The God-Machine Chronicle - The Key (Conclusion, part 2)

Last night we finished up The Key. First, some overall thoughts.

I really like the rules revisions we've made. Honestly, I think that the NWoD system works pretty well as written, but the revisions that we've made (to Morality, combat, extended actions) do a pretty good job of moving the system away from the traditional "roll to pick locks" style of RPG and more toward the "roll to resolve this conflict in this genre" that focuses things.

I worry, though, that it's going to get the same reception as Promethean. That is, the the game is focused, but that in putting that focus and asking the players to participate more in the narrative, we lose the people for whom "gaming" is "I play my character and the GM is responsible for everything else." Thing is, Conditions and Aspirations and even breaking points (all things that were added, rather than just revised) are all systems that only work when the player and the ST are engaged with them. You can toss a player the Shaken Condition, but if the player isn't going to play it they aren't ever going to resolve, they aren't ever going to get the Beat. And I'm spoiled because my players do engage like that.

As for the God-Machine Chronicle sections that aren't rules, I think that the Tales are going to be good story starters, and I think my decision to go through and explicitly tie each of them to a statted character (even if it's just an angel whose stats may never matter) was the right one. Tying Wesley Cote to the Key made the whole thing more accessible for me, and I can't imagine I'm alone. I'm hoping that the chronicle tracks will be useful for people, but we'll see.

Anyway, last night. First, dinner.

Skirt steak, canary melon, yum-yum sauce, portabello mushrooms, weird rice mixture.

One of the stranger baskets I've had lately. I wish I'd had more mushrooms, but you work with what you have.

The rice stuff I just cooked normally. In retrospect I wish I'd have made a sauce with the yum-yum to go with it, but I was trying to get dinner ready (we watched The Impossible yesterday and it ran all the way up to when folks got there). The mushrooms I chopped up, cooked with some wine and beef broth, and then mixed in the yum-yum (it's basically the sauce they give you with shrimp at hibachi restaurants). I put that in the center of the steaks, and then rolled them up, salted and peppered them, topped with a little of the sauce and baked 'em.

The melons...oy. I don't like melon. It's not a textural thing, I just don't like the flavor. I've gotten around that with cantaloupe by making it into a cobbler kind of thing with white cake mix, but I didn't have any (and we had cake for dessert anyway). So with this melon, I cut it up into bite-sized chunks, made a tempura batter with flour and tandoori, and fried those sucks. That actually came out really well - enough sweet to be pleasant, but the tandoori cut the melon flavor nicely.

So then game. Last time, Mallory was in the hospital with a wound in his neck, while the others worked the crime scene. Berry checked outside, and found a pair of footprints by the side of the building and a key drawn on the wall...and the marker was still fresh. After making sure no one was going to stab her, she got Cochrane, who confirmed that the tread was the same as the other shoes they'd seen, but these prints were slightly smaller. Also the prints were just...there. Like someone had just appeared there.

Lundy and King looked over the camera footage, and tried to figure out what the weird little time-glitch meant. King, more readily accepting a supernatural explanation than Lundy was, put forth the notion that this guy was time-traveling. Lundy said that even if that weren't crazy, what kind of chance did that give them? How could they stop him?

King thought about the evidence some more, and realized that the only thing that the killer had ever taken from a victim was the briefcase of Dr. Halliday in Utica. Why? There was a file in that briefcase, of one Anne Cote. Lundy called the hospital, and learned that Anne Cote had been Dr. Halliday's patient, and had died of an internal hemorrhage during a miscarriage. Lundy figured this was as close to a lead as they had, so he had everyone pack up (including Mallory, who was injured but not on death's door) and head to Utica.

Cochrane looked through the evidence of the Hackensack murder on the plane. Yes, it did look like two different people had traced that key, but beyond that the evidence wasn't telling them anything.

King slept, and dreamed. He dreamed of a house, of using an old iron key to open a door, stepping inside, and watching himself and his compatriots walk in. He stepped up behind Cochrane (at the back of the group), grabbed her, and stabbed her in the throat. King woke up with a start, down another dot of effective Integrity and picking up the Shaken Condition.

They landed in Utica and headed to the hospital. Lundy found a nurse who had been here long enough to remember Halliday and interviewed her, while Cochrane and King headed to the records room. Mallory got on the phone to the local PD to try and get the records sent over, and Berry found a cute nurse and flirted with him (wasting time with her Vice to get a Willpower back).

