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Page 1 of 5 Everlasting :Book of the Unliving
Lizard skips the half-human dream insects and decides to look at a late nineties game where you play angst ridden undead in a world filled with all sorts of supernatural entities, using a dice pool system and filled with pretentious posturing. And, no, it's not from White Wolf! Welcome to Everlasting: Book Of The Unliving!
Everlasting: Book Of The Unliving
Originally, my plan for this next installment was something called "Numenon". As far as I can tell, Numenon is a game about playing imaginary half-human, half-insect creatures that exist in some vague sort of... uhm... I'm not sure. I couldn't really figure out where the game started and the weird self indulgent pseudo-philosophical text stopped. So I put that one on hold, and decided, mostly on a whim, to haul out "Everlasting", a game which manages to be just about as pretentious as Numenon while still having an obvious game there. It's a lot like a mid-90s White Wolf game, except with worse art and layout, a more poorly designed system, and the "pretentious poser git" factor turned up to 11.
It produced four volumes and some supplements, though, and it seems to be workable. I say "seems" because, like 90% of my games, I have never even tried to create a character. This ends now!
But first... the pretension!
A quick break. When you are roleplaying, what you are doing is pretending to be magical elves in fairyland. I usually bring this up in online game boards, especially those catering to the PVP crowd, because they tend to act all rough and tough and macho and claim to be "HARD-CORE!" because they like games where they can "kill" their opponents and "risk" things, and look down on "WoW kiddies" and "roleplaying weenies". But no matter how much they try to act as if there's something manly about ganking n00bs, it still boils down to pretending to be magical elves. The equivalent in tabletop RPGs is the attitude that there's something special, mystical, or otherwise meaningful about playing. This group tends to look down on "hack&slashers" or "D&D players" and usually blathers on about things like "recapturing the collective storytelling experience" or "tapping into Jungian archetypes" or "voyages of internal self discovery". Bull-effin'-shit. You're playing magical elves in fairyland. Get over yourselves!
While the banner of hippy-dippy New Age psychobabble has moved on to those games published under the "Indie" banner, notably disciples of Ron Edwards and the Forge, back in the good old 1990s, the Usual Suspects were White Wolf (which has, since the departure of Rein-splat-Heigan, finally mostly grown out of it, though not their unreadable layout issues)... and their hordes of wanna be imitators. One such was (perhaps still is, I think they've published recently) "Visionary Entertainment Studio", and,in 1997, they published the first of the Everlasting games, "The Book Of The Unliving".
Before we get to chargen, though, let me justify my charge of "Pretension". The back of the game screams "It's More Than A Roleplaying Game", and goes on to note it features "communal protaganists", "tips on achieving epiphanies" (!), "dream control methods" (No.... not for characters who can enter dreams. These are for the players. Really!), and "personal mythology". The second score in the Pretension Trifecta is that they claim it's not roleplaying, it's... wait for it.. "Legendmaking", and the final capper comes from the fact they include a cermony -- that the players are expected to perform -- to open and close the game. Now, if this ceremony consisted of:
Players (as a Greek chorus): Oh when shall we begin the game?
DM: When the pizza arrives!
Players (again, in unison): Oh when shall the pizza arrive?
DM: When it gets here!
It would be pretty cool. But, it doesn't. I have no time to type in all the balderdash, especially as I'm writing this on a laptop which is slowly but surely cooking my testicles, because we have a blackout and this is all I can do and I want to write as much as I can before the battery dies and I have to try to fall asleep, but here's a sample:
Guide: Here we gather, we who seek admittance into the Secret World of magic and wonder, we who seek entry into the worlds of legend, we who shall be eldritch for our allotted time.
(The Guide lights the candle)
Lights. The. Candle. The FRACK? The frackin' frack?
This is the kind of crap people who know nothing about RPGs make up because they think that's what RPGs are all about. Maybe the authors are snickering up their sleeves at all this, knowing it's a joke, laughing all the way to the bank at the thought of a bunch of pasty-faced nerds, perhaps with a token goth chick, intoning this with all seriousness before getting on with the business of killing things and taking their stuff.. I mean, having an Odyssey of Personal Legendmaking inspired by Lucid Dreaming, or maybe they really believe it. I hope it's the former.
Did I mention you can use dice, playing cards, tarot cards, or a diceless system? And that they recommend each player use the method they're most comfortable with?
