About the Page

This page documents the background and story of Shenrakari, a character created for an Amber-variant roleplaying game. While this subsite's content is present largely for the benefit of the players and GM of the game, I'm trying to take the background and diaries created for it as opportunities to get more experience in writing fiction. I invite any and all to puruse the material here and send along feedback via emailing me (mancuso@umich.edu), keeping in mind that I'm not giving the attention to readability and flow chapter-to-chapter that I would to a more serious writing effort.

For the curious, see also more info on...

• ...the game
• ...the GM

Background

What follows here is the background material created for the character. This is in various forms, mostly non-narrative, and is basically reference information about Shen, his people, his world and his philosophy.

(Eventually, I hope to consolidate and organize all of this info into a more intuitive layout, but as I know myself well enough to know I'll almost never get to that, I present it here in it's current form. Pardon the crummy formatting in some cases - it was quick and dirty.)

• Original overview
• Other people in Shen's world
• The character quiz: interesting specifics
• On Shen's People
• Working Glossary of Shen's Extra Vocab

Diaries

While these are called "diaries" as a matter of course (character diaries are often used in Amber campaigns both to help document the campaign and to aid players in better developing their characters), they are written instead in a narrative form. Each entry corresponds to the occurances surrounding one session of the game, and might be best thought of as a short "chapter" in the narrative sense. Again, I am not taking the extra efforts to revise these or write them with chapter-to-chapter continuity in mind, but I would hope that they would, on the whole, serve to tell Shen's tale, as well as each provide some decriptive value to the curious reader.

• Pre-session: introduction
• Session 0 (Character creation): With WInter Rains
• Session 1: Seven Shadows Out
• Session 2: Parhen Vitan
• Session 3: An Unseen Fire
• Session 4: Things Unsaid
• Session 5: One Wind
• Session 6: Flight
• Session 7: Silence
• Session 8: Wind Seeker
• Session 9: Breathe
• Session 10: The Unweaving
• Session 11: Reflection
• Session 12: The Shape of Scattering
• Session 13: Alone
• Session 14: Kingdom of Promises
• Session 15: Pattern
• Sessions 16-18: Song
• Session 19: Pattern II
• Session 20: Time to Stop
• Session 21: Darkness and Light
• Session 22: Points of Focus
• Session 23: Reflection II
• Diaries for sessions 24-28 coming soon in audio form...
• Session 29: A Sitting - coming soon...
• Session 30: Grasses
• Session 31: A Higher Light
• Session 32: (untitled) - coming soon...
• Session 33: Perfect Balance
• Session 34: Wandering in Circles
• Session 35: Like Waking Out Of A Deep Sleep
• Session 36: Shen Watched
• Session 37: Pattern III

Note

Some of the character names or concepts used in these writings are the creations of the GM and/or the creator(s) of the Amber game and stories, and the rest of the content and text overall are (c)1999, 2000, 2001, 2002 Joseph Mancuso. Please contact me before reproducing or distributing any of this material. Thanks.