Design Document (beyond the veil)
more to come...
Beyond the Veil started as a confluence of two impetuses. The first, an abiding annoyance with a certain type of play (and running) of nominally political live action role playing games. The second, a personal question as to whether an interesting, playable, and enjoyable game could be designed using little more than raw economics and, as a direct outgrowth, quasi-Pavlovian punishment/reward schema without it boiling down so far as to be Monopoly; the Roleplaying Game. Though, every effort has been made to simplify the roll of Gatekeeper (or GM) to that of Monopoly's Banker. Through the confluence of these drives the idea for players as spiritual entities grew- a separation from NPCs with much if any significance distills the political aspects by removing an external GM as a foil while the need for resources to be easily convertible through personal power suggested a setting where the various aspects of existence were somewhat transitory in nature. Viola, spiritual beings. Actually, in the earliest drafts the players were restricted to demons/malfasians trapped in hell, the name of the game was actually "To Rule in Hell." There were no light substances, and "agents" were all "cultists." However, basic math going through the strictly economic nature of the game quickly indicated that another tier of "goods" would be beneficial.
In an effort to reduce the number of rules an individual player has to know, most of the system should be packaged into discrete bundles and made into powers. These should cover the abilities other games provide with skill use, class/race abilities, etc. A new player's understanding should progress only as fast as their ability to
Conversions[edit]
The following are some of the key conversion rates between various resources. Such conversions always require powers, and how close the power comes to this "ideal" conversion should be based on the power's rank. (obviously powers which do not conform to this are outdated and need to be revised.)
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