The Tome of Neverworld (1996) is yet another big rulebook from the big rulebook era, complete with surprisingly professional art, impossible rules and a world that seems silly at best. I bought it primarily for the…stone golem?…on the cover. The cover is emblematic of the game — none of the characters seem to know what they are meant to be doing and environment is impossible to parse. Is the blue sky a portal? How is that the walls also seem to be the floor without bending? We’ll never know because, uh, this is, “A world where science never reigns.” You think that’s special, pal? Lemme tell you a little bit about life in America circa 2025…
Anywho. I refuse to spend much time on the ROC system (Rolling Outcome Chart). That’s right, they somehow took a chart resolution system and made it baffling. Results range from 1 (failure) to 700+ (a result so good it literally bestows godhood). This is because d100 system explodes on a result of 100 (roll again, add the two totals, if the result is another 100, keep going). There’s no practical reward for this besides experience point bonuses. It gets worse from here, but you don’t need to know how, because you’re just going to avoid this thing if you see in on a shelf, right? Right.
You would think a game called NeverWorld would really focus on the World part, but, nope. Basically, the myriad races live among themselves in isolation from the others. There is plenty of information on each race and their cultural practices and their weird fantasy names, but the world itself is largely undefined. The last chapter of the book is partly devoted to generating it. This is dismaying.
As I said at the start, the art is shockingly competent. No clear credits, and I don’t recognize any of the names so I can’t figure out who is who. But one artist is doing a pretty passable Elmore impersonation. Another is…well, if there was LLM-generated art in 1996 I would maybe accuse them of using it. Their work is good, but very still and faces tend to repeat in an unnerving fashion. One other artist is maybe worth a note, because they deliver painting after painting of what I can only describe as Furry art. Humanoid animal people have been a part of fantasy practically forever (see: the Minotaur) but there’s just something about these paintings that screams “Furry” to me. To my knowledge, it’s the first, but certainly not the last, instance of Furry art in an RPG.
Oh, and Traveller’s Marc Miller has a consulting credit on this. I would love to have been in on that conversation.
