Everway

Review: RPG

Reviewed by John Wick

Originally published by Wizards of the Coast, recently acquired by Pagan Publishing
$34.95 box of 120 cards, 2 maps, and 3 books

Everway is an unique role-playing game. From the first time I opened it, I knew that I was going to be in for a wild ride. Wizards of the Coast certainly made it pretty to look at. They also got one of the most unique and innovative minds in the industry to design it. It comes in a big box and inside that box are three books, a deck of Tarotlike cards for mechanics resolution, full-color character sheets and over two hundred "Vision" and "Quest" cards. But is it worth the thirty-four bucks you have to shell out for it? Take a look...

The first thing you should know is that there are no dice rolling around in that big white box. Now, this doesn't mean it's a diceless system, it's just that Lady Luck is wearing a different dress in this game: she isn't rolling dice, she's drawing cards. There's a lot to be said for a card based system. Dice are very linear, while cards allow a wide range of variants. The "Fortune Deck" provided in Everway allows the game master to add a bit of flavor to the determination of success and failure. Everway allows three different resolution systems: The Law of Drama, The Law of Karma, and The Law of Fortune.

The Law of Karma simply states that if the player has the stats to pull off the action, the GM should allow the action. It's a quick judgment system that doesn't slow down game play: "I have a 4 and you have a 1. I win."

When using the Law of Drama, a GM looks at the needs of the story and that is what determines the success and failure of the player's action. Lastly, the Law of Fortue allows Fate to decide the outcome with a random drawing from rhe deck. Three different styles for every game master to play with. If one style doesn't suit your taste, use another. The options are limitless.

The world is a multi-dimensional universe with the characrers srarting in the conjunctional city of Everway where rhe gateways to a thousand worlds await the players. With an infinite amount of possibilities, you can travel from dimension to dimension, encountering uncountable worlds with the possibilities limited only by your imagination. And when your imagination runs out,, that's where the "Vision Cards" come into play.

The Vision Cards are colorful and brilliant images that are to be used by the game master to design adventures. Just look at the image on the front, read the questions on the back, and you've got a dozen ideas for new adventures just by reading a couple cards! It's a very cool idea, tatting into the whole "visionary" theme running through the game. Words are wonderful (I love words, I'm a writer after all), but a single picture is worth more than a thousand words; sometimes it's worth a thousand stories.

The second use for the Vision cards is in character creation. When you create a character, you draw a couple random cards, look at the images, read the questions on the back and ssrt making your character. Use the image as one from your home world, or perhaps as a recurring dream, or as an important story in your character's life. Perhaps even answer the questions on the back in your character's voice, or apply them to his past, providing dark secrets that not even his most trusted friend would know. The Vision Cards are infinitely useful to both game masters and characters.

As I said at the beginning of this review, Wizards of the Coast were the original producer of Everway. However, due to change in production schedule, the entire role-playing division was canceled and all the products were sold off. Luckily, Everway has passed into the very capable hands of Pagan Publishing (whose main voice, John Tynes, was on the design team for the game), a small press company in Seattle that also produces The Unspeakable Oath magazine. If the quality of past Pagan Publishing products (say that five times fast) is any indication of what future expansions will look like, we can expect fine supplementary material for it.

Everway is a game quite unlike anything else I've ever seen. The cost is a little high, it may be a bit too off the mainstream for many, and the characters presented are definitely not Conan clones (white Anglo-Saxon males) which many may interpret as a tip of the hat to "political correctness", but all in all, it's a great game that looks at every aspect of gaming from a different perspective. And that's what "visionary" roleplaying is all about.

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