Everhammer Full Rules

Looking back on my last post, and the one from June, I don't think there's really enough info there for anyone else to run this hybrid Everway/Warhammer FRP game.

So,  I'm going to post below the actual rules document I've GM'd from. It's just 2 or 3 pages, written pretty informally, and in a couple spots talks about things I hadn't yet done (like convert Wound cards to reference Everway's stats instead of Warhammer's). It was basically just a brainstorming document that proved solid enough on it's rough draft to work without major revisions. Obviously, it's derived from Everway and Warhammer, so I make no copyright claims about it. Feel free to use this system in your own games if you'd like. I feel that, given the nature of RPGs and the common assumption that every GM creates house rules, this document falls under "fair use". It doesn't quote either game system directly, IIRC, but certainly appropriates numerous concepts from both.

To use this "EverHammer" document to it's fullest, you'd need to have a copy of Everway and a copy of Warhammer 3rd. A passing knowledge of each game would be very helpful - you'll need the setting info from Everway and a modicum of familiarity with the combat system from Warhammer.  The Everway boxed set contributes two necessary decks of cards, gives examples of appropriate powers,  and lays out the basics of the setting. The Warhammer boxed set provides dice, fatigue markers, and location cards that can be used as-is. It also provided wound cards that I didn't use exactly, but which certainly provided the inspiration for the wound decks that I created/converted and used for the game. To use these rules, you'd have to make up your own Wound cards.

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Everhammer Summary
An Everway variant using elements of Warhammer FRP 3rd

Character Creation:
(Per Everway, except that dice are derived from Element pools.)

• Draw three fortune cards to determine Virtue, Fault, and Fate
• Draw five image cards to decide on back story
• 20 points to build character
• Four Elements must rate between 1 and 9. 3 is human average.
• Zero-point power. Others cost 1 point per Frequent, Versatile, or Major. Max 6 points on powers.
• For truly flexible open-ended powers, you’ll want Magic. Magic ranges from 0 to 7.

From Warhammer:

• Dice: Blue for Elements, Yellow for Specialization, Black and Purple for difficulty, White
• Location Cards
• Abstract Movement and Manoeuvres system
• Assisting others with your manoeuvre
• Group Initiative
• Fatigue

Tweaks to warhammer stuff:

• Dice symbols are a little different.  
• Comet & Chaos Star draw a fortune card for unexpected developments
• Eagles & Skulls only affect fatigue, or trigger location effects
• Wounds are crits only. Wounds via mental attacks are disorders.
• Fatigue is 1 stat (not 2) and affects all elements. At end of fight, recover fatigue = highest element.
• Assess the Situation can be done with any Element you haven’t rolled yet this battle.

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EverHammer Longer Version
Keeping the cool bits from Warhammer FRP 3rd Ed, and fusing them with the solid narrative system of Everway. Warhammer 3rd is too fiddly, and Everway is too simplistic, but meeting in the middle and playing on synergy and strengths is powerful.

Keeping the best dice from Warhammer 3rd. Those are the Blue, the White and Black,  and the Yellow and Purple dice.

Using the four “Classical Elements” stats from Everway. 
Most rolls are Blue dice equal to stat, vs a number of dice equal to target/opposing stat. However, defense dice are 1 purple and the rest just black. By contrast, the attack roll will be Blues and often a Yellow. You’ve got a better than 50% chance of hitting a foe of equal calibre (unless you’ve got a 2 in your attack stat).
For non-contested rolls, the GM assigns a difficulty number. This is total dice rolled against you, one of which is purple and the rest are black. Average challenge is 1 purple and 2 black.


Characters are built from the usual Everway budget of 20 points. Attributes come out of that total, and you must spend at least 1 point on each, with 3+ points per stat being very recommended, as that’s human average.

Still get a free 0-point power. One small bit of design space opened up by the dice is that your 0-point power could add a single die (usually a white one) to a die pool (as long as it’s an infrequent, non-versatile die-pool).

Other powers cost per Everway. Frequent, Major, and Versatile each cost a point. When a power is being used, it adds a die to the roll. In most cases this is a White die. However, any power that is major will add not just a white die, but also one extra yellow die per Major rating.

Defensive Powers: Any defensive power will convert one more black die into a purple (which is similar in impact to adding an extra black die, but it’s actually a little better for the defender in terms of the foe getting more banes). Major defensive powers add extra purple dice per level of major, which is pretty potent.

In general, the dice reflect the powers, not the other way around. That is to say, the storyline impact of a major power is probably better than its dice odds. There will be times where that major power means you don’t even have to roll.

