Elysium Social Diary: April 2016

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Elysium Social Diary

This site started as a blog for an Amber campaign that didn't go far due to situations beyond the game. It did, however, give me a starting point to create some trump sets, and repost some sets that were drawn for this and a previous campaign by Hywel and Heather Phillips.

So here are links to the blog, the trump sets, and the pages for individuals. The personal pages show the collected trumps for each character, both people from Zelazny's books, and characters from the campaigns.

Diaries:

Trump collections:

The Esteemed Abellot - NEW Another new set for 2022. Monochrome book illustrations as trumps.
Battle Trumps - NEW These are a set I made/collected in 2022. The locations are corridors from the same locations I usually use for the shadows. The set is mostly of everyone armed for war.
The Six - The only photo I have of the early days. We hired a 13th century hall for a week of roleplaying, feasting and plotting in the late nineties. The sketch is from a meeting many years later.
The Sketchbook - More images of the models from the Elysium and Mystery set.
The "Bravest" Students - A set based on art by madnesslab on Deviant Art. The additions use South Park avatar creator.
The Trumps of Mystery - A set which is a development of the Elysium cards, based on new photos of the same models and actors.
The Dragon Trumps - I was offline for a while, and found a collection of portraits from a game called Three Kingdoms. I edited them slightly, but they are a Chinese (I think) version of the trumps.
The Trumps of Brynmor - My first set that used photos of the players for the most part. These were doctored to appear as messy paintings. The messiness was so that they didn't just look like bad photographs when printed at the scale of playing cards.
The Trumps of Elysium - My second attempt at a set. These are photos again, this time of mostly very beautiful models. They were altered in software to appear in a "graphic novel" style. I love these, and in my mind, a lot of the characters were this pretty.
The Trumps of Corwin - This set is partly the line drawings of the Elder Amberites from the Amber Diceless Roleplaying books, with the players added in from images in a similar style. The restrictions meant this set took a long time to compile. Many of the new pictures are from the Deviant Art website.
The Trumps of Dworkin - These are some of my favourite trumps. Most are paintings by a brilliant artist called John Larriva. I first saw him on Deviant Art but he now has his own website here.
The Trumps of Gwynfor - Now these are just silly. I had got so familiar with the faces of these characters, or at least the versions I had decided on, that I tried to use a police PhotoFit system. It proved too fiddly for my taste, but I found a website called Avatar Face Maker that allowed me to make the faces I was looking for. They are silly, but I had great fun putting them together.
Amber Tarot Set - I have the physical set of these from my University days, although I can't find them at the moment. I renamed the Major Arcana to try and get as many of the first campaign's characters into the set. I started using the name the "Challenge Generation" for these characters, and it fits nicely. The second campaign's characters then needed a name, and as quite a few were students at Elysium University, they became the "Elysium Generation".
The Trumps of Benedict - I'll admit I don't like this set as much. The art style is interesting, but the source of images ended up with many from one jpeg with all the figures facing to the right. This was, however, where I decided to remove an arm from Aileen's figure (she lost an arm when wizarding) and then went over the other sets and removed her right arm in many cases.
The Royal Portraits - This set started out as a collection of brilliant trumps drawn by an artist on Deviant Art called coupleofkooks. I then used some of their other art to add to the trumps, then looked for portraits in a similar style elsewhere. It took a very long time, but I found a lot of art I liked on the way.
The Trumps of Lorraine - Now these are truly brilliant. Heather Phillips drew them during sessions of the campaign in between dominating the story and challenge, with a few monumental mistakes along the way. I think she was the other player who obsessed about the game almost as much as me. Hywel, our GM, drew the occasional card that I've put in this set too.
The Second Trumps of Gwynfor - I stumbled onto this site, and it seemed to give an evolution of the first anime face site, so I made another set and decided it was by the same Elysium character (who has only appeared on this website).
The Trumps of Alesandra - An even better set of cards by Heather! I hope she draws some more, even if the campaign never goes further. In fact, in an ideal world, I'd love to see her make both this and Lorraine's cards into a "full set". Granted, this would probably take years, so I'm happy to settle for the cards she has drawn.

Personal Pages:

I put a quote either from Zelazny's books, my diaries (including this blog), in character letters or random quotes found on the Internet, at the beginning of each page, mostly so that if viewed on my iPhone they didn't all start with the same disclaimer.

Elder Amberites

Angel
Benedict
Bleys
Brand
Caine
Coral
Corwin
Dalt
Dara
Deirdre
Delwin
Dworkin
Eric
Finndo
Fiona
Flora
Gerard
Julian
Llewella
Mirelle
Oberon
Osric
Random
Sand
Swayvill - Ok, technically not an Amberite, but an old character from the books, so he fits in here best.
Vialle - The quote here is from a private letter from my character, Culain, to the GM. As it was mine, I felt it could be quoted without upset.

Challenge Generation

Aileen
Cevedic
Culain - My character from the first campaign.
Dorian
Farrel
Genevieve - Farrel's sister, only heard of in passing. I was bored and wanted another person to make trumps of.
Greine - He started out blonde, but all my versions ended up as a scary druid!
Julianne
Katerina - Never a player character, also from Chaos, but she is to marry Krest, so fits into this group.
Krest
Logan
Lorraine
Martin - From this generation, but he and Merlin appeared rarely
Merlin - As said about Martin, he's from this group looking from the outside.
Milvus
Qharis
Tarn
Zag

Elysium Generation

Alesandra
Bors
Brynmor - My character from the second campaign.
Enigma - A confusing name, as Julianne got mind scrambled in the previous campaign and called herself "Enigma" for a while.
Finn
Harlequin
Myron
Tanith
Theobald