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 and my pizza is still not here

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. This review covers the second half of the work, or the update to the Onyx Path game engine. If you only interested in the rule updates then you are in luck because the Onyx Path people has provided them as a separate and free PDF available at Drive Thru RPG. Although a part of the larger God Machine Chronicle book and including the same border art, the mechanical changes are not dependent on the story elements of the larger work so a gamer does not have to pay for a larger book to make use of the rule changes.

As a rules supplement it is reminiscing of the old Dungeons and Dragons book Unearthed Arcana, which provided a comprehensive collection of rules for the D&D system. However, that book provided additional and optional rules, to round out the game system with rules for madness, reputation and more. By comparison, the rules changes in Chronicle revise the basic Storytelling game engine employed by Onyx Path. Many of these changes track with home rules used in many individual games in the World of Darkness, or at least games using the storyteller engine – which is a good sign from the Onyx Path people, namely that they are listening to the fans. This has earned the Onyx Path people a “kudos” for running a responsive company. Oh sure company boss man Rich Thomas might actually be Randall Flagg in disguise, but even so the company still produces good content.

Now on to the particulars. As with the first half of the book, which is about the actual God Machine and how its fucks up your shit with clockwork precision, the section on rules changes is a solid exercise in how to do a PDF properly. To reiterate, Mike Chaney, who handled the art direction and design, did a good job with the Chronicle, which possesses quality layout, many bookmarks, an index and it searchable. The Onyx Path tendency to use 100 words where 10 or 20 would have sufficed is less evidence here than in the first half of the book, which also reduces the number of minor typos that appears in the second half of the book. Again, the art in the book is comparatively sparse, though the art present does an admirable job of selling the work.

Across the board the mechanics of the storyteller system have been revised, some a little, some a lot. For those who do not know, this is the latest incarnation of the game mechanic system Mark Rein-Hagan and friends first developed in the early 1990s. It is a dice pool system, where the participants roll a number of 10-sided dice to attempt to accomplish a task. How many dice they roll depends on the task. Usually a player adds a characters score in a relevant ability to relevant skill and rolls that many 10-siders against a difficult of 10. If a PC is attempting to shoot someone, the player rolls the characters score in dexterity plus the characters score in firearms. The more dice which hit 7 or above, the better. Other relevant scores include things like Willpower, courage and humanity or the characters relative morality score. In this system player increase ranks in skills as they go, rather than leveling the entire character

The changes to game mechanics in Chronicles more or less start with experience. For one, it is cheaper to buy points during character creation. For another, earning experience is in many ways linked to the new morality system. These revised rules link experience points to aspirations, among other things discussed in a moment, possessed by a character and aspirations are essentially a mix of goals and objectives.

Ideally, they should be things that a PC may plausibly attain – so a player might reasonably set an aspiration for the character as getting a new and awesome set of wheels, but taking over the tri-state area is just silly. Anyway, all the aspirations are determined in a conversation between the player and the game master and should receive frequent adjustments as the game proceeds. Achieving an aspiration is a “beat” and it requires fives “beats” to earn an experience point. Beats also include story elements deliberately generated by the players, preferably using various character traits such as aspirations, conditions and integrity. White Wolf and Onyx Path never employed the D&D mechanic of equating killing everything and everyone in sight with getting experience and power – and thus making mass murder a good thing for the character. However, White Wolf and Onyx Path did essentially make experience a vague order to go out and do stuff. The revised system is considerably more specific in terms of what does and does not earn experience and it is nicely wedded to making player characters specific and hopefully dynamic in the pursuit of experience points.

Chronicle revises the Storytelling system’s Morality mechanic, which has long been a hallmark of the setting and the system. Back in the day, when still called humanity, it served as a measure of how vampire characters were deteriorating into monsters. Since then the mechanic has gotten someone handicapped and shows it age. Now called Integrity, much like the aspirations it does a good job of employing a rules mechanic to coerce players into using specific terminology to make their character more distinct and hopefully dynamic. Virtues and vices should not be physical descriptions of a character, but moral and possibly spiritual descriptors. Examples include righteous, courageous and patience as virtues with pessimistic, hateful and deceitful as vices. Integrity also includes breaking points, where a character is confronted by something that will test them in some manner. The PC may be tempted to a moral compromise or encounter psychological shock, but the nature of what qualifies as a breaking point varies from character to character. The book provides a decent mechanic and advises players and storytellers discuss the breaking points for the characters.

The work also includes rules for soul loss and the terrible things that happen to people who have lost their souls, such as a decay of integrity, problems in regaining willpower, being a thrall or finding oneself has transformed into an editor at DC Comics. The loss of a soul is a plot point in some of the God Machine’s machinations, but other things can cause the loss of a character’s soul and there are story possibilities in efforts to get a soul back.

Merits are reworked top to bottom and the list presented includes many fighting styles. Flaws appear to have been reworked as conditions and tilts, or handicaps a character possesses until resolved in some dramatically appropriate manner. Social combat – and the storytelling games have been and remain about social conflict before martial conflict – is now termed social maneuvering. The rules for PCs to persuade and coerce NPC now are more rules specific in terms of the important of PC stats and so are arguably should be clearer and less susceptible to accidental misinterpretation. Onyx Path revised martial combat, though not as deeply are other parts, such as the mortality system or merits and flaws. For one thing, participants must declare their intent before entering combat and then they roll to see if they are successful. Weapons do automatic damage and thus make combat lethal more quickly than it had been before.

Chronicle provides an extensive section on rules for ephemeral beings such as ghosts, spirits and the angels serving the God Machine. Arguably the changes to the rules for ghosts makes them closer to the Wraiths of the old game line, even if the rest of this section is largely in service to the God Machine. Following the ephemeral section is a list and discussion of equipment and services, a list of magic items, more or less, termed bygones.

Most of these rule changes appear solid enough, with the better changes including the new experience point system and the new system of flaws. The weaker changes are the changes to social conflict, which look good on paper but looking good on paper is not the same thing as actually being good.

In the end the rules modifications in god Machine Chronicle get a 20 on a d20 roll. They are over all solid and for the most part feeling as though they resulted from the Onyx Path people carefully listening to the fans and how the fans handled things in their home games. Further, the system update is both free and optional – it takes only a few moments to download the PDF but even if you choose not to do so, you may still run your games.