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"The future is always a wholeness, a sameness. We're all tall and happy there," she said. "This is why the future fails. It always fails. It can never be the cruel happy place we want to make it."
- Don DeLillo, "Cosmopolis"
First off, this game has been conceived as a horror/survival game, which is in some ways contrary to the spirit of Amber, but even gods have things that they fear. Secondly, I wanted an Amber game set entirely in Shadow. The easiest way was Amber after the apocalypse - Brand won the Patternfall War and the Pattern was erased and he died trying to replace it. Some of the elder amberites died, some lived, some went mad - which ones is only GM knowledge. This, of course, means that some things taken for granted in the Chronicles either were entirely fabricated by Corwin and/or never happened. The entire second series never happened at all. Take nothing as gospel.
Mono No Aware is based around Shadow after the end of things. Amber is gone, and it's loss is felt everywhere, even in places that have never heard of it. There is still joy, but the sadness at the core of things is felt by everyone at some level and many Shadows have become darker and uglier with the passing of Amber. Dark and ugly Amber may have been under its thin veneer of beauty, but it was Real and its light was a very bright thing that shone far and wide but now is no more.
This game will differ from traditional Amber in a lot of ways (the first being that there is no Amber :)). For one, most everyone in Shadow tends to have at least one chaos-ranked stat as the Shadows that survived the war are stronger than other ones, and often very old. Generally, the best in most Shadows have at least one amber-ranked stat so PCs won't be insanely better than everyone else. And they can die. While other interpretations of Amberites tend to the 'nothing can kill them' idea, in this game the elders aren't *that* powerful themselves, and some of them have died. The only thing that's kept most of them alive this long after the Patternfall War was nothing less than Oberons blessing and lots of hiding.
For the curious, this is my take on the stats:
Human - human.
Chaos - very fit human, probable olympic athlete.
Amber - Olympic athlete, easily.
Of course, ranked Amber gets higher than that, and will verge into what others may see as godlike and awe inspiring but you can die the same as others, and by the same means. If someone drops a nuke on you, you're dead. The gods have fallen from their pedestal in Amber and all the worlds have changed.
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