I haven’t fully developed my rules variant for EverMyst, a Fate hack merging the meta settings of Everway and of Myst. My grasp of Myst lore is pretty tenuous but this game will incorporate ideas both from original source material of the point and click games and novels, as well as that of the Fate-powered Myst game, Unwritten. (The latter seems to take many liberties with the Myst universe, but seems to be internally consistent enough and provides interesting new background material)

The core game is basically Fate, with Elements in place of skill pyramid or Approaches, and I intend to lean HEAVILY on the Fate fractal to keep statting to a minimum fraction of game time, particularly as I’ll be acting as both GM and an ensemble cast of heroes and villains who may cluster into parties or break up and reform at any point based on how cool and sensible it seems at any moment in play. Think Marvel Heroic/Cortex Plus notion of splitting the party NOT being verboten, and in particular the ever-changing cast and party composition in Final Fantasy VI. (known to many in the West as FFIII originally)

The character creation rules for EverMyst are mostly inspired by those of Everway itself and its point distribution across Elements, Powers and Magic. As elements in EverMyst are essentially replacements for skills/approaches, we need to constrain their scores in a way similar to Everway, allowing for epic heroes who shine in one or two areas but need to lean on the squad in others. As there are only 4 elements, I’ve also decided to incorporate Everway’s specialties, which are heavily context-dependent extra bonuses beyond the bonus always awarded when taking an action using a given element. In this respect, elements might even be thought of as replacing the 4 basic actions that Fate encompasses, though they’re still always mechanically behaving like Create Advantage/Overcome/Attack/Defend and utilize the same 4 outcomes as Fate.

I really haven’t created a single character beyond some onion paper-thin sketches of archetypes and the notion of a sort of party leader/sage guide (the “Growth Walker”, who has learned seemingly all the general knowledge of the realm we begin the game in) to a host of younger “middlings” who are coming of age and must leave their tribe to learn of the world as a whole in order to assure the continued survival of their tribe in a world of merciless nature and merciless peoples. The realm itself: a vast desert that may even encompass the entire sphere of Grehn, the majority of the world’s fecundity trapped by some magic or artifice of the Lords of Oasis, the enormous and diverse capital city the explorers must eventually visit during their travels.

I’m also incorporating the notion of a coalition of inter-world spherewalkers hell-bent on conquering every sphere – and yoking its populace as enslaved soldiers at best, or Matrix-style energy sources at worst – in a quest for ever-more power and immortality. This coalition is at war with traditionalist, benevolent egalitarian spherewalkers who tend to live among the people of their worlds rather than reigning over them. This idea was something I’d planned on incorporating into an Everway game I plotted out a few years back but never played.

The parallel ideas of Everway’s spherewalkers, gates and spheres with that of Myst’s Art, linking books and Ages is fertile ground for exploring the philosophical questions around the Art: is it ever truly creating new worlds, or merely specifying more particularly-described existent worlds in an infinite multiverse? Are gates and books somehow related? What is the true origin of the gates, and what truth or myth is there to the Walker who is said to have created them as he/she steps from sphere to sphere?

Anyway I’m really digging the idea, whatever anyone else may think. Here’s a Gdoc export of some of my notes so far:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SX20ZdjSHm5Q1ZNIrb60JekLRXBVlUQ5M8A1jUvRHoU