Evermore

In the city of Evermore, memory is a plague and truth is a tomb.

Evermore is a tabletop roleplaying game of Gothic psychological horror. One player is the Protagonist: haunted by a sin, a loss, or a delusion, and slowly coming apart. The other is the Narrator: guide, tormentor, the voice that leads them down. Or play alone, and write your descent as a first-person confession, the way Poe's narrators always do.

Over five Acts, a Rider-Waite Tarot deck decides what is true and what is delusion. The story ends at the Inhumation, when you learn what really happened, whether the Protagonist saw it in time, and what their gravestone says.

How it plays

• Memory Fragments. Each Act circles one fragment: a locked attic, a letter you burned, a reflection that doesn't match. At the end of the Act, both players secretly decide whether it was True, Distorted, or False.
• The Toll. When a scene hangs on what you want, the cards name a price. Pay it, and you get what you wanted and one true answer. Refuse, and the Guilt grows.
• Guilt and Breaks. Guilt only rises. At 6, 9, and 12 the Protagonist breaks: lost hours, violent impulses, truths forcing their way up. Or stop fighting it, and break on your own terms.
• The Rule of Evermore. Every card you draw is logged and returned upside down. Whatever it brought into the story will return, inverted. The friend who blessed you now accuses.
• The Buried Card. One card lies face down under the Guilt Track from the first minute. No one looks at it. It is what truly happened.
• The Raven. Once per game, the Narrator asks one question. The Protagonist must answer honestly, and the answer is permanent.

What you need

• A Rider-Waite Tarot deck (78 cards)
• A pencil and the printable play aids (included)
• 1 or 2 players; the book estimates 2.5 to 3.5 hours for a duet, and solo play can span several sittings

What's included

• Evermore (version 1.3), 36 pages, screen PDF in full colour
• Print edition PDF, black and white, 5.5 × 8.5 in
• EPUB
• Play aids, 8 pages, in A4 and US Letter: the Guilt Track (with the Buried Card), the Protagonist, the Inhumation, the Card Log (two pages), and for solo play a Playing Alone reference, the Procession, and the Manuscript

The book includes the full Tarot interpretations for all 78 cards, twenty ready-made Memory Fragments, a sample starting scenario (The House of Echoes), and a two-page Quick Reference.

Content

Evermore deals with death, guilt, madness, grief, and psychological horror. The game includes safety tools (the Veil, the Sealed Tomb, and the Shroud) and a debrief after play, the Vigil.

Credits and license

Designed and written by Roberto Bisceglie, Loreseed Workshop. Inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination by The Alan Parsons Project, For the Queen by Alex Roberts, and The Quiet Year by Avery Alder. The Shroud adapts the X-Card by John Stavropoulos; the Veil and the Sealed Tomb adapt Lines and Veils by Ron Edwards. Cover photograph by Adrien Olichon, via Pexels. Set in UnifrakturMaguntia and Crimson Text.

Released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0). The cover photograph is used under the Pexels License and is not covered by CC BY-SA.

For fans of Edgar Allan Poe, Tarot, and stories that end in the ground.