.
💡 Whatever you choose, answer this before the auction: what does your homeland need from this treaty, and what would it cost them if the negotiations went badly?