Everway: Purity's Plight
Since last year, Josh had been telling me that I should play in one of Kat Miller's Everway games. This year, I was able to play in two of them.
The first was "Purity's Plight", and Josh and a few others got in with generic tickets, aka "genericked their way in". Kat had envelopes for several factions. The only indication of what each faction was about was a picture card on the envelope, a nifty addendum to the Everway system. As there were more people than factions, she pared folks up. I think two sisters got the same fashion, and she pared Josh with me, but as I was the Officially registered one, I made the choice of envelope.
Three of us at the table were playing previously created Everway PCs. Josh was playing Manifold, who, along with Ever Onward, had been in one of Kat's games last year. Both PCs at least appeared to be children, and neither player knew the plot involved child stealing. Manifold originated as Asks Many Questions in Robert Dushay's Celestial Mechanic, where she acquired the boon of slowed aging and skin with speckles that glow in the dark. Over 30, she was tired of being treated as the child she appeared to be. I played Finder, who originally appeared in Robert Dushay's Fisher of Souls.
Kat went through the rules and worked out character details which also included how PCs might fit into various factions. The action started in Gateway, a sphere with many gates, though not as many as Everway, and with, I think, no direct route to Everway. But where Everway is merely, and often barely, tolerant of spherewalkers, Gateway is ruled by them.
The envelope assigned Manifold and Finder to the faction of shapeshifting dragons, as humans whom the dragons trusted. That is, I suspect Kat would have allowed us to create dragon PCs, but it wasn't required. Our mission: To rescue the girl/dragon Jewel from the spherewalker Blood before the dragons decided to reveal their presence and act. The deadline: The next morning.
Ever Onward was trying to locate a natural gate that was forming in the nearby realm of Purity, populated by utter pacifists. Two inhabitants of Purity were there as well. I forget the man's name, but the woman was The Name of the Rose. Their problem: The city was besieged by an army of demons. This army was surprisingly well-behaved and well-disciplined, but warned them that if Dove was not returned by the next day, they would raze the city to the ground. The army had sent another PC, the only spherewalker its master trusted, to Gateway, and insisted that the folks from Purity knew who Dove was.
There was a brother and sister from Gateway as well, concerned about the demon army which had walked through Gateway to Purity. Oddly, the demons kept strict discipline, and no one was harmed.
All the PCs had been waiting for the Gateway Council to address their various problems. However, as the game started, the Council had decided to take the day off. Given the deadlines, the PCs were not pleased. Most spoke among themselves, but Whisper quickly returned to the army besieging Purity.
The Gateway party was curious about the Dragon party, as its arrival had thrown the till then merely inefficient council into utter confusion. However, Finder was taking his lead from Manifold, and she was staying quiet about the dragon bit. They did mention Blood, however.
Blood was a thoroughly despicable Spherewalker who'd been killed. Several time. He never stayed dead. As for the demons, they came from what should have been a sealed sphere, where only spherewalkers could get in and out. The sphere was used to dump undesirables. Spherewalkers would pop in when they felt like killing a demon and then pop out. Now, there were two realms in this sphere, I learned after the game. One had gorgeous people who were thoroughly evil inside. Whisper, framed for the murder of his wife, found himself with these people, who listened sympathetically, and told him that a good way of proving himself not evil was to slay a demon. Like, say, the king of the other realm where demons look just like demons, but are often better behaved than humans.
I don't know how much Kat decided or how much Whisper's player decided or what was played out and what extrapolated, but Whisper had the good sense to note that the demon he'd been sent to kill ruled benevolently and his subjects were more decent than those of the other realm and of Whisper's own realm. Whisper, therefore, told the king everything, and knelt, awaiting death. Instead of being killed, however, he became the first spherewalker trusted by the king, who didn't like spherewalkers as they had the habit of popping in, killing his subjects, then leaving. So, Whisper was sent with the army to find the king's daughter, Dove. Blood, assisted by the folks of the other realm, had kidnapped her.
It seemed clear that all the PCs should go to Purity. That is, it seemed clear to everyone except the folks from Purity, who wanted no outsiders who might shed blood. As the rest of us stared at them in bafflement -- and it was -so- effective for them to be PCs, not NPCs -- they told us of a prophecy. It seemed to predict death and destruction when innocent blood was shed, to be followed by rebirth. The event setting this off was a meeting of dragon and dove. As soon as Finder heard that, he saddled his horse and rode through the gate to Purity, closely followed by the others.
