The Jenny Everywhere Roleplaying Game (game)
The Jenny Everywhere Roleplaying Game was a Jenny Everywhere role-playing game sourcebook, including character and concept profiles, explanations on game mechanics and rules, and a fleshed-out synopsis for a first adventure. It was created by Benj Christensen with illustrations by Marc Lapierre and constituted one of the highest-profile commercial Jenny Everywhere works of the 2010s.
The game reused elements developed by Christensen in The Jenny Everywhere Chronicles, though it was not directly set in the comic's continuity, as well as introducing a number of new characters, ultimately released into the public domain by Christensen alongside those original to The Jenny Everywhere Chronicles. These included the third-ever Abstract introduced, Rae.
Contents
Gameplay
The game is a standard table-top roleplaying game calling for several players and a game-master serving as a narrator as well as acting out the parts of non-player characters.
Plot
Scene 1: The Mark
Jenny Everywhere, Michael Wherever, Odious,the Chosen, Lol and Julie Jacobs have been travelling the Multiverse together for some time. They settle in for the night at a makeshift camp in one universe, only to be attacked by six dog-sized Robotic Insects who swarm them and place an indelible “mark” on each of them. Despite a valiant struggled, they are soon all marked, as when the team manages to defeat five of the Insects the sixth one self-destructs, marking all remaining team-members in the process. Once they are all marked, they find themselves forcibly shifted to a new universe, where they appear in a large sealed room, we--llit with columns of light in each corner. Three of its walls are solid metal, but the fourth is clear glass, allowing them to see another symmetrical rule where a different team with its own Jenny Everywhere is standing, looking as though they've just been in a fight. A doorway appears in each of the two reams, with both leading in the same direction; after uneasily nodding at each other, each team moves onto the next room(s).
Scene 2: The Room(s)
They find themselves in a second, lager divided room, again with a glass pane between them and the other team. They find that they cannot shift across the glass. The room contains an artificial environment made up of towers of stone and unkempt vegetation, obviously intended as an obstacle course of sorts. On the other end of each half of the room is an exist; one would need to safely traverse the environment to get there. They take a moment to examine the other team (made up of the other Jenny, Rae, Ace, Ellison, Aitar and Krystal), who wear the same strange yellow marks as themselves.
Suddenly, a loud buzzer comes off and half the team begins to see a completely different environment from the stone towers: a beach with elaborate tree houses built around palm trees, with rickety bridges over the chasms instead of ladders to go around them as in the “stone towers” area. They realise that two universes have been condensed and overlapped into a single room; as they can only see one or the other, never both, they must help their teammates that see the alternate reality with moving through their portion of the room. Both teams eventually make their way to the door, but with some delay between them.
Scene 3: The Fight
The victorious team from the previous room finds that the new room has taken an appearance similar to their “home base”, although it is not precisely the real article; for the main team this is the makeshift camp from earlier, but in the version of events where it was the other team which was victorious, it is a mysterious spaceship deck. After a few moments as both teams get their bearings (whichever setting is picked), the “other team” attacks them and a battle ensues.
Scene 4: The Choice
Whether the party win or lose the conflict, teams end up in the room from the beginning of the adventure — only now everyone is in the side of the room that was at first occupied by the “older” team. A portal has opened and the winning team is allowed to leave. Before the winning team press their advantage, however, the older team explain that they were themselves dragged here by a third team who were able to leave after defeating them in the previous “go-around”. They offer the team with Odious a free choice to leave or not. Though the team with Odious can choose to leave, being returned to the real camp, it is also possible that they instead elect to give their competitors their freedom. Once again stuck, they try in vain to escape through various means before giving in and summoning a new team, preparing to go through the challenges again in the part of the experienced team.
Change to Scene 2: The Room(s)
Each member of the team presses one of the buttons on the wall of their half of the bisected room, summoning a new team made up of a Jenny Everywhere, a Michael Wherever, Richard, ShatterScreen, Delta 22-6 and Silence.
