Setting
I've recently been introduced to the concept of heartbreaker RPGs. Games that were clearly a labour of love by someone trying to improve on some aspect of their favourite game.
I suspect most people who've played World of Darkness games will at some point have had the same thought: since all these games have the same setting and system, could we combine them all together to make one great big awesome game with vampires, werewolves, mages and changelings all together.
Those who've tried it will know that the answer to this is no. Changeling magic is embarrassingly underpowered compared to mages. Vampires are completely incapable of getting along with werewolves. I've played in an online chat and forum based game that wasn't a disaster, but only because the four games were ultimately kept pretty distinct with only minimal crossover.
The Everlasting is a heartbreaker intended to fix this. While it's split into four individual games, each of them is compatible with all the others by design, while at the same time still working as a standalone. The setting is the Secret World, parallel to the real world but full of magic and supernatural beings. It's pretty similar to the World of Darkness, obviously, but the wider variety of player character types forces it to expand further.
The four books each focus on a specific area of the Secret World. The Book of the Unliving has the vampires you'd expect, subdivided into different types depending on bloodline. What's particularly interesting here is that the author has done his research, and the bloodlines are all based on different vampire myths from around the world. It gives them a grounding in the real world that I found was missing from Vampire: The Masquerade.
As well as vampires, this book also has revenants and ghuls, again based on real world mythology, and giving a bit of variety to the creation of your undead horror-hunger character as you find yourself needing to feed on human flesh or human life force rather than blood.
The Book of the Light introduces a variety of divine character types. You can play an angel, a minor deity called a daeva, or a grail knight, which brings in Christian theology, a whole bunch of Pagan mythology and the legends of King Arthur. For some reason this book also includes werewolves, which stick rather closer to traditional tales than the complexity of the WoD werewolf.
The Book of the Spirits provides options for sin-eating gargoyles, Native American inspired manitou, and spirit possessed people. The Book of the Fantastical has the faeries, dwarves and orcs you'd expect.
The meta-fiction doesn't get in the way too much, just stating that a recent event called the death-knell (which coincides with the Chernobyl incident) has released a bunch of demons onto the earth. From there you're pretty much free to create your own story. Or rather to...no, we'll come to that later. For now, I'll just note that as modern fantasy settings go, this one is incredibly detailed and very well researched. It's obvious how much love the author put into this, and it's got loads of potential for telling interesting stories.
System
For this section I'll be primarily looking at The Book of the Undead, as a lot of this is repeated pretty much verbatim in each book.
It starts out well enough. You've got attributes and skills, which determine how many dice you have in your dice pool...
Wait.
This game doesn't have one system. It has five.
System 1 is your standard WoD style dice pool. Roll x dice, count successes, ones cancel out successes. The biggest problem here is that it uses d12s. As any RPG enthusiast will know, dice come in standard sets. The 7 dice polyhedral set, blocks of twelve standard or thirty-six small d6s, or a set of ten d10s. d12s just aren't something your average gamer owns in significant quantities, unless it's part of a truly massive set of dice. I've been a gamer for about 15 years now, and I have a whole bag of d6s and d10s, a bunch of specialist dice like fate dice, but only four d12s because they're part of the polyhedral sets I own. Sorting out dice for this game is going to mean having to buy a bunch of individual dice.
Not that this matters, though, because the system that the author actually wants you to use is card draws. Never mind that drawing 5 cards from a deck has radically different probabilities than rolling 5d12, plus there's a whole different thing that happens if you draw a King. Still, you probably own a standard deck of playing cards, so there's that.
There are also rules for using percentile dice, because that's totally comparable to a dice pool, and for complete freeform with no dice or cards, simply comparing your combined stat to a difficulty modifier to see how plausible something is.
And then there's tarot, which is pretty much the same as the standard card draw except you all have to have your own deck because you're going to start by drawing three of the major arcana and use them over the course of the game to steer events. This I actually like, as it gives the potential for narratively interesting things. The bit where it tells you the proper uses for the cards, and how players should be punished or shut down for using them in other ways, not so much.
So this is all completely bonkers. You're being clearly pushed in the direction of card draws over dice, but at the same time it says that each player can use whichever system they prefer. So it's entirely possible to end up with all five going on at the same table.
The game is trying to be all things to all players. As a result it's just an incoherent mess.
But leaving that aside, we have character creation.
Here the book does something right. A brief, step by step summary of character creation, with chapter references for the different 'races' within the game. It's succinct, easy to follow, and should have been front and centre instead of being inexplicably relegated to a set of sidebars, but nevertheless it's excellent.
Characters are built on a point-buy system, except when they're not. Number of points are given for each section, but there's also an option to do a card draw, do some maths with the result, and use that instead, should you want to make things considerably more difficult for yourself and run the risk of wildly imbalanced PCs, which given that the whole point of this game is to create a set of PCs that don't have the wild power imbalances of the different WoD games seems like a strange approach to take.
Card draws aside, the character creation is really focussed on creating a character who's more than just a set of stats, giving you a set of questions to consider, and a selection of example beliefs, outlooks, passions and other aspects to really flesh them out. It fits the kind of game this is intended to be.
