A really great generic - universal system, that allows the GM to focus on the story. Highly recommended!

I use Barbarians of Lemuria for short campaigns and one shots. The Sword and Sorcery Codex has become indispensable to those endeavors! Character creation has much more depth with the addition of Homelands. The additional creatures and adversaries make for lively new encounters. There are ready made settings and adventures included within. So many options to pick and choose from to create your own style of Sword and Sorcery! You will not be disappointed.

If you don't own "Barbarians of Lemuria", but still want to play in a sword & sorcery (or fantasy in general, but the book specialises a bit into that subgenre) game, this is a perfect, if not a must-have addition to the core rules of "Everywhen".

Spoilers – You have been warned - For the past few days, I have soloed my way through SC5 Hellflower (20 pages, free at DriveThruRPG). It is for Barbarians of Lemuria Legendary Edition (110 pages, same place) which I did use. I used one PC out of this RPG and four out of the adventure (pre-generated characters). I used Magic the Gathering cards as the solo engine along with a yes/maybe/no oracle. Here are the highlights of the adventure. The adventure started with the PCs in the town market. They heard two rumors (one of them false) and then walked to the garden of Sforza the Scarlet Dreamer. Tamsin was able to climb the wall to gain access, but the others had to go in through the main entrance.

Their first encounter was a box turtle. They picked him up and put him in a bag. The second encounter was Pumpkin Head. They killed him and soon found a Seal of Cleansing. They continued on and ran into him again. This time Tamsin the PC broke the seal. Pumpkin Head broke in half and then disappeared. Next, the PCs found a scroll of Carbonize. When Turnip Head showed up, Tamsin cast that spell and killed him. The next encounter was Gourd Head and Scarecrow. The PCs won that battle. The PCs burned the two bodies. Moving on, they noticed one trap and were able to avoid it. Rokas used his agility to avoid the Saber Tree. At the Lotus Pond, they were able to collect some raw ingredients for a local drug. Rokas was able to see through an illusion at The Grove.

At this location they did find the NPC Naram rooted into the ground (he had been a bad boy). Tamsin freed him with a dispel magic. He joined the party and told them about The Heart of Aminah. He led them to the well and Rokas and Sal went down the well using Naram’s silk rope. Down there they encountered Aminah. She told them her story and gave them The Heart (a gem). Sal sensed that her story was “off”. They went back up and had a discussion. They decide to leave the garden. A few minutes later Naram makes a grab for the gem (I told you he was bad). The entire group ends up on the ground, fighting for the gem. Naram ends up dead along with Tamsin. The PCs loot the bodies and head back to town. They sell the gem and the raw ingredients at the marketplace. They keep the box turtle. At the tavern, they “pour one out” for Tamsin. Maybe you will have better luck.

Give this fun adventue a try!

As far as I'm concerned, one of my best generic systems of the moment. Very fluid, quick to set up, easy to master. Lots of options for adjusting the level of simulation or ease of use. Possibility of using different dice combinations. Personally, I most often play with 2d10 or 3d6. Easy to adapt. And a range of extras that's starting to be very well supplied. The career principle is a plus that gives participants a good vision of their character. A must-have.

This is a fun encounter/adventure with plenty of room for more development. I love the vibe of the ruined fortress.

"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." - Aaron Marks

Read the full CHG review here: https://cannibalhalflinggaming.com/2021/05/12/everywhen-review/

This is the supplement that Everywhen has been needing from the off. It provides all you need to run games in the 1930s and 1940s - the core pulp era! With a few minor tweaks the 1920s and 1950s are easily playable with 'PPP'. The large number of scenarios included show off the full range of games that are possible - treasure hunts, crime fighting, dinosaur hunting, occult investigation, etc.

The scenario 'Hooray for Hellwood' is a beauty!

