Page 183 - Chronicles of Darkness

don’t see any conflict between their beliefs. They are certain Chronicles set in the regional tier frequently seem like
it’s no accident that angels appear so often in religious texts. they have the potential to get out of control. Even if the
After all, angels are the first servants of the God-Machine. survival of the characters isn’t the highest stake, using the
The leader of each Spoke puts aside his or her given name background threat of, “Oh shit, the whole world could end
and takes up a new name, complete with the surname Hub, up like this!” isn’t bad form.
to show sublimation of the self and devotion to the Great As an example, MIT creates a new generation of nanobots
Wheel. that get out of the laboratory and begin to reproduce. In their
No two Spokes use the same methodology to bring order search for energy, they latch onto anything that produces
from chaos, preferring to tailor their solutions to the problem electricity, bringing down the grid before shorting out. Why?
at hand and the capabilities of their Wrights. One group It’s all because the God-Machine requires an hour of total
might decide to combat an oil spill by spearheading a wider darkness during a solar eclipse. The background threat is what
community effort at clean up, while another might decide might happen if a couple of nanobots make it to new sources
to engineer the downfall (or outright destruction) of the of power and begin spreading across the planet.
companies responsible for the disaster. The Cult isn’t above The shadow government from the X-Files is a fantastic
using violence to accomplish its goals. Sometimes the best example of the hidden system. No one really had any idea who
solution to a problem is to simply to crush it. they were actually reporting to, even the people at the top. It
The Cult of the Wheel believes it can influence the isn’t hard to come up with ideas for similar organizations. In
God-Machine, and thus the Great Wheel, through the use this age of smartphones, nearly everyone has a camera and a
of mathematical sorcery. The equations drawn out in syn- digital video-recording device in their pocket. How is it that
thetic lubricants and surrounded by circles of iron filings no one has managed to capture pictures or video that blows
would baffle most mathematicians, but the Hub of each the roof off the supernatural world?
Spoke claims to draw inspiration from the God-Machine In the U.S., the group responsible for suppressing this
itself. Occasionally, it does seem as though these efforts have kind of proof is a militant hacker organization given power
tangible results. The Spoke in Detroit is certain it averted a and (they believe) authority by an angel. They developed
catastrophe by summoning an angel to the city. malware that scours the internet, deletes files from mo-
Regional bile devices and purges computers. People that keep hard
copies are hunted down using tracing algorithms and are
either “encouraged” to recant or simply vanish. The hack-
The regional tier raises the stakes by increasing the scope ers believe they are in charge, but what if someone else is
of consequences. Instead of a single problem with local con- actually pulling their strings? This is the regional hidden
sequences, the God-Machine includes entire cities, nations, system at work.
or even continents in its plans. The regional tier expands Actual gear-and-grease appearances of the God-Machine
the scope of a chronicle exponentially. Solutions lead to new in the regional tier are much more overt than at the local tier.
problems; whole battalions of the God-Machine’s agents can The U.S. contains thousands of ghost towns. These include
be involved, and the shadowy workings of the hidden world places that were big during a mining boom or company towns
can become more exposed. that were abandoned when the jobs went overseas. What if
At this tier, the theme and mood of a God-Machine these towns were really constructed to hide the mechanical
Chronicle become more apparent. Every organization has a guts of the God-Machine? Every basement is filled with
hidden master (or masters) and the feeling of being a cog in crackling conduits, clanging pipes, or whirring belts. When
a machine, of straining against an unknown and unknowable enough towns have been completed, the long dormant fault
system, should begin to weigh on the characters. lines in the Midwest will begin to move, dumping out the
The press jokes that a certain congressional candidate Great Lakes and creating a water shortage beyond the worst
is robotic, but the characters aren’t laughing. Lacking the dreams of environmentalists.
perfect instrument for its designs, the God-Machine made Regional chronicles can also take the form of the road
a man from clockwork parts and vat-grown flesh. A seat in trip. If symptoms of the God-Machine’s meddling crop up
Congress is just the first step toward a presidential bid. How all over the country, characters will need to travel in order to
does the troupe fight that without one of them becoming take the fight to the God-Machine. Road tripping can also act
the next Lee Harvey Oswald? as one method of trying to keep ahead of the God-Machine’s
If we look to the big screen for examples of the regional agents. Midnight Roads goes into the details of this sort of
tier, 28 Days Later comes to mind. The rage virus sweeps chronicle, but if your troupe doesn’t have access to the book,
across England, turning the majority of its citizens into vi- plenty of inspiration can be found in popular media (such
cious, zombie-like predators. Because England is an island, as the television show Supernatural).
the disease cannot make the jump across the Channel and
infect Europe as well. The movie is about people trying to Regional Organization: The Black Tide
survive the regional problem of a deadly disease. The virus
has the potential to shift up the scale to become a global Theories abound about the Bermuda Triangle. People
problem, but that isn’t what the movie is about. claim the disappearances that happen there are the results

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Shards of the Divine-Building the God Machine Chronicle