Just a few brief thoughts

[zdashamber]

Does anyone else get the impression that Benedict is defined by ever-present rage?

I'm seeing a man who chose to serve his king rather than his family, and was broken thereby. His rage at his brothers is matched by his rage at what Oberon asked him to do to them, and surpassed only by his rage at himself for doing it. His life since has been something of an exercise in throwing good money after bad... After all, if he took the throne against Oberon's wishes, he'd've been broken for nothing. And if he's going to serve the king, he should serve the king as well as he can. And in war he can kill...

Corwin was right to fear him.

Comments

[simonepdx.livejournal.com]

Yes, both my current ongoing convention game, Undertow, and a previous game with a similar-but-diverging startup, Winds That Will Be had just such a Benedict.

In Undertow, Benedict has just been cut off from the rest of shadow, along with Arden, as he refused to see reason in calling off his one-man war against the Fae.... Julian and his son's sacrifice of sacrifices, to be sure, but what do you give to remove someone like Benedict?

Both games are at least in part on line at http://www.indeterminate.net/amber.

[colomon.livejournal.com]

Interesting... the new double serial "historical" campaign(s) I've been toying with takes almost exactly the opposite viewpoint of how that history went -- namely that Benedict's brothers took the fall for what Benedict did. (And Benedict most certainly did not kill them.) Of course, the rage in Benedict is still there in my version -- the difference is once his brothers were killed, he learned how to hide it.

Of course, the reason I haven't written my notions down is that I don't actually remember what is said in the books with respect to that piece of history, and I'd like to be consistent with the Corwin chronicles, anyway.

[cochese.livejournal.com]

My Benedict is a man driven by fear. As a youth he was a fop and a wastrel, and then he saw his siblings get cut down due to politics. Fearing for his life, he decided to pursue warfare as a way of helping himself to feel "safe."

I draw that mainly from Dworkin's "mark of doom" comment.