Page 209 - Chronicles of Darkness

Methods may be vital in both discovering the nature of the hauntings
as well as helping to take back the technology stolen in the
Academics: Many of the graves of a small local graveyard God-Machine’s experiment.
have been dug up. Why? That’s going to be hard to discern. Barfly (p. 50): You might not need an invitation to get
First, you’re going to have to figure out who was dug up in into a dockworkers’ pub, but you’ll be treated to the coldest
order to figure out why. Roll Intelligence + Academics to sort of receptions unless you can get the locals to warm to you.
through old church records and figure out whose remains
have been disturbed. Escalation
Crafts: It’s possible that you can spiritproof some ma-
chines, but the process is delicate and complicated. It will It’s possible that if the characters organize well enough,
take a skilled hand. Roll Dexterity + Crafts to experiment they might prove the experiment is more trouble than it’s
with ghostproofing your computer without destroying its worth, causing the God-Machine to focus its attentions to
delicate components. other matters. But what if a scattered handful of techno-
Drive: The boat has a mind of its own, and it’s taking you exorcists aren’t actually enough to deter the God-Machine?
out to sea. That might not be an insurmountable problem, What if the God-Machine’s experiment is successful, and it
but those clouds look threatening. Roll Strength + Drive to decides to spread it? Or what if this experiment is the first
wrestle the controls away from the ghost controlling the boat stage in launching a more destructive (The Scarlet Plague,
enough to aim the craft back toward land. p. 225) or invasive (A Glimpse of Mesmerizing Complexity,
Stealth: Black Nathaniel is out hunting for ghosts, and if p. 216) initiative?
he can’t find any, he’ll make some. Roll Dexterity + Stealth Imagine a world where people must fight to reclaim tech-
to sneak under the watchful eye of a murderous angel. nology from wrathful, tortured ghosts while trying to hide
Animal Ken: All of the cats in town — actually, in all of from monstrous machine men wielding the ghost-infested
the towns you’ve visited — are acting strange. Roll Wits + tech. Should the story go cosmic, a full-on end-of-the-world
Animal Ken to figure out what the common cause is. scenario could position the last survivors of a nuclear ho-
Persuasion: If New England loves anything more than locaust against the God-Machine’s agents and its twisted
a ghost story, it’s a town hall meeting. The crowd is getting ghost tech. The characters struggle to survive, rebuild, and
restless and panicky. Roll Presence + Persuasion to calm the steal back fire from Prometheus, after a fashion, and ward
locals into telling you their story before panic sets in. their tools against further possession. Left unchecked, this
Encyclopedic Knowledge (Computer) (p. 44): With a scenario could go, by way of Missing Persons (p.210), straight
focus on technology and the Computer Skill, your character into This Is Hell (p. 231).

THE KEY

Somewhere out there is the Key to the God-Machine. in this impossible crime, no one is going to be able to sweep
Last Thursday he killed three people in three different cities it under the rug too easily.
at the same moment. How do you catch a man with no way The killer has left notes, mocking messages detailing how
to track him or prove his guilt? How do you stop a Key that he’ll kill again and when, but not where. As he says, “space is only
can open a part of God? an issue for you. I can be anywhere I want, and I will be. How
Infrastructure many of you have wives at home? Can you be in two places at
once, like I can?” He also says he’ll be writing to the newspapers
next. He plans to be, as he puts it, “the greatest cog the machine
Three different police precincts are baffled. Local papers has ever known, the greatest killer the world has ever seen.”
in three cities are pointing fingers and someone on a local The Truth: The Key is Wesley Cote (p. 250), a man who
network affiliate is suggesting that the police are covering came unstuck from time just after his wife’s death. As a teenager,
up an internal problem. How else can you explain three Cote received a visit from his future self (once he’d started kill-
murders, performed with an identical ritual, with blood and ing) and was informed of his destiny. He honed his ability to
other evidence indicating one single suspect in three different sidestep time and space, and used it to kill, but only ever in the
cities at the exact same time? future, from the perspective of his widowed self. Wesley has his
Most of the departments, being territorial and embar- own theories about what he is and why he does what he does,
rassed, want to push this whole thing aside as quickly as but the truth is that he is mobile elimination Infrastructure.
possible. They want to treat it as three different crimes, find Occasionally an angel called Grief delivers a message to him,
their own bad guys and wrap up the strangeness. However, and he kills a person on the say-so of the God-Machine. The
because the media has heard so much, and are so interested rest of the time, he just kills at whim.

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Tales of the God machine