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Dawgstar
Jul 15, 2017

Rand Brittain posted:

Don't forget the bit about how Obama's election caused the roads to Arcadia to open again.

Oh, I suppose you can think of anything MORE hopeful? :colbert:

Jokes aside I kind of wish we'd gotten like an Arcadia book but it honestly might be better left to the, if you'll forgive me, imagination.

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Ferrinus
Jun 19, 2003

i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

Rand Brittain posted:

Don't forget the bit about how Obama's election caused the roads to Arcadia to open again.

So that's what the Nobel Prize was for!

joylessdivision
Jun 15, 2013



Rand Brittain posted:

Don't forget the bit about how Obama's election caused the roads to Arcadia to open again.

This is a different kind of cringe then I'm used to from a WW game.

Old Doggy Bastard
Dec 18, 2008

I always feel like the role of humans in most major world events underscores how significant mortals still are in world events, especially so for the events which throw out the current order and scramble the world like 9/11. Vampires need to live with enough fear of humans that the idea of a masquerade collapse is an existential threat large enough to warrant all the effort. I'd argue that after 9/11 the national security infrastructure set up, especially financial regulation and tracking, also happens to accidentally be an excellent kindred tracker.

Lord_Hambrose posted:

Blood Dimmed Tides is a treat from top to bottom.

Lasombra antitribu pirate eternally at sea still loving rocks.

Old Doggy Bastard fucked around with this message at 02:31 on Jul 19, 2021

PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce

Old Doggy Bastard posted:

I'd argue that after 9/11 the national security infrastructure set up, especially financial regulation and tracking, also happens to accidentally be an excellent kindred tracker.

Boy do we have an edition for you.

FirstAidKite
Nov 8, 2009

Old Doggy Bastard posted:

I always feel like the role of humans in most major world events underscores how significant mortals still are in world events

This is why if I ever manage to get a Promethean game going, I'm going to have it based at least partially in Johnstown because the idea of the Johnstown Flood of 1889 (specifically the horrors that occurred at the Seven Arches Bridge where a mass of the flood debris got caught) resulting in the creation of a Promethean extempore is intriguing to me. The flood was caused by upper class excess and neglect and it would be important to maintain that this was something done by humans to humans and that the event not only signaled the steady downfall of Johnstown as a whole, but also created something that represents and is tied to the uncaring rich whose actions killed so many and obliterated so much of the town's potential to grow and thrive. Combine that with the fact that massive storms are already associated with major events for prometheans such as their birth as well as Johnstown suffering from major floods since the 1889 flood about every 40-50 years and the town currently being into that 40-50 year range since the last flood in 1977 as well as the town's continued stubborn existence in spite of everything that has happened means it'd make for a good setting for promethean. Tying the general patterns of great floods to the creation of a particular promethean just makes sense without feeling like it's trying to say "actually, Henry Frick did nothing wrong and it was all a promethean's fault" since it still puts the blame for the flood in Frick's hands but just adds in that his willful neglect and inhumane practices unknowingly made him a demiurge and resulted in the creation of "something." The promethean would try to keep on their pilgrimage as the town itself ebbs and flows.

I've thought a lot about this and it's a shame I'm never actually going to do anything with it because I never actually run anything and also lol at the idea of actually running a game of promethean.

FirstAidKite fucked around with this message at 03:55 on Jul 19, 2021

Loomer
Dec 19, 2007

A Very Special Hell

Old Doggy Bastard posted:

I always feel like the role of humans in most major world events underscores how significant mortals still are in world events, especially so for the events which throw out the current order and scramble the world like 9/11. Vampires need to live with enough fear of humans that the idea of a masquerade collapse is an existential threat large enough to warrant all the effort. I'd argue that after 9/11 the national security infrastructure set up, especially financial regulation and tracking, also happens to accidentally be an excellent kindred tracker.

Lasombra antitribu pirate eternally at sea still loving rocks.