Dice icons: We’ve really simplified things.

• Hammer: Success as always. Attacks do 1 or 2 damage, depending on whether you rolled 1 or 3 successes. Damage is done in crits. NPCs will, in addition, have a target line that if a PC rolls the NPC is taken out automatically.
• Hammer +: Success, and roll another yellow die!
• Comet: GM flips top card of the Fortune Deck, and improvised appropriately. The better possible interpretation of the card happens, regardless of up/down orientation.
• Eagle: These are only fatigue-related now, unless there’s a location card. One or more eagles gets rid of 1 point of fatigue.
• Crossed Swords: Challenge result. Cancels out a hammer.
• Chaos Star: GM flips the top card of the Fortune deck, and the worse interpretation happens.
• Skulls: These are only fatigue-related now, unless there’s a location card.. 1 or more skulls means 1 point of fatigue.

Other roll effects: Location cards can give other effects for die rolls, but the most common will be for Eagles or Skulls.

Attributes used: Most attacks roll fire. Most powers use Air. Attacks are always defended against with the same trait that they rolled. If your foe has a better dice pool than you, change stats.

Initiative: Per WFRP 3rd. Each PC rolls. Every major NPC rolls, and once per distinct type of henchmen. Any person on the team can use any slot, whoever knows what they want to do, should do it.
Assuming all sides know trouble is coming, they roll Fire for initiative, depending on whether this is a melee or a social conflict. If, however, it’s instead an ambush, we’ll roll water.

Fatigue and Injuries: 
We’re using the core of the Fatigue and Manoeuvre systems from WHFRP. So, you get 1 free manoeuvre per turn. Each mano past 1 costs a fatigue. Range system is Engaged to Close=1, Close to Medium = 1, Medium to Long = 2, Long to Extreme = 3. So going from Extreme to Engaged in one round is 7 fatigue.

In addition to movement, manoeuvres can be used to interact with the environment, draw or ready a weapon, or assist another. Assisting is just narrating how your action provides an opening or opportunity for someone else, thereby giving them an extra white die on their next action. You can also narrate sheltering them or intervening, which adds a black die to attacks against them.

Fatigue is marked with tear drop tokens. If your fatigue exceeds your active stat, each point beyond it adds a black die to your roll.

Shedding Fatigue: At the end of a fight, you get back fatigue equal to  either your highest stat, so you’ll start the next fight very close to fresh. (Plus basing it on highest stat helps make high stats better, which is important given that we’re using dice for Everway).

During a fight, you may “Assess The Situation” to regain fatigue. Assessing involves  rolling any trait you have not yet rolled this fight. The difficulty is a single purple, plus 1 black per foe you’re engaged with. If you score 1 success, it cures 1 fatigue. If you score 3 successes, it scores 2 fatigue (total), and if you score any eagles that cures 1 more.


Wounds: This is the trickiest part. The GM has just a couple days to make a bunch of Wound cards (criticals) and Distorder cards (like insanities, plus party tension meter, distractions, etc). I’ll base them off the ones in WFRP, but converted to these four stats and simpler system. If you get more crits than your Earth score, you’re out of the fight.

Healing: You may roll Earth once per day to get rid of injuries, and Water once a day to get rid of disorders (the stress effects). Success gets rid of one card, regardless of numbers of symbols rolled. Only 1 card (of each type) can go away per day.

Magical Healing: Is just like normal healing, except the healer is usually the one rolling. Magical healing is limited to one roll (and one success) per day, but it does stack with mundane healing.

Everhammer Revisited

I ran some "Everhammer" (Everway, using select mechanics ported over from Warhammer FRP 3rd Ed) over Thanksgiving while visiting friends in Portland, OR.  This time we got in 12 to 13 hours of actual play, split in two sessions. This slightly more than doubled the total amount of Everhammer I've run.

Overall, it went really smashingly well.

Plotline: 
The session was mostly creepy, with a little bit of humor, and a heavy layer of impending doom. Apparently, I was doing something right, because the players kept deciding to put distance between themselves and the various creepy NPCs I'd made. (As I compose this, I'm reminded of a review I once read for the movie Lost Highway where the review put himself on a strict budget of no more than 10 uses of the word "creepy" in one review. I think I'll do the same.)

We picked up from last time with the PCs having just come through a gateway into an unidentified Realm. They knew that there was a pretty major villain (quite probably Alurax the dragon) just a few days behind them, so they didn't really want to stay near the gate. The nearest civilization was a huge barn or stable up on a ridge a few hours hike from their current position. As they approached, they had some encounters with ghosts, which revealed there were some real "wicked witch" types living at those stables. The witches were sort of Norn like, seers and prophetesses who delighted in giving out terrible omens, and sometimes chose to swindle and murder their potential clients.

