The Everway Thread

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Llew ap Hywel

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So my Mythras prep/reading is going uber slow due to a variety of reasons but well, today though I’ve felt to tired to focus intently so I’ve taken a break and decided to flick though the simply gorgeous Everway box set.

Everway was one of those games I’ve always loved owning and flicking through but never considered playing.

So in the spirit of curiosity anyone else have any familiarity or gaming experience with Everway?
 
I owned Everway back around '97. One of the first Rpgs I picked up when I was getting back into Rpgs after a 8 year absence. I think it sold rather poorly at local game stores, which meant that they had a lot left in stock that one shop seriously discounted, so I spent something like $20 for it.

Ran one session of it for a girlfriend and an old friend. I think I used a prewritten adventure that was in the core book. Had a decent time. She was new to gaming, and totally bewildered by the experience; he'd had some experience with WFRP and Paranoia in high school - not a great player, but he participated. I enjoyed the tarot-style task resolution, and the rather free-form play. Liked the card art.

Unfortunately, though, it didn't turn into anything long-lasting so it went back on the bookshelf and a few years later I sold it off.
 
I owned a copy and it was very pretty. Never ran or played it though.
 
I’d love a copy to try it out. They seem rare, perhaps WoTC will consider a limited edition anniversary edition. It obviously isn’t very good in pdf unless you’re going to do a lot of working printing the cards.
 
Picked it up at a thrift shop about a year ago but haven't had a chance to really look at it.
 
I owned Everway back around '97. One of the first Rpgs I picked up when I was getting back into Rpgs after a 8 year absence. I think it sold rather poorly at local game stores, which meant that they had a lot left in stock that one shop seriously discounted, so I spent something like $20 for it.

Ran one session of it for a girlfriend and an old friend. I think I used a prewritten adventure that was in the core book. Had a decent time. She was new to gaming, and totally bewildered by the experience; he'd had some experience with WFRP and Paranoia in high school - not a great player, but he participated. I enjoyed the tarot-style task resolution, and the rather free-form play. Liked the card art.

Unfortunately, though, it didn't turn into anything long-lasting so it went back on the bookshelf and a few years later I sold it off.

It was overpriced for the rpg market at the time and the marketing was not just awful but misleading. It’s a strange game, I get a lot of inspiration from it but no inclination to run it, although that’s partly down to my group.
 
I’d love a copy to try it out. They seem rare, perhaps WoTC will consider a limited edition anniversary edition. It obviously isn’t very good in pdf unless you’re going to do a lot of working printing the cards.
They’re findable, sometimes as new but usually retailing for about £75 last time I looked.
 
Picked up a copy for $5 in a discount bin, along with the Spherewalkers handbook. Loved everything about it -writing, aesthetics, character creation, setting-except one thing.

Unfortunately it's a major thing - the game has no resolution mechanic. Oh, I know, it sounds like it does. Uses some fancy words to say there are three ways to resolve anything that happens in the game. The thing is, all 3 of them are the same thing - the GM just decides what happens.

Yeah, one can play like this, but I find it unsatisfying. I like not knowing what's going to happen. I like the unexpected. The closest thing to randomization the game offers is "draw one of our art cards and use that as inspiration for what might happen", which is like using a tarot divination reading as a core game mechanic, minus the symbolism and guidance from codified interpretations.

In the end, I've basically just used the game to mine ideas for Planescape.
 
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Picked up a copy for $5 in a discount bin, along with the Spherewalkers handbook. Loved everything about it -writing, aesthetics, character creation, setting-except one thing.

Unfortunately it's a major thing - the game has no resolution mechanic. Oh, I know, it sounds like it does. Uses some fancy words to say there are three ways to resolve anything that happens in the game. The thing is, all 3 of them are the same thing - the GM just decides what happens.

Yeah, one can playa like this, but I find it unsatisfying. I like not knowing what's going to happen. I like the unexpected. The closest thing to randomization the game offers is "draw one of our art cards and use that as inspiration for what might happen", which is like using a tarot divination reading as a core game mechanic, minis the symbolism and guidance from codified interpretations.

In the end, I've basically just used the game to mine ideas for Planescape.

Lol it sounds like we have used it with very similar purpose.
 
I played it quite a bit. The resolution mechanics and character creation are excellent. There are some rough edges though, such as the magic system, and I find the default setting pretty uninteresting to play in.
 
