The Blog of Roon

My New Year’s friend is letting me borrow his copy of Everway for a bit. Why did nobody tell me about this game before? It rocks. I am definitely going to hunt down a copy, and David and I are discussing moving our Al-Qadim campaign to it—we haven’t actually used any D&D mechanics in so long that keeping the game in D&D is pointless, even a nuisance.

It’s just easier to think about Juskinah and her friends in terms of Everway, which must be some indication that we would find the mechanics congenial. I found (well, actually, David found it) a right-down brilliant Vision card for her right off the bat, and within minutes of reading the section in the players’ guide about characters meeting their Fates it was clear to me when and how Juskinah had done so.

I’m not completely thrilled with the setting, as it (like D&D) is afflicted by unwillingness to let characters bond with their surroundings. I prefer games like Ars Magica, in which characters have a physical place in the world that they both change and are changed by. Still, Everway does allow characters to adventure within a single realm (or a group of closely-bound realms), and I must immediately concede that Everway is the closest to a genuinely workable multi-cultural game setting I’ve ever seen.

I’m also not happy with the “superhuman character” model, though I suppose I’ve lived with it long enough in D&D. I am a plebeian at heart; I prefer hobbits to elves, ordinary people in extraordinary situations to overendowed champions doing the impossible. If I were to run an Everway campaign, I think I might reduce the number of points available during character creation. (Which actually takes care of the problem rather neatly. Hmmm. Points to the game again.) Or I might juice up background characters to be more on a par with PCs.

The incorporation of fortune-telling into the game is utterly brilliant. I love it. No cheesy Augury spells, but the dark and perilous ambiguity that the Delphic oracle inspired.

I can’t say enough about how flexible this game is. I was having fits trying to turn the Pegana mythos into a D&D pantheon. No sweat in Everway. Quite simple, in fact—and I’m definitely tempted.

I wonder if anyone does Everway play-by-email?

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 2nd, 2003 at 8:50 am and is filed under Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.