The small towns of New England have a problem — something is causing their machines to break down. Little villages like this can’t easily compensate when stoplights and cellphones lose functionality, but life goes on. When boat engines start bleeding and gears scream, though, it’ll be up to you to fight the ghosts in the machines.
Infrastructure
Along small coastal towns and riverside villages in the New England states, the God-Machine has begun an experi-ment. It’s haunting the machinery human beings use every day. Why? Is it part of a plan to test our dependence on it?
Maybe to see how weak we’d be in the face of a worldwide cataclysm? Whatever it is, it’s an experiment and for now it’s being performed on a small scale. All of these low population towns are near the coast. That may be a part of the plan, but it isn’t a direct explanation of anything. The water is part of a pattern but not a solution.
Don’t get caught up in the “why,” because the “what”
is the issue for your characters. With their machinery being overtaken by ghosts, it’ll be a long struggle before the
char-acters can even consider digging at the root of the problem.
Right now, a few people scattered through these towns are trying to take old folk remedies said to protect them from ghosts and apply them to the issue. The characters may get directly involved with the resistance, may spearhead it, or may try to avoid it while seeking other solutions.
The Truth: The Infrastructure at work here is Logistical, overseen by the angel called Black Nathaniel. Black Nathaniel takes a more active role than many of the God-Machine’s agents, calling up spirits of the dead and binding them to electronic and mechanical devices.
Interchangeable Parts
Characters who are able to travel a bit are ideal for this chronicle. While the characters won’t need to travel cross-country, they need to be able to cross state lines in order to hit all the locations where the machines are breaking down.
Ties to those small communities are also a plus, as they can be insular. Professional fisherman, characters with family ties through the region, or even a Highway Patrol or Coast Guard officer would have a reason to move around and yet find a place within various communities.
Of course, being outsiders trying to solve the problem may itself be an angle of approach when Storytelling this chronicle. Getting in and getting close to the people affected by the God-Machine’s experiment is difficult, but sometimes it’s the unknown quantity who can break through established patterns of interaction.
Blueprints
The God-Machine is running an experiment on these towns. As mentioned above, its reasons for the experiment — what hypothesis it wishes to test or plan it wishes to advance
— aren’t immediately important. One possibility is that it prefers have ghosts haunt physical, easily portable machines over them being anchored to people or places and wants to see if this approach makes hauntings more or less chaotic.
Another option is that the God-Machine just needs the unquiet dead of these towns out of the way to make room for something else (perhaps a region-wide Infrastructure). As Storyteller, don’t make this decision unless you have to — the characters probably won’t ever discover that truth anyway (unless you escalate the chronicle to the Global or Cosmic level, but by that time the characters should have enough of an understanding of the scale of the God-Machine that “we’ll never really understand” becomes a viable answer).
The God-Machine is churning up the souls of the dead from wherever they might rest and stuffing them into any-thing with a circuit board or moving parts. Many locals have their traditions and their superstitions, but this is different.
The traditions of old sailors and other folk superstitions just aren’t compatible with this technological terror. As a result, without outside agents, (like the characters) the locals won’t make the leaps of research and study necessary to resist. The machine ghosts of the God-Machine terrorize the locals until
Ghost Machine
it’s satisfied with the results — but that might leave the North East dotted with tiny ghost towns too dangerous to reclaim.
Linchpins
The spirits of the dead might reside in computers, watches, millstones and even overhead lighting. All of the things we understand as complex machines are, in essence, an extension of the massive cosmic entity that is the God-Machine. A fisherman might turn on his television to find the signal dead and the faces of those he left behind in the war screaming profanity at him. A husband who let his wife die rather than keep her on a ventilator may face her final revenge when he cleans out the garbage disposal one night.
Reapers and Sowers carry the ghosts under the direction of Black Nathaniel (Chapter Three, p. 132). These angels are hard to catch; the average person never sees the Reapers and Sowers, only the ghosts they’ve bound. They work in pairs, of course: the Reaper is a tall, gaunt, mechanical man that smells like rust and motor oil carrying an old fashioned lan-tern that glows an ugly green. That’s where he keeps the souls he’s reaped from elsewhere. The Sower is a squat, womanish horror made of moist leather patches from her duties sewing souls into the workings of the God-Machine.
Methods
Academics: Many of the graves of a small local graveyard have been dug up. Why? That’s going to be hard to discern.
First, you’re going to have to figure out who was dug up to figure out why. Roll Intelligence + Academics to sort through old church records and figure out whose remains have been disturbed.
Crafts: It’s possible that you can spirit-proof some machines, but the process is delicate and complicated. It will take a skilled hand. Roll Dexterity + Crafts to experiment with ghost-proofing your computer without destroying its delicate components.
