Everway and Abarat
Clive Barker has come out with a sequel to Abarat, a young adult fantasy novel that takes its heroine, Candy Quackenbush, to a world with an island composed of an island for each hour of the day. I started reading the sequel, then realized I’d have to go back and reread the original, or at least skim it. I couldn’t remember much at all from Abarat, apart from a mean wizard with lots of hats, a creepy midnight island, and a squid hat that became incontinent in death. (Don’t ask.)
Picking up Abarat today, I remembered why I didn’t remember much of it: the story is thick with powerful imagery, but saddled with a plot that doesn’t seem headed anywhere particular, nor reach a conclusion any more complete than the often temporary resolutions of smaller plot arcs throughout the book. Which is not to say it’s bad—I enjoyed it, mostly—it’s just hard to recall the colorful images without a plot to hang them on.
Abarat will always be linked in my mind with Everway, a highly experimental role-playing game by Jonathan Tweet. The rules are quite simple, even sketchy (especially when it comes to magic), but the real experimentation lies in the central role of graphic images. Everway encourages players to rely on pictures, rather than statistics and skill lists, for inspiration. Character, location, and even plot design starts with the selection of a few cards from a thick deck of cards with fantasy illustrations. The tone of the illustrations is not what you might expect: although a few cards depict staples of fantasy and RPGs, half-naked dragonriders are conspicuously absent, while mundane images like a crowded marketplace or a farmer a leaning on a plow are fairly common. With a few intriguing pictures in hand, you can tell the skeleton of a story, and build from there. Only later are numbers brought in to allow practical handling of abilities that the back story implies.
I associate Abarat with Everway in part because I encountered the book at a time when I was studying the game. Mostly, however, it’s because of the common reliance on imagery. Abarat has a couple dozen illustrations by the author, stylistically resembling certain Everway cards. Significantly, Abarat and Everway also share a desire to pursue a less hyperbolic form of fantasy than you find in swords and sorcery: there are wonders to see, yes, but they needn’t be epic in scope to entertain. I enjoy this approach to fantasy, and wish there were more of it. Even the geography is similar, dividing the universe into discrete episodic packets. There’s nothing in Everway to prevent you from creating a long, serial campaign, but the cosmology favors a sight-seeing tour, hopping from sphere to sphere, solving a problem and moving on, like Candy Quackenbush (or Captain Kirk), staying just long enough to observe the local curiosities.
Naturally, anyone who enjoyed either Abarat or Everway should check the other one out. The latter can be hard to find; sadly, all that art proved too expensive to support in a niche product, and its author is now editing the D&D line, never to be seen in imaginative RPGs again. But copies still float around, and a few plucky web pages try to keep the setting vital. Both are excellent daydream material, the kind of thing you can cannibalize for your own stories, literary or otherwise.