Line and Veil System

[MidnightPoet]

Put simply, a line is something which will never come up as part of a campaign or session, while a veil ensures that whilst an action or event might take place, this will happen ‘off-screen’: mentioned in passing, but not dwelled on in detail and not a significant part of any plot or encounter. They were first developed by Ron Edwards in Sex and Sorcery, a supplement to his RPG Sorcerer, in which he discusses a number of scenarios involving sex, how they might be handled in different ways and how they might affect the players around the table.

Although lines and veils began as a way of thinking about how to handle explicit content in games, this is not their only function. What is classed as a line or a veil is down to each set of players, though the DM will typically list standard lines such as detailed violence, sex, assault and so forth. In this case, I am primarily using this to gauge player attitudes towards horror tropes, such as body horror and trauma.

If a player begins to find a scene alarming or uncomfortable, they are always welcome to post in this thread to draw a veil or line at any time.

Line

A Line will never be presented or mentioned in the game. For example, a player may be deathly afraid of spiders. They mark it as a Line, so all players and the GM knows not to describe or present pictures of spiders in an encounter. This may not stop the GM from describing spiderwebs or the like, but no such monsters will appear. If there is a spider monster, it will instead be another type of monster, such as an aberration with the same abilities and statblock, instead.

Veil

A Veil will be mentioned, but only briefly, and never described in detail. A common example of a Veil is sex. Your character, James Bond, may flirt and may even invite people to their room in-character. However, any description of what they do behind closed doors is unnecessary. It is enough for the audience to understand that Bond (successfully or awkwardly) seduced the NPC for information and then skip to the scene where he shares that information with the rest of the team.

Here is a list of the known Lines and Veils

Lines	Veils
Detailed descriptions of violence	Sex
Child abuse
Sexual assault

 

Edited February 7 by MidnightPoet (see edit history)

[BobtheWizard]

My lines would be child abuse and sexual assault. I'd rather not play in a game with those. I'm ok with spiders, fantasy violence and consensual sex, but agree that a veil for sex is best.