Just curious to see if someone can break down the differences between The Sprawl and The Veil.
Mind you I’m not asking which is better, just what they each focus on, etc.
I played The Sprawl in a home-brew setting at a convention, but I gathered it was heavily mission based, but I’m willing to find out I’m wrong about that.
Thanks!
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I posted about this recently: https://plus.google.com/103667855585775066713/posts/JF7wR2jcJNu
I have both, have not played either yet, and have only skimmed The Veil.
The Sprawl focuses on mission-based, 1980’s-style, William Gibson-inspired cyberpunk. There is no setting, so every game will be be “homebrewed”.
The Veil is more about the emotional states of the characters. I’ve only started digging into it, but how a character feels and the emotion causing the action is more important than what they are actually doing.
Sprawl is Shadowrun/Cyberpunk 2020 stuff. It’s cyber criminals doing cyber crime in an explosion of neon and gunfire.
The Veil is literary science fiction, all about emotions and exploring specific themes or questions.
Aaron Griffin thanks for linking in your post! That’s in essence what I was looking for. Also, I thought Paul Beakley did a nice job of something things up in the response thread.
So, the Sprawl Trilogy vs Gibson’s later works ?
The Veil adapts Strings from Monsterhearts, to my mind making them less elegant, and is a little more ‘move’-y than I like in a PbtA chassis. A spare, concise moveset lets each move bear more narrative freight. The implementation of emotional mechanics is interesting — I’d have to see how it works out at the table before passing judgement. It might be good enough to justify the additional mechanical framework of regularly tracking all the little +1/ -2 things that apply to every roll, if the table is really buying into the exploration of emotions.
On a production level, I really, really dislike the pull-quotes from cyberpunk media, in triple font size, on what feels like every fifth page. It wrecks the text flow to no benefit.
I’d give the Veil a B, maybe B-minus upon reading it, but if the systems mesh well at the table, it could bump to a B+. As PbtA games go, it’s no tremulus, at least.
The Sprawl is Shadowrun in PbtA, without the fantasy elements.
The Veil is transhumanist, about the relationship between people and technology. Each playbook captures a different thematic lens for exploring that relationship. It’s… wildly and completely different. But it’s really not cyberpunk: that’s taking the ad copy at face value. One playbook is about a robot with a single emotion, slowly discovering new emotions through play, one at a time. One playbook is a cyberdruid whose progress comes at the expense of their land, and who can put in effort to restore the health of the ecosystem. The choice of playbooks create the intersection of themes being addressed in play. You could throw these characters into a Shadowrun mission, but then, you could not, in the same way you could just follow them having breakfast. Traditional Gibson-esque cyberpunk tropes are things you can bring into the game, but don’t appear integral to it.
A Sprawl session is “here’s a party breaking into a corporation to secure some data.”
A Veil session is … way too idiosyncratic to thumb-sketch, depending entirely on the setting and playbooks chosen by the players. Both a weakness and a strength.