A lot of what The Veil does makes more sense when you play it, I feel. I’ve heard so many people who didn’t get how States would work, or that they’d power game it. Or how questions vs beliefs would really alter play. A lot of my writing has the assumption that people are reading it to play it, for better or worse.

This is a contribution to the genre and inspired directly by a lot of literary works in it, like Altered Carbon. That’s the training wheels scenario, essentially. You get the plot beats because it’s a staple of the genre, but everything else about it is changed. So how does something so familiar play out when you have the option to play with your gender identity via slack decanting/sleeving, the switch to creating emerging questions, some of which you answer yourself with flashbacks if they’re about your past, and the injection of the different playbooks people use. I think this shows that it’s not a rigid emulation. The “training wheels” shows that morphing these tropes and injecting what I have to say about them creates something interesting, different, and new.

I think it serves the purpose of the game to educate people on the genre and how to subvert or play into it. Especially with this book because you have the fictional positioning to create whatever gender identity you’d like having been decanted into a slack, along with the other mechanical changes.

You want the plugins in the book to help understand the moves and the playbooks, or what’s the hangup? I just clicked on “here” for Pinterest and it takes me to the board…?

I think Lauren is a way better editor than our previous one. The first printing had an editor too though, of course. But because the first printing was a misprint I’m not sure how superior the editing is. If people read 2nd printing and Cascade, then it’ll be apparent, I guess.