The Veil is a cyberpunk tabletop roleplaying game that provides a sandbox for creating and playing in cyberpunk worlds. Created by Fraser Simons who designed, wrote, and play-tested the game and published by Samjoko Publishing, it was Kickstarted successfully last year by 665 backers for a total of CA$ 21,073, crushing their goal of CA$ 7,700.
The book, containing the system rules, is a well thought out storytelling framework with excellent ideas and suggestions for storytelling, it seems a shame to call this simply a rulebook. So I will take my cues from the Kickstarter page and just call it ‘The Book.’ The Book contains some truly beautiful and inspiring cyberpunk art, quotes from some of my very favorite authors (Richard K. Morgan anyone?) and, of course, everything you need to create your own sandbox cyberpunk tabletop game.
The Veil uses the Apocalypse World engine in which 2d6 determine how successful–or unsuccessful–a specific action a character attempts to accomplish is. The system has been modified to fit The Veil’s themes. One of the more interesting aspects of the rules are the six emotional states a character has, which act as stats. When a character takes an action, they must state what the action is as well as their current emotional state, then these states act as modifiers on die rolls.
Then there is the concept of giri as debt. You do something for someone, you have a giri on them. They do something for you, they have a giri on you. Having giri means you can request favors and actions from others. Owing giri means others can request favors and actions from you. You might refuse, but that will come with a cost of it’s own.
In The Veil‘s setting, what you see isn’t always real, and what’s real isn’t always what you see. The realities of the physical world are obfuscated by an ever present augmented reality that just about everyone in the world is connected to. Buildings that are bland cement slabs, in reality ,might present as knockoff Disney World caricatures of themselves with spiraling staircases and ramparts. Perhaps no one wears makeup because the digital avatar they present to the world is always in pristine condition. Advertisements might never take physical form as instead they are presented as floating billboards existing only in digital space.
With regards to how the world and it’s augmented reality are presented, because that’s the really great part of The Veil— the world you play in is the world your group creates. World building takes up the better part of the first session and continues in every future session. This is a collaborative storytelling game where every person, including the storyteller, has an active hand in crafting the world the characters exist in.
The game is big on prompts. There are numerous prompts throughout the initial character and world building phase that press the players and storyteller to decide what type of technology exists in the world, what type of government, what type of poverty and what type of social structures exist. It takes a few minutes of getting used to if you’ve played more typical tabletop sessions where a GM, having spent hours developing a world and populating it with people, relates the details to you monologue style and then asks you what you want to do. I’m not knocking that way of doing things but the approach The Veil takes is an incredibly rewarding and different experience.
I sat down with The Veil guidebook and reference sheets a few days before I was set to run my game. I went into the rulebook expecting rules, setting, predefined characters, lists of corporations and perhaps a timeline of events that led the world to the cyberpunk future of The Veil.
What I got instead was so much better. The Book gives you handy ‘playbooks’ for the character archetypes you can give to your players. The printouts serve as both character sheet and as prompts for helping the players define their characters.
There is also an excellent world building sheet which the game encourages the storyteller to NOT fill out on their own. This was surprising to me. It was uncomfortable. I had planned to sit down and write out a one shot that I could run my players through in a couple hours. All that went out the window when I realized that almost the entire first session was intended to be spent building the characters, crafting the world, and creating NPCs– together.
I scrapped my idea for a one shot and realized that my players and I were going to have to deep dive this if we were going to get the full Veil experience. The game does offer some pre-built one-shots, but I felt that would be cheating since so much of what makes this game great is the collaborative nature of the storytelling.
I attempted to come up with a predefined plot that I could run the players through after we’d created the world, but I kept coming up blank– I mean, not only did I not know what kind of characters they would be playing and what kind of NPCs I might have, I didn’t even know what kind of world it was!
This is why I describe The Veil as a cyberpunk framework. It gives you the system and then it gives the storyteller and players the tools to collaborate on their own cyberpunk world. The Book presents several prompts to the storyteller regarding how to frame the story they wish to tell. A question that the players are seeking to answer. Something akin to: ‘Where does a person end and technology begin, in a world where technology and people are so intertwined?’.