I ran it a little when it first came out, and it was fun. I like the way the elemental stats tie into the symbolism on the cards. Tristram isn't entirely wrong in saying it comes down to GM fiat, but I found the cards gave surprisingly clear results in a lot of cases. I wish I hadn't gotten rid of it, as I would probably do better with it now than I did back then.

The Spherewalker Sourcebook is great whether you have Everway or not. It's a systemless book in an encyclopedic format with entries that subtly relate in detailing pieces of the games multiverse. It's one of Greg Stolze's early gaming projects, and he put a lot into it. He found it crushing that it became a completely ignored supplement to a game that had already been written off as a failure. I've borrowed ideas from it for many fantasy campaigns over the years.

It really needs a PDF/POD release.
 
I ran it a little when it first came out, and it was fun. I like the way the elemental stats tie into the symbolism on the cards. Tristram isn't entirely wrong in saying it comes down to GM fiat, but I found the cards gave surprisingly clear results in a lot of cases. I wish I hadn't gotten rid of it, as I would probably do better with it now than I did back then.

The Spherewalker Sourcebook is great whether you have Everway or not. It's a systemless book in an encyclopedic format with entries that subtly relate in detailing pieces of the games multiverse. It's one of Greg Stolze's early gaming projects, and he put a lot into it. He found it crushing that it became a completely ignored supplement to a game that had already been written off as a failure. I've borrowed ideas from it for many fantasy campaigns over the years.

It really needs a PDF/POD release.
The spherewalker handbook is immense, I’ve often delved into its pages for ideas over the years. You can see elements of it in Greg’s Reign writings, another under appreciated game.
 
Yeah Spherewalkers Handbook is one of the best RPG supplements of any system. I dont know how easy it is to come by these days, but I highly recommend it just to mine ideas for any game.
 
I bought a copy of Everway a while back. It was something I'd always been curious about but never ran into in person.
It is quite nicely done... it seems like an artifact of an RPG scene in an alternate Earth's 1970s. I do like the setting... which reminds me a bit of things like Planescape and Astulae.

I've tried to find the Spherewalker Sourcebook for less than $100 but have had no luck.
 
I still have a box of Everyway, although I lost the expansion cards and Spherewalker book some time ago. I have ran it with casual gamers.

The basic system is loose, but actually works well in practice. The main problem I had were that the Vision cards were kind of a gimmick insofar that they were not really necessary to play - beyond providing visual reference for scenes, which was more useful for scenario ideas really. The fact that you supposed to then collect them, as per the fashion at the time (Magic: The Gathering was enjoying it's first boomwave in the 90s), was a bit tiresome. The setting itself wasn't developed in any meaningful way until Spherewalker came out, either.

I'd have rather seem the box provide bigger fortune cards (the tarot-like ones) and possibly have more than one set in the box so players could handle their own decks.
 
I still have a box of Everyway, although I lost the expansion cards and Spherewalker book some time ago. I have ran it with casual gamers.

The basic system is loose, but actually works well in practice. The main problem I had were that the Vision cards were kind of a gimmick insofar that they were not really necessary to play - beyond providing visual reference for scenes, which was more useful for scenario ideas really. The fact that you supposed to then collect them, as per the fashion at the time (Magic: The Gathering was enjoying it's first boomwave in the 90s), was a bit tiresome. The setting itself wasn't developed in any meaningful way until Spherewalker came out, either.

I'd have rather seem the box provide bigger fortune cards (the tarot-like ones) and possibly have more than one set in the box so players could handle their own decks.
I liked the the vision cards. They really did help with character backgrounds. You could use any range of collectible art cards for the purpose, not just Everway ones, or even just throw in CCG cards with cool art.

Nowadays, you can even just put an image gallery online. Tristram's art thread would substitute nicely for vision cards.
 
I've always wanted to take Everway and adapt it for use with actual Tarot cards. Change the setting to fit, base it on Mathers/Crowley's weird cosmology expanded into a kind of Occult Planescape drawing on Morrison's The Invisibles.
 
Also, is it just e, or did Everway seem like an attempt to do RPG presentation to mimic computer games? The box design, the sizing of the rulebooks, it all gave me a serious "Myst" PC game packaging at the time.
 