Lundy learned that Anne Cote's husband, Wesley Cote, had gone berserk when Anne had been taken into surgery, even before her condition became so much worse. The nurse told Lundy that Wesley had to be restrained, and then three months later Halliday was killed out by his car. Cochrane and King found Anne's file, her death certificate (death by internal bleeding arising from complications during a miscarriage) and there were notes that she'd been seeing a therapist, Dr. Erika Epworth.

They went and talked with Epworth, who told them that Wesley and Anne had been overjoyed about their pregnancy, but that Anne was dealing with some anxiety (hence the therapy). She said that Anne had reported that Wesley was getting strange phone calls, telling him "Don't let them take Anne into the blue room." And indeed, the room in which she died during surgery was blue. Epworth was prepared to write this off as coincidence (many rooms in hospitals are blue), but it was clear that it troubled her.

She mentioned that Wesley had been investigated for the murder of Dr. Halliday, but that he'd been out of town when it happened. She said he had no history of violence...but then a chill went down Cochrane's spine. King asked again, and Epworth mentioned that Wesley had some violence in his record, but she wasn't privy to the details. She knew he'd experienced lost time as a teenager, though.

The characters reconvened and decided to go to the police station. Berry called Cohen, and he told her that they were off the map as far as he was concerned. He wasn't sure of the outcome anymore, but did tell them that Cote didn't so much lose time as take it. He told them that, if you change yesterday, it changes today. There might be a thousand yesterdays, but there's only one today, so whatever yesterday you had leads to the today you're in (this led to the some temple-rubbing as players worked to get their brains around it, which is what I wanted). He said to watch for things that changed, inconsistencies and details that just didn't make sense.

They got to the police station, pulled the files on the murder of Dr. Halliday, and looked over them. They found a photocopy of Wesley Cote's driver's license, and Mallory ID'd him as the man he'd shot - but this picture was 15 years old, so why had the man Mallory shot looked identical? The investigation concluded that Cote had been out of town (in Columbus, as it happened) when Halliday was killed, and he had no criminal history to indicate that he'd know how to hire someone...but then the chills happened again. Lundy picked up the investigation again, and it had changed. Now it said that given his history as a juvenile offender, it was possible that Cote might know to hire someone, but there was no evidence to support that theory. Berry noticed that the camera in the room was now in a different corner than when they walked in.

They planned to go to Cote's house and see if he was there. Cochrane and Mallory decided, instead, to go back to the hospital and interview Epworth again, get some more information about the Cotes. Berry asked to get an ax; this suggestion was (obviously) met with horror from the other cops, Cochrane in particular. She let that go (eventually) and they split up.

Cochrane and Mallory got the hospital, but Epworth's office now had a nameplate reading "Michael Surrick." They talked to Dr. Surrick, who told them he'd been hired a year ago to replace Dr. Epworth, who had been murdered outside her house, stabbed in the throat. The characters went to the morgue to check the records of Epworth's death.

At the house, a housekeeper answered the door. Lundy flashed his badge and asked for Cote; she rather confusedly said he was out. She let them in so she could find the note he'd left, but then something changed and she said that he had left instructions that no one came in, and made them wait. They entered anyway ("Did you hear a scream, Lundy" "Yes, I think maybe I did.") and found the door that King had seen in his dream. They opened and saw that it led back into the same hallway they were in. They entered, and found themselves in the same house, no housekeeper to be found.

Berry looked around and saw that it was later in the day, and looked like it had just rained, neither of which had been true a moment ago. Lundy texted Cochrane and King to ask them to check the first three victims against Cote, but he got two phone calls back - wrong numbers. He stepped back through the door and did it again, and got a response from Cochrane. Berry went back through the door and called Cohen, who suggested if there was a kitchen that expiration dates were a good way of telling when you were. They checked, and found they were in May 2007, about a year "ago" (remember my games are offset by a few years).

Lundy found a package of markers upstairs, as well as a notepad with an addressed and "7:12PM" on it. Going back through again, Berry Googled that address, and found that it was Erika Epworth's address - she'd been murdered in the evening as she took the trash out.

