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Post by Finarvyn on Jul 29, 2007 14:20:53 GMT -5
Neil Randall has actually contributed a lot to the Amberverse.
Two "which-way adventure" books: 1. Seven No-Trump 2. The Black Road War
In addition he was the major creator of The Visual Guide to Castle Amber, which was sanctioned by Roger.
All of them were published during Roger's lifetime and all of them were in some form approved. On the other hand, one of the which-way books centers around a character Derek (son of Eric) who is never mentioned in any other Amber source that I can recall. Of course, with a which-way book there is no single sequence of events that can be fit into a timeline, either, so it's hard to know how these fit into the saga.
The main question here is this: how "official" should material from these books be considered?
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Post by nihilisticmind on Sept 26, 2007 22:50:47 GMT -5
I've heard of the books but I've not read them... Any idea where I can find them? ... tried eBay already and found them, but are they worth buying/reading?
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Post by Finarvyn on Sept 27, 2007 13:36:27 GMT -5
I didn't think that they were that great, but I'm not a huge fan of choose-your-own-adventure style books. The writing style isn't great and isn't terrible, but it's not Roger Zelazny. I don't recall anything really amazing, except that one of the main characters was Derek son of Eric and he's not mentioned in any of the official geneologies.
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Post by nihilisticmind on Sept 27, 2007 18:01:12 GMT -5
Sounds like I should forget they even exist... It's not like I would think of them as Canon, so... Maybe the Derek, son of Eric, thing is a nice addition, though. Anything more you recall about him?
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Post by Finarvyn on Jun 12, 2008 21:04:47 GMT -5
One thing I tried was to map out the possible paths that one could take through the "which-way" books. My thought was that, like a linear RPG adventure, there would be certain points in the storyline where every story had to go in order to get to the end.
My thought was that if I could map this out I would be able to pick those "hard points" and insert them into a timeline as semi-canon.
Drove myself nuts trying to map it all out. Seven No-Trump has 110 passages and The Black Road War has 94. Sure, some of the passages get used more than others, but it was still insane trying to follow through all of the options so eventually I gave up.
I may give it a try again someday. Who knows.
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Post by Finarvyn on Jun 12, 2008 21:11:07 GMT -5
What is interesting about both Seven No-Trump and The Black Road War is that each starts with an introduction by Roger himself.
TBRW has a list of mothers and offspring. There is also a list of "personal colors" for the main characters.
7NT is more of a generic "this is what Amber is" sort of thing and not quite so insightful.
The Visual Guide has a family tree, which is kind of nice. It also has some nice B&W trumps, many of which can be found as online images. (I think they're all done by Todd Hamilton.)
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