I originally said that constructs or augmented humans were equally okay, but thinking further on it, that could dilute the Children of Oberon schtick. One cyborg (an "adopted" Child) is okay for contrast, but the other characters should be made from scratch. Every character has a remote terminal of the Great Machine, but otherwise can be mechanical, biological, or a combination. Regardless of their composition, though, they should be able to pass for human, at least in a trenchcoat and slouch hat, in bad lighting.
Since Amber is at this point only a couple of hundred years old, characters should be 50 or younger, and only the oldest one or two will have met the previous generation.
You know about names and descriptions and personalities and illustrative background incidents, but for this, you also need two motivations. One motivation should be "The glory of Amber" or "Impress Oberon" or something along those lines. (You can change it later if you become cynical and embittered.) The other motivation can be whatever you like: "Get X to reciprocate my love", "Build an army of radioactive cyborg cephalopods to conquer the Aether", "Beat down every other martial artist in existence", whatever.
In a fit of... something, we are using Truth & Justice, the superhero version of the PDQ system, which can be downloaded for free from Atomic Sock Monkey. This may yet turn out to be a poor idea, but we can always switch to Hero.
As per the PDF above. You get a total of +10 to divide among your qualities, so the possibilities are:
You also have to have a weakness, something you aren't good at or can't resist. It doesn't have to seem major -- one of the examples in the T&J book is "Poor singer" -- but it will come up. (The different between a behavioral weakness and a motivation is that a weakness is negative where a motivation is positive: "Can't resist a pretty face" vs "Collect a harem of the most beautiful women in the Aether".) A weakness is treated as a poor [-2] quality, although you often don't roll it.
Powers are like super-scale qualities. They are rated in the same way, but powers trump qualities: even average [+0] Super-Strength is better than master [+6] Thews.
Unlike qualities, which default to +0, the default for a power is to not have it, so you do have to allocate +1 to a power to get it at average [+0]. Since you start with a total of +6 to allocate to powers, the possibilities are:
The power "Remote Terminal" is mandatory at the +0 level (costing 1 of your 6 points), which gets you the ability to move through the Aether and to communicate with Amber (or, through the switchboard, with your siblings), and lets you draw energy to power your non-human parts. The only justification I can think of to get this at a higher level is to have experimental aetheric/psychic equipment installed.
Most characters will have the power "Construct" at some level. At +0, you are powered by your remote terminal, so you don't need to breath, eat, or sleep very often (although you do need some food and oxygen to maintain your living parts, and will go mad if you don't sleep once in a while). At +2, you're a robot, but still made of normal materials, so molotov cocktails, live power lines, and vats of liquid nitrogen are still dangers. At +4, only the most extreme environments will damage you. Also, having the "Construct" power makes you difficult to kill in that if your brain and remote terminal can be recovered and taken back to the labs in Amber, you can get a new body.
With any remaining power points, you can buy cool construct powers. Super-strength, invulnerability, built-in heat ray, wings, poison glands, regeneration, stuff like that.
If you want to have fewer powers and more qualities, you can buy that as a power, and get additional points to buy qualities equal to 2 plus twice the cost of the power. (Thus, the minimum is 4 points of qualities in exchange for a +0 power.)
You can limit a power, so that some part of what the obvious description of the power should encompass, doesn't work. (The book example is Flight, limited so that the character can't fly more than 6 feet off the ground.) This doesn't get you more points to buy powers with, but when the limitation comes up, you get a hero point. If you overcome it in an especially cool way, you get another hero point. Hero points can be spent to display your awesomeness and avoid humiliation; more on that later.
A vulnerability (which can be physical, mental, social, or professional) doesn't let you do anything cool, but it does get you hero points. When a vulnerability comes into play, the afflicted character:
You start with 5 Hero Points, and have a maximum capacity of 10.
This file was last modified at 1639 on 04Sep06 by trip@idiom.com.