Page 234 - Chronicles of Darkness

WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR

All war is hell, and when you’re serving in an active and maybe a Peace Corps relief worker all caught up in the
combat zone, time stretches and contorts to make your stay wheels of the God-Machine.
in Hell long and tortuous. Only, that all isn’t supposed to be
literal. Massive shelling in this ancient desert has uncovered Blueprints
something that man wasn’t meant to see, and since then,
you’ve seen the true meaning of war. The God-Machine has passed no moral judgment on the
characters, no matter what they might surmise by their situ-
Infrastructure ation. Rather, mystical pathways connect between places of
great violence and bloodshed. War, to the God-Machine, is
Your chaplain thinks everyone died when that shell hit a place, and the flag moves from parts of that place to others
and uncovered an artifact, the Flag of Elam. That’s how he without the normal constraints of space and time.
explains what’s going on. Well, when he can stop crying long The characters, of course, may never fully understand that
enough to speak. He isn’t taking it well. But you’re elite, you detail. What they do know is that they are moving, through
were trained to endure all sorts of mental anguish, and maybe the artifact, from one war to another. They don’t need to
that’s why you and your team can observe all of this without move in any chronology or with certain lessons or stories
going completely Section 8. in mind. Past, present, and even potential future wars are
One minute you’re fighting insurgents in what was once fair game. The Flag is simply doing what it does, and the
the cradle of civilization. Then a bomb went off, probably characters are caught in the tailwind.
fired off by your side accidentally. When the sand and debris If there is a way out, it isn’t death. Characters that die in
settled, everyone was looking at an ancient, tattered flag. one war find themselves alive again the next time the char-
It’s got no words on it, and its markings have faded over the acters move to a new war. They remember their deaths in
centuries. It’s just this big, terrible thing and over it hovers excruciating detail. Each time a character dies in war, though,
what you can only describe as the angel of death. It looks he forgets some part of his original life and takes on false
different for each of you, but you know what it is. You can memories from the war in which he died. A Storyteller may
feel in your bones what it means. reflect this by removing one Skill Specialty from a character
The next second, you’re wearing Roman armor and sheet and replacing it with something appropriate to the
weaponry, and are in what’s probably Germany or Ireland. war in question. So a modern soldier might lose his Sniper
You’re covered in blood, and you and the other soldiers are all Firearms Specialty, and have it replaced with a Weaponry
looking at this artifact when your praetor demands you fight Specialty in Swords to reflect his new memory as a centurion.
on. Keep killing the barbarians! That’s what you’re here for. Dying is also a breaking point (p. 73), no matter how
After the battle, you find the rest of your team. They’re often it happens.
confused, maybe scared, but are accepting what they see.
The angel, or the flag, has moved you back in time to this Linchpins
ancient war campaign to fight and fight. You don’t know if
you’re ever getting out or getting home, but you kind of felt They characters were never meant to look at the Flag of
that way while fighting the insurgents anyway. Elam directly, any more than they were ever meant to see the
The Truth: The God-Machine didn’t do this to the char- angel Triage. The characters were simply in the wrong place
acters deliberately. The flag that the soldiers uncovered is a at the wrong time.
Linchpin, a kind of placeholder that the God-Machine uses Triage appears after the characters have shifted in time
to mark active combat sites all throughout history. Usually once. The angel isn’t here to save them, though, or even to
no one notices it, but the characters uncovered it, and since correct the problem. It’s here to assess whether it’s worth
they aren’t able to control it they’re sliding through time, stop- the God-Machine’s time to reverse what happened (return-
ping at various battles. This isn’t part of any Infrastructure ing the characters to the moment that they discovered the
necessarily, which is why the God-Machine hasn’t stopped flag), or just let the characters cycle through time until they
it. It’s just a glitch, albeit a potentially messy one. return to the point naturally. Of course, since they’re shift-
ing randomly, they have no guarantee that they’ll ever return
Interchangeable Parts to their own time (but spaced over an infinite number of
shifts, it’s likely).
Characters might be members of the military, of course, Triage does not travel alone. The creatures in service to
an elite team of Navy SEALs or Army Rangers, for example. the angel appear as men, though their true forms are man-
They might just be some foot soldiers, a translator, an embed- sized snakes with the heads of lions that have milky, blind
ded reporter, a private contractor with too much free time, eyes. These Blind Serpents hide among the events of war and

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What Is It Good For