It's something the Dark Ages material did quite well. Vampires didn't really cause a lot of what went on to happen, but they did shape how it turned out by being involved. The purge of the Cathars was as brutal as it was because of both Cainite infighting and the proto-Inquisition exploiting it to strike at the undead under cover of heresy, the efforts to continue the Fourth Crusade fizzled because contesting factions tried to steer it, the instability of the Latin empire isn't just because its inherently unstable but because there's a brutal shadow war waging between the Venetian and Latin courts that prevents coherent government emerging in the first decade, etc.

It's a good compromise position. Were the Crusades themselves the spawn of a secret vampire war against the Sand King, etc? Nah. Were specific events or trends in the Crusades directly caused by them? Sure! Agency for both is provided, while keeping the mass movements and actions of the mortal population a major factor in Cainite history because they're just particularly adept fleas clinging to a great beast, and when it shakes, their entire world trembles.

The intersection with this style and events like 'Gangrel killed Olof Palme!' isn't quite as neat, but to be honest that's because a lot of early WoD worldbuilding is, while satisfyingly gonzo as all hell, pretty much just throwing poo poo at the wall and seeing what sticks in a way that fades out during the late 2E era for good or ill. You can really tell that a lot of it was a certain author having a fascination with x conspiracy or y mystery or z culture/subculture/ethnic group and throwing it in because why the hell not? So you get that schizoid sort of vibe, and then after that you get authors aping the existing texts that've set it so every big event was Totally All Vampires without pausing to consider 'does this actually work?' Dark Destiny 3 is a fun example of both - all the DDs combined authors with no experience with the setting with authors with a ton (and the best middle ground: people with none/very little who nonetheless look at the brief document, go 'this loving rocks, this is the goofiest poo poo, it's gonna be fun', and go ham on it, who tend to break the rules or established canon in ways that are fun) sometimes its clear that the authors are really just sticking to the brief of 'stories involving dracula manipulating the world' without stopping to go 'but how would he? Why would he?', so the book simultaneously has stories where Dracula has Lincoln assassinated for spoiling his plan to move to the slave plantations and where he looked through a portal and started a blood cult in Sodom and Gomorrah, and ones where he's just randomly stalking celebrities and embraces Marilyn Monroe for Some Reason.

Digital Osmosis
Nov 10, 2002

Smile, Citizen! Happiness is Mandatory.

I know basically nothing about the oWoD Dark Ages plots and have long been intrigued by the Albigensian Crusade (though not enough to like, read a book about it) so Loomer, who were the Cathars in the WoD? How did they play into a Kindred shadow war? I always liked the fact that, IRL, there's some debate about if the Cathars ever even existed or not. The idea of a Pope calling a Crusade against Western Europe to root out a bunch of heretics who might not have ever actually been a thing strikes me as pretty loving hilarious, if also dark af and totally understandable.

Also, the talk about CtD20 got me looking through the PDF I grabbed when it was being given away and that made me think about the oWoD --> CoD game lines that changed the most and the least. I'd say least is probably VtM to VtR, if only because it was the first and had a vested interest in not scaring people off by being too different. Mage is an interesting one because it's kind of like well, cosmologically the settings could not be more different (consensual realty versus platonic truths) but I feel like in practice nMage is actually pretty close to a more focused take on the themes and gameplay loops of oMage, especially from revised on. CtD to CtL is pretty seriously different. That inversion (Arcadia as the land of hopes and dreams vs. Arcadia as a land of unthinkable terror) IMO actually did fundamentally change the game, although I always thought there was always a tiny wiff of CtD baggage in Lost, especially in a few of the later supplements. I think the most obviously different line is probably Demon, though, seeing as their protagonists have basically nothing to do with each other except very vaguely in flavor. I guess if you consider Geist to be a remake of Wraith that'd be up there too, but I don't.

Loomer
Dec 19, 2007

A Very Special Hell
So, basically, the real world Cathar stuff is going on, and behind the scenes the Cainite Heresy is manipulating a bunch of churches within the Cathar movement to cover their own needs and expand their own power base (while simultaneously other Cainite heretics are denouncing them because it predates Catharism and some of them have Opinions.) The Courts of France are embroiled in a conflict over the murder of an envoy from the Courts of Love to the Prince of Paris that's using them as pawns, and Esclarmonde the Black, the queen of Toulouse, is tired of all this poo poo and starts trying to do her own thing a little. She sponsors all sorts of ideas including the emerging heresy, which results in the rest of the Courts of Love turning against her and helping stir up the Crusade so they can ride in on its heels to wage war on her.

