“The World They Knew Could Not Explain What They Saw”
“Magic declined not because it was disproved, but because it became disreputable.”
— Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971)
“Angels and demons served as public metaphors for the private unease of empire.”
— Ramón Mujica Pinilla, Angels and Demons in the New World (2006)
Empires rise with scripture in one hand and fire in the other. But the real story lies between them – in the tension between what was believed, what was experienced, and what could no longer be explained.
The Veiled Age is not a fantasy grafted onto history. It is a speculative reconstruction of what early modern people might have believed if they had been right about the world – but wrong about why.
Its foundation draws from three core source categories:
Historical Analysis
- Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic grounds the setting in the intellectual and emotional terrain of pre-Enlightenment Europe: a world of overlapping causalities, sacred institutions, and desperate charms. [Source]
- Ramón Mujica’s work Angels, Demons and the New World exposes how supernatural warfare was used as imperial justification in the Americas. Demonic pacts, Marian miracles, and Indigenous visions were not fringe – they were official narratives. [Source]
- J. M. Roberts & Odd Arne Westad’s The Penguin History of the World provided a global scaffold, helping place Europe’s religious intensity within a broader pattern of cosmological and institutional change. [Source]
Colonial Contact Literature
From Inca ghost battles to Jesuit miracle catalogues, the documents of early global empires treat belief not as culture – but as weaponized reality. These texts inspired our Truth mechanics, cosmological axes, and factional frames.
Renaissance and Esoteric Thought
The game draws on Renaissance-era hermeticism, neo-Platonism, and debates over ensouled matter. In that worldview, everything could be alive – and needed interpretation, not just measurement. This philosophical heritage informs the game’s Alive ↔ Dead metaphysical axis.
Designing The Veiled Age was a matter of re-reading history with a different lens.
Rather than treat “magic” as superstition, the game assumes its effects were real – but caused by misinterpreted technological relics or alien, psionic abilities. This reverses the common trope. Instead of “science masquerading as magic,” we get:
→ Relics mistaken for revelation.
→ Truths misfiled as blasphemy.
→ Tech mistaken for soul.
The result is a world where every belief system is partially correct, and every institution is partially blind.
We also took structural influence from the following OSR and narrative RPGs:
- The trauma and sanity systems of Call of Cthulhu
- The ideological stress mechanics of Burning Wheel
- The dreamlike, non-linear world assumptions of Numenera
- The religious-political tension of historical TTRPGs like Dark Ages: Inquisitor
But no single lineage dominates. The Veiled Age is a philosophy of setting design:
- Belief as system
- History as vector
- Revelation as fracture
A Jesuit character trained to see miracles as divine interventions watches a character trigger a divine-like effect with a forbidden relic. They must pass a [S]ubversion Save – or suffer the effect and a potential ideological crisis.
A scholar finds a Marian shrine that predates Christianity, embedded in local myths. Activating the shrine triggers visions no scripture accounts for.
A village elder recounts a truth known only through generation-old, oral transmission. A player must decide whether to internatlize it – or dismiss it as superstition.
At the table, encounters with the unknown or mystic shape how characters advance in and interact with the world, and how the world responds in turn.
“Empires suppress the miraculous not because it is false, but because it is unruly.”
— (Paraphrased from Ramón Mujica Pinilla)
The Veiled Age is built from real histories – bent just slightly. The beliefs, fears, and explanations of our ancestors weren’t foolish. They were frameworks for survival in a world that often spoke back.
Now, you walk that same world. And what it says to you will depend entirely on what you’re willing to believe.
Coming Soon: Design Diary #3: Character Creation