So the PCs decided to sneak away from the creepy witches. From the high vantage point of the cliffs, they could see a small village not too far away, and what looked like a large military camp a few hours beyond it.

They head to the village, but find the locals paranoid, conservative, creepy and a little insane. These people are in to a little S&M apparently, and punish the smallest crimes with mutilation, piercing, and huge heavy chains. So the PCs slink away from the creepy rural locals, and head towards the military camp, which the rurals had referred to as the big city.

The big city turns out to be even more fundamentalist and creepy than the little village was, so the PCs decide to high-tail it back to the Witches, and see if they get the evil prophetesses to point them in the direction of the nearest gate away that doesn't have a ferocious dragon beyond it.

At this point, speaking as sadistic and awful GM, I was feeling pretty good. I'd made the PCs so stressed and nervous they'd fled a dragon to the witches, fled the witches (and ghosts) to a village, fled the village to a city, and fled the city back to the witches. It warmed my cold dark GM's heart. So, of course, after a creepy (and just plain wrong) couple of scenes interacting with the Witches, it seemed only appropriate to have them relate that the only other gate out of the realm was back in the creepy city.

Back to the city it is. There was a bit of a run-in with the TSA equivalents amidst the city watch. That didn't go so well, and the PCs ended up in a running battle all the way into the middle of town. After some pretty nasty fighting, they managed to get to the gate. Around the gate (on this side) the creepy repressive chain-wearing punishment-mongers had built The Museum of Human Suffering, so that anyone entering the gate from another world would immediately know that this place doesn't tolerate dissent.

On the other side of the gate, in whatever world it links to, was a cage and a watchdog. Basically, the folks there didn't want the creepy sadistic folks from the Suffering museum to invade/expand/visit, so they'd set up some barriers to stop it.

The PCs managed to finagle their way out of the cage around the gate, and we decided to leave off there. The storyline will resume the next time a 3-day weekend takes me and my wife down to Portland again.

Anyone looking to learn more about the witches should read my page on Crone Crater.
Anyone looking to learn more about the chain-covered folks should read my page on Restriction.
I can't fill in any more details in this post, because I've already used my allotted budget of "creepy".


Mechanics:
Everhammer is basically the general character creation rules from Everway, with the dice from Warhammer 3rd added in. I blogged about it once a few months ago. Full write-up here.

To give you a feel for it, if a character with Fire 4, an Archery specialization, and a 0-point power called "Improbable Ricochet" (this is actually one of the PCs) were to fire in a bizarre bouncing arc at a villain with Fire 5 and no relevant defensive powers (which was one of her main targets during the battle in the city), the die pool would be 4 Blue, 1 Yellow, and 1 White vs 1 Purple and 4 Black dice.  That's a 58% chance of scoring a Wound, and a 53% chance of scoring one or more Boons. In the process, she has a 22% chance of taking a Fatigue for her efforts. I'm pleased with it. It's simple and intuitive, easy to improvise, and the math works well enough.

Fatigue flows pretty fast, but between my tweak that it only takes 1 Boon to remove a fatigue, and my port of the "Assess the Situation" action, it's pretty easy for PCs to manage it. There were high and low crests and troughs to the fatigue levels, which provided dramatic tension as needed, but in actuality, only one roll ever ended up penalized by pre-existing fatigue levels. It was just enough to keep the players wary, but never lead to a doom spiral. Success, if you ask me.

It was quick and easy to pick up, as well. My rules document is 2 pages long. I reread it just before we left to take the train down to Portland, and only had to reference it twice in 13 hours of play. The players needed about 5 minutes to look over their character sheets again, and be walked through one sample die roll, and then everybody was ready to go. Success again, all around.

The players had no complaints. I, however, found three rough edges I need to smooth over, two of which stemmed from the fact that I didn't do any prep work.

• Everway NPCs are all about their weird powers. As GM, next time I need to spend a few minutes pre-game writing up weird powers. I had to improvise them as the game rolled on, and that wasn't always the best. However, the guy who could pierce your nose from a distance was pretty neat, mainly because it came up during combat.
• Same thing about Boon & Bane effects. I could have used some terrain cards appropriate to the places my fight scenes were happening at, and some prepared effects for high Boon or Bane rolls or for the Comets and Chaos Stars. These dice symbols and effects are all really detailed and defined in default Warhammer FRP, and improvising them off the cuff was a little uneven. Sometimes I was on fire, other times I froze up.
• Exactly how many Wounds or Fatigue does it take to knock out a PC? According to my 2-page rules summary, it takes Wounds = Earth +1. That rules summary doesn't mention how much Fatigue it takes to make a character pass out, but my original post here about the system says the answer for Fatigue is 10. One of my players had it written on her character sheet KO=8. That character's Earth score is 3. Somewhere, numerical wires got crossed several months ago. I can straighten it out easily enough, but it was annoying to discover the disparity (and lack of answer on my rules sheet) mid-session.