One thing that's pretty innovative for a game that originally came out in 1997 is the destiny and backlash points. Destiny points work like fate points in Fate or bennies in Savage Worlds. They can be awarded for good roleplaying, and are used to improve rolls or alter events in the PC's favour. Backlash points are used by the GM to turn successes into failures or cause trouble, and are awarded when the PCs do evil things with magic. There's a certain amount of accountancy required, as each PC has their own individual pool of backlash points, but it's a workable system.
Things turn wonky again when we get to the combat system. Every character has a speed rating. This does not determine initiative order, however, but tells you which turns within a combat round you can act upon. A round has 10 turns, and a character with, e.g. speed 4, can act on turns 3, 5, 8 and 10. Which could be just about bearable, if it wasn't for the fact that different actions take different numbers of turns. Then there's opposed roles, difficulty modifiers (just in case you really need to have a sword fight while swimming) and a set of base difficulties for different weapon types, because if you thought this was going to be like WoD with a set target number to beat on your dice pool, you are sorely mistaken.
Naturally there is also a page of rules for freeform combat, plus instructions on how to make this involve far more maths than necessary. At this point, I've had enough.
Style and Substance
Physically, The Everlasting is in standard large RPG size. Unusually for large books, they're all paperbacks (although I understand later editions were available in hardback). The covers have nicely detailed colour paintings. The internal art is all black and white line art, nothing special but all perfectly servicable and quite respectable for something this old. All except the Book of the Fantastical have nicely decorated page borders (and that book is a bit of an oddity, having basically been produced as a fan project when for some reason it wasn't going to get released).
But now we get to the actual text. And if you thought the rules were kind of nutty, this is the point where the game goes totally off the rails.
I have a pet peeve in RPGs, and it's games that use their own terminology instead of industry standard terms. Everyone knows that unless you're playing D&D (in which case you have the DM or dungeon master), the person running the game is the GM, or game master. There's no need to mess with that. And yet many games do, whether it's World of Darkness with Storyteller, Call of Cthulhu with Keeper, or Apocalypse World with MC.
And yet, while I don't like it, I can see why they did it. WoD was trying to demonstrate that it was a different type of game to D&D, one focussed more on stories than killing monsters. CoC, which also renamed PCs to Investigators, was trying to tell you something about what kind of character and story the game involved. AW was trying to indicate how the GM plays a rather different role in that game to what they do in a more conventional RPG.
The Everlasting, however, has absolutely no excuse for what it does with standard RPG terminology. The GM is now a Guide, and the PCs are Protagonists and that's only the start of it, because this game doesn't have rules, it has guidelines, it doesn't have campaigns, it has Odysseys, and lest you were thinking this is some kind of game you're playing, it's not an RPG, it's an interactive legendmaking experience.
Mind you, to know what you're in for on this front, you only have to look at the credits page. Rather than the usual writers, artists and designers, you will instead find credits for things like Limner of Tome Cover, Illumination Administers, and Wise and Noble Oracles.
At this point you won't be surprised to find that each book contains multiple lexicons: a general one, one for the rules (sorry, guidelines), and one for each different type of character, erm, protagonist, as apparently absolutely nobody in the Secret World can just use normal words for anything.
And it spells magick with a k.
There's a few pages of fiction at the start of each book, and as game fiction goes it's OK - although somehow I thought that the one from the Book of the Unliving might actually be about unliving characters, rather than focussing mostly on daevas.
Credit where credit's due, there is a nice section about how to construct stories which translates pretty well to any RPG. In accordance with how this book normally works, it's relegated to a sidebar.
And finally, the bit where the game, OK, legendmaking experience isn't just off the rails, it's off the cliff and into the sea. Chapter 13: Legendmaking.
To truly do justice to how completely batshit this chapter is, I'd have to reproduce the entire thing. As it is, I'll just share a couple of things.
Multiple pages are given over to the subject of lucid dreaming, with explanations of why you should, and instructions on how to achieve it. All this is somehow supposed to help you...honestly I'm not sure. I think you're supposed to do your own story in your sleep? It doesn't seem to have any link to the rest of the book.
And then there's the ritual. This game genuinely includes an opening and closing ceremony for game...legendmaking sessions. Everyone has lines to say, and significantly coloured candles are to be lit. A sample:
Guide:
Let us walk now, past the shadows of the flame that cast upon the cave's wall, beyond our mundane world. Our protagonists shall be our representatives. They shall symbolize a deeper truth than our everyday activities. Let us close our eyes.
There is more to reality than what we see. More than what we hear. Can feel it? Look with your imagination. Listen for the spirits in the air.
Any Single Participant:
And so it begins.
If I tried this with my regular gaming group, I think I'd be eaten along with the takeaway.
Summary
There are some great ideas in this game. The setting is exceptionally well researched and full of potential. But the whole thing is so bogged down by both its desperate attempts to appeal to everyone and the layers upon layers of jargon, mysticism and overall pretentiousness that the idea of actually taking it off the shelf and playing it is unthinkable.
Someone liked it, enough to get the Book of the Fantastical out there when it wasn't going to happen, plus the two add-on books that I don't own. The setting has enough going for it that you could probably extract the character types and import them into a different game engine and end up with a half decent game.
But as it is, it will remain, forever, a heartbreaker.
Although doubtless it would have its own word for that.
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