Reading Everywhen

 

I've played a little Barbarians of Lemuria here and there, always found it easy-going, but never got really invested in it. However, in my perpetual search for the right system for my setting heartbreaker, I remembered that with Everywhen, there is a generic rules-set for the engine, so I dug that one out again, and lo and behold: I really like it. Let's see why:

The core mechanic:

2d6+Characteristic+Career or Fighting Skill +/- difficulty mods: Beat 9 and succeed!

That's it in a nutshell - a core roll that goes back to Traveller (and is very similar to the core roll of the Fighting Fantasy/Troika! family of games, which is dear to my heart). I like the "pyramid" curve of this roll were most results will be between 5 and 9, but that still has a lot of room for the occassional 2 and 12 - which are made a lot more likely by the use of dis-/advantage, which will have you roll an additional die and the drop the highest/lowest.

I like the simplicity of mechanical character traits: you basically get 3 sets of four; one is your characteristics (Strength, Agility, Mind, Appeal), one is your combat Abilities (Initiative, Melee, Ranged, Defense), and is four careers that you can choose freely (everything from Alchemist to Zealot). Yes, that means that mechanically, combat gets the same weight as "everything else" - but it also means that you don't have to worry about balancing in combat, because everyone gets 4 points to distribute among combat abilities (though there is an optional rule that allows you to move over 2 points to Careers), and even Careers like Warrior or Gladiator won't influence your combat abilities directly. And if you're really set to play a non-combattant, put 2 points in Initiative and 2 in Defense (to get somewhere safe before combat begins and to not get hit). Also, if combat doesn't play a big role in your campaign, it's not as if anyone would have wasted points they could have used elsewhere on their combat abilities.

I really like Careers - they both serve as your lifepath, as something like character classes and as skills. If you've been a sailor at some time in your life, you just add that Career for tying knots, balancing, swimming, scrubbing decks ... the system lends itself perfectly to easy adaptation to all kinds of settings - I can see Career descriptions do a lot of the heavy lifting in setting descriptions, much like they do in Troika! Careers will probably also shine in hard-ish science fiction setting, where you often end up with far too complex skill systems otherwise.

Generally speaking, Everywhen is a pretty simple skill-governed system without skills that lets the characters try to do whatever comes to mind, with a usually pretty good chance at succeeding, as well.

What Everywhen as a rulebook specifically lacks is a little more flesh on some of the bones: There are no worked career examples, and the magic/psionic chapters give you good general guidelines for how to gauge difficulty and effect, but there is not one example spell. The same goes for monsters: You get procedures to create different kind of monsters (human-ish opponents, creatures, entities like demons and elementals), but practically no examples for actual adverseries.

Instead, Everywhen provides several rules sub-systems that I'm not sure would have needed that much attention. There's Scale (which basically adds advantage dice for super-human traits), which I understand a lot of people don't like - I'm fine with it, though it seems a little too complicated, compared to the rest of the system. There's Challenges, a kind of extended conflicts, which seem interesting, but  aren't explained that well. And there's mass battle and vehicle rules - the stuff that usually makes my eyes glaze over in any kind of rules systems, so I probably can't blame Everywhen for me not being able to to read through them. The vehicle rules are probably fine (I really couldn't say), but the mass battle rules, for some reason, seem really invested in having you use military units like squads and platoons to calculate losses, and since I really only have a less than vague idea of what any of these terms mean in relation to each other, it all leaves me scratching my head. There is a table giving you the numbers, but why ask the GM to do the arithmetics with weird, non-decimal units if you could just abstract all of this into a rough number of combattants? To me, it feels a little like RPGs that, instead of having 100 Copper Pieces=10 Silver Pieces = 1 Gold Piece, insist on having 64 CP =12 SP = 1 GP or something along the lines, just because the latter is supposedly more historically accurate.

However, let me stress that the sub-systems kind of make sense - be it for careers, magic, vehicles or creatures, Everywhen quite consistently provides procedures that you will need to fill with life, which, in the case of this system is a pretty easy task. It's just that procedures for vehicles and mass battles don't quite justify the page count they take up, in my opinion.

 The interior art (B&W) is alright, though not terribly inspiring. I feel that the cover is kind of a miss, it's murky and ... I don't know, it just doesn't say anything to me. That's a pity, because I adore artist Peter Frain's colorful and pulpy work on the Barbarians of Lemuria Mythic edition.

So, in the end, I would have preferred having all that mass battle and vehicle stuff in a supplement to make room for spell, and, most importantly, career examples. The good thing is that the recently published Sword and Sorcery Codex for Everywhen/BoL offers both that AND a bestiary, but I haven't read through that yet - I'm pretty sure it will be awesome, though. So, despite a few reservations, I really recommend Everywhen as a simple, flexible system for all kinds of adventure genres. I really want to see a space opera take on it.

There's some really interesting settings for Everywhen already out there - my favourite for now is Red Venus, a dark-ish take on sovjet rocket retro-scifi. And there's a series of great FREE Sword&Sorcery scenarios by Everywhen author Garnett Elliott on drivethru.com.