The besieging army was well disciplined and less interested in the spherewalkers than in the latest response from Purity. The prince of the city, a winged man named, I believe, Owl's Worth, knelt before Whisper and the demon captain Grim, saying they could kill him if they'd spare the city. He had with him cages full of doves, every dove in the city.
Name of the Rose: That's Owl's Worth. Always going for the literal.
Grim recognized Manifold and Ever Onward from the previous adventure Kat had run, and wasn't exactly pleased. He correctly guessed their companions were spherewalkers too.
Grim: What have you done?
Finder: Nothing, yet.
Grim: That's what all spherewalkers say.
Finder: Do they say "Nothing, yet," or do they just say "Nothing"?
Finder did manage to ask something more useful. As tensions mounted, he shouted, "What does Dove look like?" After a moment of shocked silence from the demons, one of them quickly turned into a female winged demonic teenager, and hastily back to his own shape, looking around nervously to see if anyone would smack him. Name of the Rose slipped off, and we noticed a rose bush that hadn't been there a moment before. No connection, as it turned out. The other Purity PC had an invisible dragon friend who proceeded to make himself useless for the remainder of the game, asking the shape shifting demon how sharp his claws really were.
The woman from Gateway realized she wasn't sensing the psychic ickiness one expects from demons. Ever Onward realized that the still-forming gate he was seeking was in the city. Owl's Worth insisted there was no gate or girl, and believed it. The PCs decided to go into the city. Grim had no objections, but warned them that if they were still there after his deadline, it was their own problem. Finder, picturing a draconic war if Jewel wasn't rescued, said that the razing of Purity would be the least of their problems. Owl's Worth told him to speak for himself.
Everyone headed for the temple, though I forget how we knew that was the place to go. Perhaps Ever Onward sensed the gate. Quickly withdrawing into the temple was Blood, posing as a recent acolyte, and another priest who gave the shadows sharp edges. The stone gargoyles that been animated, though we only saw six of the ten that adorned the temple. A somewhat comic battle ensued, where, to no one's surprise, Finder's horse proved smarter than his rider, and the Gateway man stuck his sword into a stone gargoyle and had a very hard time pulling it out. He refused to abandon it.
Despite everything, the PCs got inside, some from the front, others from the rear. A gate was forming on a dais, and at ground level, Dove was chained in one cage, wile Jewel, kept in human form by a quartz shackle, was in another.
Manifold used her magic to momentarily shatter the quartz shackle. Jewel immediately switched to dragon form, shattering the cage. Dove saw this and screamed as only a demon can, nearly shattering everyone else.
This made an excellent distraction, as none of the religious extremists who thought they were supposed to bring on a new age by killing the two girls had a thought to spare for possible interlopers, what with a large dragon on the loose.
Name of the Rose tried to free Dove, but couldn't find the key on the acolyte she'd just knocked out. At the start of the game, Kat told me that Finder's ability to ride any normal animal was a 0 point power, not a 1 point power, and she suggested that, given the name, perhaps he had a minor talent for stumbling over lost items. This seemed the dramatically appropriate time for Finder to literally trip over the key, not knowing what he'd found and unable to get it to Name of the Rose even if he knew she needed it. His view and his path were both blocked by a very large dragon.
A dragon whose movements inadvertently threatened her rescuers, whom she couldn't see, as they were behind her. Worse, the sound of Dove's screams frightened her, and she tried to back up. By the time she understood she was being rescued, the temple had a new door.
The high priestess, who had been trying to fulfill the prophecy as she interpreted it, and Blood fled through the new gate, and Finder got the keys to Name of the Rose as she was breaking open Dove's cage, a task that was much easier once Dove stopped screaming. And that is how the PCs rescued the dragon and the demon from the nasty humans.
Meanwhile, the new gate now led to Everway. Kat later told me that where the gate goes depends on how well or badly the PCs do. I asked if it were possible for the PCs to lose, and she said that it was, and that it cheats the players if the PCs can't lose, no matter what. If Jewel had been killed, the gate would have opened into the realm of the dragons. If Dove had been hurt or killed, the gate would have led to the demon realm, allowing her father to send hoards of demons through to take revenge.