The thing is, this game, and the others in the series, are not devoid of Cool Shit. It took White Wolf years to bloat their world with every conceivable bit of Urban Fantasy rubbish imaginable -- Everlasting gives it to you from the get-go. While future volumes contain orcs and dragons, this first book gives you not just Ye Olde Bloodsuckinge Freaks, but Ghuls, Revenants, Dead Souls, and Reanimates, and each has quite a few subtypes. There are ideas here worth stealing, developing, and exploring. The layout is actually quite a bit more readable than most of White Wolf's stuff. (Hey, graphic artist people! Most gamers are male. Most males have some form of color blindness. Dark grey text on a black background, or anything printed over an image, is often un-bloody-readable! Sheesh.)
So, any way.. let's make a PC.
Wait, did I say "PC"? I meant "Protagonist". (Oh, and you're not a player... you're a participant.)
OK, we skip past more pages of pretentious crap, and I can't tell if the writer is describing the game world (which makes it more tolerable) or expressing his belief about the nature of the real world (which makes it hilarious). Come on, people, I just want to make up a character already! Stop telling me about "Legendmaking" and get on with it!
Ah, here we are. Protagonist Creation. Hmm. We're finally getting to the good stuff. There's three basic undead types for play... participants -- Ghuls (cannibal undead), Vampires (Non-sparkly, I hope.), and Revenants (animated corpses which are sort of psychic vampires). Each has many sub-types, many of which are actually unique and interesting. I remember liking the Ghuls when I last flipped through this book, so we'll go with them. There are five types of Ghul, of which four are playable.I will choose a Grotesquerie, a ghul which drank too much "Anecro" (the magical liquid that makes you a Ghul) and which are hideously deformed. What can I say? Sometimes I just like to play myself. This gives me +1 Instinct, +2 Resilience, and +2 Strength. Please note that neither the attributes nor the scale have been defined yet. Just in case you were wondering if I skipped something.
It suggests flipping ahead to Chapter 4 to learn more about Ghuls, so I did so. The fact is, it's a very nice chapter. There's a lot of stuff about catacombs. There's just enough information on each of the Ghul sub-races to give you an idea about them without drowning you in detail or leaving no room for your own twists and imagination. There's spcial Ghul powers, Ghul magic, a discussion of why someone might choose to become a Ghul, the rules for "degeneration" (the process by which a Ghul slowly becomes less and less human and turns into a mindless monster), etc. It's well written, clear, evocative, and mostly bullshit free. It actually gives you what you need to know to either play a Ghul or run them as NPCs, and gives them enough unique things that it justifies having them as a separate race. What pretentiousness there is seems to be written from an in-game-world perspective, making it far more tolerable. Inspired by the picture on page 91, I decide I'll be playing a scholar type, perhaps from the 1920s (very Lovecraft), who, let's say, stumbled on the Magic Ghul Formula in Ye Olde Forgotten Tome and did something wrong (hence the Grotesquerie), and now pursues Ghulish magic in the hopes of altering his appearance while still preserving his immortality. This probably takes him to lots of dangerous places, where his heightened physical might will be useful. We'll call him Gary. Gary the Ghul. Why not?
(Oh, my personal lair is a Cryptorium, being a Ghul is called "the Curse of Azael", and, and this is a direct quote, I can "travel to the Underworld as easily as traveling to New Jersey". I know where I'd rather go. Badum-bum!)
Apparently, one of the things Ghuls do is smuggle guns into the Underworld. Which sort of makes the New Jersey reference make more sense. That's.... kinda cool, actually.
Finally, I notice that Ghuls don't like Elves, but do like Orcs. Why, yes, Elves and Orcs are part of the kitchen-sink urban fantasy Legendmaking Odyssey that is Everlasting, but they're mostly covered in another book. Which I own. If you ask me nicely, I'll roll up an elf and post it here, too.
OK, back to game mechanics. I've done Step One, which is to pick my splat (sorry, my genos, and Step Two, which is pick a concept -- though I didn't follow their "20 Questions" format. Now comes Step Three, Ethos, or what White Wolf used to call "Nature and Demeanor". Aaaaand... we're back in Pretension Land. "In order to have real legendmaking" (as opposed to, what? Fake legendmaking?), it begins, "a protagonist must undertake a Hero's Journey". It further notes a participant cannot change their ethos without the Guide's approval. (The GM is the "Guide", in case you hadn't picked up on that bit of clodswallop.) None of the "ethoi" really fit my concept, but Explorer comes closest, so, Explorer it is. This doesn't seem to have mechanical effects, the way similar things do in White Wolf, or maybe I just haven't gotten to them yet.
We're about to get to Persona Qualities, but the light here is fading fast (how appropriate!) so I'll continue later. Of course, this won't be posted for hours, perhaps days, so it's all sort of meaningless, but I write these things as unedited stream-of-consciousness and my stream is damming up, so, I'll stop here. Maybe I'll go outside and take advantage of the remaining light to read some more KODT back issues.
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Characters From A Thousand Games 
