A very special group. It was obvious, right from that first day in Milwaukee, on a Sunday morning in August of 1986. They came from all over. A couple of guys from Florida, two females from New Jersey, lone role-players from Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Vermont, Wisconsin and, of course, a trio from my home state of Michigan. Each came in response to the modest flyers Thad posted in a half-dozen places around the convention. Strangers. It was the very first time that a group of strangers had come together to play the Amber Diceless Role-Playing System. Sure, we had been playing in Detroit for nearly a year. But that was a home town crowd, packed with players from all my regular campaigns and previous play-tests. These were strangers. Critical strangers. Carol Dodd was the harshest of the potential critics. "Prove it," she seemed to be saying, "prove that you can run Amber, a place I know and love. Run it, and just try not make a fool out of yourself." After a spirited Attribute Auction I faced one rough task of Game Mastery. The first time I ran Amber I allowed myself two weeks between creating the characters and starting play, plenty of time for figuring out player character background and parentage. "You saw your father rarely while you were growing up," I told Carol, twenty-five minutes after the close of the Bidding War, "and Bleys was not there when your mother died. He showed up afterwards, and set you upon the Pattern...” A few weeks later I received the first pages of Bronwyn’'s Tale. Flip to page 33 of this journal and read what I saw back then. I knew I had to publish it. Amberzine started there. Erick Wujcik March, 1992