Running back to 2007, Lundy hot-wired the car in the driveway and they race to the address. They got there just as Cote appeared behind Erika, and King and Lundy shot him, leaning out the windows of the speeding car.

Meanwhile, Cochrane and Mallory went to the morgue, and Cote appeared from nowhere and stabbed Mallory in the throat, dropping him (he was alive, but stunned - full of bashing damage). Cochrane drew her gun and shot him. He stabbed her, but she shot again, dropping him.

In 2007, they found Cote up against the fence, bleeding. Berry started to question him, but King (resolving his Shaken Condition), shot him - from his perspective, they were too far off the map for the standard methods to work. Figuring that they should get out of here before police arrived, they got in the car and went back to Cote's house. As they walked in, Cote appeared behind them, stabbed Lundy in the neck and dropped him. He went down, bleeding out. Berry popped her asp, and King grabbed Lundy to stabilize him. Cote ran, trying to circle around to the door, but Berry stopped him. He stabbed Berry in the stomach, but she cracked him with the asp, and he backed off, leaving Berry behind.

King dragged Lundy through the door. Cote followed, and locked the door behind him. He looked down at King and Lundy and raised his ice pick...

...Berry shot the lock, and the door opened to somewhere else. She couldn't see features in the room, she just heard what sounded like an immense clock. She called out, and Wesley Cote appeared, but this one was scraggly and thin. Cote told her that he'd tried to save his wife, he'd called himself to warn them about the blue room, but it hadn't mattered. He tossed her the key, telling her to destroy it. She told him she was sorry for what had happened to him, shut the door, opened it, and stepped out into the "present" (2008).

Cote was there, standing over Lundy and King. Berry locked the door, and Cote crumbled and vanished. At the hospital, the Cote on the floor of the morgue did as well. The loop had been closed.

Now four of the five characters were seriously wounded, so their next rendezvous was at the hospital. After some treatment, they were playing cards in a lounge when Bobby Cohen came to visit. The four murders that they'd been called up to investigate had still happened, but the one in Hackensack, and Erika Epworth's, had not.

Cohen told them that Cote had been trying to save his wife by making his younger self a killer, so hopefully she wouldn't marry him, and thus not die. But he'd retained love for her - he still made the calls, after all. And he'd been the pawn of something greater, something more complex and terrible than any of them (including Cohen) understood. He asked Berry if she knew anyone who did metalwork; she said she did (her friend Tori). King asked, jokingly, if maybe they couldn't got back and win the lottery first.

Cohen responded that he wasn't sure what that would do. They'd closed the loop, but he wasn't sure there would never be another Key murder again - maybe Cote had gone into the future (from their perspective) to kill people? If they interfered, would that open the loop?

"What rises may fall," said Cohen. "What has fallen may rise again."

Conclusion of The Key, Part One

We were supposed to end this game on Monday, but we got a late start (it was Michelle's birthday, and we were finishing dinner and so on), so it's gonna wind up going one more session. I think, though, that it's going to wind up being a nice segue into my Demon playtest, which is only right.

So last time, Lundy decided the characters would split up, some going to Hackensack, NJ and some going on to Utica, NY. Berry got a call from Cohen, their mysterious time-shifting informant, who told her to make sure they didn't split up. Berry took this to heart and spent the plane ride convincing Lundy. Lundy finally agreed (mostly to shut her up) that they would stop in New Jersey, take or copy the files (since this was very much a cold case, there would be nothing of a crime scene to process) and then get back on the plane and head to Utica.

The characters arrived at the facility that held all these old case file boxes. The cop working the desk was a young guy with his arm in a sling (obviously on injured leave). He checked the characters' credentials, and then asked one of them to come behind the locked cage door to help him lift the box. Lundy, of course, volunteered Mallory.

Mallory and Officer Kondrilik walked down the aisle toward the box, and Mallory saw something move out of the corner of his eye. He had time to react (and use his Defense, which probably saved his life) - a man struck out of the shadows and cut his neck open with an ice pick.

Mallory drew his gun (Quick Draw) and shot the dude, and then wisely backed up so he wouldn't get stabbed again. Berry jumped over the fence around the files area, and King followed (also a parkour practitioner, as it happens). Cochrane tried to shoot the lock on the door and failed; Lundy shoved her out of the way and did it.