Kavak
Aug 23, 2009


Loomer posted:

It's a good compromise position. Were the Crusades themselves the spawn of a secret vampire war against the Sand King, etc? Nah. Were specific events or trends in the Crusades directly caused by them? Sure! Agency for both is provided, while keeping the mass movements and actions of the mortal population a major factor in Cainite history because they're just particularly adept fleas clinging to a great beast, and when it shakes, their entire world trembles.

I think I've finally reconciled my problems Masquerade's focus on Vampire masterminds and conspiracies versus real-world history and all its ugliness. Thank you!

Dawgstar
Jul 15, 2017

Loomer posted:

It's a good compromise position. Were the Crusades themselves the spawn of a secret vampire war against the Sand King, etc? Nah. Were specific events or trends in the Crusades directly caused by them? Sure! Agency for both is provided, while keeping the mass movements and actions of the mortal population a major factor in Cainite history because they're just particularly adept fleas clinging to a great beast, and when it shakes, their entire world trembles.

As Rose Bailey said in her book about running Vampire: they don't run the show, they just buy the popcorn. It really helped put the game in perspective.

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.
Also best to keep in mind that vampire priorities aren't the same as human ones. It's likely that attempts to cause big events either fizzle out or blow up in their fanged faces. While being used to living in a shadow society and a parallel power structure means I imagine local courts can sometimes weather wars, revolutions and regime changes almost intact if they adopt the new outward faces quick enough.

Loomer
Dec 19, 2007

A Very Special Hell
Man, there are some weird relics in the timeline of the Accordance War. The Iron Knives massacre was either Samhain or Beltaine (it's Beltaine), and the War began at Altamont. Or it starts in a Sidhe charge in May 1970.

I think Dansky must have been working on an old draft to get Immortal Eyes: the Toybox out the door as fast as possible (it was released the month after the corebook dropped), because all of the date fuckery is in it and he was the writer. It's unfortunate, because some of the imagery is cool - Sidhe motorcycle cavalry tearing around the Bay Area carrying out massacres as soon as they arrive, and so on - but it's utterly incompatible. If anyone happens to have a copy of the first few drafts of CtD, I'd be very curious to see if this is the case or if it was just Richard getting into a Groove and doing his own Thing - or if, like the published version, they actually hadn't set any dates in stone yet and we're seeing an Alternate Changeling in that one book. The only actual specific dates for the War in the 1E core are the Moon Landing triggering the Resurgence, and the Beltaine Massacre - and if that date wasn't settled in the first few drafts it might explain why Dansky has it on Samhain. Of course, he also has that being the same night that the Sidhe emerge from the trods, so it's still a mess - but it also sets it so there was no possibility of peace at all, just a straight up decapitation strike and immediate invasion.

We could also just say 'True Thomas the Rhymer is wrong', since it's an IC account - but True Thomas's whole shtick is that he cannot tell a lie, so then it's either 'True Thomas has dementia' or 'the letter is a forgery', and at that point we're getting into weird territory (albeit one that could still make for an interesting plot hook).

Arivia
Mar 17, 2011

Dawgstar posted:

As Rose Bailey said in her book about running Vampire: they don't run the show, they just buy the popcorn. It really helped put the game in perspective.

I've heard criticism of that little passage in the nWoD core rulebook about the God-Machine sending the conquistadors to South America on similar grounds but I think that one actually makes sense, since the point of the God-Machine is that it actually DOES run the show.

FirstAidKite
Nov 8, 2009
I don't know a whole lot about the God Machine but does it actually even have any opinions or plans or goals or is it basically just an omnipotent/omniscient computer running "programs" to do whatever it thinks is keeping itself and the earth operational and maintained? Mainly asking because I don't know how much the God Machine actually cares about humans or anything else on the planet as long as they aren't specifically loving up its infrastructure.

Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018

Canonically? No one knows, ST decides.

