In the land of Inis Fael, where the High King reigns and the Order of the Sacred Grove advise and guide the councils of the wise, reality itself is set to unravel!
The Arch Druid warns of his visions through the mists of a seeing stone. Dark forces are coming into alignment, intent upon the destruction of the Land of the Living. The revenant dead will be unleashed, along with malefic spirits bearing ill will toward those of the Quick, from their purgatory on the fringes of the Land of the Dead.
The ancestral spirits tell of strangers on the Other Side of Midnight, an Otherworld inhabited by the Aos Si and creatures of the shadow fey plotting the demise of humanity from their hidden palaces and impenetrable strongholds beyond the reach of mortals.
The rise of a death-cult led by a practitioner of the black arts with designs on the desecration of the shrines to the Old Gods and the defilement of the sacred places is weakening the lines of ley and dissipating the Veil separating the realms…
The darkest beings in the cosmos, the cruellest and most wicked of spirits, the most treacherous and dishonoured of warriors from the past, soon to be all free to cross the divide between worlds, and walk into our own.
In the game players take on the role of the heroes, developing their skills, gathering weapons, armour, and relics while harnessing the power of magical items to take on ever increasingly potent enemies from The Land of the Dead and beyond.
There are two modes of play, with one of these - the Adventure Game mode - comprising around 100 hours of campaign material including 30 scenarios, in an episodic connected narrative. This narrative features variable endings, but also, and quite uniquely, multiple beginnings. These are played on preset map layouts featuring a unique token system that reveals what you find, puts enemies into the play and presents you with many choices, as you reveal them. More about the Token system later!
The other mode is the Dungeon Crawl mode! While the whole game is technically in the Dungeon Crawler category we also could call it a World Crawler, as much of it takes part in outdoor locations also. So we called this mode the Dungeon Crawl Mode as it is the purest Dungeon Crawl experience to those familiar with what should define the genre. It contains a further 10 scenarios intended to be played as one-shot adventures - each one keeping you busy for a single game night for the times when you prefer your adventuring bite sized!) This format is a tile stack system with tiles that trigger game events and present the narrative decisions. The longer scenarios feature several such tile stacks. As you move and the dungeon evolves, you generate the tiles. Each scenario instructs you how to do this based on what you roll on the custom dice, or trigger with Spawn Cards and Round Numbers which you track on a large D12. Typically this means you place enemies, traps, treasure chests, and sometimes dungeon features into play! You will make decisions on those trigger tiles which will dictate what may follow. What happens when you reach a Trigger tile is described in the Book of Revelations. One of the players reads the entry and follows the instructions. Choices you face and their outcomes may change up the tiles in the current stack, or a future one. In this fashion, the scenarios will never play out the exact same way twice! Often a Boss Fight awaits you after you progress through the levels of the Dungeon. That’s not all though! Sometimes even in the Dungeon Crawl mode you explore some outdoor environments, like in the Weaver of Caer Marthen scenario. This creates quite a rogue-like experience, with endless potential, and limitless gameplay.
The game features true solo adventuring as an option. We know every co-op is on some level a soloable game, with the individual taking on multiple Heroes or Characters. But the Thinning Veil is designed so that you may take a single Hero through the scenarios.
A Hero’s journey begins! Join the fight! Here is what makes it special!
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Two for One! A campaign game and a game of self contained scenarios in one box
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Fully customizable asymmetrical Heroes to build from the ground up, by spending Souls and collecting items. The Souls System additionally can be used to fuel the powers of rare artifacts and potent magical spells & even grant passage to other worlds.
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A unique Hero Phase where all players have their own resource of actions generated at the start of each game round forming a combined pool to use in a sequence of their choice. This allows for greater interaction and synergy, and no 'downtime' waiting for your go! It also grants the players some agency over when and where Enemies activate.
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A unique scaling system that allows players to join in or leave the game at any point by adapting the difficulty to factor in any change in player count.
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The game features multiple beginnings as well as multiple endings. This ensures those teaching the game to a new group can have a more varied experience themselves. No constantly repeating 'scenario one: the tutorial!'
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If a player is in Twilight, the scaling system adjusts to a player count equal to the number of active Heroes, until they return to the Land of the Quick or perish. So the difficulty responds to the game conditions.
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In-game Progression! Upgrade your Hero as the game progresses! No need to wait until you reach a point between scenarios to level up! Spend Souls as you earn them to gain Skills, increase attributes or imbue weapons and items with their power!
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Unique Token System! There are three sets of 10 tokens in the game, each with a design on one face and a number between 1 and 10 on the other. The designs are Gravestones, Sidhe Spirals and Triskelions. As you move through the tiles / zones of the game, these indicate where you should reference the Book of Revelations for a description and instructions. Some choices in the Adventure Game will lead to removing tokens from other areas based on what you have done in the current location. In the Dungeon Crawl they may mean you need to include new tiles or remove existing ones from the current or future stacks! This versatile system means the narrative can play out very differently each time you play. The numbers on the tokens often have an effect too, or are connected to your game objectives!
