The Secret Game

Everlasting flew beneath my gamer geek radar, which I find a bit embarrassing for several reasons. First, I regularly read gaming news sites. Second, I like the modern fantasy genre and believe that more great modern fantasy games are a very good thing. Finally, and even more embarrassing, is the fact that the publisher and author operate out of my home state, no less! But, everyone likes good surprises and finding a treasure, even a diamond-in-the-rough like Book of the Light, has been delightful.

Steve Brown started publishing RPGs for the Everlasting setting about six years ago — Book of the Light is the second of four core rulebooks (called Foundations) for Everlasting. It concerns the war between good and evil in the Everlasting setting, covering character types like Angels, Daevas (godlings), Questers (mortals whose quests grant them divine favor), the Wer (lycanthropes), and Demons.

After what seems to have been about a five-year break in production, the company is in the hands of a new owner, Visionary Entertainment (VESI), who seems to be committed to promoting the game and publishing more material for the setting. The final core book, The Fantastical, is due out this August (2003) at DragonCon in Atlanta. After this, several products are on the boards:

• September 2003: Guide Screen (with new character sheets?)
• October 2003: Codex of the Immortals (a manual for designing preternaturae — PC powers)
• December 2003: Magician's Companion.
  

After seeing Hero Games' phoenix-like rise from the ashes, it's good to see another company attempting the same thing.

Before I get into the meat of the review I want to point out that this is not, unfortunately, a playtest review. Read on with that in mind. For that reason I do not comment extensively on the basic gaming systems.

The Bad

There's some very good material for gaming in Everlasting: Book of the Light (BotL), but there's also some less-than-wonderful elements I want to address up front. I feel I need to admit what some might consider a prejudice, but what I see as fact borne out of my own 20+ years in the hobby. Namely, that "high concept" or "art" gaming is more dependent upon the skill and desire of participants than the game itself. This is not to say that games and their settings don't influence the potential for a great game, but I don't see it as the chief ingredient of an extraordinary roleplaying experience. BotL aims for creating mythic experiences in roleplaying, citing sources like Joseph Campbell, etc. All I can say is I'm not after that in a game. Therefore, there are some high concept phrases like "Interactive legendmaking experience," and "more than a roleplaying game!" that I just found off-putting in Book of the Light .

Along those same lines I find the need to reinvent the gaming vocabulary as just another hurdle to getting into a game. Along those lines we have: Guides (GM), Protagonists (PCs), Supporting Characters (NPCs), werwulf (werewolf), etc. Yawn. When you add these common redefinitions to the tons of new verbiage found in Book of the Light (Dominion, Azhi Dehaka, Agartha, Alcedama, Merodachian, Preturnaturae, Vattan, Dekans, etc.) there's a lot to wrap, and re-wrap your head around. Perhaps all of this just seems too heavy-handed to me — an impediment to the really good parts of the game. I'll leave it up to you to decide if Book of the Light reaches its "legendmaking" goals, nor do I mean to belittle this goal. I'm merely after a good setting, good rules and fun. On these counts BotL delivers.

Another problem is that the Book of the Light is caught in a dynamic between being a self-contained game and the fact that it is part of a much larger setting. While it seems possible to play with just this book, there are numerous places where other books, like the yet unpublished Codex of the Immortals and Magician's Companion, are referenced. There were several times I was frustrated after stumbling upon an interesting concept only to be referred to another book. Some may look upon that as a plus - there's a lot to look forward to in this line. Others may see it as a mark of an incomplete game. Personally, I think that its real hallmark is this larger world. It should play to this strength.

Every chapter dealing with the game system needs many, many more concrete, "in-play" examples. These are often tedious to write, but would definitely speed a player's understanding of the game's systems. I like the mechanical/system variations BotL offers players, but the lack of examples makes this aspect even harder to gasp and appreciate. While definitely not simulationist, there are a lot of numbers in this game. Some numbers attached to concepts a gamer can easily grasp, such as skills and attributes. Others are assigned to emotional/metaphysical states, etc. These should have brief, but concrete examples of their use when the concepts are introduced - not detailed later in the text. The chapter on combat should be filled with examples of in-play use of the concepts and how they relate to the numbers: a quick overview of a fight, etc. Examples are few and far between.

