Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber is a ten book cycle, published in two phases. The first ran from 1970 through 1978 and features Corwin, the second from 1985 through 1991 and feature’s Corwin’s son Merlin. When Gygax references Amber in Appendix N, he is only referring to the first set of five novels, obviously, but the whole series forms up a very nice whole, I think.
The events of the novels are too intricate to relate. Suffice it to say that Amber is the only real city and its royal family are reality bending, semi-immortal sorcerers. An infinity of other worlds exists, though, and they are all shadows cast by Amber itself. Our Earth is one of them. Amberites can travel through Shadow, manipulating it and taking advantage of time differentials to master skills and weave elaborate, murderous plots. It is good stuff, written in Zelazy’s trademark punchy style. I read each book in about a day.
Confession: for a long time, I had no idea exactly what Amber inspired in D&D. When I figured it out, I felt rather daft. The strange, infinity of Shadow, the raging Chaos at the bottom of it all, the way the Amberites traverse and bend reality, all that informs what would eventually become the D&D multiverse and its Great Wheel. Me, a Planescape stan, not realizing this for years, is just plain embarrassing.
I don’t own snazzy old copies, just the recent and rather aesthetically dull omnibus, so today’s post is the Visual Guide to Castle Amber (1988), a kind of literary sourcebook of a type that was popular for genre series in the 80s. It is fun, narrated by Corwin’s sister Flora, and is essentially a guided tour, with maps, of the castle, Amber’s history and its inhabitants. I am not crazy about Todd Cameron Hamilton’s airbrushy paintings (never pictured Corwin as Timothy Dalton TBH), but I quite like James Clouse’s line drawings. Weirdly, the manticore doesn’t have wings. Which I would usually applaud, but in the books, they definitely do, so that is weird. And maybe the source of the winged D&D manticore I so loathe.
