Everway, Cult of Ron style (LONG)

[Uncle Dark]

I learned a lot about setting up and running games just by reading Ron's Sorcerer PDFs.  Mind you, a lot of this learning consisted of finding a vocabulary for thinking about issues I'd already been worrying at.  Ron gave me (well, sold me :wink:) a more refined set of tools for my art.

All this is by the way of saying, "Thanks, Ron.?" And since it was he that suggested I write about my Everway game, it seemed appropriate to start with him.

[/fanboy]

So, I manage to score an Everway set off Ebay, and it seems that (for some reason) it was much easier to get people to commit to playing Everway than Sorcerer.  Maybe there's some magic in the genre-tag "fantasy" that still sends pleasant shivers down the spines of gamers.  Maybe I'm just not pitching my Sorcerer ideas right.  But I digress...

I decided to run Everway, and I thought I'd put some of the stuff we all chew on here (player protagonism, non-party games, and so on) to work in the new game.  I decided that I'd draw up a relationship map, come up with some themes I wanted to explore, have everyone write up kickers, and so on.  I also decided that spherewalking was to be a sideline in the game, with most of the action in Everway itself.

Then the number of players doubled.  I went from 3 to 6 overnight.  Now, 6 is about the limit I can handle as a GM at the best of times, let alone when experimenting with this narrativist stuff.  Add in that no one in the group had played Everway before (including me), and only 3 of us (me and two players) were at all familiar with the game.

And, of course, I'm the only one of us on the Forge, or who spends any time reading all this artistic meta-game stuff.

So, here I go, charging in past all those pansy angels.

Character setup takes significant time, since no one is familiar with the system and I'm demanding extra stuff from the players besides.  I set up a character creation jam session, and ask everyone to come with basic ideas.  Most of them actually do, much to my surprise.

Now, the big hurdles we trip over are the kicker and player protagonism.  I'm not using these terms, of course.  What I have done is asked four questions of each player:

Who is your character?
What are his/her long-term goal?
What are his/her short term goal (and how does this advance the long-term goal)?
Why are you in Everway (what's here that you need for your short-term goal)?

I advised everyone that if they took more than a sentence or two to answer these, then they were thinking too hard.

The number of people I had to walk through this bit surprised me.  I'd thought it was fairly straightforward.  3 out of the six came up with fairly generic stuff, and didn't move much past this.  One of them seemed completely unable to grasp that the kind of goals I was looking for were concrete, objective accomplishments.

So what did we end up with?

Three Everwayans:
Pheonix, a mercenary buccaneer, formerly of the Crow, one of Everway's military clans.  Pheonix was betrayed and left for dead by her enemies in the family.  She wants to find them and punish them, and she's in Everway because that's where they are.  She is played by Dawn, a feral narrativist.

Raven's Eye, a teenager from the Weavers (a merchant clan), who is that generation's only spherewalker.  She wants to establish contacts with Outsiders that will allow her to set up her own inter-dimensional trade routes.  Raven is played by Tabitha, a relative newcomer to gaming.

Bounty, a Sinister (enforcer and assassin) for a rival merchant clan (the Diggers).  He questions whether or not his actions actually serve his family.  (This is the guy who didn't get "concrete goals").  Bounty wants to investigate his relations via his father's line (which are not legally his relatives, by matrilineal Everway standards).  Played by Troy, a full-immersion simulationist.

Three Outsiders:
Rue, an exile from a people for whom dance is a form of prayer.  She has a recurring dream of a Griffin who promises her enlightenment, and she's come to Everway to visit the Library of All Worlds to research griffins.  Played by Margaret, the only other person really familiar with Everway.

Stormchild, a shaman who seeks to learn from a wise person he saw in a vision (and also wants to visit the Library to research his quest).  Stormchild is played by Michael, whose main form of gaming is White Wolf LARPs.

And Traveller, a weretiger mercenary who never really put together any solid goals, since real life intruded on his time to think about gaming.  Traveller is played by Ken, a good, solid renaissance gamer who loves to GM off-the-cuff, freeform games.

Oh, and did I mention that this is a kid-friendly game, with Ken and Margaret bringing along their toddlers and Michael bringing his one-year-old?

So, after six hours of wrangling, we set up what I just told you, and agreed to meet every other week.

This gave me two weeks to work up a relationship map and figure out how to make things interesting.