Finally, I encountered several editing/proofreading gaffes - from misspellings, to grammatical mistakes to just elementary writing "no-no's" such as the repeated use of repetitive repetitions in the text. These are not ubiquitous, but occur often enough that I noticed and found them distracting.

The Good

There's a lot material worthy of praise in BotL. It's an incredibly rich world to work with — one of the most fully realized settings of this genre. BotL covers humans who have been given immortality due to the power of their quests, an ancient race of godlings struggling for enlightenment and/or worldly power, angels seeking divine grace — but this is just a fragment of the whole setting. The denizens of the Book of the Light are a few among a host of other supernaturals: dragons, faerie, undead, sorcerers etc. Amazingly, even with all of these seemingly disparate elements, Everlasting works as a setting. Most importantly, new story ideas popped into my head with nearly every page. That's the essence of a good RPG. I came away from reading it thinking of interesting character concepts and cool plots to inflict on the players. 

Of the three major groups presented in the book, I have to say I was most inspired by the Daevas, the descendants of the mythic gods. It is from their culture that most of the other Everlasting take their cultural cues. The Daevas are organized into mythic households which mirror many of the pantheons and groupings from mythology, such as the Olympians, Vanir and the Fir Bolg. A simple trip to the library (or most gamers' bookshelves) would allow you to translate any favored mythic group into a Daevan household. Or you could take more esoteric mythic structures, such as the "gods" of  natural phenomena (winds, currents, etc.) to build your game around. There's a lot of stories to be told just with this one PC type — a small part of one book in the Everlasting setting.

The wholeness of the Everlasting setting is most apparent in the relationships between the various character "races" in the game. Many elements of the game, such as the concept of fellowships, assume that different types of supernaturals will work together and the background sets up several reasons for this. (Although it does an excellent job of not demanding this style of play). 

I also like that BotL has a much more of an inclusive, and strangely...um...more upbeat (?) tone than many other modern day games. I don't mean BotL presents a "happy, shining bunnies," game world (it's not), but neither is it just world filled with beautiful, angst and clove cigarette-filled poseurs, either. You can be tragically hip, or a maniacal beast, but it's also okay to be heroic, altruistic and big "g," Good too. The game deals in shades of gray, but the gray cuts across a spectrum from black to white — kick ass, stare at your navel, right wrongs -- its all here.

Some people love, or at least like, metaplot. (If you don't know what I mean by metaplot, please Check out DaveB's excellent summary of the Mage metaplot as an example of the epic, but setting-changing metaplot from Mage: the Ascension.) If running a game through all of a metaplot's twists and turns doesn't appeal, you'll appreciate Everlasting's extremely rich background, sans metaplot.

There's an underlying theme of options that I enjoyed in this game. There are five basic character types detailed in BotL, but each of these has myriad of choices of its own. Furthermore, there are three basic options for handling the game system: cards, dice or freeform. Character creation has several alternatives as well, including a nod to random generation, usually a method scoffed at by many games of this type. I greatly appreciate this kind of openness as a player and GM. Bravo.

As you can tell from my mini-rant on high concept games, there are elements of BotL that I did not care for. While some of it comes across to me as "been there, done that," there are some ideas I really had not considered, such as communal PCs, GM-less play etc. For  persons drawn to the legendmaking aspect of Everlasting, there is a chapter concerning alternate methods of roleplay and ways to investigate mythic themes using the game.

Odds and Ends

Art and Design

Art is a big deal to some folks, but not to me unless the art is really execrable, or the book is just stunning, like Nobilis. Most of the art in Book of the Light is evocative of its mood, while some of it is just bad. I personally like the woodcuts as much if not more than the commissioned work. It's fair to say that the art is of the level of any standard RPG. The internal art is all b&w with an okay color cover. The book is perfect bound with glue, although I've heard of hardback versions of the undead book for the setting.

