Quote from: Maese Mateo;684869The way I understood it from what was said over the WW forum, is that you can play Demon with the rules from the QS plus the Demon book (without the WoD core), is that correct?

The last I heard, Demon was going to incorporate the updated rules from GMC so that you'd just need to learn the basic system from somewhere, either the WoD core for the full text or one of the quickstarts for a simpler version.

Quote from: Skywalker;657933FWIW I found GMC to be pretty much a revision of the Cthulhu mythos using what scares people today as its foundation, rather than what scared people in the 1920s.

Now that does sound kinda interesting.

This thread made me really, really excited about Demon - which I honestly thought I never would be.

Quote from: Future Villain Band;684611It's very much in tune with stuff like the horrific weirdness in Thomas Ligotti or Clive Barker, or the background craziness of Warren Ellis' Planetary.

Well that has me wanting to give it a look. I love Ligotti's stuff.

QuoteIt's also in line with things like the Slender Man mythos and the like, or the random horror of V/H/S.

Slenderman, yes... though I'm not sure how I'd get that feel into an RPG.

So this does interest me, I thought the essay in the World of Darkness basic book was pretty good, which is a rarity for RPG fiction. However, some of the feel of the art and writing I've seen reminds me of the game Kult. Which isn't a bad thing, I really liked that game world.

Imagine some Lovecraftian elder horror with a mechanic motif rather than a sea-animal motif. It is an unknowable, possibly ancient multi-dimensional *thing* involved in much of the horrors and evils of the nWoD.

It is trivial that the God Machine is composed of mechanisms rather than tentacles. The God Machine Chronicle includes maddeningly incomprehensible alien... things, to plots that make no fucking sense but still manage to eat you and insane cults.

Any number of things may or may not be a part of the Chronicle and its sinister plots. This may or may not include your iPod, the Boeing Dreamliner and the super collider in Switzerland. Other cogs in the Chronicle might include chatter-box people who wheedle you for information amid their seemingly positive rapid fire speech, people working in tech support may or may not be a part of the Chronicle and especially those assholes who frequent internet forums.

A further complication is that not only is there difficulty in determining who and what is a part of the God Machine at all, even those things which are a part of the God Machine are not always a part of the God Machine – a machine does not use every gear in its assembly all the time. Cogs, gears and components are used when needed... so a person or thing might be "trustworthy" while at other times those people and things occasionally serve a multi-dimension entity of alien binary logic and fine mechanical precision.

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 novel 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 and horror stories and might be a defining characteristic. However, the Onyx Path people involved have employed these elements well in this book.

The book includes a set of rules which are not actually part of the story but will be part of the game engine from now on.

Quote from: IceBlinkLuck;685349So this does interest me, I thought the essay in the World of Darkness basic book was pretty good, which is a rarity for RPG fiction. However, some of the feel of the art and writing I've seen reminds me of the game Kult. Which isn't a bad thing, I really liked that game world.

This new material in general is pretty different from the mythology laid out in "Voice of the Angel", the original vignette in the WoD core. Marco Singe and his "Testament" do fit into the big picture, but it's safe to assume that he was at best misinformed: the messengers of the God-Machine have no interest in actually revealing the truth about the universe to humanity, only in telling people whatever will nudge them towards the right place in the overarching plan.

GMC and the Demon line do continue the "techno-fantasy" approach, though. As mentioned before, a good example of a high-powered demon might not be so much Lucifer as Agent Smith from The Matrix.

(The Slender Man could work well as an angel. Then again, he's not unlike a Fae, either...)

I find it unusual that there's so much interest in this concept; its not really something radically new.

For what it is, the book is well executed.

Yeah. I think people go more for quality than innovation.

Doesn't sound original. Haven't read any of it, don't really want to invest, but at a guess -- Gnosticism, a machine Demiurge, Archons, metaphors for the world as an impersonal meat grinder -- all the good bits cribbed from The Invisibles (been there, done that with Mage in the 90s) and lovingly rendered in the ham-fisted WW way. I wonder how it compares to Unknown Armies?

Still, I enjoyed those things years ago, if it's well polished it could be a great product for someone younger, just not for me. Actually I think the most dated part is the actual idea of a metaplot to sell books, but then I'm not that sort of customer.

Actually sounds a bit like KULT to me.

Quote from: The Yann Waters;684608...And now that the Demon demo is available on Drivethru, this is how it describes the Machine: "It's a literal machine, surrounding, infiltrating, and encompassing the world. Some demons suspect that the whole World of Darkness might be the God-Machine, others believe it's a function of the universe that serves itself rather than its original purpose. Still others believe it invaded a pre-existing world like a parasite. It isn't a metaphor, or a spirit, but a physical machine of metal, oil, and glass. Its primary sites, where its gears endlessly turn, are hidden from human eyes inside facilities folded into the space between floors of skyscrapers, hidden in hives of steel and belching smoke that humans simply ignore, or churning, red-hot, deep beneath the Earth's surface."

When I read this, and the comment above about Clive Barker, I too went 'KULT' in my head.

Yes, of course, KULT. Never really played it so doesn't figure highly in my head, but spot on.

So, WW are differentiating their stuff from the Mythos by ripping off another game that differentiated itself from the Mythos 20 years ago?

Actually, in this era of Kickstarters, I dearly wish whoever the fuck holds the KULT license to get their head out of their collective rear hole. Because I would pay all of the money even though I'm unlikely to ever play it.