Unboxing Everway I

One of my best memories about Everway is when I loaned my friend Amon my brand new copy of the game. I came by his house and he had most of the cards spread out on his dining room table. I thought, "How cool!"

Open the Big White Box (no accident, I believe) and among other things, you see three bins with full color cards. The game came with four sets of cards: 36 Fortune Cards (a multicultural Tarot deck), 90 Vision Cards, 3 Source Cards on the city of Everway, and 6 Quest Cards for a sample adventure that came with the game.

The Fortune Cards are used to create characters and worlds. Worlds in the multiverse are known as spheres. The regions/countries that make up each sphere are called realms. Everyway is city in a realm called Roundwater; Everway is also the city at the center of the multiverse.

The Playing Guide (PG) connects the Fortune Cards to the setting in a single sentence: "A realm is an area on a sphere where certain cosmic forces hold sway, an area with a shared story" (PG8).  Those cosmic forces are represented by the trumps of the Fortune Deck. Every realm (and indeed, every character) has a Virtue, a Fault, and a Fate that corresponds to one of the trumps of the Fortune Deck.

You can see a list of Fortune Cards at the Amberway II site. There is another one here. At one point in time you could actually see the original Fortune Cards online. I am not having much luck finding them today. But this is an even more convenient list of the Fortune Cards - one which can be printed out and shared at the gaming table.

Over the next week, I'll talk about the cosmology of Everyway a bit more. Then we'll create some realms.

Detailed Everway Review

Bob Dushay has published a detailed review of the Everway RPG. It catalogs the core Everway products (with the exception of a couple that were published  by another company, and not broadly distributed). My friend who publishes Hereticwerks recently borrowed one of my copies of Everway. He described it (rather aptly) as very similar to the Diaspora RPG; its simplicity and openness enables players and GMs to create new worlds and setting materials. The published materials in the core box set provide setting premises (such as how Spherewalkers get from world to world), a central world that binds together the multiverse, as well as the names of a number of realms. Just enough is provided to get the imagination rolling.

What This Will Be

This will become a blog for the Everway RPG settings and campaigns that I have created or will create in the future.