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Shards of the Divine:
Building the
God-Machine
Chronicle
Telling a good story is a lot of work. It’s fun work, to be sure, but it still takes
time and dedication. This holds true whether you have taken on the role of
Storyteller and must present a new world for the players to explore, or whether
you are a player fleshing out the final details of a new character. This chapter aims
to make all that work easier, by providing suggestions and structure for creating
characters, stories, and settings for God-Machine chronicles.
Before we discuss the God-Machine and what sorts of stories your troupe can
tell with it, we need to discuss the concept of tiers.
The Tiers
No matter the medium, every story has a scope that provides boundaries and
context for that story. You wouldn’t expect a film set in a small town to suddenly
explode into a globe-hopping extravaganza. The concept of tiers provides this ele-
ment in Chronicles of Darkness games.
By now, Chronicles of Darkness players might be familiar with the idea of using
Into this wild-beast different tiers as a way to set expectations for the direction of a chronicle. For those
tangle these men had unfamiliar with them, tiers were introduced in Hunter: The Vigil, but the concept is
been born without their not unique to that game. Tiers are just another tool for building a chronicle. Setting
consent, they had taken a chronicle at a certain tier gives players an idea of what to expect. It’s also possible
part in it because they for a chronicle to begin at one tier and slide up or down to end up at a different
could not help it; that tier. The four tiers are local, regional, global and cosmic.
they were in jail was
no disgrace to them, Local
for the game had never
been fair, the dice were Games set in the local tier are narrow in scope, but not shallow in depth. These
loaded. sorts of games are generally set in a limited location, involve normal folks, and
have consequences that are more important to the individual than the masses.
—Upton Sinclair, As an example, the Wellington School (p. 205) educates children with behavioral
The Jungle difficulties. The reason for these troubled children is actually the absence of the
God-Machine’s influence. What might the God-Machine inflict upon these
children to resolve such a problem?
Ghost stories are good examples of local stories. Typically, a small group of
characters is trapped in a single location. Over the course of the story they slowly
discover the secrets behind the haunting, which may or may not include ideas
about how to stop the marauding specter. The backstory about how the ghost
came to be provides a glimpse into the greater reality of the universe, without
drawing the characters completely into that reality.
You’ve probably seen movies that could be described as belonging to the local
tier. Attack the Block is about what happens when aliens invade a British council
estate (i.e. housing project). The stakes involved could be described as global
(alien invasion), but the scale of the movie is local. The kids that fight off aliens
aren’t worried about what might happen if aliens take over the world. They’re
only concerned with what the aliens could do to them and their neighborhood.
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Shards of the Divine-Building the God Machine Chronicle
