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Another RPG Bundle - Everywhen
Aug. 21st, 2023 09:49 pmEverywhen from Beyond Belief Games is a "universal RPG" derived from Barbarians of Lemuria (1992) but trying to cover all eras and genres.
( Everywhen )
Generic systems can be a very mixed bag - GURPS from Steve Jackson Games is the obvious leader in the field, and the rules are (to put it mildly) complicated enough to cover any genre, while making it easy to omit the parts you don't need. Basic Role Playing (Chaosium) follows a similar approach. By comparison Everywhen tries to keep things really simple. This makes it easy to pick up and adapt to a wide range of campaigns, but there are some drawbacks; for example, the usual character generation process starts out with four attributes, with only three points to spend on them, which means that a lot of starting characters will have fairly similar characteristics. This can be changed for higher-powered genres such as superheroes, of course, but it seems odd that it should be so granular at the base level.
Without having played it, it looks reasonably well-written and playable, but I'm probably more interested in the scenarios and settings, and the possibility of adapting them to systems I already know, than in learning yet another new system. Having said that, it's pretty cheap and you get quite a lot for your money, and there are some very interesting setting ideas, so it's well worth taking a look.
One small peeve common to a lot of RPGs - this has a huge table of contents at the front, but you can't click on it to jump to the relevant page, you have to scroll up and down. It isn't a huge nuisance, but most document editing software can create interactive tables of contents automatically, or at least with relatively little input from the editor, it seems a pity to omit it.
( Everywhen )
Generic systems can be a very mixed bag - GURPS from Steve Jackson Games is the obvious leader in the field, and the rules are (to put it mildly) complicated enough to cover any genre, while making it easy to omit the parts you don't need. Basic Role Playing (Chaosium) follows a similar approach. By comparison Everywhen tries to keep things really simple. This makes it easy to pick up and adapt to a wide range of campaigns, but there are some drawbacks; for example, the usual character generation process starts out with four attributes, with only three points to spend on them, which means that a lot of starting characters will have fairly similar characteristics. This can be changed for higher-powered genres such as superheroes, of course, but it seems odd that it should be so granular at the base level.
Without having played it, it looks reasonably well-written and playable, but I'm probably more interested in the scenarios and settings, and the possibility of adapting them to systems I already know, than in learning yet another new system. Having said that, it's pretty cheap and you get quite a lot for your money, and there are some very interesting setting ideas, so it's well worth taking a look.
One small peeve common to a lot of RPGs - this has a huge table of contents at the front, but you can't click on it to jump to the relevant page, you have to scroll up and down. It isn't a huge nuisance, but most document editing software can create interactive tables of contents automatically, or at least with relatively little input from the editor, it seems a pity to omit it.
