Ever After Tales

Ever After Tales is a lightweight card-based roleplaying game, set in the world of storybook endings, charming princes and headstrong princesses. Players draw cards from a communal deck of ordinary playing cards, then take actions in line with their character’s abilities, nature and goals.

Ever After Tales takes a more direct approach than other systems; players have more agency to control what their characters can do, allowing them to help craft the story they’re dreaming of. The fun comes from deciding when to use your resources, rather than the suspense of an undetermined outcome.

Because of this, the GM doesn’t have to keep track of a lot of complicated charts, or roll dice behind a screen; they can focus on imagining vibrant worlds to react to the players’ actions, and dictate how their actions resolve.

How To Play

Keep a deck of standard playing cards at the centre of the table. This is shared by all players; if you have a number of players, or your characters are stronger than average, you may opt to include more than one standard deck in the same pile. The exact make-up of the deck is up to the GM to manage; you may decide to exclude Jokers, or treat Aces as 1’s, but generally a deck should include an even distribution of all four suits.

When you start a session, every player is dealt a card for every point they have in all their Attributes, then keep as many cards as they can. The rest of the cards go to the heap (or discard pile).

Most of the time, you can simply describe your character’s actions to the GM, and they’ll respond in kind. But if you attempt to take an action that has some kind of risk or consequence associated with it, you have to justify it somehow.

When the GM decides an action requires it, you have to play a card from your hand of the appropriate suit to determine how effective it is.

The higher the value of the card you play, the more successful your action is. If you’re competing with another player’s action, your

Judge carefully before using a card; if the value is too low for the action you’re trying to achieve, there may be unforeseen consequences, or else fail outright.

If you can’t play an appropriate card from your hand, your action doesn’t just fail – it fails spectacularly. It’s up to the GM to decide just how bad things get at that point.

Example: Taking Action

A swashbuckling hero swings into action, charging the enemy pirate with a rapier in hand! The GM feels this is an Adventurous action, and asks for a card to be played. Our hero boldly throws down a 7 of Spades; the GM tells them this is enough to fight with passion, for now, and they leave a bloody scar on the pirate’s cheek!

Art by Arthur Hughes, 1863:

La Belle Dame sans merci