Power-Related Skills

Craft Shadow

• Prerequisite: Manipulate Reality or Shadow Mastery feat.
• Benefit: The character can create a permanent Shadow whose prerequisites the character meets. Crafting a Shadow takes 1 week for each quality the creator wishes to bestow on the Shadow. To craft a shadow, the character must spend 100x of its base DR in XP and use up raw materials (GP) costing 500x its base Vitality Cost. See rules on Shadows in the Artifact section.

Manipulate Pattern Energy

• Prerequisite: Summon Pattern Energy Feat
• Pattern Defense: Concentrate on the Pattern and move its power into your body. This takes a few moments at best, depending on your Wisdom and concentration, but it strengthens your mind, and lends strength to your existence.  A character with this Pattern Defense on is essentially immune to Chaos-generated forces. Likewise, it's difficult or impossible to use invasive Magic on a character who is using the Power in this manner. On the other hand, keeping the power internalized requires real concentration, so the character can't move or fight effectively. If the character's concentration is broken, then the Pattern instantly flickers out.
• Once the Power is summoned to you, you can alter your sight. 
  • Pattern Link: By using Scrying, the character can, once a person has been located, use the Pattern to form a mental link to that person, as in a Trump connection.  Such and effort can be opposed, and is draining in any case.
  • Scrying: By casting out from one's body with Pattern Energy, one may see things far removed. This allows the character to search through a Shadow or Shadows for a specific target.  This effort may be avoided or contested, and the degree of success on the skill check helps determine how long it takes to locate the target. Targets that are close or easy to locate, relative to their surroundings (or happen to be in a place where the use decides to check) can be found quite quickly. For a random search, the base time starts at one hour for something close to the user, and broadens to days or weeks for those things hidden, lost, or very distant.
  • Track Disturbance: The breaks and distortions in Shadow, caused by those who have the Power to move from one Shadow to another, can be detected through the use of the Sight.  The character looks for tiny disruptions in Shadow, attempting to find their source locations in the Shadow being studied, which other Shadows are involved, and what Power was used in the disruption.  How long this takes depends on how old the trail and how major the disruption.  If a single Hellrider passed through the Shadow just minutes before, the traces could be detected in just a minute or two.  If the passage had taken place the day before, it might take an hour to find the traces.  However, if the disturbance was major, as is the case if a vast army was led through, then the traces will be obvious and easy to find even days later. The effectiveness of this is limited by the age of the trail, care the pursued used in covering their trail, number of people being followed, and the Water rank of the person doing the sensing.

* - Skill check might instead be an opposed roll.

Manipulate Probability & Shadow 

• Prerequisite: Manipulate Probability & Shadow Feat

A character can't make something unlikely happen, not without great effort. Small changes can be made without great effort.  Short of money?   Imagine a loose floorboard, under which is hidden a treasure, look and it will be there. Those with this feat are endlessly lucky. What is possible can, with time and effort, be made probable, and what is probable can be made certain. While this power is absolute, it always involves some effort (and, usually, movement). 

In order to affect probability you must usually move. Subtle changes don't require much movement, but the more drastic the change, the more effort, and the more you must move around.  The problem here is that you can easily move right out of one Shadow and into its neighbor.  Second, affecting probability fairly slow; far slower than combat time. If you wish to make use of this feat, it's best if it be prepared before a battle. A minor change, such as the color of a coin, might take as much as a half a minute. Something useful, such as weakening a wall, or making a weapon brittle, could take a minute or more.  

The DR for all such efforts are halved when working on one's Personal Shadow (see Craft Shadow, above), and increased by 150% when working on another's Personal Shadow.

* - Skill check might instead be an opposed roll.

Manipulate Reality  

• Prerequisite: Manipulate Reality feat.

It is possible to create personal Pocket Shadows which can be used for various purposes, brought into existence by a character's warping of Shadow, which can have deadly side effects for the novice. (See Shadow Storms.)   Shadow Pockets can be fixed to a particular location or can be moved around by their creator, thus allowing the character to 'bridge' Shadow from one location to another.  One drawback to Shadow Pockets is their fragility. As artificial constructs they are easily destroyed by the strong touch of Pattern or Logrus energy.

By bringing the Pattern to mind and walking it, you can use the power to change Shadow wholesale. This Power allows you to open Shadow to others, moving those who know nothing of Shadow. Those already Hellriding can be obstructed and/or sidetracked as long as you devote your attention to it. Shift the Shadow that lies in their path, and you can make passage smooth or rough, as you see fit.

The Pattern can also serve as a tool to manipulate whole Shadows and pathways between them. With this method you can alter structure of a Shadow or even erase it altogether. Erasing Shadows is not something you would do lightly as it seems to have a detrimental effect on the overall arrangement of Pattern and Shadow. (Again, see Shadow Storms.)   Doing away with a Shadow either on purpose or by accident will upset things in the larger cosmos. Shadow Storms, shifting of Shadow barriers, and the displacement of established pathways through Shadow can all result from a Shadow being wiped out. An even bigger problem is that Others will likely notice this kind of large-scale interference in the order of things. The difficulty of erasing a Shadow varies: to wipe out a ephemeral wisp of a Shadow near the edge of Chaos is dangerously easy. To eradicate a primordial Shadow that predates Oberon's rule of Amber could very well kill even a skill Master of Shadow.