Wyrd Sails is an impressive piece of work. I'm of the opinion that true sword and sorcery always has the slimy touch of Lovecraft's mythos about it - Tower of the Elephant anyone? And while Wyrd Sails is set out to provide all your Norse V Lovecraftian horrors needs, it is also perfect for non-Mythos Norse action as well. Add any other gamebook for any system that goes into the ins and outs of the Norse world (or just watch that Kirk Douglas film 'The Vikings') and use its background information to power an epic Everywhen Norse campaign!

I think that this is an excellent quickstart for Everywhen - it really clearly explains the basics of the rules system (I particularly liked the combat flowchart).and it offers good suggestions on how to play the game, for example the use of hero points. I also liked the adventure, not hugely complicated, but very enjoyable!

Nine excellent adventures. Full disclosure: I'm mentioned in the acknowledgements, probably because I loved draft versions of some of these scenarios the author shared on various platforms. Really, though, how could you not rave about these adventures, each one showing a perfect grasp of a particular genre, all popping with ideas and provided with suitable (and memorable) pre-gens? Of the nine my favourites are 'Reverse Beowulf', where a Wyrd gang take on an existential threat, and 'Hellriders', 80s VHS slasher schlock come to vivid life. The rest are great, too: some straighter than others, genre-wise, but all extremely enjoyable. So this is a marvellous advert for Everywhen (and Barbarians of Lemuria) but it's also worth buying for conversion to other, lesser, systems. I just hope Garnett has more in the pipeline - including, perhaps, some of the so-far-unpublished Hyborian BoL adventures that appeared on the brilliant Strange Stones blog years ago? Because while I like getting scenarios for free, I love paying their creators for them. [James 'Snort' K]

Dogs of WAR is an '80s action & adventure setting book for the author's Everywhen system.

Inspired by movies from Blue Thunder to True Lies, TV shows from Airwolf to Tour of Duty, and various other media, the supplement gives players and GMs plenty to work from in building up an adventure.

I had previously picked up the older version of Dogs of WAR and thought this one was a standalone upgrade to that, but this book does require that you purchse Everywhen. Everywhen is a simple and effective RPG in its own right, and is worth checking out. The core mechanic is very simple to understand.

Back to Dogs of WAR, the character creation summary/overview in this book is much appreciated and, in my opinion, accelerates the process of getting a game up and running.

The author includes plenty of examples, tips, and contextual information where appropriate, which is also helpful.

The default setting and group identity seems pretty optional--your characters can be "war dogs" without being Dogs of WAR, in other words.

There are tons of career specializations, backgrounds, and other characterization tools in the book which are very welcome. "Cleaner" was one specialization that I'd forgotten about, from all those old spy action movies. It was nice to see these little details in the book.

Regarding equipment and weaponry, the author clearly tried to walk a fine line--on the one hand, yes, your character can automatically have the gun or gadget you want them to have. Done. On the other hand, you want a weapons table, right? OK, here you go--there are some additional details given for a variety of weapons.

Vehicles are included as well. Even a gyrocopter for Cmdr. Bond.

Setting and Sample Missions: The provided setting details are helpful and the sample missions offer a lot of variety.

While each setting is accompanied by an illustration, one thing I'd love to see in future books is a simple map or two. For example, a rough map of the area around the Nazi U-boat, or a basic plan of the Daniel Streib building or Stony Mountain Facility. Still, it might be fun for a GM to draw these out.

Finally, Alternative Settings are offered which, while not super-detailed, give some idea of the versatility of the setting. For example, "The Tomorrow Project" references Twilight:2000 and The Morrow Project RPG and gives some rough idea to seed one's imagination with a basic setting and world. It's nothing very detailed but it's really well-appreciated by those of us who spent time in those fictional worlds in the past.

Just a quick note: In the Everywhen core book, the author provides directions for using different dice, to the player's taste. For example, while the regular mechanic is based on 2d6, you can use 3d6 or 2d10 or 2d12 and consult a simple table to see the equivalent failure/success target numbers. I thought this was a really nice addition.

To summarize: If you like the setting, the book is well worth the cost. The Everywhen RPG core book is worth picking up as well (and necessary to play this setting book) and it also rounds out the Dogs of WAR setting--is your simple patrol boat not enough? Turn to Everywhen and outfit your Akula class sub! Etc.

