Taken together, the four core rulebooks of The Everlasting game line – The Books of the Unliving, of the Light, of the Spirits, and of the Fantastical – offer a huge and varied setting. Unfortunately, the somewhat arbitrary division of the line into those four "complete games" means that in each case, the remainder of the setting gets short shrift. Worse still, in some cases, the abilities offered don't even do justice to the subjects of the rulebooks in question – the daevas and faeries, in particular.In fact, each book hints at a system for giving creatures a much wider array of powers – a system to appear in a future release called The Codex of the Immortals. Well, it's taken a decade and the resurrection of the game line, but that book is now here. The question is, was it worth the wait?
Content
Everlasting Society
The chapter begins with a look at the history of the Everlasting – which, effectively, is a look at the setting's version of the history of the world itself.
While having a complete history all in one place makes a great reference, it's neither truly complete nor objective. Instead, it's based upon the partially falsified and/or faulty recollections of the dragons. That would be great if this were The Book of the Fantastical, but it's not. This was a chance to see, objectively, how the entire setting fits together – something that distinguished it from the original World of Darkness, with its multiple subjective histories for each supernatural species. Instead, the "dracocentric" history basically reaffirms the dragons' claim to being the source of all life on earth, with no mention of God or the angels at all – which, to those using the Book of the Light, is an awfully big omission. Still, the chapter does give a timeline from 400 million B.C. to the present, including the first appearances of manitou, vampires, ghuls, and other Eldritch races.
The majority of the chapter looks at just what it means to be an immortal – their relationships, their codes of behavior, their sanctums, even their leisure activities. Above all, the section explores the ways in which individuals cope – or don't – with the prospect of living forever. It all goes a long way to making the Everlasting into something more than just another group of supernatural superheroes – more so, in fact, than the flavor text in all four core rulebooks combined.
One minor complaint, though: the chapter touches on the value of maintaining mortal "secret identities," but it doesn't really offer any specifics as to how this is done. We're simply told that the realities of modern-day life make this process a little more complicated than it was in the past, but still not terribly difficult. Just for the sake of suspension of disbelief, I'd really like an example or two of how the Everlasting have managed to stay off the radar of modern society.
There aren't many rules in this chapter, although it does feature guidelines for creating apprentice Eldritch as both PCs and NPCs. No matter: plenty of game system goodies are just around the bend.
Advanced Protagonists
This section begins with brief notes on playing child protagonists, playing yourself as a PC, ability scores that fall off of the system's scale, "everyman" skills, and skill specialization.
The vast bulk of the chapter, however, goes to the task of reprinting all of the skills from the main rulebooks in a much more detailed format, including examples of when a specific skill would be used in conjunction with a specific attribute, difficulty modifiers, the effects of extra successes and disasters, and various professionals likely to be proficient in each skill.
Is this useful information? Yes. Is it worth 25 pages of a supplement? Not to my mind, no.
Character Distinctions
Okay, now we're getting somewhere.
The core rulebooks didn't offer much in the way of Distinctions (advantages and disadvantages); instead, they set up some general cost guidelines and gave a few examples, promising a large listing in this supplement. Well, here's the supplement, and here's the list, with just over 200 advantages and disadvantages of all sorts. That's a pretty impressive selection – doubly so, given the fact that this listing can serve as a more comprehensive cost guide for homebrew Distinctions.
Preternaturae
Here's where the book really earns its keep.
Towards the end of each chapter on Eldritch races in the core rulebooks, a table appeared listing "affinities" – the base costs for "generic preternaturae" (supernatural powers) falling under a wide variety of categories, from darkness to plants to technology.
The problem? There were no such preternaturae in the core rulebooks. Instead, readers were told to wait for the Codex.
As I mentioned in my reviews of the various corebooks, this was a bigger issue for some Eldritch than for others. How can you be a daeva of water without water powers, for example? And the powers listed for the fey in The Book of the Fantastical simply aren't up to the task of handling such a diverse category of creature.
At long last, the Codex fills that gaping void as promised – and then some.
Eldritch races possess varying degrees of affinity for powers falling under the categories of Air, Animal, Astral, Corruptive, Darkness, Domination, Dream, Earth, Electrical, Extradimensional, Extrasensory, Fate, Fire, Ice, Illusory, Insanity, Life, Light, Majesty, Necromantic, Personal, Plant, Psychokinetic, Spatial, Spiritual, Technological, Telepathic, Temporal, Vocal, and Water, with the affinity tables in the core rulebook race chapters listing a base cost for each category – the lower the cost, the higher the affinity. This supplement lists just over 130 powers, most of which can fall under more than one of the categories – a blast attack could be Light, Fire, Ice, etc. – and each of which have costs listed for three ability levels. To calculate the cost of purchasing a power for a specific character, the player adds the character's racial affinity to the relevant cost on the power table. It's a nicely flexible and comprehensive system
This huge range of powers creates several important effects on the game line.
Obviously, it casts off the limitations of the race-specific abilities listed in the core rulebooks. But it does more than that: it also makes thematic powers a matter of cost (in game terms) and commonality (in setting terms) rather than of access. In other words, it may be more expensive and rare for an angel to have Corruptive powers or for a demon to have Light powers, but it's possible. If the possibility of characters bucking their species stereotypes so completely bothers you, this could be a drawback – assuming you aren't willing to enforce some restraint on your players, that is.