Rand Brittain
Mar 25, 2013

"Go on until you're stopped."
Nobody really knows what the God-Machine wants. I continue to like my description of it as "terrifyingly omniscient but also terrifyingly stupid."

Yawgmoth
Sep 10, 2003

This post is cursed!

Mors Rattus posted:

Canonically? No one knows, ST decides.
That was my biggest problem with the GMC book, to be honest. There's no endgame, there's never even so much as an "if this continues/succeeds, [definite (bad?) thing] will happen" beyond maybe leading into another scenario with no real plot or stakes. At least give me a possible fail state, don't just shrug and say "idk something bad lol".

Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


It's fairly important to Demon that the God-Machine be pretty inscrutable. Whether this is because it's seeing things we don't see, has interests that are simply orthogonal to anything a human would have as a goal, or is just extremely stupid is explicitly a frustrating mystery.

I Am Just a Box
Jul 20, 2011
I belong here. I contain only inanimate objects. Nothing is amiss.

FirstAidKite posted:

I don't know a whole lot about the God Machine but does it actually even have any opinions or plans or goals or is it basically just an omnipotent/omniscient computer running "programs" to do whatever it thinks is keeping itself and the earth operational and maintained? Mainly asking because I don't know how much the God Machine actually cares about humans or anything else on the planet as long as they aren't specifically loving up its infrastructure.

The God-Machine doesn't think or make decisions except in the way that the European Union or the Apple Corporation thinks and makes decisions. It's an organization and a multilayered mechanism that has grown beyond the individual desires, needs, or motives of its constituent agents and directors, and of whoever might, in the distant past or future or in another reality, have once been responsible for initially assembling it.

Even a computer is not a great analogy for the God-Machine. The God-Machine isn't one computer, no matter how impossibly sophisticated an artificial intelligence is running on it. The God-Machine is the internet. It's the emergent properties of what people do when placed in a certain context and given certain powers. Except in the case of the God-Machine most of those people have long since been supplanted by angels and other stranger and more reliable occult entities and devices.

The God-Machine is designed in a very ground's-eye-view kind of way. A lot of attention is paid to the core loop of its projects and the conflict they produce: each project has tangible infrastructure which can be interacted and tampered with, some kind of linchpin somewhere to direct your focus on that could cause some form of cascade failure if breached, some tell which player characters can identify is eerie and out of place and cues them in to investigate suspicious events, and some intended occult output that should have stakes that directly impact the concerns and interests of your player characters (like harnessing the souls of the people living in the apartment where your brother and his family are living, or installing slave-spirits into the local traffic lights that can see supernatural phenomena when the light turns yellow and reports it to a clean-up crew). What matters is that it's a high-strangeness Ligotti conspiracy that is shoving its nose in your business, made up of people and things that all know enough of the plan to do their local parts and know a few connections to investigate further, so that you have the option of going on the offensive and doing enough damage to put it on the retreat without having to rely on plot devices.

Little attention is paid to what the God-Machine's projects and objectives are on the international or cosmic scale, because most player characters aren't archmasters or President of the United States to be meeting and conflicting with projects on that zoomed out level. Most of what is nailed down is what's relevant to characterizing and imposing patterns on its more local projects. The God-Machine subverts and co-opts other processes to integrate into itself. It uses the masses as resources and commodities and thus favors anything that keeps them vulnerable, manipulable, and uninformed. It requires stability to maintain infrastructure that's interlaced with modern civilization so it tries to avoid mass destructive events except under contained and controlled bounds. Those are patterns to characterize what typical projects encountered in play do so you're not just pulling poo poo randomly out of a hat.

Anything larger scale than that isn't necessary to establish the gameplay loop of Demon and the GMC, in the same way that revealing things like the origin of the strix and the ultimate motives of the Mother of Monsters and whether Longinus was really cursed directly by God are not necessary to establish the gameplay loop of Vampire. So that is left to Storyteller discretion with a bunch of occasional "maybe it's this, maybe it's that" ideas. Maybe it really is a system that's just grown like kudzu and now only really exists to perpetuate itself. Maybe the God-Machine is a colony project from another reality slowly using the process of history to mold Earth into the shape of life in the alien world that sent it, in preparation for first contact and possible invasion. That's a sample possibility that the GMC book throws out. But it's not something you need to decide at the start of a Demon game. or potentially ever.

