Page 193 - Chronicles of Darkness

the physical and temporal anomalies in whatever city you’d Sequence
like to use for the Tale. You can use “mysterious person from
the future tells them what they do next” again, but that plot A Glimpse of Mesmerizing Complexity (p. 216) 
device only works as long as they players enjoy it. If you use Ghost Machine (p. 207)  Wake the Dead (p. 214)
it clumsily or overdo it, you’ll get eyerolling at best and “no,  Sister City (p. 201)  Urban Wandering (p. 235)
fuck this guy, let’s go to Paris” at worst. If the players do leave
the chronicle track, choose another Tale and nudge the story Progression
back toward The Moon Window when possible. In any event,
The Moon Window works more or less as written. The troupe needs to establish a reason for the group to be
The Moon Window  A Journey Into Time traveling together, and depending on the size of the group,
that might be the hardest part. A Glimpse of Mesmerizing
Searching the offices of NalCon should give the characters Complexity begins with an uptick in traffic accidents, so the
ample opportunity to learn about Dr. Henry Girard and his initial group of characters might be investigating this phe-
work. You can have the characters see the online video, asking nomenon, traveling between accident sites but not nomadic
them to travel back into time, but at this point in the track by nature. Once they have the chance to follow the strange
it might be better if they find the video on a NalCon server devices into the Twilight factory and confront the gear work-
as part of The Moon Window, instead. You can still reveal, ers, they have learned beyond a doubt that the supernatural
later, that Girard left it there for them to find because he knew is real, it’s out there on the roads, and it’s very strange.
they’d be there, of course (the nice thing about time travel is
that it doesn’t matter when the time machine works, so long A Glimpse of Mesmerizing Complexity 
as it works). The characters can go back in time, stop Girard, Ghost Machine
and then learn that they, in the future, hatched this plan with This transition might be the hard sell. The characters now
Girard, beginning with their involvement in disrupting the need not just a reason to travel, but a reason to travel together,
tracks in Squares of the City. investigating strange stories of ghosts possessing machines. If
Wanderers they started off the first Tale investigating the paranormal,
this might be just another assignment (as an aside: the crew
of a reality show dedicated to hunting down the supernatural
The road-trip chronicle is a lot of fun with the right group.
Traveling across the world, meeting new, strange beings, might be superb cover for a group of monster hunters or
God-Machine cultists). In any case, one of the characters
learning about the supernatural, and otherwise experiencing might have a personal connection to one of the hauntings in
the diversity the setting has to offer can be very rewarding New England and get the other characters to come with her.
for a troupe. This track sends the characters on a trip, not
just across the U.S., but into a different version of the U.S. Ghost Machine  Wake the Dead
The hook for Wake the Dead involves one of the
Themes characters killing someone. You can run the Tale with the
Travel isn’t safe. The spaces between the cities are isolated, wrongfully-dead person just being someone they know, but
unfamiliar, and dangerous (the sourcebook Midnight Roads) it loses a lot of the impact. If you can manage to nudge the
examines this in detail, and the opening fiction, “Road characters toward killing someone, it might be possible to
Gospel,” has some very God-Machine-like elements to it). bring in a new character if one of the existing ones meets
In a road-trip chronicle, the players should always feel like her Fate. Or, you might present the situation to a player
outsiders. They are always in unfamiliar territory, looking in that you think would enjoy the roleplaying challenge — he’s
on things they aren’t supposed to see. With regards to the killed someone that he shouldn’t have, has managed to
God-Machine, that means the strange, barely hidden plots cover up the death, and now the dead aren’t staying dead.
that it keeps hidden via geography. The characters get to be If possible, the ideal situation for the lead-in to Wake the
explorers, visiting new places and overturning new rocks Dead would be for the death to happen during the first story
with every Tale. (maybe the character gets mesmerized by the blip and runs
The trick is to make every new location feel different. someone down), but for the full impact not to be realized
Unless you’ve done a great deal of travel, capturing the feel until Wake the Dead.
of a new place quickly can be difficult. One way around that Wake the Dead  Sister City
is to use the players’ experiences. Set the stories in places they
know about, and ask for familiar landmarks or restaurants. Between the end of Wake the Dead and the beginning of
Do some reading online, not just about the history of the Sister City, you need to get the characters to Seattle, as Sister
place, but its demographics, economic status, and cultural City is one of the few Tales with a specific location. Fortunately,
identity. You don’t need a lot of depth or breadth here, just Seattle has a lot to offer, and Wake the Dead offers a nice
enough details to make the place feel real. method for crossing the country from Ghost Machine’s New
England. Sister City is less travel-focused, but the characters
are now crossing between two versions of the same city. If

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Shards of the Divine-Building the God Machine Chronicle