Hey guys, sorry for the intrusion. Last time I’ll post the Veil on here – I promise. We are entering the final 24 hours and have 2 final stretch goals. One for massive double spread chapter headers in the book and one for free compendium classes for the playbooks afterward. Any eyes on the project is much appreciated – thanks!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/samjokopublishing/the-veil-cyberpunk-rpg
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/samjokopublishing/the-veil-cyberpunk-rpg
It’s been asked a few times haha! I’m just going to copy and paste an answer I gave in the Veil community where I contrasted the differences between it and Headspace, too! Sorry, it’s kind of long winded.
I’ll try to be as brief and as thorough as possible here! haha!
Alright, so. The Sprawl is a mission based system, I feel like it’s akin to Dungeon World in that instead of going and looking for treasures and such you’re doing missions and the playbooks are geared towards being gritty replaceable action packed cybernetic dudes running jobs. Headspace is similar to the Veil in that it has emotions as a big focus but has all the team linked up together. There is stress and sync and their actions effect one another directly and mechanically with every move. Not so in the Veil.
First off, there’s a mixed reality in place for everyone, where everyone has a neurochip except for one playbook. What that means is everyone is in a world where physical and digital can be interacted with as though they were the same thing. How that looks in the fiction as well as how heavy you use that in the fiction is up to you. Especially as the Architect you’re walking around with repressed stuff in your subconsciousness able to manifest themselves digitally and you’re in an environment where digital and physical could be the same. So how that comes into play can be super interesting.
The Veil doesn’t link the playbooks together in terms of mechanics at all like in Headspace. Playbooks digress or evolve into each other’s on purpose though for some long campaigns, but other than that there’s nothing like a linked mind with skills and such. It is also a light setting so your fiction may or may not have anything to do with missions. It’s also very interpersonal friendly as well as encouraged with the Specials for each playbook – so right away we know that intimate moments is a thing that brings with it heavy fictional connotations.
It also focuses heavily on “the why”. Instead of having stats, you have states – which are your 6 core emotions. Whenever you trigger a move you apply a state and increase an emotional spike in that emotion. When you spike out, there’s a special move that’s triggered that has you deal with that emotion that’s gotten out of hand.
Advancement is through a belief system inspired by burning wheel. So what happens with the system now, is that the players are constantly in the fiction, because even when they’re triggering a move they’re also considering how their protagonist feels and they are keeping their beliefs in mind. So is the MC – they have a move specifically to remind them to push at the players beliefs each time along with a few others tweaked for cyberpunk. Their “Let them feel the ripples” move, is specifically to make them feel as though there are other forces at work, perhaps an omnipresence of some kind.
My playbooks are very different than any AW game I’ve seen so far. I’ve made them pretty fiction heavy, everything is exploration of the self. For that, for the MC session and maybe the most exciting thing about it, arguably – is that the integration of question based scenarios. You take a question you want to explore – presumably about cyberpunk culture, media, whatever – and inject that question into the game and you all explore it as you play to find out what happens. There’s also a spot for introducing interesting technological aspects as well as cultural aspects on the scenario sheet for the MC to make use of. Check out the playbooks and you should see what I’m going for there.
I’ve got a debt system put in that’s similar to Urban Shadows – but tweaked for cyberpunk, called Giri. They have moves that puts a really interesting spin in interactions because now the difference between honor and obligation as well as paying people to get things/do things will really have different mechanics in play.
Tags are broad and used to give players fictional positioning, not mechanical benefits like in The Sprawl and…maybe Headspace?…not sure on that. You can have whatever cybernetics you like but it’s balanced with negative tags that come into the fiction with misses or when otherwise pertinent in the fiction.
Your Jam is a thing, whenever you have downtime or skip time where it’d make sense in the fiction that you’d get paid – you get cred. Whether this factors into the main overall story you’re playing in could factor into it or not. Maybe ALL of your jams is investigating synthetics on the run, maybe some are maybe others are hiding those synth guys from blade runners etc. Maybe the story isn’t about that at all and you just get cred as though it was an off-screen gig. I don’t want money to be the focus I want people exploring their characters by their beliefs.
Basically what interests me is that – yeah, these people are badass. You can tell from the playbooks they are because they have so much fictional positioning. That’s sweet! But so what’s interesting to me is why they do the thing. So it’s all about that while you’re exploring major questions/themes etc that you want to explore to bring it together for everyone.
Lastly, (I think? Ha!) it’s a soft setting so could take place anywhere. It doesn’t have to be in an urban sprawl at all, it could be in whatever setting you like. Maybe there’s no mega-corporations at all. The first playtest I ever ran, they decided they were in a huge futuristic Pyramid. The bottom, of course had all the slums and the higher up you got the more affluent people were and they were getting to the bottom of a mysterious drug people were doing which killed people sometimes. It ended up the drug was people on the higher ups memories being digitized into a drug people could inject themselves with. The second was pretty Shadowrun-esk except they were hired by someone to delve into his mind (inception like) because he had hired someone previously to alter his memories and now needed it reversed. So they went in and had to figure out what thoughts and data and things looked like in his mind. Ended up that there was a younger version of an A.I storing itself within the man’s mind and lots more. Another was a destroyed wasteland from war with satellites beaming the Veil to the inhabitants. With the mixed reality you can really bring whatever you like with your imaginations come to the forefront. The Veil will be different for everyone and the exploration of the question could be different for every protagonist.