The Symphony

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THE GOD MACHINE

To its inhabitants, the world is a nightmare of occult conspiracies and otherworldly powers vying for control in the shadows. Humanity looks the other way, afraid to look in the dark for fear of confronting chaos. But it’s not chaos hidden there. It’s order. Cold, calculating alien order. The order of the God Machine.

The God Machine is a literal machine, surrounding, infiltrating, and encompassing the world. Some suspect that the whole world 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 mortals simply ignore, or churning red-hot deep beneath the Earth’s surface. Sometimes, a gear pokes out of the skin of the perceived world like a badly-broken bone. Unfortunate humans encounter them and come away changed in mind or body, or else are used as raw materials.

The God Machine doesn’t communicate with any mind on the scale of a demon or human. Even the angels only know whatever mission It burns into them whenever they’re sent out in the world. As far as any demon or pactholder can tell, the God Machine wants to perpetuate Its own existence, and thus the status quo. Demons tell stories of natural disasters stemming from the gears getting jammed or broken, which point to that existence being necessary for humanity to survive in anything like its modern state. The God Machine wants the world as it is, a place of shadows and secrets, of monsters hiding in broken mirrors and strangely patterned spiders that invade the human mind.

When the God-Machine needs something to happen in the world, It seems to prefer to work using existing human tools. It is a machine, and like any machine it requires Infrastructure — power for its tools, concrete and steel to build facilities, humans to staff Its projects, and a cover story to avoid suspicion. Whenever It can, the God Machine repurposes human labor as its own or arranges existing objects and people into magically-charged configurations. Why build a new method of communication between two sites when it can simply use phone lines, the internet, or the post office? Infrastructure is just the stage, though, not the play. The God Machine requires sequences of events demons call occult matrices, through which Infrastructure is set up to encourage and host. When a matrix takes shape within Infrastructure, the God-Machine gets the result — the output — It needs.

INFRASTRUCTURE

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SYMPHONIC ENTITIES

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INCARNATIONS

The God Machine creates angels for reasons only It fully understands — each with It's own purpose in the grand design. Once created, an angel’s role and the tasks that fall within its purview are fixed. The God Machine can transform, upgrade, or destroy It's angels, but It seldom does. While It has created each Angel distinct in Its capabilities, methods, and appearance, nearly all fit within a few broad categories called Incarnations. A Demon retains their Incarnation beyond their Fall.

AGENDAS

Though they lack the self-awareness to appreciate it, angels possess a powerful raison d’être free of doubt or unwanted introspection. They serve the God Machine and that is enough. Demons have cast away that certainty of purpose and they feel its loss keenly. The compulsion to fill that void with some purpose custom-built for their strange and terrifying new condition claims nearly all the Unchained. Most subscribe to one of a handful of demonic philosophies.

SOULS & AETHER

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SPELLS

Angels are granted Influences and Numina — magical powers relating to their mission — along with the Essence to power them by the God Machine. Demons must learn to make do without. Capitalizing on half-remembered, half-felt knowledge about the magical underpinnings of reality and physical law, demons and thus pactholders learn Etudes and Cadenzas. An Etude is a secret law or cheat code. They may be natural or may be the sign of ancient meddling by the God Machine, but Etudes are both useful and strangely comfortable. More powerful are Cadenzas, which are the use of Etude along with an investment of power to break rather than bend the rules. Cadenzas are highly potent magical abilities, but risk Compromise.