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This page describes Everway element scores as they are used in House of Cards. Some of this material was developed by Jim Henley for the Amberway II game.
Your character has four elements: Air, Earth, Fire, and Water. Values for the elements start at a minimum of 1 and go to a maximum of 10. The score values double for each increase, so a character with a 4 Air is twice as airy (observant, quick-witted, etc.) as one with a 3 Air. Every character has a specialty in each element, which is an area where the character is effectively at +1.
| Everway Scale |
Amber Scale |
Comments |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | - | - |
| 2 | - | - |
| 3 | 1 | Average human |
| 4 | 2 | "Chaos-level" |
| 5 | 3 | "Amber-level" |
| 6 | 4 | - |
| 7 | 5 | - |
| 8 | 6 | - |
| 9 | 7 | - |
| - | 8 | - |
| - | 9 | - |
| 10 | 10 | Oberon, Dworkin |
Starting characters have a maximum value of 7 in any element. Elders may have higher elements, especially in their area of power. For instance, Corwin may have an Earth of greater than 7. However, his Water probably isn't that high.
Your character is a member of the Royal House of Amber, which means he or she is generally stronger, tougher, and better than the ordinary mortals around him or her. In Amberway, we acknowledge this extraordinary status by putting Amber PCs on a +2 scale compared to shadow creatures. That is, when you compare your score in an element to that of a shadow person for resolution (of, for example, combat), your character is at +2 compared to the shadow person. A score of 4 Fire would be an effective score of 6 Fire, for instance, when resolving a combat against a shadow person. The chart on this page shows how the conversion operates.
Some powerful shadow characters and creatures operate at the same scale as the PCs. The GMs will perform any necessary conversions; the chart is merely to give the players an idea of how the GMs measure element scores for comparisons.
Comparing the elemental values to the ADRPG system, a 3 in an element is roughly equivalent to Amber rank, with 2 as Chaos rank, and 1 as Human rank. This meshes nicely and not coincidentally with the fact that a 3 score in an element in Everway is human normal.