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chuckroWorld of Darkness: The God Machine Chronicle
Part of the premise of the New World of Darkness was that it wouldn’t have a metaplot: They deliberately left out the “shared world” necessity (and the resulting conflicts) of the original WoD, along with the hordes of NPCs running various shows. A lot of the sourcebooks were good about giving options for what could be out there, but the world-spanning (and line-spanning) conspiracies were gone. This book is a shared-world setting book, putting out the premise that the World of Darkness (or, at least, one specific World of Darkness) is run by the machinations of a literal Deus Ex Machina; a reality-spanning machine that might well be God.
The game hooks and ideas are divided up by Tiers, which I’m pretty sure have appeared in other NWoD books I’ve read. Basically, you define the scope of the game (local, regional, etc.) and go from there. There’s also a useful bit about setting up your game as having a G, PG or R rating, which is brilliant advice that White Wolf could have used twenty years ago.
This is fundamentally a book of “How to run this chronicle”, which is a great thing. They give a giant list of Tales involving the God-Machine’s machinations, and multiple different chronicle sequences that use selections of them. This is followed by a similarly-large listing of mortal and supernatural characters who can act as supports or antagonists for each of these stories. And, of course, 100 pages of the book are the rules updates, which are available (and reviewed) separately.
The concept overall reminds me a lot of the TV show Nowhere Man or something similar: There is the general sense of an overall mystery or conspiracy, and the stories within that are standalone mysteries and general weirdness that touch on the greater story, but never really give you enough to solve it. I suspect the follow-ups to this are going to be ways to properly tie in the various supernatural lines into the God-Machine’s machinations.
And as I read through, I made a big list of ideas I want to use at some point. If you game with me, you might not want to read this.
Mage: The Awakening – Intruders: Encounters With the Abyss
In a lot of ways, this is a horror book, more in-line with core NWoD, but for the Mage setting. The influence of the Abyss reminds me a lot of the Wyrm in OWoD, but without the greater conspiracy aspects, of course.
The intro story is impressively horrifying. Also, it made me think of John Constantine from the twist at the end.
There’s an attempt to do with the abyssal entities what Lovecraft did back in the day (but has now become a trope): Make them seem genuinely alien. Where ghosts or spirits have definable and comprehensible motivations, abyssal entities don’t. Where most other creatures can be defined with form or substance, there’s an encouragement here to make abyssal entities more abstract: The manifestation of the entity itself can be a poem, a moment in time, a magical practice, or simply an idea.
The meat of the book is the selection of intrusions, each with a lead-in story and descriptions, ways to research it, ways to exile it, and a collection of story hooks based on it. While I’m not sure how well most of them fit into my current plans, there are a lot of decent concepts here.
World of Darkness: Inferno
Similar to World of Darkness: Immortals, this is a crossover book, not a core system book, and intended to be a NWoD update to a core line that hadn’t been updated: Demon: The Fallen. They give details of how to mesh this book with the stories, cosmology and systems of Vampire, Werewolf, and Mage. (Plus a few notes for Changelings and Prometheans.) All the bits you’d expect are here: Summoning demons, stats for them, details for making pacts (required sacrifices and received benefits), details of demonic possession (and playing possessed characters), and stats and story hooks for a few sample demons and possessed characters.
Mage: The Awakening – Astral Realms
The rules for magic in the Astral (which are significantly different than the OWoD rules for such journeys, which made Spirit or Mind critical and a bit overpowering) are best summed up as, “If it looks like a duck, magic works on it like a duck.” Given that every Mage character can meditate into a dreamworld, making every form of magic useful (even if Mind is slightly moreso) is great for game balance and making sure that all the players have fun.
The cosmology of Mage: The Awakening (and the greater NWoD) is a bit messy and confusing, but as best I can figure, it works like this:
• At the center is the material world, also called the “Fallen” world by mages. Reality as we know it is here.
• By entering “inner” realms through meditation and mind magic, you can travel “Up” into the astral dreamspaces. Above these is the Abyss, the vast nothingness that separates the fallen world from the supernal realm. Above the Abyss is the Supernal, which includes the five realms guarded by the watchtowers. (Theories persist that these correspond to the realms below them—Stygia is the Underworld, Pandemonium is the Inferno, Arcadia is Arcadia, the Primal Wilds are the Shadow, the Aether is the fan-theorized Empyrium.)
• All around the material world is Twilight, an invisible layer that directly corresponds to the material world and is inhabited by spirits and ghosts.
• “North” through Twilight and the Gauntlet is the Shadow, which reflects some of the material world and is inhabited by spirits. (Focus of the Werewolf line.)
• “South” through Twilight is the Underworld, which is inhabited by the dead who are no longer fettered. (Focus of the Geist line.)
• “East”, through the Hedge, is Arcadia, home of the Fae. (Focus of the Changeling line.)
