House of Cards: Lurking and Adding Players

House of Cards has a number of lurkers who are friends of people in the game, or sometimes their spouses. Joining the list to lurk gives you access to both of the lists, the ability to post to the OOC list (but not the IC list) and if you're interested, the Discord. If you ask to lurk, this is what happens:

1. We receive the request to lurk.
2. We ask the players if it's OK for you to lurk. Usually this is nominal, but we have had a case where we had exes in the game and that worked out badly, so now we check.
3. Players weigh in, which takes no more than a week.
4. Barring an unexpected demurral, we add you to the lists and the players welcome you.

Very occasionally, House of Cards recruits new players. Lurkers have first choice of any available roles, subject to player veto (and for the same reason). If the number of slots available is greater than the number of lurkers, the GMs may ask for suggestions or recruit among the greater Amber community.

Character development for new characters after gamestart follows most of the procedures that we used for the original characters. The major differences are as follow:

• We don't use vision cards because we now have enough information to flesh out characters and their place in the world instead.
• We select the character's entry point to best meet the needs of the current plot.
• We restrict parentage, because we have to have a reason why an involved parent wouldn't have brought their child to Amber for Random's coronation. This usually means the new character's parent doesn't know who they are. (In Silhouette's case, her mother believed she was dead and that Silhouette, although clearly a member of the family, is not who she claims to be.) New characters may also be the children of current PCs or younger generation NPCs.

We tend to say House of Cards is in the endgame stage because many plots are rolling toward a conclusion. However, the game has been going on for almost two decades, and even with the end in sight, there's a long way left to go to get there even without considering the long-bruited House of Cards II. After all, it took about twelve years to get to what the GMs thought was the main plot in the first place.