It appears to have been heavily influenced by divinatory tarot, the four classical elements of ancient Greece, and world mythology.

In order to clarify their use, Tweet coined some new vocabulary to describe and formalize methods of gamemaster adjudication; these terms have been adopted by the wider tabletop RPG community.

Tweet's adjudication terms are: Karma (making a decision based on character abilities, tactics, and the internal logic of a fictional situation), Drama (making a decision based on what moves the story along), and Fortune (letting a randomizer — drawing a card in Everway, but could also refer to rolling dice in other games — determine the outcome).

Everway was released as a boxed set designed by Jonathan Tweet, Jenny Scott, Aron Anderson, Scott Hungerford, Kathy Ice, Bob Kruger, and John Tynes, with illustrations by Doug Alexander, Rick Berry, Daniel Gelon, Janine Johnston, Hannibal King, Scott Kirschner, Ed Lee, John Matson, Martin McKenna, Ian Miller, Jeff Miracola, Roger Raupp, Andrew Robinson, Christopher Rush, and Amy Weber, and cover art by Susan Harris The games revolve around heroes with the power of "spherewalking" traveling between worlds called "spheres".

The authors considered anthropology in terms of describing how the people of various spheres live, including many similarities across cultures.

Some of these common features are entirely realistic (language, art), and others plainly related to the game's fantasy elements (magic, knowledge of the Fortune Deck).

Several dozen other spheres are given one-sentence and a few are given page-long summaries, One is detailed as the setting for a sample adventure, "Journey to Stonekeep".

Each character begins with twenty points to divide between four Element scores roughly equivalent to statistics for Strength (Fire), Perception (Water), Intelligence (Air) and Endurance (Earth).

This is done by choosing an Element for its basis, which affects its theme; e.g., Air is associated with speech and intellect and would be suitable for a system of spoken spells gained through study.

Equipment such as weaponry is handled completely abstractly, with no specific rules for item cost, carrying capacity, or combat statistics.

The meanings are printed on the cards (e.g., "Protective Measures Turn Dangerous" vs. "True Prudence" for "Drowning in Armor") and explained more fully in the game's books.

Though cards sometimes have obvious interpretations for the context in which they are drawn, the rules explain that sometimes they are best read simply as "a positive (or negative) result".

Swan was a big fan of the diceless system, saying, "It makes for a brisk game, and Everway, to its credit, plays at blinding speed."

[3] In his 2023 book Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground, RPG historian Stu Horvath found the cards used to resolve action were too ambiguous, noting, "For example, when characters who are evenly matched in the fire attribute are brawling, the GM draws a card: War, inverted, which indicates 'Effort Misspent' — but whose?