The organization of an RPG book tends to exist on a continuum between reference books and novels/art books. (I'd put HERO 5th on one end of this and Nobilis on the other.) BoTL is on the novel/art book side of the scale. The layout of the pages is busy and the full-bleed, fade-to-black border of the pages means that some of the words almost become lost in the background — for a book of "light," it's pretty dark. I prefer cleaner layout for RPGs. As with all books organized in this manner it means that the initial read-through is pretty effortless. Trying to find information once you read through is a bit of a problem, since the index is, as is typical of RPGs, inadequate.

The character sheet printed in the back of BotL is definitely a victim of style over usability. The one offered on the website via a fan is better, but the current version (2.0) has several misspellings. (The generous fan who complied it hails from Norway, so again forgiveness is in order.)

Systems

There are two systems described in BotL: freeform, and a random mechanic which uses cards or dice. The freeform mechanic is addressed in several places, so it's fair to say that it is not just a throwaway notion of the game designer. The random mechanic is the default for the rulebook, with cards given the nod over dice. Again, more examples would be a very good idea. (Tarot cards may also be used to generate these numbers and as story aids.)

Protagonists have the typical roleplaying conceits — scores that correspond to intrinsic attributes (Strength, Dexterity, etc.) and  skills (Computers, etc.). Characters also have persona and torment scores which represent the protagonists' mythic, and good old human character flaws.  I have to say this is a neat concept , but  not well explained in the book. (If you're reading this VESI, in-play examples would be an excellent addition to the website and future editions!)

The basics of the mechanics seem sound enough — the Guide (GM) decides a difficulty number the protagonist (PC) must achieve and the skill used. The skill score reduces that difficulty number. The player draws a number of cards or rolls a number of dice equal to the governing attribute of that skill. The number or lack of successes determines failure or degree of success. I like this because both skill and attribute are important without overshadowing one another.

What the book fails to point out is that the odds of generating the same difficulty number for dice and cards is very different, so I would personally caution using both methods at the same gaming table — at least without warning everyone present. Cards are neat, but often people fail to realize that once a single card is drawn out of a deck, the odds shift, sometimes dramatically. So, if Fred is using cards and Gina is using dice, even if their PCs' stats are the same, the odds of them achieving the same success are very different.

Website and Support

VESI's website is not what I would call state-of-the-art, nor is it very pretty. The company is just getting on its feet, so I feel obliged to cut it some slack in this department. The forum is fairly active with old fans anticipating their game's revival and the staff at VESI is very responsive to questions, problems and suggestions.

The demo kit found on the site does an excellent job of explaining the rules, although the included adventure included is pretty darn linear - standard gaming con fare. The PCs presented in the adventure are a big help as well, and definitely give one a handle on the breadth of the Everlasting setting. I strongly recommend reading through it.

High marks for the forum, low marks overall for the website.

Chip Dobbs, the president of the company, was extremely responsive to my problems. My copy of Book of the Light had a printing error, but within a short amount of time I had a new one. So while I may not give good marks for their website, the company does have support where it counts. Kudos for that.

Buy this Game if...

...you are a gamer who likes the modern day fantasy genre RPGs like Unknown Armies, In Nomine, the World of Darkness games, GURPS Cabal, Urban Arcana, Witchcraft, etc. and you would like a non-canon resource for your game.

...you are a player of another modern day fantasy game who is looking for a change.

...you are not a fan of these other games, but think the genre could interest you. There is certainly some new ground broken with Everlasting.

Style: 2

The layout and art is average, the organization and editing need some work.

Substance: 5

Simply put, after reading Book of the Light, I would like to play or run this game and I plan on acquiring others in the Everlasting line. If you are a gamer who enjoys modern fantasy, Everlasting: The Book of the Light warrants a space at your gaming table, or at least on your bookshelf as a wonderful resource for that genre.