The chronicles of Amber

The Dessin and its relationship to creating/altering or accessing realities has been compared directly to Amber's reality-shaping/movement system. Bottero explicitly named Zelazny among the writers who shaped him.

Gary Gygax lists it in Appendix N of the 1979 Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide, his published list of the fiction that shaped the game. Roger Zelazny is listed for the Amber series, whose true world casting countless Shadows beneath it, walked between by those who know how, belongs to the same multiverse thinking that shaped the game's planes.

Roger Zelazny named Henry Kuttner's The Dark World as a direct influence on Amber, and the resemblance he was acknowledging is specific. Shared:

• A narrator who wakes in our world with no memory, is told he is someone else, and turns out to be a prince of another world with powers he does not yet remember having
• That other world as the real one, with ours a lesser place adjacent to it
• A family of immortal, quarrelling, half-divine siblings who are the story's real antagonists
• Amnesia used as the device that lets an insider be explained to

Filed MEDIUM. Zelazny took a starting position from Kuttner and then built the thing Amber is actually known for, the Pattern and the shadow worlds, which has no equivalent in The Dark World.

Farmer's sci-fi/fantasy series follows immortal, human-like "Lords" who construct their own artificial, customized pocket universes and battle each other for dominance. Zelazny took this conceptual framework to create the multiverse of Shadow. Amber and the Courts of Chaos are the two fixed realities, while everything in between consists of infinite, parallel worlds. The royal siblings act exactly like Farmer's squabbling, god-like Lords—possessing the unique power to manipulate, traverse, and rule over these lesser realities.

Durrell’s series features four novels that retell the exact same sequence of events in Alexandria from the vantage points of different characters. Zelazny used this technique to master the unreliable narrator. In the first five books (The Corwin Cycle), everything is filtered through Corwin's personal biases, lies, and flawed memories. The reader gradually learns (just as in Durrell's work) that reality changes entirely depending on who is telling the story.