For the map, I used Romeo and Juliet.  I did this partly because Shakespearian tragedy is great for coming up with backstory based around noble families, and partly because the tone of detective fiction didn't fit with what I wanted to evoke.  Adapting it was easy.  There are three families involved: the Capulets, the Montagues, and the family of the Prince of Verona.  These became the Masks (entertainers and mobsters of Everway), the Weavers (to give Rue/Tabitha an in to the action, if she wanted it), and the Crow, respectively.  I reversed the genders of most of the characters, to reflect the matrilineal families of Everway.  The role of the Priest who aids the young lovers became a scholar at the Library.

To make things interesting, I decide that one of the lovers (the Juliet) is Raven's cousin Hatch Weaver.  The other (Romeo) is a young woman, Wind Mask, who is related to Bounty via his father?s brother.  Hatch's other suitor (the one his family favors) is Whistler Crow, cousin to Wind's best friend Puzzle (the Mercutio of the piece).  Of course, Pheonix is going to be shaking all the Crows down, looking for people involved in her demise (yes, she actually died).  Reed Crow is Bounty's sensei, and the person most likely to investigate the untimely death of any Crow in this affair.

Just to confuse things and set up possibilities for later stories, there is a character in town named Griffin, who is a dragon in human guise using dream magic to manipulate Rue.  No connection to anything going on, he's basically a shiny, sparkly red herring.  For now.

Feh.  It?s two in the morning, I'm sick, and I have to work tomorrow.  I'll catch everybody up on the three sessions played to date later.

Lon


[ This Message was edited by: Uncle Dark on 2001-12-28 04:56 ]

[joshua neff]

Lon--

That sounds really interesting so far. I'm glad your posting this. I haven't gotten around to actually playing Everway yet, so it's good to read an account of it which would influence my own running of it.

[Ron Edwards]

Hey,

I've played a hefty amount of Everway, and for me it's gone one of two ways, in terms of player reaction/activity:

1) Solid Heavy-Metal style surreal fantasy adventure, with a great deal of character introspection and development, based on the Fate card.

2) Frustrated horror on the part of at least one player, especially in terms of "winning" the scenario at hand - the person I'm thinking of was entirely shocked at the idea that his character was more important (to me) than how the backstory/crisis turned out.

I think that Everway has a tendency to be confusing about where its Premise comes from: player-characters or setting. If it's setting, then you get kind of a cross between the Village People and ST: Next Generation, in which our multicultural heroes travel about helping others out of their provincial jams. If it's player-characters, then all the effort that goes into realm-creation, and realm fate-cards, and all that, tends to distract the players. Yet that diversity of realms and cultures is a primary attraction of play, so removing that is a big minus.

When I play it again (because nothing beats that Vision Card + player-question-round system of character creation), I plan to emphasize character development, ie Fate-Card-flipping, as the "point" of play.

Best,
Ron

[joshua neff]

then you get kind of a cross between the Village People and ST: Next Generation

Oh man, is that a TV show I want to see!

[Uncle Dark]

Josh, you frighten me.

I actually stated outright that I wanted to avoid the ST:TNG effect of play.  I described it pretty much as you did, Ron, though the Villiage People reference never (mercifully) occured to me.  I told everyone that this was not what I wanted to to, and there was a great sigh of relief from all.

Fate cards do figure in to most of the characters' goals.  For example, Pheonix's fate is The Fish: The Soul Prevails vs. Shallowness.  Dawn reads this as being a choice between mere vengance and trying to actually change things so that no one else will be betrayed as Pheonix was.

I love the game, really.  At times I find it lacking in structure at points when I need something to lean on.  I'm not that great at visualizing action, sometimes, and a lack of detail to action/combat rules sometimes catches me flat-footed.  That's a relatively minor point, though.  My onlyother minor gripe is more easily fixed: JT and I don't always see eye-to-eye on what makes for a good "fantasy" tone.

I agree that the Vision card, Fate card, Element system is fantastic.  Later experiments with Everway will include adapting it to different genres, such as Space Opera (check out A Galaxy Far, Far Everway for an example).

More to come, after breakfast.

Lon

[Laurel]

By coincidence, my life partner got me a copy of Everway off Ebay and I'd also been thinking about combining some Sorcer-esque techniques.  I hope you keep this thread going, I'm really interested in how things go over the long haul.

Laurel

[Ron Edwards]

Hey Lon,

Have you had a chance to play Everway yet? The holidays didn't do much for my own role-playing schedule, and I know you're a family guy, and there were what, six players, right? So no big thing if you haven't. I wanted to say that I was pretty interested in the game, though.

Best,
Ron