The man moved around Kondrilik and stabbed him in the throat. Mallory shot the man again, twice, but the man ran to the end of the aisle. Lundy moved around to the other aisle, but the aisles were closed at the ends. Cochrane used the desk phone to call backup, and then started tending to Kondrilik. The assailant was nowhere to be seen.

Quick work on the characters' parts saved Kondrilik's life, and though Mallory was injured pretty badly (four lethal damage; in story terms, the ice pick pierced his neck and ripped the skin open, but missed his jugular by that much). Mallory had a breaking point when he saw Kondrilik lying, apparently dead, but just picked up the Shaken Condition (again) and didn't lose Integrity.

But then there was the issue of the vanishing man. Cochrane looked over the crime scene, and found that all three of Mallory's bullets had connected (and were retrieved). Blood spatter indicated that the last shot had pierced the killer's heart, so he would have died in 60 seconds or so...but then where did he go? Cochrane had a breaking point, succeeded (no Integrity loss) and picked up the Obsessed Condition, trying to find the piece of evidence that makes this all make sense.

King and Lundy watched the camera footage and saw Mallory shoot the guy...and he just vanished. Lundy had a little breaking point there, too, and picked up the Spooked Condition. King, for his part, accepts that something supernatural is happening, but unlike Berry, he doesn't have the direct experience necessary to put it in any kind of context.

System notes: As I suspected, the revision of Defense combined with the new damage rules means that combat-build characters are scarier. Both Mallory and the bad guy are such characters, and if Mallory hadn't succeeded on the Reaction to Surprise roll he'd probably have died. But the real test this time was the Social maneuvering system, which is what Berry used to convince Lundy not to split up (which, in turn, probably saved someone's life).

I like the system, and I think what's going to have to be important is setting things up so that your impression level gets as good as possible. Otherwise, you're talking days or weeks of game time, and for simple requests that's just not feasible. I think the system works for what it is meant to do, though, and I think it complements, rather than replaces, the idea of using simple Social actions (which means that as I'm writing Demon powers I'm approaching things the right way).

Snow Day Post #1: God-Machine Chronicle Update

Snow day! Wheee!

One of the nice things about working in a public school district is that I still get to enjoy snow days. Of course, it puts me closer than I'd like to out of compliance on an ETR, but I can manage that.

So! Anyway! Last night we finally got to play World of Darkness again.

The characters were in Erie, PA. It's the next morning, the day after Mallory shot and killed a man named Peterson, who'd pulled a gun (seemingly on Mallory, but some evidence suggested he was pointing it at something behind Mallory, except there was nothing there). All of the reports, however, were very much in Mallory's favor - it was a good shoot. That didn't mean Mallory was doing well. He'd been up all night filling out reports, and only the dedicated efforts of Agent Lundy kept him on the team and armed.

King, meanwhile, hadn't had a great night, either. He'd had dreams of stabbing a man in a thunderstorm, and he woke up to find he felt as though he'd really done it (Mind of the Madman Merit; he lost an effective dot of Integrity and picked up the Spooked Condition, which he still has. He'll get the dot back when the killer is apprehended). Upon awakening, he thought through the dream. He remembered the man's hat coming off, and he remembered seeing a car with a Kentucky plate.

The characters got together in the morning to talk about their next move. They'd gone over most of the forensic and technical evidence. Cochrane had the post-it note overnighted from Detroit, and compared the one from the crime scene here. They were identical in terms of fibers, the handwriting was a perfect match, it's just that the one from Erie seemed slight older. But that wasn't possible - there couldn't be two of the same item. She also analyzed the paper that the note from the killer was written on, but couldn't find a match. Frustrated, she sent some to her labbies in Tulsa with instructions to pull it apart.

The characters decided to go and visit Cohen, whom they'd put in protective custody. They found him in his hotel watching the weather channel. Lundy interviewed him, and Cohen revealed that he'd suffered from bouts of lost time, the worst being a three-week period when he was 14. He thought he was schizophrenic for a while, tried medication, nothing worked. And then finally he learned to control it, but now he'd sometimes experience the future before it happened. He described it as similar to deja vu, except that he would see multiple possibilities and would never quite know which one was coming. He also knew that Lundy didn't believe him, but that was fine, there was no reason he should. He did tell Lundy, though, to plug his phone in to charge.