I'd like to thank the author, Simon, for publishing this book and look forward to exploring the system more.

Everywhen feels more like a collection of optional rules for Barbarians of Lemuria than a cohesive system in and of itself. To the extent it is a coherent RPG system it can't seem to decide if it wants to be rules light or rules medium. I do appreciate the way it lays out the Lifeblood system in a way that doesn't really alter BoL's system, just makes it more explicit. Aside from that, however, it looks and feels like a GURPS supplement (for better and for worse) and leaves the Gamemaster with lots of work to do and, at best, a few helpful suggestions. The art throughout is simple but solid (GURPSian, if you will). Some of the optional rules are decent but almost all of them seem unncessarily complex for a sytem that doesn't even bother to lay out an explicit action economy for combat rounds. The writing and layout are serviceable.

My ultimate takeaway was disappointment: I was excited to get a bit more meat on the mechanical bones of Barbarians of Lemuria but after finishing the book I realized I was still going to have to do all the work to make the system and settings function together and most of the optional rules and subsystems were similar to ideas I had already been considering as BoL houserules anyway. All that said, I do hope they keep coming out with supplements. I definitely prefer the traditional gaming approach of BoL to the PbtA style stuff that is coming out these days. Sadly, it really seems like Everywhen and Barbarians of Lemuria are dead systems at this point. That doesn't stop you from playing them...but I wish there was more online discussion and resources to take advantage of.

I've been running the sample adventure in Blood Sundown for the past few nights for players who are relatively new to RPGs and it has worked a treat. Everywhen's simple mechanics with little bookkeeping or arithmetic make it ideal for new or casual players, and the range of pregenerated characters included mean you can be up and running almost straight away. The sample adventure could probably be played in an evening if players most fast, but it'll have taken us three sessions of 2(ish) hours. The adventure itself is a good introduction to a 'Weird West' setting, and while everything needed is there on the page, there's no reason a GM couldn't put extra meat on the bones and turn the conflict between Dr Vitale and the townsfolk of Bliss into a longer campaign. The adventure does contain a section that implies some pretty basic information is hidden behind a dice roll, which is something that I try to avoid at all costs as a GM - player agency requires some information, even if it isn't complete or entirely correct - but that's an easy enough fix. You still need to reward characters who have, for example, the 'keen eyesight' boon or high Mind scores, but the reward cannot be the basic information required for action. That said, the adventure doesn't require the PCs to any particular thing for it to work, but that doesn't mean it is a railroad - Dr Vitale has his own plans and will put them into action if he can.

The rest of the book is a very good sourcebook for running a Western game using Everywhen. It doesn't have to be 'weird' - it'd be perfectly possible to run a 'historical' or 'Spaghetti' Western game using Everywhen and Blood Sundown, as long as it affords for competent protagonists (and even here, to add more grit to the game simply lean the balance of NPCs away from Rabble and towards Toughs and Rivals). The book includes a range of setting appropriate careers (as you'd expect from any Barbarians of Lemuria adaptation) some new equipment and setting appropriate rules (such as advice on how to handle a fast draw shootout), as well as a discussion of Faith and Magic appropriate to a 'Weird West' game, which would be well suited for 'weirding' other historical settings too. There's a fairly slim, but perfectly adequate bestiary of mundane animals and supernatural creatures.

I can recommend this both on its own terms, and an example of an Everywhen 'build'. I was a little underwhelmed by the examples in the core book, but that is par for the course when it comes to a system that aspires to be 'universal'. As an example build - and this, I expect, is true of all the recent Everywhen releases - Blood Sundown shows GMs what they can do fairly straightforwardly with the Everywhen engine.

As a final point; the layout is clean, the page decoration uses only greys and blacks, and the art is perfectly good black and white work and it all prints well. While I have stumped up for the PoD, before that was available I printed it 'booklet sized' on my home printer and found it worked well.

