Out of Character (OOC):
Chronicle: Mage 2: The Dethroned Queen
Venue: Mage: The Awakening 2nd Edition
Chronicle Storyteller: Jerad Sayler
Assistant Storytellers: Hannah Nyland & Alex Van Belkum
Los Angeles: The Dream Factory
Demons in the City of Fallen Angels
The strangeness of the city may not have been caused by the God-Machine’s machinations, but it certainly facilitates them. All of its programs seem to be aimed towards a goal that the city’s demons are desperately curious to uncover.
ARC has many human members, but the inner circle consists of stigmatics and demons. Norman Castle was himself a stigmatic who had somehow received a vision of the God-Machine’s long-range plans for the city and the world. He did not fully understand these and mistook them for Arcturan space transmissions. The Starchild has spent years wrestling with the recordings of these visions, trying to interpret them and figure out how they pertain to local Infrastructure. Her demon allies use her gleanings to identify and sabotage a number of angelic operations.
They each follow their own individual goals, working together only to combat common enemies or resistance to their collective power. They often clash with one another, especially when their pet projects are at odds. Instead of overt violence, they orchestrate minions to move against each other’s interests until one side cries “uncle.” They use much the same tactics on each other that their human competitors use against them – drawing away talent, undercutting funding, and so on.
Most of its detectives are humans who believe they are being hired to spy on Hollywood stars or to collect blackmail on executives. And they are. Their demon bosses — mostly Inquisitors — then sift through their findings and flag whatever catches their eye, whatever stinks of the God-Machine. Most of D.D.’s work is dull and never leads anywhere, like most detective work. Still, its demon owners feel it is necessary. So many false leads and dead-ends, and yet, sometimes, pay dirt: secret Infrastructure, and even a revealed linchpin now and then.
An angel disguised as a pool cleaner to the stars, he dutifully and diligently cleans the pools of actors, producers, rock stars, and studio execs, although they all ignore him. He’s strictly background material, set dressing. Many a demon has fallen prey to the trap of ignoring the pool man while they’ve talked openly about demon matters, and then couldn’t figure out later how the God-Machine was able to find them.
This unnerving entity was once an angel but was somehow left behind when an operation reached its completion in the 1920s. Not Fallen, he simply remains, discarded, forgotten by the God-Machine (an Exile), and trapped in the Cover role he once played, a silent film star. He cannot speak, he wears a 1920s style suit, and his face is covered in white pancake makeup. He still tries to sabotage demons, but cannot summon help from angels. A demon once realized that damaging or trying to destroy the Silent draws the attention of angels (although they ignore the Silent), so word has gotten out: avoid him and do not engage. Some have speculated that loneliness drives the Silent, and that just the right amount of attention at just the right time might be enough to make him Fall.
A Hollywood stuntwoman and a Destroyer demon, she likes trouble and thinks she’s invulnerable. That means she can be hired freelance by just about any demon to help them in dangerous situations. She acts like she’s got a death wish, but has no actual desire to die. Her risky lifestyle enhances her sense of being alive, of her disconnection from the damnable Machine, but to keep that going, she now has to keep chasing the next high of near-death experiences.
A counterpoint to the Great Wall of L.A., the famed citizen mural that illustrates the history of the
The observatory in the San Gabriel Mountains and the nearby antenna farm are both active —
Chronicle: Mage 2: The Dethroned Queen
Venue: Mage: The Awakening 2nd Edition
Chronicle Storyteller: Jerad Sayler
Assistant Storytellers: Hannah Nyland & Alex Van Belkum
Los Angeles: The Dream Factory
Demons in the City of Fallen Angels
Adapted from source material in Demon: The Descent "Demon Seed Collection" sourcebook and Demon: The Descent "Interface" Anthology.
((Most of the following information is not considered common knowledge to the Awakened. Instead, think of it as a good setting guide for running the Demon (The Unchained) side of the strangeness of LA. Mages have a historic tendency to get the Unchained Demons and Angels of the God-Machine mixed up with other types of demons (such as evil spirits, supernal beings, Geotics and beings from the Lower Depths. Infrastructure of the God-Machine is hard to delineate from ruins from the Time Before. Further obscuring the truth of the matter further, the energies produced by the Ring of Fire appear to be almost Azothic, meaning that the angelic Qashmallim aren't far behind either.))
