I’m not sure how many Sandman fans read this, but for several years now I’ve been trying to figure out how to adapt the storyline from “World’s End” to a one-shot. The basic shtick is that an odd band of people from different times and realities all end up in an inn as reality is torn assunder about them. To pass the time, they tell stories. Each of the stories revolves around the character Dream in some fashion.

That’s always seemed like a great parallel to the giant Shadow storm in Courts of Chaos and so I’ve wondered how I could adapt it to Amber in some fashion.

My first attempt had revolved around players having standard Amber characters basically playing Baron Munchausen, while also trying to obtain from the other characters something that their character required but was in the possession of another character. I did a trial run of it locally, and it sucked pretty hard. It could have been re-worked, but it was pretty iffy to begin with so I shelved the whole thing.

Today it occured to me that it may work if each player were to essentially run a mini-game, each about an hour at length. So, each player would present the game as the story their character is telling, but the other players would play out the story themselves. I started to scratch that idea, since getting people to offer to GM is a pain in the ass in the first place. Getting people to sign up for a game where they would be expected to GM would be a failure from the get-go.

But then a devil on my shoulder cleared his throat and said, “Well, what if each player just had to come up with a concept, perhaps even at the game itself, and then the other players may just have to come up with simple, easily defined characters and the whole game was some player-narrated story-game?”

And that is when I knew there was no God.

Now I have to see if I have the patience or stomach to come up with a simple story-game mechanic. I could probably use something poached from InSpectres or PTA, but ultimately I’d want something that would allow players to come up with a broadly defined character in under a minute.

The earliest I could probably run this is ACUS, which would give me several months to try and do a trial run of it.