* - Skill check might instead be an opposed roll.

Shadowwalk  

• Prerequisites: Shadowwalk feat.

Moving through Shadow is done by changing minor things that lay in your path. The character decides that over the next hill will be a patch of blue flowers, around the next corner is a jagged rock face, in the next village is a country fair. Down that alley is a shop dealing in obscure weapons. By such minor changes you move closer to what you seek in Shadow. Shadow Walking is relatively easy since you are changing very subtle, very small details.

As long as someone can see you, you can Lead them through Shadow. A person of the Blood Of Amber can lead any amount of people through Shadow as long as there is a visual link, even if indirect (i.e.: The Amberite can be seen by Troop A, Troop A can be seen by Troop B, and so on) then all parties involved move through Shadow simultaneously.

'Fast and Dangerous: the Hellride'  A problem with the Hellride (in which one thing is unchanged and everything ELSE is changed by the Shadowwalker) is that generally a certain level of speed must be maintained for travel to progress.  Since things change so quickly using this technique, most technological means of travel (such as cars, planes, and boats) won't work at least some of the time, and many tend to use a reliable mount, such as a well-trained horse.  Animals must be specially trained for this activity or they tend to panic and cause the rider difficulties he/she doesn't want during such a stressful and concentration-intensive procedure.
     
Hellriding can get you from one end of Reality to the other in about a week.   Generally three days of Hellriding can get you to and from most places within a Realm. Each new destination takes at least one day to find; those with higher Skill ranks or more experience will need less time to find things.

Slower than Shadow walking is traveling through Shadows where everything is to the character's liking. For example, one can choose to walk through the worlds where there will always be welcoming faces and rosebuds strewn on the roadway. Or, if you choose to travel in a luxurious train, you can stick to those Shadows that contain rails. This is usually known as Selective Shadow Walking, and it is extremely slow but it's very comfortable. Normal Shadow Walking from near Amber to the Courts of Chaos would take approximately six weeks, a year if Selective Shadow Walking is being used. 

Shadowwalking and Hellriding (but not Selective Movement) can also be used to find Creatures and Artifacts. For someone with an 18 Wisdom & Charisma, basic Artifacts take one day to find; those with higher Attributes and more experience will need less time to find things.

Skipping Forward In Time - The character goes to a place where time moves slowly. While the character is spending a few minutes in the "slow time" Shadow, time is speeding hour by hour along in Amber. So a character can leave, spend a few minutes out in Shadow, and return days, or weeks later. It's even possible to find a Shadow that moves so slowly that it becomes almost like a stasis, and where the character can wait for years to pass in Amber.

Holding Back Time - The other handy trick of Shadow time is going out to a "fast time" Shadow, where hours pass relative to minutes ticking in Amber. A character could go to Shadow Earth, sleep 10 hours and return to Amber where only 4 hours have gone by. In faster Shadows it's possible to spend years in preparation, while only a day or so passes in Amber.

Task	DR	Vitality Cost
Moving through Shadow	10	4
Moving through Shadow Quickly	15	6
Leading Others (Slowly)	20	6
Finding a Specific Object	25	6
Finding a generic person	25	6
Hellride	25	8
Selective Shadow Walking	25	4
Following another's Trail Slowly	30*	6
Leading Others (Quickly)	35	10
Finding a Specific Person	35*	6
Finding a Specific Shadow	35	6
Following another's Trail Quickly	35*	10

* - Skill check might instead be an opposed roll.

Use Logrus Energy

• Prerequisite: Summon Logrus Feat
• Logrus Defense: Concentrate on the Logrus and move its power into your body. This takes a few moments at best, depending on your Wisdom and concentration, but it strengthens your mind, and lends strength to your existence.  A character with this Logrus Defense on is essentially immune to Chaos-generated forces. Likewise, it's more difficult to use invasive Magic (charms, etc.) on a character who is using the Power in this manner. On the other hand, keeping the power internalized requires real concentration, so the character can't move or fight effectively. If the character's concentration is broken, then the Power instantly flickers out.
• Once the Power is summoned to you, you can alter your sight. 
  • Scrying: By casting out from one's body, one may see things in far more detail and distance. This allows the character to search through a Shadow or Shadows for a specific target with tendrils of Logrus power.  This effort may be avoided or contested, and the degree of success on the skill check helps determine how long it takes to locate the target. Targets that are close or easy to locate, relative to their surroundings (or happen to be in a place where the use decides to check) can be found quite quickly. For a random search, the base time starts at one hour for something close to the user, and broadens to days or weeks for those things hidden, lost, or very distant.
  • Track Disturbance: The breaks and distortions in Shadow, caused by those who have the Power to move from one Shadow to another, can be detected through the use of the Sight.  The character looks for tiny disruptions in Shadow, attempting to find their source locations in the Shadow being studied, which other Shadows are involved, and what Power was used in the disruption.  How long this takes depends on how old the trail and how major the disruption.  If a single Hellrider passed through the Shadow just minutes before, the traces could be detected in just a minute or two.  If the passage had taken place the day before, it might take an hour to find the traces.  However, if the disturbance was major, as is the case if a vast army was led through, then the traces will be obvious and easy to find even days later. The effectiveness of this is limited by the age of the trail, care the pursued used in covering their trail, number of people being followed, and the Water rank of the person doing the sensing.

* - Skill check might instead be an opposed roll.