Change to Scene 3: The Fight
Running into the fighting room at the sound of the buzzer, they once again find that it has shifted to resemble one of the two teams' home bases: either the makeshift camp once again, or a sparsely-furnished warehouse. A fight begins, but the team with Odious do their best to convince the new team that this isn't their fault. When both teams agree not to fight, both are teleported to the final room containing the exit portal — but the same rules as before apply: only one team is allowed to leave.
Change to Scene 4: The Choice
The team can either choose to remain in the testing rooms for as long as they can bear, systematically forfeiting to send new teams on their way, or let themselves be persuaded by the newer team to keep cycling; if they leave, they simply end back at their camp, wondering what all of this was about, not knowing who set up the testing rooms and why.
Worldbuilding
Jenny Everywhere
- The story's main Jenny had versions of Julie Jacobs and Jordan Jacobs as her adopted siblings. After Jordan was abducted by something from another world, Julie insisted on setting out with Jenny on a journey to find her; it's been three years since then by their subjective timeline. This Jenny is short and athletic with up-sticky black hair, tan skin, large ears and a Grecian nose. She wears white-and-red sneakers, olive-green golf pants and a short-sleeved red T-shirt with an “S” in white; her scarf is white with red stripes on each end and her goggles are silver with red lenses. She has a propensity to shout random words during a fight to invigorate herself.
- The second Jenny Everywhere seen is heavier-set than the previous one. She wears a leather aviator jacket and a long black scarf over some everyday clothing. She has long brown hair tied up in a ponytail. This Jenny is travelling with a party including an Abstract, Rae.
- The third Jenny Everywhere seen, in the version of the story where the main team do not leave as soon as they're able, is black and has curly black hair. She wears blue jeans and a a leather jacket with a green scarf, over a tank-top promoting a rock band unknown to the main team. Her goggles, which she is wearing over her eyes, are green.
- Jenny displays the ability to exchange an object for another by shifting it, which continues working even within the rooms area where she herself cannot shift away.
Michael Wherever
- The Michael Wherever travelling with the story's main Jenny is a Shifter like Jenny, but somewhat less skilled, only able to teleport himself within a universe in a very tiring away and even the only as a fight-or-flight reaction to extreme distress. (He can also take two people with him when he does so if their hands are touching them, though he cannot do this several times in a row in a short amount of time.) He is “an explorer, looking for the next interesting book or trinket to add to his collection” with a relaxed attitude to theft, which he thinks is more or less a victimless crime on the scale of the Multiverse. He appears as a heavy-set young man, somewhat taller than Jenny, wearing light brown trousers, a black belt with a silver buckle, brown shoes, a dull-blue shirt and rimless glasses; his hair is short and blond and he carries a brown leather satchel.
- A different Michael Wherever travels with the third Jenny Everywhere seen. He is dressed very similarly to his Jenny, though he is also blond with white hair and lacks the goggles and scarf.
Julie Jacobs
- The story features a version of Julie who is the main Jenny's adopted sister. She wears a necklace with a medallion of unknown nature and has her red hair in a big ponytail. The two are “roughly the same age” and she was “the popular kid while Jenny was the oddity”. Her relationship with Jenny has become troubled following Jenny's continued inability to help her find Jordan.
Abstracts
- The Abstracts number thirty-six. They are “immortal and basically invulnerable”. They know that they were created and have not always existed, but their origins are a mystery throughout the Multiverse. Odious believes himself to be several centuries old and is ultimately looking for someplace to belong.
- Two Abstracts feature in the story: Odious and Rae, each travelling as part of a team led by a Jenny Everywhere. Rae appears to have “too much energy to contain”. Odious's Mask is noted to exist “for your protection”: he can apparently incapacitate anyone instantly by showing them his true face.
Other
- The Chosen has accumulated a number of legendary artefacts including the Boots of Kileez, the Light of Fayd, the Blade of Aderax and the Necklace of Khas.
- Julie Jacobs has a Zap Orb.
Continuity
- The story features the Abstracts (including Odious), Julie Jacobs and Michael Wherever, all of whom were introduced in COMIC: The Jenny Everywhere Chronicles.
Behind the scenes
Read online
A watermarked PDF ebook of the Roleplaying Game can be purchased online with a recommended price of $1.00 on drivethrurpg.com.
