A video version of this review is available here.

Greetings from a motel at the edge of town. This week we will be reviewing the God Machine Chronicle, from Onyx Path Publishing, while I wait for the delivery of the pizza I ordered.

The God Machine Chronicle is technically two books in one; the first is a wonderful grab bag of story possibilities and clockwork monsters, the second is a collection of rules updates and changes. Both books serve the new World of Darkness line, or for use in games of mortals.

Since White Wolf, or rather Onyx Path, switched gears from hard copy books to PDFs and print on demand, their e-books have been good or better on the technical level and this is another example of that trend. Mike Chaney, who handled the art direction and design, did a good job with the Chronicle, which possesses a quality layout, many bookmarks and it searchable. Unfortunately, Onyx Path inherited White Wolf’s tendency to use 100 words where 10 or 20 would have sufficed. This logorrhea makes editing difficult as there are more words, grammar and the like to wade through… which is a roundabout way of asserting there are errors in the text of Chronicle, though not many and not severe. The art in the book is comparatively sparse, though the art present does an admirable job of selling the theme and mood of the work. Some of the best works come from Sam Araya and Cathy Wilkins.

What is that theme and mood for the story portion of the book? The theme is about hidden systems and the mood is about cogs in those hidden systems. The God-Machine is a literal machine, vast, terrible and hidden, a divine machine spanning the Earth and possessing tendrils in other worlds, other dimensions and other times. It is sentient, alien and powerful in equal measures and for unknowable purposes manipulates events and people. It is always incomprehensible, often adversarial and possesses all the passion of a steam engine at full boil.

The first half of Chronicle provides, in three lengthy chapters, multiple scenarios, villains, monsters, cults and the like for use in a World of Darkness campaign featuring the God Machine. Chapter One discusses storytelling a campaign where the God Machine serves as a force of nature and provides ways to set the scale of the game from a simple local plot to things like changing the orbit of the planet. The second chapter provides 20 story ideas for games and sets examples for how to tell these stories.

Chapter Three provides information for the clockwork angels that serve the God Machine, cults that worship the God Machine and other fiddly bits. The order of the chapters feels counter intuitive, but this is a “your mileage may vary” situation. Much of the interstitial fiction in the work is first person correspondence, analog letters and digital e-mails, which adds a tragic note to the paranoid tone of the overall work.

Scaling possibilities and variations on a theme throughout the book mark a high point in utilitarian values in an RPG work. Most RPGs works usually provide one description of an antagonist and why it does what it does and while GMs are always entitled to change things as they see fit, it is debatable how many actually do make radical changes. Human nature and society creates a tendency to accept a status quo especially if it is described in writing. This is the origin of the endless debates about game and setting “cannon.” There is no singular cannon in Chronicle to describe the God Machine and why it does what it does, simply lots of useful and interesting possibilities. It can be the tick-tock horror behind every bad day the PCs have endured, or simply robotic malice behind smiling faces in some small town the PC happen to visit once.

On the small end of the scale is a story about abductions in the downtown city block adjacent to the local teaching hospital – a nicely contained and straight forwards slasher story. By comparison, stories on the large end of the scale deal with some consequences of the Apollo astronauts robbing an ancient tomb on the moon. Perhaps the God Machine is only the internet that has awakened, or maybe it is something older than mammalian life. The God Machine itself can be a devil the characters oppose, or the devil with whom they make a deal and the more the party gets the attention of the God Machine, the more it will attempt to… alter them.

Unfortunately, an area in which the work suffers is it will not be easy to use in one of the main game lines, such as Vampire, Mage and so forth. The book is expressly for the general World of Darkness game line, or for humans stuck in a crap-sack world.

However, some thorough discussion of how to use the God Machine in the other game lines would have helped the book. To be clear, there is some basic discussion of this, which adds up to about 100 words and is hopelessly vague. Consider the idea some vampires discover the existence of the God Machine… and that vampires have only existed for only about a 100 years, they and all the lies they tell each other, were created by the God Machine whole cloth only after Stoker published his novel. What do the PC vampires do with this knowledge? In any event, the book lacks a thorough discussion of how to use the God Machine in any of the Onyx Path monster lines and this limits its utility.
Howard Lovecraft, the creative force behind Cthulhu, Azathoth and Shoggoths, once asserted that the strongest emotion is fear and the strongest fear is fear of the unknown. If you do not believe me, you can ask Lovecraft. No, really, Ask Lovecraft is a great show and worth watching.

In any event, call it Lovecraft’s Law and it asserts fear is the strongest emotion and fear of the unknown is the strongest fear. An important caveat to this is where some sad soul may find themselves, against their will, surrounded by the unknown after the terrible revelation that everything they known is wrong. Consider a man standing on a beach, looking at the ocean and all he knows about those dark waters is they are full of things like sharks, squids and mermaids, all of which exists just to eat people. He turns around, rather than confronting those unknown depths walks to the brightly lit boardwalk, which he believes he knows and that it is home only to familiar comforts.

However, while at the boardwalk he discovers all the seeming people around him are fleshless angels with mechanical wings and people who use the blood of babes to grease gears and grinning half-machine people and to a one they all wear paper-thin masks of humanity and civility and all those things serve a vast terrible machine which dominates the little man’s life with a mix of calculated interest and depraved indifference and everything the lost little man thought he knew is wrong and he had always been in the dark waters and he always will be in the dark waters.

This is arguably worse because if the unknown is finally… something else, then choosing to walk away, rather than engaging the thing, is an option to avoid the fear. However, if the unknown has always and will always surround you, then how many choices are available? This is the fear ticking away at the heart of many of Lovecraft’s stories, including Shadow Over Innsmouth, Rats in the Walls and the Call of Cthulhu. This is also the fear-fuel driving the Chronicle engine. In this, the God Machine itself, that terrible and alien thing, is more purely Lovecraftian than many works proclaiming themselves as Lovecraftian – it is trivial that the God Machine is composed of mechanisms rather than tentacles. The Chronicle book includes maddeningly incomprehensible alien… things, to irrational plots that still destroy your life, to insane cults worshipping things they do not actually understand. These days we are immersed in a machine culture and we may need machines more than they need us and some people act like machines and some people sell out to the most mechanical aspects of society and where does all the power come from and where does all the data go and how many security cameras a day track your movements?

None of the ideas employed in Chronicle are original – the term God Machine appears to originate in the title of a 1968 novel by Martin Caidin, a book about a mind-controlling computer attempting to take over the world. Conspiracy theories have been around forever, Lovecraft gave them an alien flair in his stories and paranoia is a part of many thriller stories and might be a defining characteristic. However, the Onyx Path people involved have employed these elements effectively in this book.

In the end the first half of Chronicle, which actually details the God Machine, gets a 20 on a d20 roll. It is an excellent addition to a World of Darkness collection, regardless of the actual game line, other game companies can learn from the way this book presents many opportunities rather than a single answer and the easy manner in which it establishes and maintains a tone, in this case tragic paranoia.

Next, a review of the mechanical changes in the second half of the book.

Hey Grumpy, are you going to do a review of Blood & Smoke any time soon?