But more fundamentally, with certain "four-color" powers such as Density Control, Elongation, and Size Increase, the list of abilities spills over from the realm of the supernatural into superheroics. Want to have a werewolf with winged flight like Hawkman, a dragon who can spin webs and cling to walls like Spider-man, or a dwarf who can stretch like Mr. Fantastic? Once again, no problem, if you're willing to pay the cost. And again, this may be a drawback for GMs with a low gonzo tolerance. If you want something beyond the modern supernatural "standards," however, this could make for a fun change of pace. Considering how seriously the game takes itself, though, I'm just not sure these out-and-out superpowers were a wise addition, thematically speaking.
Another bonus: GMs lacking a complete set of core rulebooks can use these powers to flesh out the relatively sketchy descriptions of the other Everlasting found in each book. For example, GMs without the Book of the Fantastical won't have stats for a dragon's breath weapon, but they could use the Explosive Blast power from the Codex to fudge it. (Granted, this still won't help with making PC versions of those Everlasting, given the lack of affinity tables for them.)
On a somewhat less subjective note, I found a lack of thought given to the full implications of certain powers. The Advanced level of the power Colocality, for example, lets the character appear in two or more places at once, but doing the exact same thing in all locations. Does this mean that all duplicates can hold only the exact same item? After all, keeping a grip on items of different shapes would constitute taking different actions. And the power Disrupt Machine lets the character interfere with or destroy one or more machines per success level rolled, but what counts as a single machine? There's only a higher difficulty for supernatural machines, so does that mean a PC with this power could disrupt a super-advanced but non-supernatural supercomputer like HAL just as easily as he could a toaster?
Nevertheless, while I might quibble about the quality of some of the offerings, I sure can't complain about the quantity. The sheer number of options is almost overwhelming. (Which, I suppose, could be considered a flaw in and of itself, insofar as it further complicates an already complicated character creation system.) And as if these options weren't enough, the chapter then throws in a whole series of enhancements and limitations to customize the powers.
After a very brief discussion of the ways in which mortals may be awakened to the reality of the Secret World, the chapter concludes with the mechanics behind one of those methods: empowerment by an eldritch. By spending Destiny Points on – and time with – a person, place, or thing, an Eldritch can pass along some of his supernatural power. Empowered weapons can do debilitating damage to supernatural creatures and become more potent overall, minions can gain extended life spans and superhuman attribute levels, and any object, place, or creature may gain preternatural abilities – either those latent in the subject (such as psychic powers) or those of the Eldritch performing the empowerment.
The greater the Empowerment score of the Eldritch, the less time and fewer Destiny Points that the process requires. And that's a good thing, too, because other than enhancing minions – which costs a mere three Destiny Points and requires roughly a like number of weeks – empowerment takes a lot of time and Destiny Points. The cost in both is so high, in fact, that unless your campaign spans decades, centuries, or even millennia, it's unlikely that powerful subjects of empowerment will enter play at all. Empowering a submachine gun, for example, would take 27 DPs and 233 years by default, and bestowing preternaturae of a cost equivalent to 70 character creation points would cost 70 DPs and take 1,597 years.
Style
The Codex shows a noticeable improvement in proofing over theBook of the Fantastical. The art isn't stunning, but it's both good and consistent. Perhaps more importantly, it's restrained – a very good thing, given the small (6" x 9") dimensions of the book. There isn't that much room to spare.
Speaking of which, the layout and typesetting still show a noticeable lack of polish. While this doesn't render the book unreadable by any means, the inconsistent line spacing and font sizes that fail to make headers stand out quickly became hard on my eyes.
And while I always prefer to see an index, the decision to give the index entries the largest type size in the book left me baffled – as did the choice to make the index single-column. That, much more than the expanded skill descriptions, appears to be nothing more than page-count padding.
Conclusion
If you're a fan of The Everlasting in general, this book is very nearly a must-have. If you're a fan of daevas and/or faeries, it is a must-have. Now, to be frank, I'm not a fan of "must-have" supplements – if a supplement is "must-have," it isn't a supplement at all, but rather part of the main rulebook being sold separately.
That said, what's done is done regarding the game line as a whole. So, how does this book stand on its own merits? Well, I'd have to say that the preternaturae mechanics are by far the main reason to buy the book, the rest being a mix of nice bonuses and semi-fluff. I'd have rather gotten just the powers – and perhaps the Distinctions and empowerment rules – for a lower price.
Still, given the sheer number and variety of powers available, the book's a decent deal for the money. And really, if you're filling a decade-long gap in a game line, aren't the fans owed a little overkill to compensate? So, if you want to take full advantage of the flexibility of The Everlasting, I'd recommend picking this one up.
SUBSTANCE:
- Setting
- Quality = 3.5
- Quantity = 3.5
- Rules
- Quality = 3.0
- Quantity = 4.0
STYLE:
- Artwork = 3.5
- Layout/Readability = 2.5
- Organization = 3.0
- Writing = 3.0
- Proofreading Penalty = <0.5>
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