Chronicles of Darkness is the second edition of the new World of Darkness role playing game. The new World of Darkness was the attempt by White Wolf to do a reimagining of their existing World of Darkness game lines. The old World of Darkness games ended in a choose your own apocalypse send off that allowed them to keep the games while dispensing with the convoluted and often contradictory setting they'd built up over the past thirteen years. The new setting saw moderate success but ultimately failed to attract the die hard fans away from its previous incarnation. White Wolf ultimately decided to scrap the new setting and passed it to Onyx Path Publishing. Onyx Path in turn released the second edition of the new World of Darkness under the title Chronicles of Darkness to distinguish the two settings.
Chronicles is in general a modern supernatural horror RPG using d10 dice pools for task resolution and has a strong focus on characterization baked into the mechanics. Characters are built by filling out dots to express attributes, skills, merits and whatever else which inform the size of the dice pools. All of that will be familiar to anybody who played the older World of Darkness games but that's about where the similarities end. The Chronicles of Darkness core book has character creation for regular old humans. Yes, they can have psychic powers but those aren't even that strong. The other game lines exist but there books assume possession of the core book for the complete rules so the default for the setting is normal humans against super natural threats in stark contrast to the old World of Darkness. That's right, you're playing Call of Cthulhu but with vampires, werewolves, and mages. This includes a sort of sanity stat called integrity. Characters also have virtues and vices that reward role playing with will power points to be spent on skill checks and powers. These elements help to mechanize the role playing into the game systems and make the character a bit more than mystery solving, mythos battling, sacrificial victims of the setting.
Once you have your character the story teller will weave their tale and call for rolls in the form of attribute + skill, attribute + attribute, or however else the dice pools are generated and the players will roll that many dice. Difficulty is raised or lowered by just adding or subtracting dice. Unlike previous versions the target numbers are always eight, nine, and ten with the tens exploding. Dice showing those numbers count as successes. Five or more successes is an exceptional success, one to four successes is a success, zero success is a failure. If the dice pool is reduced to zero or less then the player makes a chance roll where only 10 will grant a success and a one inflicts a dramatic failure. Players may also elect to turn a normal failure into a dramatic failure once per session in order to gain a beat. Five beats earns an experience point which can be spent on character improvement. Beats are earned in a number of other ways most of which involve risks or bad things happening to the character. Most unmodified rolls are going to be in the one to five dice range meaning characters have better than even odds of succeeding at unmodified rolls. Conversely, beats come from risks and failure compelling players to take risks and court disaster. While the story teller decides the density of risks the rules as written provide no discretion for awarding beats for good role play or clever solutions. This makes for a game that is very much about striding into and sprinting away from your own bad decisions.
The last thing worth noting is the default setting. Chronicles is the reboot of the reimagining of a setting that was arguably kinda insane. The old World of Darkness had vampire civil wars that raged through the centuries, werewolves are ecoterrorists, men in black are actually human mages trying to keep the existence of magic from the general public, and mummies are a thing. Behind all of this was God who created the setting and cursed Cain to be a vampire. By contrast the new World of Darkness was too cool and postmodern to give you straight answers about why vampires and mummies are running around. With these two poles in mind Chronicles had a lot of latitude for deciding how to frame the setting and they decided to go all in on the weird. The central antagonist type thing for Chronicles of Darkness is the God-Machine. The God-Machine is an incomprehensibly vast mechanism distributed through space, time, and beyond. It assembles machine angels to accomplish its tasks and installs supernatural infrastructure to create miracles. Its parts are in the world in folded space and rooms with no doors. What it wants or where it came from are questions for the story teller but it provides an enemy on par with the Great Old Ones. Like the Great Old Ones it has disparate cults but unlike them the God-Machine is intimately interested in the comings and goings of humankind. The why and how of this are again left up to the story teller. Bizarre as it is the God-Machine is a great tool for creating plots. Why is all of the supernatural stuff secret from the general public? The God-Machine wants it that way. Why did the player character's neighbor go missing? She wandered into some infrastructure and got turned into that killer cyborg from last session. What's up with the pile of CRT TVs showing tomorrow's news? God-Machine! The God-Machine is simultaneously able to do just about anything and reliant on components that can be destroyed with a crowbar. It is arbitrarily threatening and arbitrarily effectible as the plot demands.
A Rube Goldberg deity might make it into the top five weirdest things in Chronicles of Darkness but it has to compete with a lot of other game lines. At present there is Vampire: the Requiem, Werewolf: the Forsaken, Mage: the Awakening, Promethean: the Created, Changeling: the Lost, Geist: The Sin-Eaters, Hunter: the Vigil, Mummy: the Curse, Beast: the Primordial, Demon: the Descent, and Deviant: the Renegade. Each of these has there own vibe with different threats and powers for the particular variety of freak you choose to play. Chronicles has been extant since 2013. Onyx Path has been slowing down in their release and while the game lines aren't dead it would be fair to claim that they're dying. Fan support remains but new content is at a slow trickle even from third party sources. This can be seen as a good or bad thing for people coming in since it means the scene is over but it also means that the game is fairly self contained at this point. Chronicles of Darkness and its assorted spin offs are something of the neglected step child of the White Wolf gaming empire both because they aren't actually White Wolf's and because the company would prefer that people forgot the new World of Darkness ever existed. Despite this and the general indifference of that fan base Chronicles has been a very successful failure. It's maintained momentum over a ten year life span and whether it keeps going or tails off it will stand as an example that even an unpopular reboot can find a niche.
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