Page 232 - Chronicles of Darkness

Time travel is, as any fan of science fiction knows, tricky Urban Wandering (p. 235), This Is Hell (p. 231), or Wake
to get right without creating all kinds of logistical problems. the Dead (p. 214). On a smaller scale, just being familiar with
Maybe the characters do destabilize things — that kind of the nuances of time travel might lead the characters to Do-
instability could lead into any number of Tales, including Over (p.199) or make them ideal to track The Key (p. 208).

THIS IS HELL

Let me offer you a choice. Free will, baby, that’s what this Blueprints
is all about. Open a door, let me through, I can hand you the
keys to Heaven or Hell, and you can decide which side wins In this chronicle, the God-Machine wants nothing less
all of reality. You just have to choose. than Heaven on Earth — its version of Heaven, anyway. It
Infrastructure wants a clean, cold, orderly place devoid of the nuisance of
free will and perfectly patterned and symmetrical. The world
should have a place for everything, and have everything in
Lines are being drawn in the sand all across creation. its place.
Monsters, occultists, spiritualists, and mediums see more The problem is, only free will can strip humanity of free
activity out of the once-silent heavens. The number of posses- will. For many of the same esoteric reasons that the God-
sions skyrockets and exorcists are being run ragged trying to Machine needs to build Infrastructure before it can easily
keep up. Some of the scholarly types have started collecting affect the world, humanity, or some representative thereof,
clippings and accounts of angel sightings. The religiously af- will have to accept the God-Machine’s version of Heaven in
filiated are ticking off signs of their version of the apocalypse order to renounce free will.
the way some people play drinking games. So the God-Machine has a plan: Run the Earth into the
And the characters are right in the middle of it, having ground. Hate and war and sexism and venereal disease and
dreams of war and conflict, and dreams of blood and sex child abuse and all the evil we pile on top of each other help
and sweet, joyful suffering. They’re having dreams of Heaven the God-Machine edge us closer and closer to giving in, giving
and Hell and someone’s whispering to them, begging them over, and breaking down.
to take sides. But the God-Machine isn’t the only game in town. In
The Truth: In this Tale, the God-Machine is trying to shift some tiny subsection of the supernatural world live what
the world into a heretofore-unknown form of Infrastructure. some people mistakenly call demons. Maybe they are de-
If it needs a title, call it “pure” Infrastructure. If the God- mons, by some definitions, but they think of themselves as
Machine succeeds, it won’t have restrictions on where and “Celebrants.” These entities do inhabit a space the likes of
when it can send its angels. which Dante and Virgil would describe as Hell. Their motiva-
Interchangeable Parts tions are chaos and creation for their own sakes. They revel
in pain as well as pleasure, unfettered by smaller concepts
like hate and mortality. They are the greatest fans of free will
Characters in this chronicle shouldn’t all be in the dark
about the supernatural. Having a little insight into the dark
of the night is ideal for most of the characters. Either they’re
occult researchers, professional exorcists, kin to a pack of
werewolves, or psychically attuned to secrets. If you have Demons?
access to any of the monster games for the Chronicles of Longtime readers and players of other Chronicles
Darkness (Vampire: The Requiem, Mage: The Awakening, of Darkness games might wonder if the
Geist: The Sin-Eaters and so on), you might consider running Celebrants bear any relation to the inhabitants of
this Tale for a group of supernatural characters. Pandemonium (in Mage: The Awakening) or
Or, This is Hell might be the perfect Tale to use to close the demons that inhabit the Lower Depths (and are
out a God-Machine chronicle. The characters are still mortal, described in Inferno).
but they have seen enough during their time chasing down The answer is: If you have those books and want
the God-Machine that they cannot be considered “normal” to draw those parallels, sure. If not, then the
anymore. Celebrants are exactly what we’re describing:
These are characters specially chosen for a destiny unlike otherworldly entities that resonate with freedom,
any other. Maybe it’s in their blood, in their genes, or just narcissism, and selfishness. For purposes of this
unknowable happenstance, but the characters will become story, their pedigree doesn’t matter much.
champions of humanity during the course of the chronicle.

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This Is Hell