The Veil Questions

[chrisshorb]

I’m most of the way through the Veil (Thanks Veil Inheritance Kickstarter!) and really loving it. I especially love the quotes and the art to really inspire me to color the world. And the playbooks are amazing. They informed me about the setting so well that I realized that that is what playbooks for any PBTA game ALWAYS do.

I am so jacked to a) go read more Cyberpunk and b) play this game.

Questions for the group here:

I’d love to listen to some AP - suggestions?

I’m not exactly grokking the way Alleviate works in play. Or maybe I’m not grokking the way a move connects to the fiction. Or maybe it’s actually as simple as it seems - if the protagonist does a move that keys off of MAD, then the fiction that follows is in some way angry, wrathful, pissed etc. Is it really that simple? (Please say yes )

Finally - I’m thinking of putting together in another thread an Appendix N for Cyberpunk games like this one. Any interest in such a thing?

Thanks in advance.

Chris

[Thomas_Junk]

From my understanding so far - I am new as well :

I would modify the idiom from apocalypse world “to do it, do it” for The Veil to “to feel it, feel it”. If the protagonist feels confident to do something, he adds to the spikes in that emotion. The move follows along the fiction: what’s happening tells the MC how to mechanically handle it

And sometimes you are overconfident and turn perhaps selfish - only you can save mankind - and things went south.

This would be the fictional ground for the Alleviate move where you took the one time -2 and spiked Mad one tick.

Actual play:

[darren]

Yeah, what @Thomas_Junk said is it. A move triggers all the same when a player narrates their character doing something, but the player always chooses what they’re rolling with. That begets the question, “how do you feel while doing that/about that/what’s going on.”
Every time a player rolls, they add a spike — a mark of some kind on the character sheet — to that state. Importantly, whenever you add a spike, you also remove a spike from the opposing state.
Finally, after a PC has marked five spikes in a single state, they are “spiked out” and automatically trigger Alleviate. This move temporarily changes all of the state modifiers: +1 in the spiked out state and -2 in all other states.
Then, the player has an additional choice when they roll: they can keep rolling with the spiked out state with a +1 and ride the wave for five rolls or they roll with another state with -2 to break out of the spiked out state immediately. The player can choose which to do each time they roll.
Fictionally, this looks like a surge of emotion. If they rolled mad five times, they’re totally enraged now, seeing red. They can ride that out or something might happen in the narrative that gives the player reason to choose something else. Maybe another PC gets hurt (maybe even because of them), causing them to roll with scared. Maybe they get what they want and it’s bad, so they roll with sad. Et cetera
Feelings should follow the fiction, too, so interrogate why a player is rolling with a state, especially if it seems weird. The player gets to choose, so go with it, but make them think about it — if their parent was killed and they’re rolling with powerful, what was their relationship like with them?

My Echoes series is pretty dang good! But we spend three hours in session one doing character creation skip ahead to the last hour and definitely check out sessions two and three!

[shane]

Re AP: I would also recommend the continuation of Nanostorm Blues to see how The Veil is meant to transition into The Veil: Cascade:

Also @Frasersimons we’re talking about your games!

[chrisshorb]

Ah, reading Cascade now, I see there is an Appendix N in there. Although it’s sort of strange in the print version since it refers to “here” clearly as a link. Also, funny none of the Neutomancer trilogy books on the list.

That said, I am excited to immerse myself in Cybpnk and try to find some folks here to run. If I go to Strategicon in Sept, will def run at GoD.

[shane]

@Frasersimons isn’t a huge fan of First Wave Cyberpunk and basically the Sprawl trilogy is easy enough to find out about anyway.

[Frasersimons]

I wanted to place texts that inspired playbooks or setting information in that appendix, none of those books had inspired The Veil in any way, other than having influenced the books that are listed.

If I remember correctly, the printer said we needed a couple more pages which made it a hastily done thing leading to those “click here” issues.

[chrisshorb]

I appreciated the Veil Cascade Appendix N for opening my eyes to many works I was not familiar with; and I thought I was a pretty avid consumer of cyberpunk media.

That said, I am not sophisticated enough to tell the difference between “First Wave” vs “X Wave” cyberpunk. What separates First Wave from other waves?

[Frasersimons]

First wave is generally considered up to when Snow Crash was released, which is the first book to be considered post-cyberpunk and sometimes referred to as 2nd wave works in the genre. Post-cyberpunk is critical of first wave works and subverts motifs and tropes, like Snow Crash satirizing the genre. Academically, third wave are works that are more hard science and written by people who know computer science and stuff. I think Accelerando marks that. The waves aren’t that useful unless you’re talking about stuff academically. But consumer short hand is usually stuff up until 1992 is first wave, everything else is second wave or post-cyberpunk, which could refer to literally after the sub-genre’s movement or works that critically examine the first wave stuff.

[chrisshorb]

Thanks Fraser, who knew…

BTW, what made you decide to change Giri to Obligation in the 2nd printing? In one of the APs, Lowell keeps talking about Giri, and I was like “Did I miss a key rule”?

Any other key changes to be aware of in 2nd printing?

[Frasersimons]

Community feedback encouraged me to change it, as the term is loaded in other cultures. I’m trying to recall all the changes. There was more art in the second printing, and a The Empath was overhauled. Otherwise, one or two moves here and there were tweaked on a couple playbooks.