• “West” is the Inferno, home of demons. (Described in WoD: Inferno; and apparently completely different from the planned Demon: The Descent line.)
• “Down” from the material world are the Lower Depths, which receive casual mention in several mage books as places lacking certain Arcana, but nobody’s really sure what they’re like or what lives down there.
Mage: The Awakening – Imperial Mysteries
A guide to playing archmages, who have grown beyond the street-level rules of the base system into the fourth “tier” of stories, the Cosmic tier. It heavily borrows terminology from Mage: The Ascension. Actual cosmology details? Rules for high-powered magic and systems for the movement of the gods? Yes, please. This is actual cosmology-level world building, which is what I had freakin’ wanted from the beginning. Now do another book that explains the same core setting in a completely different way, and let them fight.
The legends of each of the “groupings” of archmages are some great chronicle ideas; heck, so are most of the high-level spell details. Archmages can create Chantries, worlds in the astral plane that mimic the real world (or the Shadow, astral planes or underworld) and obey their own laws. They can create “proxies” of themselves with a fraction of their power, independent minds and untouchable souls. They can alter the abilities of existing supernaturals and create new ones. And, of course, they can edit timelines, and do so regularly (both deliberately, accidentally, and occasionally by just existing).
They give a bunch of rules systems specific to playing Archmasters and a how-to guide to Ascension—a process that is wide open to creating a chronicle of lesser characters who are (knowingly or not) causing it to happen. And on one hand, these rules are adding a lot of technical crunch to what’s supposed to be a very dramatic, story-based concept. On the other hand, if we didn’t want a rules framework for our games (and the story hooks and complications that can come with them), why bother playing anything but the most freeform of games?
The book itself, incidentally, is relatively short and has rather terrible cover art, but it covers what I wanted it to over in a fairly straightforward and interesting way, so whatever.
Here’s a fun theory: The old World of Darkness ended in an Ascension scenario: The world became fully aware of magick and its meaning, and mages became sorcerer-kings. The three worlds of the old Tellurian merged and the heavens and Earth became one. But their hubris to learn/define the true nature of everything shattered this merged world, creating a Supernal World of pure consensus magick, and a mundane Fallen World, with the Abyss between them. The Atlantis myth is just a corruption of the story of the original world and the mages who became Oracles and Exarchs. Perhaps the “old gods” cast out by the Oracles and Exarchs are the Neverborn and the Incarna of the old world.
Part of the premise of the New World of Darkness was that it wouldn’t have a metaplot: They deliberately left out the “shared world” necessity (and the resulting conflicts) of the original WoD, along with the hordes of NPCs running various shows. A lot of the sourcebooks were good about giving options for what could be out there, but the world-spanning (and line-spanning) conspiracies were gone. This book is a shared-world setting book, putting out the premise that the World of Darkness (or, at least, one specific World of Darkness) is run by the machinations of a literal Deus Ex Machina; a reality-spanning machine that might well be God.
The game hooks and ideas are divided up by Tiers, which I’m pretty sure have appeared in other NWoD books I’ve read. Basically, you define the scope of the game (local, regional, etc.) and go from there. There’s also a useful bit about setting up your game as having a G, PG or R rating, which is brilliant advice that White Wolf could have used twenty years ago.
This is fundamentally a book of “How to run this chronicle”, which is a great thing. They give a giant list of Tales involving the God-Machine’s machinations, and multiple different chronicle sequences that use selections of them. This is followed by a similarly-large listing of mortal and supernatural characters who can act as supports or antagonists for each of these stories. And, of course, 100 pages of the book are the rules updates, which are available (and reviewed) separately.
The concept overall reminds me a lot of the TV show Nowhere Man or something similar: There is the general sense of an overall mystery or conspiracy, and the stories within that are standalone mysteries and general weirdness that touch on the greater story, but never really give you enough to solve it. I suspect the follow-ups to this are going to be ways to properly tie in the various supernatural lines into the God-Machine’s machinations.
And as I read through, I made a big list of ideas I want to use at some point. If you game with me, you might not want to read this.
Mage: The Awakening – Intruders: Encounters With the Abyss
In a lot of ways, this is a horror book, more in-line with core NWoD, but for the Mage setting. The influence of the Abyss reminds me a lot of the Wyrm in OWoD, but without the greater conspiracy aspects, of course.
The intro story is impressively horrifying. Also, it made me think of John Constantine from the twist at the end.
There’s an attempt to do with the abyssal entities what Lovecraft did back in the day (but has now become a trope): Make them seem genuinely alien. Where ghosts or spirits have definable and comprehensible motivations, abyssal entities don’t. Where most other creatures can be defined with form or substance, there’s an encouragement here to make abyssal entities more abstract: The manifestation of the entity itself can be a poem, a moment in time, a magical practice, or simply an idea.