King asked if Cohen had ever been to Kentucky; he said he had, he'd lived in Berea, Kentucky briefly, but hadn't been there in years. At this point, Lundy's phone rang. "Coincidence," said Cohen. "Of course, you're getting calls."

It was a detective in Lexington, KY named Dysart. They'd had a murder there last night, a man named McAndrew had been walking home from his office, got caught in a thunderstorm, and stabbed in the neck, once, with what looked like an ice pick. Lundy told them to get their best CS people to process the scene; Dysart said there wasn't much to work with because of the storm, but he would.

Cohen told Lundy to make sure they talked to the first on scene, because there would be a temptation not to. They headed out, and Lundy told Cohen to stay in the room and not even get ice without an escort. Cohen said that he would be careful, but really, "if he wants me dead, a cop isn't going to stop him." Lundy, maybe despite himself, nodded.

As they left, Cohen called Justine back, and said that he thought she would be OK. He wasn't sure why, and he wasn't sure about the rest of them. She thanked him and made sure he had her cell phone number, and the team left for Lexington.

They arrived, touched down, and went to the crime scene, where Cochrane and King got out. The others went to the police station to talk to the first officer on scene, an old man named Pat Sayers. Sayers didn't have much to say about the crime itself - some sanitation workers out to remove a fallen tree branch had found the body, and Sayers had just called it in. But he did remember a similar, almost identical case, up in a small town in New York called Binghampton. A man stabbed in the throat, one wound, no one was ever caught. He gave Lundy a name of a cop up there ("Probably chief of police, if he hasn't retired") and left.

Mallory, not having much to do without people to shoot, started going through Internet sites looking for locked-room murders. He found one on an old "mysterious murders" site - a woman in New Jersey who'd been stabbed in the throat with a knife (one of hers), but he apartment was locked up tight. The knife was found across the room, and finally it was called a suicide because she'd apparently convulsed and flung the knife as she died. But a commenter on the site called "brootncheer" said that no, he'd seen the crime scene photos and there had been two other people in the room.

Berry, seeing this, thought it was significant, and tried to track down the commenter. But the account (traced back to ATT) was old, and all she could easily get was the city (Toledo).

Meanwhile, King and Cochrane processed the crime scene. They found no footprints in the mud. No evidence that anyone else had been there. This scene was more like Detroit than Erie; one wound, perfectly place, and scraped on the victim to indicate that his coat had been yanked back (just as King had dreamed). King went looking for, and found, the guy's hat, which had a hair (not the victim's) on it. They processed the scene and headed back to the lab for the autopsy.

The characters got together again, and quibbled a little about how much weight to give "brootncheer"'s comment. They called New Jersey and requested the files, and Cochrane got her staff working on finding similar cases, going back as much as 30 years. Steve, her tech-in-charge, said that they'd found a match for the paper - it was made by a small company in Utica, but they'd been out of business for over 15 years, and they'd mostly sold to hospitals, schools, etc. Cochrane told him to start his search there.

He called back a few minutes later, because they'd found something right away - a doctor named Halliday had been murdered by his car, in 1996. They called Utica and got the file faxed over, just after the one from Jersey arrived.

Jersey was a mess - they'd not done half the work they should have. There was no way Christensen had flung the knife; she was drunk when she died. Looking at the photos, they found a key rack - in the shape of a key - with two trace marks around it. King, analyzing the writing, determined it was from two different people.

The Utica filed revealed that Halliday had been stabbed in the throat from the front, standing at his car, keys in hand. At this point, Cochrane suggested they split up - some go to Hackensack, some to Utica - so they could investigate both crimes.

Berry's phone rang - Cohen. He warned them not to split up, and told her to make sure all the pages from the Utica file were there. They weren't (one page had fallen on the floor from the fax machine). It was a list of contents of Halliday's briefcase, so far as his assistant knew. Paper, pens, tape recorder, and a patient file: A woman named Anne Cote.

Berry told them they couldn't split up, but offered no reason except Cohen's warning. That, of course, wasn't good enough for Lundy - they were going to drop off Cochrane in Hackensack (plus whoever wanted to go with her) and then continue on to Utica.

Before they left, though, they ran analysis on the hair samples. They were from the same person - but the one from Kentucky was older by several years. They were both recent samples, but one was from an older version of the same person. This, of course, was not possible.

Next time: The exciting conclusion!