I Am Just a Box fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Jul 19, 2021

AmiYumi
Oct 10, 2005

I FORGOT TO HAIL KING TORG

Ghost Leviathan posted:

Also best to keep in mind that vampire priorities aren't the same as human ones. It's likely that attempts to cause big events either fizzle out or blow up in their fanged faces. While being used to living in a shadow society and a parallel power structure means I imagine local courts can sometimes weather wars, revolutions and regime changes almost intact if they adopt the new outward faces quick enough.
I don’t remember which VtM book it was in, but I liked the passage about how a Brujah might be idealistic about vampire society, but if their domain is the slums they are going to use their influence to ensure the slums stay a lovely place no one leaves and another dead body doesn’t raise eyebrows.

Ferrinus
Jun 19, 2003

i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world
The easiest real-world analogy to the God-Machine is just capital. Like, not the ideology of liberalism, not the capitalists who try to desperately guess what the market wants them to do and will reward them for, not the bourgeois state that upholds the class dictatorship, actual self-valorizing value itself. What does it want? It doesn't "want" things, it's basically Azathoth. It just unfolds inevitably from its premises, which if you think about them for half a second turn out to be incredibly stupid.

Dawgstar
Jul 15, 2017

AmiYumi posted:

I don’t remember which VtM book it was in, but I liked the passage about how a Brujah might be idealistic about vampire society, but if their domain is the slums they are going to use their influence to ensure the slums stay a lovely place no one leaves and another dead body doesn’t raise eyebrows.

Or to quote Greg Stolze, there's a difference in a vampire communist that sees humans as the proletariat and those that see humans as the means of production.

Yawgmoth
Sep 10, 2003

This post is cursed!

Tulip posted:

It's fairly important to Demon that the God-Machine be pretty inscrutable. Whether this is because it's seeing things we don't see, has interests that are simply orthogonal to anything a human would have as a goal, or is just extremely stupid is explicitly a frustrating mystery.
It should be a mystery to the PCs. It shouldn't be a mystery to the ST or to the writers of the book, and I absolutely loathe that "the plot holes are intentional and you're wrong for wanting any kind of answer" kind of writing; especially when given as sample plots to run. If I don't like the options given I can tweak them a little or come up with my own if I want, but I at least want some kind of baseline default resolution/conclusion to the plot. "Something bad might happen" isn't really helpful.

moths
Aug 25, 2004

I would also still appreciate some danger.



Ferrinus posted:

The easiest real-world analogy to the God-Machine is just capital. Like, not the ideology of liberalism, not the capitalists who try to desperately guess what the market wants them to do and will reward them for, not the bourgeois state that upholds the class dictatorship, actual self-valorizing value itself. What does it want? It doesn't "want" things, it's basically Azathoth. It just unfolds inevitably from its premises, which if you think about them for half a second turn out to be incredibly stupid.

There's an argument to be made that the concept of capital is alive in the same sense that a virus is, it drives pathological action and has no self awareness or interest.

But imagine that instead of money, there's absolutely nothing comprehensible to our human minds at work with the God Machine. I

Basic Chunnel
Sep 21, 2010

Jesus! Jesus Christ! Say his name! Jesus! Jesus! Come down now!

Yawgmoth posted:

It should be a mystery to the PCs. It shouldn't be a mystery to the ST or to the writers of the book, and I absolutely loathe that "the plot holes are intentional and you're wrong for wanting any kind of answer" kind of writing; especially when given as sample plots to run. If I don't like the options given I can tweak them a little or come up with my own if I want, but I at least want some kind of baseline default resolution/conclusion to the plot. "Something bad might happen" isn't really helpful.

