This game's background came from a quick Amber session at Dragon*Con '97 in Atlanta this past June.  Daric had play-tested the origin story, (The Uncommon Cold, the same name as the current FTF campaign), over e-mail before running it at D*C, and during those play-tests he decided that The Uncommon Cold would work best if we all played as Elders.  Player charcters, if I am remembering correctly, were Benedict, Brand, Flora, Llewella, Random, Caine, Julian and Gérard, leaving Corwin, Eric, Deirdre, Bleys and Fiona as NPCs.  Tracy Worcester was playing Llewella, I was playing Flora, Cathy Klessig wasn't there, because at that time she was still living in Detroit, and Tom Damon was just lurking around, watching what was happening.  As far as playing in character was concerned, everybody did an exceptional job of portraying their Elder, especially since only Tracy, Brand's player, and I had read the books, (once again, if I'm remembering correctly).  A special Tip O' My Fedora to Random's player, (sorry, but I forgot your name), and his "I take the captain's hat and put it on my head at a jaunty angle," and also one to Brand's player, (I forgot your name, too), who, as the game progressed, made me think twice as to whether Brand was a short-haired red-head or a long-haired guy with brown hair and a goatee.  But enough of this.  On to the overview of The Uncommon Cold...

For time's sake, this will be quick and to-the-point.  Unfortunately, this will gloss over details and all of the excellent quotes that were said, but it'll get you to Daric's current FTF game quicker.

(BTW, this takes place a few centuries before Corwin was exiled to Shadow Earth, back in the Golden Days of Amber.)  Earlier in the day, a ship arrived from out of Shadow, but even before the ship got into sight range, the news that it was a plague-ship was already in the palace.  Oberon ordered that no one be allowed onto or off of the ship once it docks, and that he would decide what to do with it once that happened.  Well Deirdre, being the kind soul that she was back then, went to the ship to help some of them, and later on that same day during the party held in her honour, (it was thrown on Oberon's order just because he felt like having a party), she puked in her mashed potatoes and then passed out in them.  After a few game-hours, word was all through the True Realm that there was a plague, and that even the descendants of Oberon were not immune to it.  Players asked what Shadow the plague-ship came from, and, lacking a better name, Daric said, "America."  It didn't take us players long to find out that walking the Pattern would cure us.  At just before the middle of the game, (real-time wise), I had Flora walk the Pattern, (this was before she knew about it curing us), and ordered it to send her to America.  When she got there, the first thing she saw, after seeing the oblong market-place, was the Broken Pattern right smack dab in the middle of the market.  At this point, word quickly spread among us about the Broken Pattern in America.  Fiona wanted to come through and see it herself, so Flora brought her through the Trump contact.  Eventually, Llewella got us all back to her secret higher-than-nanotech level medical facilities, and gene-coded the virus.  Flora and Fiona were without a doubt able to identify the image of the gene-coding as perfectly matching the Broken Pattern of America.  Noticing this, ideas were formed.  We decided to call the original virus Virus A.  We then made a second virus, consisting of the portion of the Pattern that was missing from the virus and its Broken Pattern, and called it Virus B.  We also made a third virus, a combination of the two, or a complete Pattern, and called it Virus C.  For some reason, Flora was still without virus, so Llewella had her donate copious amounts of blood with which to experiment.  Flora's blood was infected with Virus A, and it spread through the blood as fast as it had on all the other victims.  A second sample was then infected with with Virus B, and it infected the blood much slower than Virus A had.  Before moving on to Virus C, two lines of thought had erupted: either this will cure us, or it'll kill us quicker than the original strain.  The test on Virus C was then performed.  If one wanted to have a bet on which would be quicker, an Amberite blinking or Virus C infecting the blood sample, the winning bet would be on the Virus.  At this point, all the players decided that the only person who would survive longer than one heartbeat with Virus C would be Corwin, and even he would only survive for a total of 1/2 heartbeats.  Llewella, once she found out about what Virus C did, was about to throw it into the incinerator, when Brand stopped her.  He said that we should all hold on to it, "just in case."  Llewella vehemently and loudly protested, saing that she "didn't want to die!",  but Brand calmly explained that it could be put to good use if the need ever came up.  Llewella looked at Brand and then torched Virus C.  Brand shrugged.  It was then that something dawned on them.  Llewella asked Caine to Trump one of his captains down at the docks and have him send through one of the captured American sailors.  Llewella tested his blood and found antibodies.  She then had antibodies made for the rest of Amber, and stopped the plague.  Shortly after that Oberon forcibly admitted America into the Golden Circle, and that's about where the current game begins.  I'm playing Vyvyan, son of Flora, and Tracy is playing Jorel, daughter of Llewella; Daric gave us the options of playing children of who we played at D*C.  Tom is playing a character of his who he didn't really get to play very much in a previous campaign of Daric's, (the character goes by the name of Ferdinand and is Benedict's son), and since Cathy joined us, well, I'm still not sure about her character.  One thing that needs to be said about all of us, though, is that we all annoy the shite out of our respective Elders.
 

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