Also, is it just e, or did Everway seem like an attempt to do RPG presentation to mimic computer games? The box design, the sizing of the rulebooks, it all gave me a serious "Myst" PC game packaging at the time.
I don't know but it's one of the more annoying boxes on my shelf. I debate getting rid of it for that reason alone.
 
I had to Google Everway as I'd never even heard the name until now. Sounded like a supermarket chain. Must've come out during my RPG lacuna. The Wikipedia description sounds very loosey-goosey for me.
 
I had to Google Everway as I'd never even heard the name until now. Sounded like a supermarket chain. Must've come out during my RPG lacuna. The Wikipedia description sounds very loosey-goosey for me.

It was a bomb for Wizards of the Coast. Time was you could find it in bargain bins across the country. Apparently now its a collectors item though, going by Ebay prices. But Ebay has overinflated everyTHING.
 
It was a bomb for Wizards of the Coast. Time was you could find it in bargain bins across the country. Apparently now its a collectors item though, going by Ebay prices. But Ebay has overinflated everyTHING.
Sadly eBay has all but destroyed the joy of yard sales and thrift stores for me. I used to almost regularly find something that was a real bargain...hardly ever happens now.
 
Sadly eBay has all but destroyed the joy of yard sales and thrift stores for me. I used to almost regularly find something that was a real bargain...hardly ever happens now.

Yeah same here. I actually went to a yard sale about 4 years ago, and a guy had a pile of graphic novels. I asked him how much he wanted for one of them and, not even joking, he sat there and looked it up online on his laptop before quoting me a pice. I laughed at him and walked away.

Back in the 80s/90s used to LOVE garage sales and flea markets. These days I hardly bother with them. No other experience quite that extreme, but overall these days everyone treats their garbage like gold.
 
I liked the the vision cards. They really did help with character backgrounds. You could use any range of collectible art cards for the purpose, not just Everway ones, or even just throw in CCG cards with cool art.

Nowadays, you can even just put an image gallery online. Tristram's art thread would substitute nicely for vision cards.
Well, that's the thing you see - you can draw inspiration from any source of imagery. So why pay money to collect the cards?
 
Well, that's the thing you see - you can draw inspiration from any source of imagery. So why pay money to collect the cards?
Yeah I never liked the fact the other two card sets were random booster packs
 
It's odd to me to see Everway as something that people ask a lot for, as it was a fixture of game store bargain bins for years. The Spherewalker Sourcebook has always been a rarity though. It was put of by Rubicon games after WotC dropped the game, so there weren't that many copies to begin with, and it wasn't that much later that Unknown Armies came out and Greg Stolze was suddenly a name brand designer. That shot up in price very quickly.
 
Well, that's the thing you see - you can draw inspiration from any source of imagery. So why pay money to collect the cards?
Sources of full color imagery weren't cheap back then. RPG books were still mostly black and white. You could buy art books, but get pricey, and they dpn't have the convenient card form factor. The Internet was still in the dial-up era, so while you could find art there, browsing art with quality resolution was a slow process.

It's worth remembering that collectible fantasy art cards were just a thing at the time. We sold them at my store before and after Everway. I always thought that Jonathan Tweet's intention was just to encourage people to buy any fantasy art cards as game aids, and WotC simply put out there own line alongside all the others.

As packs of fantasy art cards were a longstanding thing, it never really carried the same taint for me that the cantrip cards for Changeling did.
 
Yeah same here. I actually went to a yard sale about 4 years ago, and a guy had a pile of graphic novels. I asked him how much he wanted for one of them and, not even joking, he sat there and looked it up online on his laptop before quoting me a pice.

Had a similar experience except the guy already had made price labels with crazy high numbers on them. He had a box of comic books. His stuff was nearly all in pretty lousy condition and nothing was especially rare, hard-to-find, or special in any way. The box had a "$20.00" label on the side. I assumed that was for the whole box but he said that was per comic. I asked if he really thought he could get $20.00 for a tattered and torn X-Men 1990s comic book. He said he got all his prices by looking at eBay. I said good luck and stopped browsing.
 
I’d love a copy to try it out. They seem rare, perhaps WoTC will consider a limited edition anniversary edition. It obviously isn’t very good in pdf unless you’re going to do a lot of working printing the cards.
Same here.
 
I used to have three boxed sets.

Then my basement flooded, leaving me with one.
 
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