On the contrary, it owns

Mister Olympus
Oct 31, 2011

Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies
You can also read the god-machine as a 21st century version of skynet, now that we understand that The Algorithm can be cruel, violent, and bigoted not because it's self-aware, but just because the people writing it had ideological blind spots. It's that twitter neural network that people fed slurs into, but it runs reality now.

e: Or maybe the evolution simulator that was instructed to make something that jumps high, but instead evolved a sort of bipedal giraffe that broke its legs when it grew to full size, because there was no incentive for actually leaving the ground, only for reaching a certain height and falling a certain distance.

Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 03:36 on Jul 20, 2021

Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


Yawgmoth posted:

It should be a mystery to the PCs. It shouldn't be a mystery to the ST or to the writers of the book, and I absolutely loathe that "the plot holes are intentional and you're wrong for wanting any kind of answer" kind of writing; especially when given as sample plots to run. If I don't like the options given I can tweak them a little or come up with my own if I want, but I at least want some kind of baseline default resolution/conclusion to the plot. "Something bad might happen" isn't really helpful.

I think WOD might not be for you.

Yawgmoth
Sep 10, 2003

This post is cursed!

Tulip posted:

I think WOD might not be for you.
Seems a bit insulting to say I'm not allowed to play an entire publisher's games because I didn't like one book, but hey

Rubix Squid
Apr 17, 2014
When it comes to the God-Machine you need to first figure out what you want from it in a chronicle before you can really answer any of the questions. The specifics of how it functions should always be in service to that first and foremost.

I Am Just a Box
Jul 20, 2011
I belong here. I contain only inanimate objects. Nothing is amiss.

Did you read the God-Machine Chronicle when it was its own stand-alone book, Yawgmoth, or after it was recompiled into the Chronicles of Darkness 2e Rulebook? The recompilation sadly omits huge swaths of the original book's Introduction, which oddly enough was one of the best parts of the book, and specifically the best material written to date on understanding the God-Machine and how to use it in simple and clear terms.

The omitted parts of the Introduction include sections specifically titled "What is the God-Machine?" (as in no really, within the setting, what is it and where did it come from), "What does it want with people?" and "What role do supernatural creatures play?" Each of these sections presents a few example answers without committing to any of them being canonical. For example, maybe the God-Machine is a nascent artificial intelligence extending its power so that it might one day birth a utopian posthuman world for its gestating "children," or it's a broken prehuman mechanism meant to seal away parliaments of archdemons and needs to be repaired and corrected against its malfunctioning will before the seal experiences total failure, or it's an alien installation conducting a millenia-long test of humanity's responses and resistance to pressures and when it finishes compiling data it will signal beings from the outer darkness and deliver them a failproof strategy for invasion and conquest. That's all taken from the sample ideas there.

So the original GMC book doesn't definitively say what the final stakes are if you let the God-Machine win, no, but if you're asking to be "given options," which you can then use as presented, tweak a little, or discard and replace based on whether you like them or not, it does have some. I get more and more frustrated when I think about this material getting dropped in the Chronicles of Darkness Rulebook version.

As far as the advice in Building the God-Machine Chronicle and tagged onto the end of each individual Tales of the God-Machine adventure writeup on setting stakes for individual projects and how to link them together to flow from one to the next, I'll agree with you, that advice is thin and unhelpful. A lot of the tales really don't fit with one another and it would have made more sense to dedicate word count not to talking about how to chain from one to the next but how to drag each tale concept out to a longer-term campaign by itself.

Ferrinus
Jun 19, 2003

i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world
"What is the God-Machine" is honestly a really bad question to ask, although it might be worthwhile to wonder something like "what historical accident began the cavalcade of loosely-related processes that we know today as the God-Machine?"

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.

Rand Brittain posted:

Nobody really knows what the God-Machine wants. I continue to like my description of it as "terrifyingly omniscient but also terrifyingly stupid."

That just makes me think RTS AI.

Kavak
Aug 23, 2009


"The God-Machine will prioritize any threat detected inside Infrastructure and redirect all its forces to deal with it, but if it leaves, they go back to what they were doing. So what we need to do is just set this drinky bird in the exact right spot, and..."

