Everway: Quest for the Queer Sphere

This is the blurb for the Everway quest I'll be running at virtual ConFABulous, on Sunday, November 7, 1-4 PM:

Everway-Silver Anniversary Edition RPG : "The Quest for the Queer Sphere" - You play Spherewalkers with the ability to use gates to walk between worlds in this multicultural, mythic, high fantasy RPG. Out now in a new edition via Kickstarter, Everway uses a Tarot-like Fortune Deck to determine the results of character actions. The focus is on narrative and story. Rules are easy to learn.

ConFABulous is a gaming convention for LGBTQ+ people and their friends. ConFABulous is 100% virtual this year. As well as RPGs, there will be a single track of high quality panels on topics of interest to gamers and fans of SF&F, horror, and comics. 

The entire convention schedule (panels and games) is here.

To play in the game, you will need to register for ConFABulous, here. Registration is free. Then, you will need to email confabulous.info@gmail.com and indicate that you want to play in this specific game session.

 The game will be played on the ConFABulous Discord server.

The convention schedule has also been published on the convention website. 

Although the panels are all on Saturday, November 6, there are enough cool RPGs that we decided to open up gaming for both November 6 and 7!

Everway At Gamehole Con 2021-Return to Fire's Wall

"Garden of Rest" by Em Niwa

I had a great time running Everway-Silver Anniversary Edition as part of the virtual game track at Gamehole Con 2021 last night. It was a great experience. The PCs had an adventure in the Realm of Fire's Wall, one that I explored for the first time earlier in the year with my home game group. While in my earlier campaign, the Realm of Fire's Wall was mainly a starting point to bring a new group of adventurers together, last night the PCs solved a fundamental mystery/problem in that realm. 

They did great with the adventure, and found that a bit of violence actually helped move things toward a solution. This felt like a bit of a surprise for the players, but each of them chose Spherewalkers who had histories of violence, so it kind of made sense. 

That being said, the violence was of the "last resort" type, in the face of an inflexible adversary who was doing real damage to the realm.

To prepare for the game, I created form-fillable versions of the sample characters from the Player's Book. Careful readers of the book will note that these are the signature characters and mostly complete sheets, except that the third image tied to the character's story is blank, as is the space under the image for players to create a brief narrative interpreting the image's relevance for the character's story.

It's great that the third picture and narrative detail are blank, as that creates a great way to pull the players into co-creation of their stories. So I made the third picture and narrative block form-fillable to support that ideation.

I provided about 20 PDF/PNG images in a Vision Card folder (including the one up above) for players to select an image that called to them. I collected these from various online art sources. Once everyone had an image, I had players introduce their characters and say something about why they selected that image, and how it related to the PC's story. Then we entered a Questions phase, in which players asked each other questions about the images and their significance for the characters, digging deeper.

This worked really well, the players were clearly engaged with the process and their characters, which set the stage for a great, character-driven game. This activity took about 45 minutes, but it was time well invested and enjoyable for everyone. 

I'll be using this technique again for convention scenarios.