A little indie game from some company called Wizards of the Coast...
Back in 1995, before purchasing TSR and Dungeons & Dragons, Wizards of the Coast was riding high on sales from Magic: The Gathering and decided to put out Everway, a beautiful and distinctly weird RPG by prolific designer Jonathan Tweet. It's recently had a 25th Anniversary edition, but this is based on the original set.
Everway is another early card-game driven RPG. It uses a 36 card Fortune Deck, a sort of custom oracle deck, for task resolution. While characters have statistics and powers and magic, these are descriptive rather than prescriptive. Challenges are resolved by drawing a card from the Fortune Deck and interpreting its upright or inverted meaning and how it applies to the task at hand. In addition, Everway has a series of 90 Fortune Cards, with more available in collectible packs. Each had fantasy art on one side (surprisingly diverse, especially for the 90s!), and a series of leading questions on the other side, which could be used as inspiration.
In Everway, players take the role of Spherewalkers, travelling between different fantastical worlds. At the centre of the spheres is the city of Everway, acting as a hub for Spherewalkers. It's like an early Planescape.
Character Creation: I found this a little challenging, because it's so open - you really need to know what you want. You start by selecting five Vision Cards to represent your character. I went through the deck and pulled out about ten cards that appealed, then shuffled them up and dealt myself five. I saw a lot of mythical animals and a lot of women, so I decided that my character is travelling the spheres to look for different amazing magical animals. One of the women looks like a knight or soldier, so I think my character also fights for the creatures she finds - a sort of fantastical Jane Goodall.
Once I had my concept, I answered the questions. Everway characters have descriptive names, so I named my character Whisper. No particular reason why, I guess she's very soft-spoken. I selected one of seven motives for travelling - Beauty (of living creatures). I then went through the Fortune Deck and selected three cards for my Virtue, Fault and Fate. You could do this randomly, but the game encourages you to pick and gives ideas about what they might mean. I chose Spring for my Virtue (new growth) and Autumn, Reversed for my Fault (want). I wasn't sure for my Fate so I picked that one randomly and got The Phoenix - Rebirth vs. Destruction. I think Whisper might be torn between eco-tourism and eco-activism.
Finally, I have 20 points to distribute between four stats (Air, Earth, Fire and Water), Powers and Magic. Powers are determined by whether they're powerful, commonplace or versatile, and cost one point for each. The other stats have descriptors of roughly what each number means. So here's Whisper's character sheet. Whisper's Power is speaking to animals. Everyone also has a single 0-point power for free. Whisper can commune with a willing animal and gain an instantaneous impression of what life is like for that animal, one time only. I figure it's a cool roleplaying flavour ability, which ties into her eco-tourism vs. eco-warrior conflict. I thought about animal magic or an animal companion, but decided against it.
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