FirstAidKite
Nov 8, 2009
God Machine really giving me some Whitest Kids U Know Sex Robot vibes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzO2mi4uHAs

bewilderment
Nov 22, 2007
man what



Mage isn't really written to interact with the God-Machine but the answer I gave to my Mage group, which I think was adapted from DaveB's answer somewhere, is:

The God-Machine at some point in some timeline was part of the natural machinery of the physics of the universe. At some point it was forced into material form and irreversibly broken. It's attempting to repair itself, which it cannot do, and so its actions are focused around self-preservation and doing strange broken things that are echoes of proper functioning.

To draw a video game analogy, imagine you've got a survival/crafting game that has a theoretical end goal, like beating the Enderdragon in its dimension in Minecraft, or building a rocket in Factorio.

The God-Machine is trying to stay alive whilst trying to work out how to craft its way through the tech tree to launch the rocket, sprawling through layers and layers of dependencies (need this material to make this tool, which makes this material, which it can use to make this tool, etc), unaware of the fact that there is no actual link in the tech tree that actually progresses to the end goal. It's stuck and cannot unstick. It's up to the part of Don't Starve where you need Hair as a crafting ingredient when you're playing as a character that doesn't have access to it, and it refuses to let things progress to the point that Hairballs will spawn.

cptn_dr
Sep 7, 2011

Seven for beauty that blossoms and dies


I quite liked the theory that the God Machine is actually Great Mountain, a Pangeaen mentioned in Sundered World. I'm not sure I actually think it's correct, but I still like it a lot.

Of course, we all know the real truth is that it's the physical remains of the Star Ladder, converted from sacred dragonbone to profane metal in the fall of Atlantis and driven mad by the Abyss.

Rubix Squid
Apr 17, 2014
Bah, mages should always be wrong!

Dave Brookshaw
Jun 27, 2012

No Regrets

cptn_dr posted:

I quite liked the theory that the God Machine is actually Great Mountain, a Pangeaen mentioned in Sundered World. I'm not sure I actually think it's correct, but I still like it a lot.

Of course, we all know the real truth is that it's the physical remains of the Star Ladder, converted from sacred dragonbone to profane metal in the fall of Atlantis and driven mad by the Abyss.

We didn’t intend Mountain to be the God Machine when we wrote Sundered World, but if it tickles your fancy go for it.

The God-Machine as described in the actual GMC and Demin’s corebook is not a singular being in any real sense - it’s the combined phenomena of all Infrastructure, not a separate entity that only manifests “through” it.

It has since, unfortunately, become quite badly Flanderised.

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Old Doggy Bastard
Dec 18, 2008

FirstAidKite posted:

This is why if I ever manage to get a Promethean game going, I'm going to have it based at least partially in Johnstown because the idea of the Johnstown Flood of 1889 (specifically the horrors that occurred at the Seven Arches Bridge where a mass of the flood debris got caught) resulting in the creation of a Promethean extempore is intriguing to me. The flood was caused by upper class excess and neglect and it would be important to maintain that this was something done by humans to humans and that the event not only signaled the steady downfall of Johnstown as a whole, but also created something that represents and is tied to the uncaring rich whose actions killed so many and obliterated so much of the town's potential to grow and thrive. Combine that with the fact that massive storms are already associated with major events for prometheans such as their birth as well as Johnstown suffering from major floods since the 1889 flood about every 40-50 years and the town currently being into that 40-50 year range since the last flood in 1977 as well as the town's continued stubborn existence in spite of everything that has happened means it'd make for a good setting for promethean. Tying the general patterns of great floods to the creation of a particular promethean just makes sense without feeling like it's trying to say "actually, Henry Frick did nothing wrong and it was all a promethean's fault" since it still puts the blame for the flood in Frick's hands but just adds in that his willful neglect and inhumane practices unknowingly made him a demiurge and resulted in the creation of "something." The promethean would try to keep on their pilgrimage as the town itself ebbs and flows.

I've thought a lot about this and it's a shame I'm never actually going to do anything with it because I never actually run anything and also lol at the idea of actually running a game of promethean.

I actually just visited that area and Henry Frick's house in Pittsburgh a couple of weeks ago! I'm glad that other people appreciate and respect Promethean for the incredible idea behind it. My gaming group also jokes about the idea of running a Promethean game as a sort of quest for the Holy Grail.

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