Having identified those three areas, I'll be ready with fixes for next time. Memo to my future self: do your prep work. It's a rules-light game, but will run much better if you're properly prepared.

Definitely looking forward with great anticipation to our next session in Portland.

You got your Everway in my Warhammer!

This is an article about how I folded two very different game systems into one another, and found the place where they intersect to be more immediately enjoyable than either on it's own.

First, some context about the two games:

The new(-ish) Warhammer FRP has some really awesome groundbreaking elements like group initiative, abstract movement, multiple-axis of success, and wickedly cool dice. However, on the whole it's a lot more fiddly than I'd like it to be, and it involves a boatload of components that hog the table-space. It's a strange (but mostly enjoyable) mix of complicated bean-counting and elegant time-saving innovations. It's a game that can't quite decide on its target audience. Too fiddly for fans of most indy games, too revolutionary and abstract for those who approach combat as a comfortable tactical challenge.

Everway is a cool older game that was one of the first really light and abstract game systems. But it's in practice, too light. Combat is entirely narrative, and things like damage, healing, initiative, and even who wins any given conflict is almost entirely a matter of GM fiat. With the right group, and the right GM, a good dose of trust, and plenty of time to get the balance of the non-mechanics fine-tuned, it can be incredible. I've had some fun with Everway before, and gotten a lot of joy from Amber, another game with roughly the same level of GM fiat and rules non-existence. While I like that style of gaming, I know they're not for everyone. If you're playing infrequently, don't know your play group well, or want a little more "game" in your game, Everway is not a good choice.

Hauling out my old Crunchometer, I'd say Everway is an umistakeable c4. It's light and simple, the rules could fit on a single page. Character creation is entirely open-ended, with the exception of four very basic and flexible attributes. There's hardly any math involved in character creation, and far less while you're actually playing.

Warhammer 3rd, on the other hand, occupies no single niche, and instead is spread across a hazy band near the other end of the spectrum. It's a c20 that plays more like a c12 (and gets to that lower rating by incorporating some features usually found in a c6).

The resulting hybrid was about a c8, which for me is pretty much the sweet spot where the gaming is really good. I was very happy with the way it turned out.

I'm not sure exactly how I realized that Warhammer had exactly what Everway was missing, but after that thought popped into my head last week, I started noticing other similarities. The real breakthrough came when I realized that in both games, nearly all character attributes will be in the range of 3 to 6 (the extreme apex of the range is higher in Everway, but in practice I've never seen a PC go above 7 and most don't go above 5). Which meant the basics of Warhammer's intriguing dice system could be ported over into Everway without having to make major changes to the character creation system of the lighter game. From there, it all fell into place organically.

Friday night, after arriving in Portland, I taught the basics of the system to my three players (two of which had never played either Everway or Warhammer), and they created characters. On Saturday, we played all day long (about 10 hours of play, IIRC), and everyone had a blast. It was probably the best gaming I'd ever had with this particular group.

So here's how "EverHammer" works. Character creation is identical to Everway. All the differences are in game play, not character creation.

The four elemental attributes use blue warhammer dice to actively do things. The difficulty is a number of dice equal to the defender's relevant stat, of which the first die is purple and rest are black. So if an archer with Air 5 attacks a target with Fire 4, they'd roll 5 blue dice, 1 purple and 3 black (about a 57% success rate, and the counter-attack with the stats flipped would be about a 37% success rate).

Powers added either white or yellow dice to active rolls. As I ran it, I had 0-point powers add a white die, and powers that cost a point or more add a yellow. I'm not 100% certain that was the right break point. The way I did it worked, but it might not have been optimal. I could see reserving the yellow die for powers whose points come from the "Major" quality, instead, for example.

If a power was defensive in nature, it added a purple die to the roll.

Additional white and black dice could be (and frequently were) applied as improvised situational and terrain modifiers.

In all cases, dice pools flow from the character creation system, and causality comes from the shared game world and goes into the dice. Never the other way around. In other words, you can't buy a yellow die on it's own, or upgrade a power to Major just to get a die.

