Recently one of the other guys in the office said, "Hey, I'm going to start up an Amber campaign; you want in on it?" I had read through the office copy of the rulebook, and it seemed interesting enough, so I said, "Sure!" I'd just reread the novels over Christmas, and I knew the basics of the campaign. Since I had a grounding in the world and the rules, my next step seemed obvious: go onto the Net.

I've been lurking around the Internet for about seven years now, and for me it's a more basic research tool than my local library. This can be attributed to a simple fact, which I'm sure somebody has codified into an Axiom of the Net: "For any topic, no matter how offbeat or obscure, somebody somewhere has devoted net resources to it." For instance, once upon a time I was the keeper of the unofficial discography for the San Francisco-based a-cappella group "The Bobs".

This time, however, I was going to search for somebody else's resources. I started on the World Wide Web. (Once, in antediluvian times - i.e, 1990 - I would have checked the Frequently Asked Questions list for the newsgroup rec.games.frp.misc and found an FTP site, but these days the first stop is the Web.)

I went to Yahoo (http: //www.yahoo.com/), which is the Yellow Pages of the Web, and told it to search for sites with the keywords "Amber" and "roleplaying." Sure enough, it found a page, and pretty soon I was staring at a truculent unicorn and a bunch of Amber Diceless material.

Furthermore, that page The Brokedown Palace (www.interrealm.com/p/bear/amber/amber.htmi), had a pile of other links to other places on the Web with Amber material. The design of the Web encourages people with similar pages to link back and forth, so once you've found one resource, you can find most of them.

After a couple of hours, I had a large pile of material, including stuff from the Amber FTP site (with a really neat Macintosh utility for tracking characters), locations of the various Amber MUSHes, and a disk full of text, variant rules, campaign logs, &c. - for the gamemaster to peruse. (As you all know, an ironclad rule in RPGs is Bribe the GM Early and Often.)

This is merely an illustrative example; the net is in no way restricted to Amber (or to roleplaying, or indeed to games). No matter what you're playing, there is a resource for you out there somewhere. Usenet News is an obvious place to wander around in search of information; my news program found over a hundred newsgroups with "game" in their title. One of them is likely to hold some interest for you, since by definition it's frequented by people with similar interests. The FAQ usually contains pointers to the real repositories of information on some FTP site or another.

I don't want to leave out the online services; I know there are game-related areas on all of the major players, but the only one I have direct knowledge of is America Online. AOL has the Online Gaming Forum (Keyword: OGF) which contains all sorts of gaming goodies, including message folders for manufacturers. If you dig deeply enough, you can even find the SHADIS folder.

Obviously this is only a brief summary of the places you can find useful stuff on the net. As a general rule, if you're looking for information on a particular topic or game, use Yahoo or one of its brethren; if you're just interested in a general field of games, try the newsgroups.

If there's enough interest, and we manage to free up the man-hours, we may start running a section of "Web Pages of Interest To Gamers" somewhere in SHADIS. If you find this sufficiently of interest, the best way to show it would be to send us a batch of URLs with descriptions; if we get snowed under by them, we'll probably conclude it's a Good Idea. Meanwhile, I have to go; there's a little something I have to attend to on rec.games.frp.misc.