written by stephen brown
320 pages
$29.95
published by visionary entertainment studios

The Everlasting is something unique, yet very familiar. My first impression was this: it's the World of Darkness - a WoD Light you could say. As I delved further into the world and storyline, I came to see the truth - it was very different. Not just for one or two reasons, but for many different reasons.

First and foremost is the concept behind the game. The Everlasting is game of a mythic experiences, something that the past ten or so generations have missed out on in our modern American society. Today, there is no mythology for our people to look to for inspiration, revelation, and insight into themselves. We of the RPG community have been given the unique opportunity to grow beyond the simple means of rolling dice and having fun, and create our own personal myths to aid in our daily routine. The folks at VES call this process Legendmaking, and to my suprise most RPG groups already do this on a limited basis.

The world of the Everlasting, known as the Secret World, is the one we all know from myth. Filled with vampires, evil ghosts, immortal knights seeking the Holy Grail, immortal gods, dragons, elves, faeries, and wer-creatures. But unlike other games of this sort, the majority of them get along, and 0)thsome may even work toward a common goal.

The details of the world are many, and well thought out, but just too numerous to go into here. All four of the books in the Everlasting series have a complete system and background - they can be used stand-alone or with the others to create a very detailed world. In fact, each book does have enough information in it about the other sides of the Secret World (Unliving, Light, Spirits, and Fantastical) to inspire the GM without the other books.

The game's system can be a little confusing for a novice gamer, since it is not a traditional RPG system. The system fits in a mere 20 pages, and can be as complex and detailed as you want. Threepronged, the system can be utilized in different ways, with the same result. The first, and most traditional to the RPG industry, is the dice system, which uses d12s. Second, and probably the most interesting, is the Tarot card system. This enables you to determine more about the conflict resolution if you know about the functionality of the Tarot. Lastly there are rules for a diceless system, that sounds more to this reviewer as a couple of friends sitting around telling a story. This isn't a bad thing, the less rules there are, the happier I am, but an RPG should have some meat.

The best part of the Everlasting series is Legendmaking. Most RPGs overlook these details, and don't provide guidelines on how to further our mythic experience. Encouraging us to put ourselves into our characters is the first thing brought up in the book. If we do this, we can see how creatures of immense power still suffer from the same problems that we mortals do. That is the basic principle of myth-making. Going out and finding yourself in your imagination is a monumental task, but one that this "game" offers a great opportunity to do. Just ask yourself one question, "Do you believe reality is more than what you see?"

This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web.
Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com