Likewise, if a power is defined as "immunity to fire" and that character is attacked with normal mundane fire they cannot take damage. We still roll, to see if there's any fatigue changes or fortune effects (see below) but damage is off the table. If they were attacked by magical fire, or dragon breath, or some complicated mix of fire and something else (such as a volcanic explosion) then damage might be a possibility but they'd get the bonus purple die for defending with the fire immunity.

I ditched the stance system from Warhammer. I'm not sure I had to, there's probably some reasonably elegant way to work in red and green dice (possibly Fire & Air = Red, Earth & Water = Green), and finding meaning for the delay icons despite not having action cards (more about that later). I was a little pinched for time (having gotten the idea for this system less than 72 hours before we were going to be playing it), and didn't want to try to figure out how to include that extra layer of complexity that comes from stance.

You roll the dice, do all the cancellations, and if there's at least 1 success left, you hit for normal damage. If you score 3 successes, you hit for double damage. Normal damage is 1 card. I made some wound cards to handle this, they were basically the equivalent of a critical wound from Warhammer. I'll probably devote an article to discussing them in depth at some future date, because I think there's some non-obvious considerations on what types of criticals enhance a fight scene, and what just ruin the game. If you suffer more wounds than you have points of Earth, you pass out. Any hit after that point could be a Coup de grâce.

For purely mental attacks, I ginned up a "disorder deck" that's basically criticals for mind powers. It's got a bit of overlap with various critical hits, insanity cards, and party tension meter effects from Warhammer. Again, when I get around to writing the article on the wound cards, I'll revisit this topic in depth.

Boons and banes were handled more simply than in Warhammer as well, eliminating all the complicated effects of various action cards. I kept fatigue, but rolled stress into it so there was just one type of fatigue point to worry about. I ran it with the existing Warhammer rule of 2+ banes = 1 fatigue, but in hindsight, I think I'll run that as 1+ bane = 1 fatigue next time. There were a lot of rolls of 1 boon or 1 bane, and not enough fatigue going around (An Everway character is less likely than a Warhammer character to have a weak-spot that fatigue penalizes.) If fatigue is higher than the active attribute, each additional point of fatigue adds a black die. Passing out sucks, and the wound system already emphasized Earth enough, so I set the pass-out to 10 instead of something attribute-based. One could argue the other way around (that wounds should be a set high number and fatigue based on Earth), and I wouldn't have a good counter-argument. I did what I did, and it seemed to work.

In theory, I still kept the door open for location cards to have more elaborate / non-fatigue-related boon or bane effects. I wasn't quite organized enough to implement that to the extent I would have liked this time out, but I'll be ready with it next time we play.

The biggest changes to the dice mechanics involved the Sigmar's Comet and Chaos Star results. In Warhammer, there's a lot of options when one of these is rolled, and deciding which option to invoke really slows down the process as either can change the other dice in the pool. Comets can, on a Warhammer attack roll, be used as a success, used as a boon, trigger a comet-line of an action, or add a critical hit. It's a lot to contemplate, and the chaos stars aren't any easier. I got rid of all the dice/symbol switching options, and just made these special symbols trigger a card draw. You'd flip over the top card of Everway's Fortune Deck, and if you rolled a Comet the GM would interpret that card in a beneficial way. If you rolled a Chaos symbol, the GM would interpret the card in a negative way. In theory this could have been as severe as a wound, but in general it was narrative effects and bonuses or penalties on future rolls. For next time, I may draft up a list of suggested/default effects by card type or severity.

I used the "group initiative" system from Warhammer 3rd. Initiative rolls were made with the water attribute, because it's linked to senses and awareness, and because Water was looking to be the least-used attribute otherwise (since Earth determines health and Fire and Air determine most attack rolls).

We used abstract movement rules and manoeuvre system per Warhammer 3rd, and the associated fatigue costs. Late in character creation after everyone was done with the Everway Vision Cards, I sorted out all the pictures of places to use as Warhammer Location Cards. I definitely need to supplement this deck, but it worked well enough for 10 hours of mostly-improvised adventure.

Pretty much everything else was pure Everway.

The hybrid system worked well. It had enough going on to spark some interesting challenges during the fights, including an interesting exchange with 2 PCs trying to draw the attention of the bad guys to protect a third that resulted in a very fluid rolling battle. Outside of combat, it was non-intrusive and simple enough that no role-playing scenes were disrupted by needing to consult rules. I think we were all very pleased with the results. There's a few things we'll do a little differently next time, but in general it exceeded all my expectations. Good gaming all around.