The meat of the book is the selection of intrusions, each with a lead-in story and descriptions, ways to research it, ways to exile it, and a collection of story hooks based on it. While I’m not sure how well most of them fit into my current plans, there are a lot of decent concepts here.
World of Darkness: Inferno
Similar to World of Darkness: Immortals, this is a crossover book, not a core system book, and intended to be a NWoD update to a core line that hadn’t been updated: Demon: The Fallen. They give details of how to mesh this book with the stories, cosmology and systems of Vampire, Werewolf, and Mage. (Plus a few notes for Changelings and Prometheans.) All the bits you’d expect are here: Summoning demons, stats for them, details for making pacts (required sacrifices and received benefits), details of demonic possession (and playing possessed characters), and stats and story hooks for a few sample demons and possessed characters.
Mage: The Awakening – Astral Realms
The rules for magic in the Astral (which are significantly different than the OWoD rules for such journeys, which made Spirit or Mind critical and a bit overpowering) are best summed up as, “If it looks like a duck, magic works on it like a duck.” Given that every Mage character can meditate into a dreamworld, making every form of magic useful (even if Mind is slightly moreso) is great for game balance and making sure that all the players have fun.
The cosmology of Mage: The Awakening (and the greater NWoD) is a bit messy and confusing, but as best I can figure, it works like this:
• At the center is the material world, also called the “Fallen” world by mages. Reality as we know it is here.
• By entering “inner” realms through meditation and mind magic, you can travel “Up” into the astral dreamspaces. Above these is the Abyss, the vast nothingness that separates the fallen world from the supernal realm. Above the Abyss is the Supernal, which includes the five realms guarded by the watchtowers. (Theories persist that these correspond to the realms below them—Stygia is the Underworld, Pandemonium is the Inferno, Arcadia is Arcadia, the Primal Wilds are the Shadow, the Aether is the fan-theorized Empyrium.)
• All around the material world is Twilight, an invisible layer that directly corresponds to the material world and is inhabited by spirits and ghosts.
• “North” through Twilight and the Gauntlet is the Shadow, which reflects some of the material world and is inhabited by spirits. (Focus of the Werewolf line.)
• “South” through Twilight is the Underworld, which is inhabited by the dead who are no longer fettered. (Focus of the Geist line.)
• “East”, through the Hedge, is Arcadia, home of the Fae. (Focus of the Changeling line.)
• “West” is the Inferno, home of demons. (Described in WoD: Inferno; and apparently completely different from the planned Demon: The Descent line.)
• “Down” from the material world are the Lower Depths, which receive casual mention in several mage books as places lacking certain Arcana, but nobody’s really sure what they’re like or what lives down there.
Mage: The Awakening – Imperial Mysteries
A guide to playing archmages, who have grown beyond the street-level rules of the base system into the fourth “tier” of stories, the Cosmic tier. It heavily borrows terminology from Mage: The Ascension. Actual cosmology details? Rules for high-powered magic and systems for the movement of the gods? Yes, please. This is actual cosmology-level world building, which is what I had freakin’ wanted from the beginning. Now do another book that explains the same core setting in a completely different way, and let them fight.
The legends of each of the “groupings” of archmages are some great chronicle ideas; heck, so are most of the high-level spell details. Archmages can create Chantries, worlds in the astral plane that mimic the real world (or the Shadow, astral planes or underworld) and obey their own laws. They can create “proxies” of themselves with a fraction of their power, independent minds and untouchable souls. They can alter the abilities of existing supernaturals and create new ones. And, of course, they can edit timelines, and do so regularly (both deliberately, accidentally, and occasionally by just existing).
They give a bunch of rules systems specific to playing Archmasters and a how-to guide to Ascension—a process that is wide open to creating a chronicle of lesser characters who are (knowingly or not) causing it to happen. And on one hand, these rules are adding a lot of technical crunch to what’s supposed to be a very dramatic, story-based concept. On the other hand, if we didn’t want a rules framework for our games (and the story hooks and complications that can come with them), why bother playing anything but the most freeform of games?
The book itself, incidentally, is relatively short and has rather terrible cover art, but it covers what I wanted it to over in a fairly straightforward and interesting way, so whatever.
Here’s a fun theory: The old World of Darkness ended in an Ascension scenario: The world became fully aware of magick and its meaning, and mages became sorcerer-kings. The three worlds of the old Tellurian merged and the heavens and Earth became one. But their hubris to learn/define the true nature of everything shattered this merged world, creating a Supernal World of pure consensus magick, and a mundane Fallen World, with the Abyss between them. The Atlantis myth is just a corruption of the story of the original world and the mages who became Oracles and Exarchs. Perhaps the “old gods” cast out by the Oracles and Exarchs are the Neverborn and the Incarna of the old world.
