Oh, I agree for the most part. The Veil definitely asks more from players than most PbtA, because it also puts forth the idea that by being aware of the media you can then subvert it, which is very satisfying. But I would very much say it’s a cognitive load heavy game, which is why Cascade is pretty well aimed at reducing a ton of it for the players to make it more accessible. But at the same time create a nice bridge from The Veil to Cascade thematically.

A huge part of making a cyberpunk game to me was the media perception of it, because not a lot of people are aware of what the genre looks like today. And I wanted people to both be aware of the source material but be OK with making their own cyberpunk, disregarding the stuff that doesn’t work and, in the case of first wave stuff, be problematic, too!

In that way it’s a post cyberpunk game as it struggles against the genre and thereby broaden it with the contributions of people creating new fiction. But, it also requires more from the MC and players than other games.

I also think that you could just have a good time not doing that stuff and say, hey, I love Blade Runner. Let’s do the story that never was in that universe. Both are OK. But in order to struggle critically against something I thought it was important to make people aware of it. In order to be instructive in the book, I felt it needed a mix of both.

Because you have media reference points and the playbooks deviating and celebrating them, a lot of the time just choosing playbooks will make it your own, anyways. Because I’ve kind of done the work at making these cyberpunk tropes and motifs as interesting as possible, and I think, unique at the same time.