Beyond the Veil DevBlog: Expanding Detection, Reputation, and Entity Vitality

Developing a game like Beyond the Veil gives us no shortage of topics to discuss in our blogs, however, every once in a while we like to give you a peek behind the veil. What are we actively working on right now in order to get the game as ready as possible before we launch our Kickstarter campaign?

The Prologue rules introduced the Wrenegade System as our core mechanics, and through extensive playtesting we are well underway with understanding what worked well, what needs a tweak here and there, and what might need rebalancing or expanding upon for the core rules. The great news for anyone already familiar with the Prologue is that apart from some rebalancing of a handful of Investigator Talents (which we’ll issue an errata for), the mechanics themselves have tested very well and will merely require expansion to cover more nuanced use cases.

Ok, here’s the highlights:

Detection expansion - Distilling the detection of entities into simplified mechanics is not an easy feat, one of our primary focuses right now is how we can further explain item usage and the distinction between handheld and installed equipment when it comes to tracking down entities and capturing evidence of their activity. We already have the broad design in place, but wanting to test it prevents us from committing anything to ‘paper’ just yet.

Reputation & Reward - Play testing and beta releasing the rules is great for kicking the tyres of a game, but to fully understand the longevity and replayability of it we need to further develop the concept of career play. How does Investigator progression work in a classless and level-less system, how does it remain balanced yet maintain a sense of advancement and achievement. How do we create a sustainable economy while still having a realistic pricing structure for the various tools of the trade. This is arguably the hardest part of developing Beyond the Veil and something we are keen to get right before full release.

Entity Vitality - The main take away I took as an Overseer of Beyond the Veil is how Vitality needs to be different for Entities versus Investigators, preventing combat situations from devolving into an onerous war of attrition. We also need to account for scalable adversary challenges, of which their durability is a key aspect of. The answer lay in the way the game was being played rather than the simple application of the existing system, by allowing a simpler version of Vitality to entities we can encourage a more narrative way of handling combat that keeps things flowing while still being able to showcase toughness for more significant threats. We’re almost there with this one, just a bit more testing to do before we can literally put it to trial by combat… Well, fighting, this is Beyond the Veil afterall!

In addition to all of this, we have a constant need to keep adding more Talents, Expertises, and Powers, develop new entities, build out existing lore and legends, fine tune those core mechanics to perfection, and ultimately keep adding more content for our community to enjoy.

Over the coming months we’ll be releasing a couple of modules, a handful of short one-shot style investigations, and gearing up to our 2026 convention schedule. From checking out Dragonmeet this coming weekend as a prospective exhibitor option next year, to confirming our intent to appear at UKGE and Tabletop Gaming Live, we are committed to making Beyond the Veil the best it can be.

Which reminds me, we really need to get working on getting an actual play live stream up and running 🤔

Stay tuned, and thanks for stopping by.