Another RPG Bundle - Everywhen

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Everywhen from Beyond Belief Games is a "universal RPG" derived from Barbarians of Lemuria (1992) but trying to cover all eras and genres.

Everywhen

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/Everywhen

This Everywhen Bundle presents Everywhen, the universal RPG based on Simon Washbourne's Barbarians of Lemuria. Conceived in 1992 and published in three editions (2004, 2007, and 2015) and five foreign translations, Barbarians of Lemuria from Beyond Belief Games is a cult classic of sword-and-sorcery roleplaying. BoL's much-admired Careers system and fast-playing, fun combat have inspired standalone RPGs in genres like post-apocalypse (Barbarians of the Aftermath), '80s action-adventure (Dogs of W*A*R), sword-and-sandal Greek myth (Heroes of Hellas), and the swashbuckling Honor + Intrigue from Basic Action Games (which we presented this past May).

In 2018 longtime BoL fan Garnett Elliott published Phil Garrad's Everywhen, a universal system that expanded the basic Lemurian framework with rules for vehicles, chases, investigations, social conflicts, psionics, and mass battles suitable for campaigns in any era or background. Elliott followed the Everywhen corebook with many supplements and adventures that show off the system's universality: Pulse-Pounding Pulp (much in the spirit of the original Lemuria) – setting books like Neonpunk Crysis and Red Venus – and the nine-adventure collection Anywhen Adventures, which casts players as ancient Mesopotamians, Shaolin monks, 16th-Century vampire hunters, shogun assassins, WWII commandos, Miami vice cops, space truckers, and more. Elliott bills Everywhen as "eminently hackable" and "the AK-47 of indie games."

Aaron Marks at Cannibal Halfling Gaming wrote in a May 2021 review that Everywhen "hit the right medium-crunch sweet spot but also had some design choices that made it easy for any GM, novice or experienced, to write exactly what they want with it. [...] Everywhen impressed me. It's light, but doesn't lose so much granularity that you can't take it seriously. It has some mechanical density, but not so much that you get lost. It neither has the detail and breadth of GURPS nor the modularity and adaptability of Fate, but it's easier to teach and to write for than either of those. [...] If you want to write your own RPG setting for the first time, or are trying to get your friends to try something new, Everywhen is a great choice. It may not lead many comparisons in a vacuum, but when it comes to actually getting the plots written and the dice rolled, it should be one of the first places you look."

This all-new offer presents almost the entire Everywhen line for an unbeatable bargain price. We provide each title complete in .PDF. Like all Bundle of Holding titles, these ebooks have NO DRM (Digital Restrictions Management), and our customers are entitled to move them freely among all their devices. (By publisher request, the DriveThruRPG versions of these files are inobtrusively watermarked.)

The total retail value of the titles in this Everywhen Bundle is US$67. Customers who pay just US$7.95 get all four titles in our Starter Collection (retail value $30) as DRM-free ebooks, including the complete Everywhen core rulebook (retail price $10), plus the free supplement Weapons and Armour and the quickstart solo adventure The Fomorian; Pulse-Pounding Pulp (retail $9); the scenario anthology Anywhen Adventures (retail $8); and Darkness: Supernatural Creatures (retail $3).

Those who pay more than the threshold (average) price, which is set at $14.95 to start, also get our entire Bonus Collection with six more titles worth an additional $37, including the Vikings-vs-Mythos campaign sourcebook Wyrd Sails (retail $10) and five settings and adventures that range widely across genres: Blood Sundown (retail $6) and its adventure Dragon by the Bay (retail $4), Neonpunk Crysis (retail $5) and its scenario Escape From Old Tokyo (retail $4), and the rocketpunk setting Red Venus (retail $8).

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.