Everway Silver Anniversary Edition

Silver Anniversary edition

Everway is the only roleplaying game that I ever got my late wife to play. We played a lot of Magic: The Gathering and Netrunner, but roleplaying wasn’t her thing. With Everway, I talked her into playing a with two other couples. My original goal with Everway was to make it accessible and attractive to new players, and my late wife’s experience tells me that I more or less succeeded. Everway is also the first game I created after my daughter was born, and it is dedicated to her. I love all my roleplaying games. Like children, each one is special in its own way. But of all of them, Everway means the most to me personally. It’s exciting that this game from 1995 is coming back in a beautiful new Silver Anniversary edition.

 

When I hired on with Wizards of the Coast at the end of 1993, I brought the rough concept for Everway with me, and it was my main project for my first two years there. My thinking was that it had to be something new and different. There wouldn’t be much point in releasing a standard-issue roleplaying game, which would have little chance of competing externally with Dungeons & Dragons or internally with Magic. Everway was an ambitious attempt to reach a broader audience, using a system that would appeal both to experienced gamers and to new fans outside the gamer community. 

For one thing, the game had to be beautiful. The standard roleplaying experience can look to observers like an exercise in sensory deprivation, and Magic had raised expectations for how colorful a hobby game could be. Everway’s imagery was as global and multicultural as we could manage. With my own little biracial daughter at home, I wanted a game that transcended the Eurocentric template set by D&D. After Everway was published, I once got an email from an African American roleplayer who thanked me for the game. He said it had changed the way he roleplayed, inspiring him to create Black characters for the first time, not just in Everway but in other games as well. Have I mentioned how much this game means to me personally?

Colorful images appeal to the
next generation of gamers

The imagery is more than decoration. It inspires people to invent characters, adventures, and lands, drawing stories out of their imaginations. New players are often delighted to find out that they can create characters and backstories with a little prompting from the artwork. Instead of dice, Everway uses a Fortune Deck, modeled after the major arcana cards of tarot decks. The Fortune Deck is a randomizer, but one that uses symbols instead of numbers. The deck has a secret pattern, but keeping the pattern secret was a mistake. Players didn’t notice the hidden pattern, so they couldn’t appreciate it, and in the Silver Anniversary the pattern is explicit. 

While Everway didn’t clear a profit, it inspired a lot of indie RPG designers. It’s fondly remembered by a number of designers who have since made great progress in developing ways to support narrative, free-form practices in roleplaying games. It was meant to show people new ideas about how to play these games that we love, and it did. 

As a project at Wizards, Everway faced a number of systemic challenges, as perhaps all the projects that weren’t trading card games did at that time. For one thing, we didn’t control costs, and the components were prohibitively expensive. Also, it’s packaging showed that the game was different—in fact too different. On game store shelves, the packaging didn’t work. Within months of the game’s release, Wizards cut many teams and product lines and laid off the employees connected to them. Roleplaying games were cut, and the roleplaying staff was laid off. I landed in R&D, working first on Netrunner and on beginner versions of Magic. Thankfully, the company worked to find homes for the games that were cut, and Everway ended up with two big fans, twin brothers Jesse McGatha and Richard Thames Rowan. 

After all these years, Rich and Jesse have formed the Everway Company to publish a new edition of Everway—the Silver Anniversary edition. The game has an all-new format, and it will look great on game store shelves. The new publishers have incorporated art from the Spherewalker supplement by my old friend Greg Stolze, and the new version is all color. It also includes a lot more content, mostly material from Spherewalker and from several published adventures. The original was slim, but the Silver Anniversary edition is grand.

How will the new edition fare? It’s a better offering than the original, and the gaming community is more ready for a free-form game like Everway than it was 25 years ago. The Kickstarter campaign will be an opportunity for us to see just how much love there is out there for Everway, and how well the game might inspire a new generation of roleplayers. Originally, the Rich and Jesse were going to handle the Kickstarter on their own, but their edition is so marvelous that I told them I wanted to be involved myself. I’ll be running the Kickstarter, and I’m excited to see this remarkable game get another shot at finding its audience.

more about the Silver Anniversary edition