A is for Amberwyne

Once upon a Fantasy Hero roleplaying campaign, my name belonged to someone else. I claimed it during a Changeling the Dreaming roleplaying campaign as a sidhe childing whom made everyone’s jaw drop with her odd way of thinking. Indeed I’d suffered severe damage, being ravaged of my power by a leanhaun I loved. Some of this conflict along with myself made its way into The Keep, an online interactive fantasy roleplaying/writing project with lots of yaoi and yuri. This was where I met Rhane. In The Keep. I was the manifestation of her lost innocence, taken on physical form due to her abuse from vampires and a leanhaun. The leanhaun, Fidessa stuck around, too, becoming an enchantress with a penchant for curses and playing with me in The Players Are the Thing. She’s the ultimate villain in the roleplaying game Rhane is playing in, while I am Rhane’s character. You may have noticed our scribbler had a passion for roleplaying games. A lot of us (her characters) were created for roleplaying games. Only she got attached to us, writing stories for us. The Players Are the Thing is a work in progress involving not only her former roleplaying characters, but a roleplaying game itself. Our game gets entirely too real when the Game Master’s dice are cursed by her own villain. Fidessa learned she was nothing but a plot device in some disillusioned woman’s roleplaying game. She is not amused. She decides to show Beatrix (the disillusioned woman) just how unamused she is. It’s up to me and the other characters to save our players from themselves and their dice, undoing ‘Dessa’s mischief. I was already cleaning up a lot of her messes. My friend, Isolde and I are were coping with her curses, traps, and monsters she’d scattered across our land. I wasn’t entirely sure what ‘Dessa was up to. Once upon a time I was very close to her, her student, lover, and companion until I learned what she’d done to Isolde and her mentor, trapping living souls in marble to make their scupting a more “genuine artistic process”. I ended up leaving ‘Dessa with Isolde after freeing the souls. Since that event, it’s been one curse or trap after another Fidessa has been leaving. We’ve been lucky to have Rhiannon warning us of what my former mentor is up to, although Isolde insists we can’t trust Rhiannon. Isolde doesn’t trust anything she’s learned from Rhiannon and ‘Dessa. She doesn’t want to believe we’re just characters in a roleplaying game. I wasn’t so surprised. I’d been dreaming of Rhane, seeing visions of Rhane. My bond with my player is much closer than Isolde’s is to hers. This gives me a much better chance of reaching out to Rhane through her daydreams, warning her about Fidessa and her dice. All of this, the plot of The Players Are the Thing has evolved over time. All this came from our scribbler’s love, not only for her characters from roleplaying games, but of roleplaying games themselves. There’s been a lot of jokes between players about cursed dice. There’s been a lot of difficulty for women in roleplaying games with alternate sexualties, wanting to play alternate sexualities within them over the years. This has resulted in women forming their own roleplaying troupes like this. Our scribbler wished to show some of this, along with how roleplaying games could be a creative, helpful process. Yes, Beatrix’s dice may be cursed, but I’m helping Rhane to enjoy life again, to channel the richness of her creative inner life into the foundation of a happiness which will last. The Players Are the Thing are the culmination of all of this. I share a bond with Rhane many may find questionable, for I am not real. Just because I’m not real doesn’t mean I can’t help. This is my conflict, my struggle, and my goal in my story; to help my player once I become aware of her. To help everyone to be a little happier, to grow and change to meet the conflicts which await us in the campaign ahead.