Any RPG that claims to have the flexibility to handle multiple genres/settings is of interest to me. For most of my gaming years I’ve found some version of the BRP (Basic Role Playing) D100 system, paired with whatever setting I wanted to try, worked fairly well. However, prep time for adventures includes sorting through a long list of skills and calculating percentages, so I’ve tried a couple more simplified RPG systems the past few years.

Everywhen appeared to check BOTH of the above boxes when I looked at some reviews –a universal RPG and doing away with Skill Lists. Everywhen uses ‘Career’ instead and you let characters do things that fit with the career they had/have. A blacksmith can do blacksmith things, for example.

Each career list is going to match the setting though, and I expected a longer and more generic list for GMs to choose from. Instead you are given three career lists from supplemental settings you can buy. Blood Sundown for weird western, Neopunk Crysis for cyberpunk in Neo Tokyo, and Red Venus for rocketpunk. There are also two settings included in the core rulebook, a vampire hunting setting in modern times with a suggested career list and a fantasy setting where careers become ‘Specializations’ like Scholar or Warrior.

I also judge an RPG by the character sheet. More and more I prefer when there is space for character art (blame the amount of super hero gaming I’ve done, where every hero and villain needs some art). With a Google image search or using an online tool like Heromachine dot com will allow you to have an image for most characters. If that can be done in one page –great, but a two page character sheet is fine too. Everywhen puts everything on the first page and the second page is just space for the background story, character art, and any notes (like a list of Psionic powers if needed).

One odd thing though? The lack of the game title on the character sheet! If you don’t already know the Everywhen character sheet, you won’t know what game system it’s for. I used a PDF editor to add ‘Everywhen RPG’ to the character sheet, taking a bit of space away from the text box for ‘Name’. Also, the standard character sheet is a fillable PDF, which is great.

The heart of the Everywhen system is rolling 2D6 and getting a target number of ‘9’ to succeed. There are modifiers for your abilities which are: Strength, Agility, Mind, and Appeal for the physical/mental side. Then there are the Combat Abilities, which are Initiative, Melee, Ranged, and Defense. I like having these split up like they are; you could have a character with average Agility (‘0’ Ability Rank) but they are a crack shot with a Ranged Combat Ability of ‘3’ for example.

Damage is handled with ‘Lifeblood’ and ‘Critical Lifeblood’ tracks. Boxes are marked depending on the damage type. There is Fatigue, Normal, and Lasting damage.

I’d consider Everywhen about a medium crunch game system with the various options you are given. It is intended to play fast and loose and probably does once the GM and players get to know the system better (which can be said for most any RPG).

Hero Points are included to help the PCs survive and thrive, which is nice. Investing the time and energy into a character only to see them die the first time a combat happens is never fun.

There are Faith Points, Arcane Points, and Psionic Points for your fantasy and sci-fi settings. Characters get Boons (advantages) Flaws (disadvantages) and Temporary Flaws if they want. You are encouraged to change those to be more appropriate to the setting. For example, I was working on a Ringworld adventure and decided to build a Kzin in Everywhen. I edited the Faith and Arcane points to ‘Credit Rating’ and ‘Reputation’ points instead which would be more useful in the Known Space setting of the Larry Niven books.

Everywhen has the bases covered for a setting with human type characters. Being new to the system I wonder how it would handle someone wanting to run a super hero campaign –and you’d need to add a list of super powers in any event. With the exception of street level type heroes, I don’t think universal games are a good fit for a super hero campaign -things get pushed to extreme levels.

What about support for this game? There are four supplemental settings available, some equipment and rule expansions, and more being worked on. Including, I think, a super hero setting –which should be interesting given my thoughts noted above.

Remember, this review is based on my initial read of the rules and the creation of a couple characters. I do want to run some adventures with Everywhen in the near future and see how my players like the system. At this time, I can say I’m positive about what I see. At $10 for the PDF or the current sale price of $28 for the hard cover/PDF combo, the price is good value. The art is all black & white, but well done and at 143 pages this core book is not a long read for those worried about walls of text.