Drive: The boat has a mind of its own and it’s taking you out to sea. That might not be an insurmountable problem, but those clouds look threatening. Roll Strength + Drive to wrestle the controls away from the ghost controlling the boat long enough to aim the craft back toward land.
Stealth: Black Nathaniel is out hunting for ghosts — if he can’t find any, he’ll make some. Roll Dexterity + Stealth to sneak under the watchful eye of a murderous angel.
Animal Ken: All of the cats in town — actually, in all of the towns you’ve visited — are acting strange. Roll Wits + Animal Ken to figure out what the common cause is.
Persuasion: If New England loves anything more than a ghost story, it’s a town hall meeting. The crowd is getting restless and panicky. Roll Presence + Persuasion to calm the locals into telling you their story before panic sets in.
Merit: Encyclopedic Knowledge (Computer) (p 162):
With a focus on technology and the Computer Skill, your character may be vital in both discovering the nature of the hauntings as well as helping take back the technology stolen in the God-Machine’s experiment.
Merit: Barfly (p 166): You might not need an invitation to get into a dockworkers’ pub, but you’ll be treated to the coldest of receptions unless you can get the locals to warm to you.
Escalation
It’s possible that if the characters organize well enough, they might prove the experiment is more trouble than it’s worth, causing the God-Machine to focus its attentions to other matters. But what if a scattered handful of techno-exorcists aren’t actually enough to deter the God-Machine? What if the God-Machine’s experiment is successful and it decides to spread it? Or what if this experiment is the first stage in launch-ing a more destructive (The Scarlet Plague, p. 97) or invasive (A Glimpse of Mesmerizing Complexity, p.89) initiative?
Imagine a world where people must fight to reclaim technology from wrathful, tortured ghosts while trying to hide from monstrous machine-men wielding the ghost-infested tech. Should the story go Cosmic, a full-on end-of-the-world scenario could position the last survivors of a nuclear ho-locaust against the God-Machine’s agents and its twisted ghost-tech. The characters struggle to survive, rebuild, and steal back fire from Prometheus, after a fashion, and ward their tools against further possession. Left unchecked, this scenario could go by way of Missing Persons (p. 82) straight into This Is Hell (p. 103).
The Key
Somewhere out there is the Key to the God-Machine.
Last Thursday he killed three people in three different cities at the same moment. How do you catch a man with no way to track him or prove his guilt? How do you stop a Key that can open a part of God?
Infrastructure
Three different police precincts are baffled. Local papers in three cities are pointing fingers and someone on a local network affiliate is suggesting that the police are covering up an internal problem. How else can you explain three murders, performed with an identical ritual, with blood and other evidence indicating one single suspect in three different cities at the exact same time?
Most of the departments, being territorial and embar-rassed, want to push this whole thing aside as quickly as possible. They want to treat it as three different crimes, find their own bad guys and wrap up the strangeness as quickly as possible. Because the media has heard so much and are so interested in this impossible crime, however, no one is going to be able to sweep it under the rug too easily.
The killer has left notes, mocking messages detailing how he’ll kill again and when, but not where. As he says, “space is only an issue for you. I can be anywhere I want, and I will be. How 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
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to the newspapers next. He plans to be, as he puts it, “the greatest cog the machine has ever known, the greatest killer the world has ever seen.”
The Truth: The Key is Wesley Cote (p. 125), a man who came unstuck from time just after his wife’s death. As a teenager, Cote received a visit from his future self (once he’d started killing) and was informed of his destiny. He honed his ability to sidestep time and space and used it to kill, but only ever in the future from the perspective of his widowed self.
Wesley has his own theories about what he is and why he does what he does, but the truth is that he is mobile Elimination Infrastructure. Occasionally an angel called Grief delivers a message to him and he kills that person on the say-so of the God-Machine. The rest of the time, he just kills at whim.
Interchangeable Parts
The characters might be a publicity stunt. The three departments decide to create a well-publicized task force consisting of detectives from all three precincts working together and sharing resources. Throw in an overseeing FBI agent in case someone decides to take the case federal, and maybe an Internal Affairs mole (this looks a lot like cops are behind the whole mess), and you have the setup for a tense procedural drama.
Or, to take it in a different direction, the chronicle could follow some news hounds as they look into the matter as civilians. Maybe the cops are tied up in the God-Machine on a less metaphoric level, and the only way to stop the Key
The Key and his killings is for these reporters to investigate themselves.
Maybe the Key has picked them as his chroniclers and a part of his delusion, so they have to find and stop him before he gets to them.
A third possibility is that the characters have already run across the God-Machine and the Key is targeting them directly. This works best if one player is willing to sacrifice her character to start things off.
In any case, let the players choose which three cities are involved. This Tale is Regional in scope, meaning that, as written, the cities should be in the same general part of the world, but if you want to take it Global and have the cities all be on different continents, that’s just as effective.
