House of Cards GM Log

Common Knowledge About Shadow Travel

posted by Ginger at 10:49 PM, September 08, 2003 | Filed under : Traveller's Guide to Amber , Traveller's Guide to Rebma , Traveller's Guide to Shadow | Comments and Followups

One of the players recently asked:

How commonly understood is the idea of “shadow travel” in Amber and Rebma?

It’s not clearly understood by most people in either city.

Amber has the Golden Circle, which is a bunch of places you can go from Amber. To an Amberite before the Sundering, traveling to a GC shadow would be like traveling anywhere else. The idea of “different world” doesn’t really register. Most GC shadows are on close to a 1:1 timeflow with Amber, so how do people tell the difference?

Since the Sundering, it’s like you’ve lost all the trade maps. People don’t understand shadow paths, but they understand the trade routes are lost and that the royal family can travel some places that other people can’t go. That was something intimates of the royal family always understood, but the understanding is spread more widely among the merchant class nowadays. People with minimal contact with royals or the merchant class probably still don’t understand about shadow.

Rebma has the Seaward Kingdoms, a collection of about a half dozen shadows that trade regularly with it. Links to the Seaward Kingdoms have apparently stayed intact based on comments from Valeria, Harga’rel, Thalia, and Conner. In the same way that people in Amber don’t really understand that the GC shadows are shadows, Rebmans don’t understand the same thing about the Seaward Kingdoms.

Given the fact that Rebma is underwater, free shadow travel of the sort known in Amber (“ride into Arden and start shifting”) is, of course, impossible without some sort of magical protection.

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