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Variable A.I that evolves as the players do, with each enemy acting in unique and unpredictable ways, even the Enemy Scrolls won’t warn you of everything in all situations, as they may have added surprises when the Game Round triggers them!
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The Enemies level up too! Of course our Enemies gain in power with the scaling, or due to scenario conditions triggered by the Round Tracker. But they sometimes additionally level up in the same way as the Heroes! Some gain Blood Points per wound they inflict, which they can spend on spells or empowering their own attacks. Others steal Souls from the unsuspecting who have hoarded them, so that they can fuel their own magical weapons! In the Thinning Veil, you never really know the dangers that you will face!
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A Unique World! As much as the game is inspired by Celtic myth, Irish legends, and folk tales and legends of the British Isles and Europe, it is also very much a dark horror fantasy of its own. Whether you are traversing the Land of the Quick, the Land of the Dead or the Other Side of Midnight, you will find yourself immersed in the eerily familiar, yet also the fantastical!
In The Thinning Veil players switch back and forth between Heroes, in an interactive Hero Phase, whilst activating and controlling enemies with varied behavioural traits.
Your choices impact the story as the decisions you make shape the future of Inis Fael. Each scenario is filled with story-based objective points. Once reached these direct you to the Book of Revelations, where you will find sequential multiple-choice interactions with dungeon elements, NPCs, enemies and a variety of important decisions that shape the tale being told.
Fighting – Utilise a custom dice system, for your individually tailored Hero, using their unlocked skills and equipped items to defeat the enemies. Enemies gain activations from Heroes in the Hero Phase, from the Book of Revelations as you explore, and in the Enemy Phase. Sometimes Enemies even gain activations or other effects from Spawn Cards creating a diverse system that is hard to predict and difficult to manipulate.
Death & The Twilight - The game utilizes a unique system of player elimination. When you drop to 0 Health, you pass into Twilight. This represents the passage of your soul to the spirit world. It has a Tarot card representation of it, with 3 spaces on. The first shows your body and has a 2+ printed to the left side of the card. The second shows the silver cord of life extending toward the distant light and has a 3+ to the left side and the final is right before the light of the Spirit World and has a 4+ to the left side of it.
Through force of will you battle to resist death in order to return your spirit to your body so you can fight on! You place a Soul Token in the middle space with the 3+ on it. If you are the second Hero in Twilight at this time, use a 3 Souls Token, and if you are the third, use a 5 Souls Token. If you are the fourth then the loss conditions are triggered and the game is lost! All Heroes pass over into the Spirit World! You could reset and start the scenario again, or even begin the campaign over if you are playing the Adventure Game!
Each round a Hero in Twilight must draw an event card from the Twilight deck, providing a unique test or challenge for that Hero to overcome. Typically this is a Will Test requiring successes equal to the number printed on the space your soul occupies in the Twilight. Cards frequently apply modifiers or substitute this test with another. You need not take the test on the card immediately, and often it is better to wait to see if your allies in the Land of the Quick can aid you! However you must take the test before the game round progresses from Hero Phase to the Enemy Phase. If you go into the light, you pass over into the spirit world and are dead! If you are just too bloody minded to die and through force of will return to your stricken body, you immediately resurrect with a measure of Health, and live to carry on the fight! This is why it is important that you continue to generate activation cubes each round along with the other players, even if you start out in Twilight. Other Heroes in play can assist you while you are in the Twilight and as the Spirit World calls to you, by using items and skills or performing rites to embolden your efforts to return! If you are in Solo, you may burn your Sprig of Acacia, for a once per game full resurrection!
If you are in that aforementioned middle space in Twilight you need to pass a 3+Will Test typically. If you get 3 successes you move your Soul token into the space with the 2+ on it. If you fail, you move your token toward the light, into the space with the 4+ on it. This means as you begin to heed the call of the light, you find it harder to resist. If you are making headway back to your body it becomes easier to resist.
An important rule to remember is that if you pass your Will test in the above example where you occupied the middle space on the card, and you did so with 5 successes you would immediately resurrect! This is because you not only got the 3 successes you needed to move a little closer to your body, but you also got the 2 successes you’d have needed in the next game round too. Likewise if you score 4 successes but were about to slip into the Spirit World from the space with the 4+ on it, if you pass the test you would move into the space with the 3+ on it. This is commonly called ‘taking one step closer to your body’. If you pass the test with 7 successes, you move to the space with 2+ on it, with your soul hovering just above your body. If, miracle of miracles, you managed an astonishing 9 successes, you could transition from near death to resurrection!
When you resurrect, you do so with the activation cubes you generated that game round. You cannot Bank cubes while in Twilight. When you resurrect, be aware that nearby enemies pose a significant danger if you possess Enemy activation cubes!