This seemed important, but also something that I couldn’t really pin down until after a session or two.
When my players arrived I had the archetype sheets laid out. I had the world building sheet in front of me. I explained the basic rules of the system to them. They picked characters, and we all started asking questions.
What does technology look like in this world? What has happened in recent history? What effects did those events have on the world as it exists now? What color do we associate with technology? What color do we associate with nature? Is the augmented reality similar to the matrix from Neuromancer or the metaverse from Snow Crash? What are the social dynamics like? What is the food like? What are the cops like? What does money look like? What kind of jobs are available? What’s religion like?
Each question seemed to spawn a new series of questions and open up new possibilities as we dived deeper into the world we were creating. The world building sheet provided by The Veil helped immensely. There were numerous questions to ask and they all spawned further discussion. I wrote it all down rabidly and when I had several pages, we came up for air. I read everything back and we added a few things, changed a few others. I read it back again.
Everyone sat back in their chairs when we finished, grinning and feeling giddy.
“Wow. This world is so fucking cool,” someone said.
“Right? Holy shit. I can’t believe how much I love this world,” someone else said.
Everyone was excited to start playing, even though we had burned through three and a half of our previously allotted four hours just building the world. The Book warns that this might be the case and it is right.
We decided that I would run them through something short, so they could flex their new characters and we could get a feeling for the combat rules. I had planned for the very broadest of encounters. Gangers would mess with the players in some way. I couldn’t really flesh it out more than that because well, when I was planning, there wasn’t much to flesh out.
Before we started, we collaborated to create four NPCs. Their landlord, a bad ass hacker type character, a cop, and a bartender. Then the players rolled to see how the NPCs felt about their characters and what kind of giri the NPCs would have on the players. The results were surprising and fun. Create a really cool NPC that is obviously intended to be friendly towards the PCs and–the NPC hates you. Create a cop that is most definitely investigating your characters actions, probably to arrest them and– bang, that NPC likes your characters a lot. It makes for some really interesting twists and turns.
As we started our scene, I asked the players to tell me about the building their characters lived in. I was looking for a good starting point, a place to drop them in the world. They described it as a Dredd-style mega-apartment complex. It had, among other things, a bar on the first floor. I put them in the bar. They were returning from a job.
I started to describe the bar and it’s patrons to them, but caught myself and stopped. It’s not the storyteller’s job to tell the players what they see. It’s everyone’s job to describe the scene. I prompted them to describe the bar, the patrons, the mood, the music. I helped by prompting them for more details, asking follow-up questions and chiming in with my own suggestions.
Everyone was involved, everyone was having fun. Everyone was contributing to the world and felt fully invested in it. Just like Augmented Reality is a shared hallucination that everyone agrees upon– so was our world. We were invested.
We played for another two hours and can’t wait to play again. We told a few friends about how awesome the world was, how great the collaborative nature of the storytelling was, how interesting and unique the archetypes and rules were, in such gushing fashion that they want to join the game. None of us intended to run a campaign when I asked for help reviewing the game, but halfway through our world-building, I think we all knew that was exactly what was going to happen.
The Veil – 9/10
In collaboration with Neon Dystopia, Samjoko Publishing is running a contest to win both a physical and digital copy of The Veil. There will be two winners, one based in the USA and the other across international waters, basically anywhere outside the USA. To enter, all you have to do is comment on our Facebook post associated with this article with your country of origin and any comments that you’d like to chime in with. If you aren’t a Facebook user, we won’t leave you out. Just send us a message to hello@www.neondystopia.com with your country of origin and we’ll include you as well. The contest ends on Wednesday, June 14th, 2017.
Currently, Samjoko Publishing is running a Kickstarter (which is already funded) for a supplement to The Veil called The Veil: Cascade, which introduces more options for gameplay and expands the current rules. If you’re interested, you can support them here. Below is their Kickstarter video: