SNOW CRASH TEST
DUMMIES
They say as you get older, your taste in music ossifies. That
it’s harder for something new and novel to break through and grab your
attention, create joy for you. I wonder if that’s true for rpgs? In the last
year I’ve read a bunch I thought would grab me. I thought they’d hit the sweet
spot of excitement I got when I first read the Ghostbusters or James Bond
007 rpg. Most didn’t.
The Veil did.
The Veil’s an
amazing rpg which embraces modern cyberpunk-esque themes and ideas. I don’t
know how else to explain it. I ran two sessions of it online for The Gauntlet
Hangouts. I dug it and
it left me wanting more. More than a formal review, I have some thoughts on it
and why it works for me.
SOURCE TAGS AND CODES
I’m struck by the differences in The Veil’s approach to
cyberpunk and my own experiences with that in games. I first encountered
Cyberpunk 2013 in ’88 while at a shop in Chicago. Within a couple of years,
it’d become a major rpg and trail blazed a whole series of like games (GURPS Cyberpunk, Cyberspace, CyberHERO,
and of course Shadowrun. Cyberpunk 2020 became a go-to game for
our local group up through the late 1990’s, with my late friend Barry in
particular running many campaigns of it. Working at the local game store, I
also got to peek in on other gamers’ approach to these games.
One thing divided me from many of the players and GMs: I’d
read a lot of cyberpunk fiction: Gibson, Walter Jon Williams, Pat Cadigan, K.W.
Jeter, George Alec Effinger. I wasn’t an expert or even that deeply into it,
but I’d read these authors. That wasn’t true for many in our group. Some picked
up bits and pieces. But for the most part, their vision of cyberpunk came from
the RPGs rather than any novel or short story source material.
On the other hand they knew some sources I didn’t. Looking
back it’s pretty clear that three anime heavily shaped their imagination: Ghost in the Shell, Akira, and most
importantly Appleseed. I wouldn’t see
those until much later; GitS not until this year. I hadn’t read the associated
manga either. Appleseed leaned
heavily into the chrome and military side of things. That complemented the
typical games we encountered: we always played Edgerunners carrying merc
missions of questionable ethics. We’d shift that formula from time to time, for
example we got vampires in our cyberpunk once Ianus released their Grimm’s Cybertales and related products.
The Veil comes
from another place. It’s the product of someone who has absorbed and
synthesized the divergent streams of cyberpunk media: books, films, rpgs, etc.
In doing so he’s made a game that has the anime feels and themes without being
a caricature. The Veil’s cyberpunk
without being entirely about murder, chrome, and loadout. It also manages to
handle transhumanist themes while remaining comprehensible and connected to
humanity. That’s something Transhuman
Space, Eclipse Phase, and Mindjammer
don’t do for me. It doesn’t feel like a regurgitation of older cyberpunk games,
religiously sticking to the same play style and only redressing the setting.
PRODUCTIVE PLACEMENT
My disclaimer: I know Fraser Simons from online gaming; I’ve
gotten to play with him several times. We even played The Sprawl together. That’s how I originally heard about The Veil. Honestly I only backed it because
he seemed like a smart and earnest dude. I was prepared to be pleasantly bland
about the game, probably praising its awesome look. But after getting The Veil to the table for two sessions I
want more. It’s clicks for me. Years of gunbunny, amoral, and nihilistic cyberpunk
had turned me off. The Veil flips
that for me. It aligns with what I want out of a game.
SPECIFICATIONS
The Veil’s a PbtA
cyberpunk game, so it has system approach drawn from Apocalypse World and like games. It has a looser setting than other
rpgs in the genre. Here player/MC collaboration creates the world. We’ve seen
that before with The Sprawl, but it
has a strong story structure. The Sprawl
deliberately echoes classic burning chrome and grimy operator cyberpunk games,
with a mission approach focusing play. The
Veil has one key setting conceit, the Veil itself. The setting, however you
create it, has a level of augmented reality everyone’s plugged into. Several
actions in the game tie to the Veil literally and metaphorically. At first I
wasn’t sure about that, but in play the device has brought cool moments to the
table. Only after playing a couple of sessions did I realize how much you could
shape the concept of the Veil itself: how it works, what it does, how potent it
is, who has control.
Like most PbtA games, players have a set of basic moves.
These tie in some of the cool concepts of the setting (the Veil as an info
source, honor debts implied by giri). Fraser’s structured these moves smartly.
More than other PbtA adaptations he keeps autonomy and choice in the players’
hands. There’s less of the “pick things that eliminate bad stuff hitting you”
choices within the moves. The same smart approach carries over to the
playbooks.
PLAYBACK PAYBOOKS
The Veil has
twelve of playbooks. They’re all striking and distinct, carving out their own
niche in the fiction. Each has a small, but evocative set of unique moves. These
support the playbook’s theme but offer enough difference that picking a
particular one at the start makes a statement about how you see the character.
But as important as the moves, each playbook contains background questions and
decisions. These aren’t just the usual relationship and backstory questions.
They ask you to define fundamental aspects of the world and your role in it.
For example, The Veil
includes the concept of Giri, an honor debt. It takes the place of debts,
strings, bonds, from other PbtA games. The choice of terminology plays into
some anime tropes. Characters who act as “Street Samurai” don’t have to be just
killers, they tie into a moral code. Giri’s a global system with some
supplemental moves. It serves as a mechanic for all characters.
But you also have the Honorbound playbook. This character
builds on and changes the concept of giri within the setting. They enforce
giri. The Honorbound player decides their “workplace” for & its relation to
giri. They can define it as traditional, commercial, ritualistic, legalist,
hidden. They also select circumstances which generate giri, a hugely important
point. Whether you incur an obligation when you offend someone’s honor or breaking
commercial contracts speaks volumes about your world. The kinds of penalties
available to an Honorbound say something as well.
Sherri and I spent a long car ride talking about what the
different formulations could mean. What if giri’s recorded and public? If it is
transferrable and even sold on a market? You could also read/build a HB
character just as a cop or a sheriff. Maybe it’s about wergild and keeping the
peace through a balance of enforcers. What if the Honorbound acts behinds the
scenes? There’s no officially accepted system for giri, but the HB’s order
believes in one. They might be terrorists trying to shape society. If persons
can incur giri, can an institution? an artificial intelligence?
Each playbook has something that it buys into and changes
within the world. The Catabolist deals with cybernetics and inplants. The
Apparatus about artificial life. The Architect about the metaverse & Veil.
The Wayward about what lies about of the urban world. What the players choose
as playbooks has dramatic impact on the game you’re going to play. That’s
compounded by the background choices players make to flesh those elements out.
That’s true in the best PbtA games, and the The Veil embraces that more than
most. The combination and interactions of the playbooks within a group creates
a distinct play universe.
MECHANATION
I haven’t talked much about the actual mechanics of play. If
you’re familiar with PbtA, everything within The Veil should be easy to pick
up. You may not get the implications of everything at first glance, though. It
really builds emergent play. For example, characters don’t have “stats” like
other games. Instead, they have states which represent emotions: Mad, Sad,
Scared, Peaceful, Joyful, Powerful. So while rolls represent proficiency in the
abstract, they’re more about characterization. The Veil has a “Feeling Wheel,”
something I thought was dumb at first glance. It breaks down those emotional states
into subtypes. It comes from therapy for emotional express.
My experience with tracking emotions in Headspace has made me doubly shy. But once we got the system to the
table, I saw the beauty of it. Choosing your feelings helps explicate your
character to yourself, the MC, and the other players. The wheel offers a
non-intrusive vocabulary for that. As important, it almost always puts the
choice and power in your hand when you go to make a roll. You don’t have to
remember that X move uses Y stat. That’s gone. Instead you decide how this
affects you. That’s smartly combined with an emotional spiking mechanic that
makes spamming a particular stat dangerous. I dig it very much.
THINKING ABOUT CYBER
Sherri used to use the term “machine-love” for games,
movies, and anime, that love The Tech. Gun lists, mecha suits, sweet bikes, hot
chick robots—any media with a fascination with chrome and weapons. There’s a lot
of old school cyberpunk where that’s your first impression. Characters are
archetypes; they’re not fully fleshed beings. They’re iconic rather than
evolving. The characters might have a unique spin or background, but they
remain objects: dead, metal tools just as much as the equipment they carry.
The Veil doesn’t
feel that way to me. It isn’t just that it uses the tag approach to cyberwear
and guns. Its more about how it connects the characters’ lives to their place
in the world. That makes it an open game. The
Veil takes to heart the “play to see what happens” PbtA admonition. Each PC
ends up with a ton of interesting material to play from. You can wrestled with
the questions of place and identity we’ve seen in media like Ex Machina, Witch Hunter Robin, Accelerando,
and beyond.
IN THE SHORT RUN
But that may itself be something of a weakness- or at least
make it more challenging to bring The
Veil to the table and get everything out of it. Character creation’s a deep
part of the process. Players have many decisions, not just picks. They’ll begin
to weave a tapestry in that first session. I knew that’d be a challenge in
about five hours, split in two. I thought establishing setting details ahead of
time would cut that cognitive load. That helped but we still put a long time
into the CC process. We engaged with some of those elements in play, but we had
many more directions we could have gone in.
Because of that we came away from those two sessions wanting
more. Honestly as soon as I can figure out how to schedule it in, I’m going to
run a longer term campaign of The Veil,
either online or f2f. I think you’d need at least six, probably more like 10-12
sessions to get at the depth offered here. That makes scheduling challenging.
The structure of the game and that richness also means I’m uncertain about
offering this to my 6 player face-to-face group. I think The Veil benefits from a tighter PC party.
To be fair, I made a conscious choice to play from the book
and engage the cc rules. Fraser has a quick-start, called Glitch City. That has
a crafted setting and pre-gen characters. As well, the supplement he’s
currently Kickstarting, The Veil: Cascade,
has more material on how to scale this. I’ve backed that.
SMALL GLITCH
Any things that bother me? Yes, The Veil follows Masks in
not actually putting the playbooks in the book itself. That really bugs me. We
have sections discussing the elements of those playbooks, but not the questions
and set up elements of those characters. We do get one page with images of the
two pages of the playbooks, but they’re so small as to be unreadable. It
frustrated me in Masks and I hope to god this isn’t the trend going forward for
PbtA games.
END LINE
I need to wrap up and I haven’t even gotten to the form
factor of The Veil. It’s gorgeous, with clean layout and great artwork. The pdf
uses a white text background (yeah!). The softcover’s a-effing-mazing. It’s
solid, larger than trade size. The glossy paper—something I often don’t dig—works
here. I cannot believe this is Fraser’s first release. It’s one of the nicest
rpg products I’ve bought.
Overall, Sherri and I love The Veil. It’s jumped to the top
of my “must play more” list. As I mentioned above, at the time of this writing
there’s a Kickstarter going on for the supplement. You can buy that alone or
with the core book there. You can also just buy the core book via that campaign
or from Indie Press Revolution. Highly recommended.
Gauntlet Hangouts Actual Plays
SESSION ONE
SESSION TWO
No comments:
Post a Comment