Blueprints
He calls himself the Key because he believes he has un-locked part of God and has full access to that aspect. He can hear the workings of the God-Machine. Everywhere he goes, he hears the ratcheting pulse of the God-Machine’s plans and whirring beats of its machinations. The Key believes that he understands those plans. It’s all clear to him. If he weren’t a perfect part of a perfect system, how could he possibly do what he does?
Granted, he doesn’t exactly understand what it is he does or how he can shift in time and space the way he does.
It doesn’t matter. What matters is that everyone knows he’s doing it. He knows he’ll be caught, eventually. He doesn’t plan to make it easy, but he does plan for it, and his capture
should be one for all of history to remember. He will keep upping the ante, keep pushing the boundaries of what he’s capable of doing until he’s caught or dead. Because he thinks the God-Machine wants it that way.
Cote is right, of course; the God-Machine does want it this way. The God-Machine created the Key using a kind of closed loop — Grief delivered the message to Cote (age 30), which drove him to the edge of sanity, which pushed him to kill, which enabled Grief to teach him to shift in time, which allowed Cote to go back in time and train Cote (age 16) to stalk and kill, which made him unstable and thus able to hear Grief’s message at age 30… The sad tale of Wesley Cote is truly a chicken-and-egg scenario, and it’s enough to cause a breaking point (see p. 155) to any character that figures it out.
For its part, the God-Machine doesn’t care much about Cote particularly. If the characters kill him, it can create another Key for Elimination Infrastructure purposes. Alter-natively, it can use a version of Cote from a different time period (if you think that wouldn’t annoy the players).
Linchpins
The God-Machine is largely a motivation and a means in this chronicle rather than a potential antagonist. The horror here, supernatural events aside, is really what one man can do, how he can hold three cities hostage just by reveling in his actions and acting as though the media should be celebrating them.
Signs of the God-Machine might be peppered through-out the stories as a method of setting the mood: they are the trappings that the Key is obsessed with, after all. He likes metal parts and gears, so the deaths may occur near large industrial machines or use them as part of the crime. Remind the players that blood smells like copper and rust. Maybe the characters find three doodles on the walls of the crime scenes, all draw with the same silver marker, but when the doodles are held up next to each other they make the shape of a key.
Methods
Medicine: The coroner does amazing work and her reports are always detailed and complete. Roll Intelligence + Medicine to suss out the details of her report and maybe pick up some vital clues for your investigation.
Politics: The old files you found have been heavily re-dacted, possibly on a federal level. You refuse to believe it’s a dead end, though. Roll Intelligence + Politics to uncover a place where un-redacted files might be held, and more importantly, how to access them.
Firearms: It was bad luck that the only witness to the latest crime is a bit of a recluse and a gun nut whose mental state was made quite fragile by what he saw that night. He sees you as an outsider, maybe even someone tied to the Key. Roll Manipulation + Firearms to bring up enough gun lore from memory to gain his trust and get past his damage.
Larceny: The cabinets in the Chief of Detective’s office are locked. You suspect that part of the reason for all those locks has something to do with the Key
Larceny to plan the best time to get into those cabinets and have a look.
Expression: A group of reporters has you cornered. Their questions are real stingers. They want answers and details you aren’t able to give them. If you blow them off, though, it’ll look even worse. Roll Presence + Expression to tell them things they already know in a new way and convince them they’ve gotten what they were after.
Empathy: Cote’s brother-in-law was there the night his sister died and remembers Cote screaming about a “blue room.” To get him to relive that night, he’ll have to believe you have his family’s best interests at heart. Roll Manipula-tion + Empathy to get him to talk (alternately, this might be resolved with the Social Maneuvering rules on p. 188).
Merit: Mind of a Madman (p 173): You’re the investigator everyone else worries about, the one with a dark cloud over your shoulder and an unpleasant knack for getting into the heads of psychopaths. You can start to understand what makes this guy tick, which means you may understand how to stop him.
Merit: Mentor (p 167): You had a professor in college who’s opened a lot of doors for you since then, but what interests you now is her work in “quantum immortality.” Of course, her knowledge and your involvement puts her in the Key’s sights — and maybe even on the God-Machine’s list for elimination. Keep her alive while she helps you sort out what is impossible and what is merely improbable.
Escalation
The Key is dead or in custody. Now what? Either from him or his rambling writings, the characters learn more about this “God-Machine” he was obsessed with. He talks about global conspiracies. He talks about other “parts like him”
operating, killing, and serving the God-Machine all over the country, maybe all over the world. One of the parts is appar-ently planning to take down a plane in the next month. How do the characters follow up? This might lead into Do-Over (p. 71) if the characters try to match travel with
operating, killing, and serving the God-Machine all over the country, maybe all over the world. One of the parts is appar-ently planning to take down a plane in the next month. How do the characters follow up? This might lead into Do-Over (p. 71) if the characters try to match travel with