Los Angeles City Building Posts:
Los Angeles is a deeply weird place. Hollywood, America’s movie-making capital certainly sets the stage for the city’s most obvious oddities, but their roots go deeper. The very atmosphere of the sprawling city and its suburbs exists in a dream logic, where time seems to move differently, nostalgia reigns, and people hold outrageous religious ideas as gospel. All these things are either because of the incredibly high incidents of Astral incursions that mages study here or as a result of these same Mysteries.
L.A. is the literary and cinematic birthplace of the Private Eye archetype. Here, everybody is a detective, and their dreams are the cases they’re each trying to solve. Little wonder that L.A. is a popular haven for Geotics, Infernals, and more powerful Demons. The constant current of young stars and stars seeking entry into the golden gate of fame and fortune provides a multitude of opportunities to form Pacts with healthy young bodies, and the perfect Covers — Hollywood producers and directors — from which to pick and choose the cream of the crop.
The city’s moniker — the City of Angels — rings true in that, yes, there are lots of mysterious angelic beings here, but they are working at projects that even experienced demons are hard-pressed to decipher. In Los Angeles, as in all places, the God-Machine has been at work. In this region, Machine has taken an approach that favors immediate utility over long-term elegance or functionality. An immense amount of Infrastructure has been built over the last hundred years, but most projects were to address an immediate need. Per the Machine’s instructions, they have been abandoned, forgotten, or allowed to go haywire. Occasionally, this results in seismic disturbances, wildfires, cryptid attacks, mudslides, or other disasters. Presumably, this haphazard approach to Infrastructure serves the God-Machine’s purposes somehow, but none of the Unchained have been able to figure out how. Even the two angels who have been active in the city almost continuously for the last 50 years are unsure. The Curator and the Machinist have been putting out fires, often literally, for decades. They receive the information that they need as they need it, and unquestioningly follow commands of the God-Machine. The Angels are seeking a comprehensive solution to the city’s Infrastructure problems. Other powerful Angels guard key pieces of Infrastructure, or toil away on Occult Matrices centered on Hollywood.
The is a suspected connection between LA's seismic activity, the destruction of both the former Assembly and Concilium and the massive amounts of Infrastructure and Occult Matrices built on top of each other throughout the city. If Awakened brave enough to live and study this Mystery today they aren't sharing their results.
The strangeness of the city may not have been caused by the God-Machine’s machinations, but it certainly facilitates them. All of its programs seem to be aimed towards a goal that the city’s demons are desperately curious to uncover.
Sub Rosa
The birth of Hollywood and the movie business marked a key point in developing the technologies of propaganda. A small number of individuals could manufacture dreams and sell them to a desperate and willing public, hypnotized by the big screen visions of heroes and villains, glitter and grandeur, comedy and tragedy. Little wonder that the God-Machine was there from the start, along with the Free Council of Assemblies, the Panopticon Ministry and a vampire organization known as the Carthian Movement.
While Hollywood is a place where imagination flowers, it’s also channeled into profit and restricted by genre conventions, strict scriptwriting rules (three acts, one page equals one minute of screen time, etc.), and guided by impersonal mass opinion polls designed to make the product palatable to the widest demographic. Behind this shallow spectacle, churn the gears of occult influences. Movies, as the twentieth century’s main form of mass entertainment were an important arm of influence over humanity, a subtle but important means of directing people how to think, behave, and perform its mysterious objectives.
With the advent of the Internet and video gaming in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the locus of American dreams has seemingly moved elsewhere, making the greater L.A. area a fading power, a Sunset Boulevard of the soul, where the city sits alone in the dark and continually replays past glories. The angels are still here in Hollywood, but there are fewer of them. Once-important Infrastructure now stands abandoned, often claimed by demons, and the ongoing operations are even more enigmatic than before.
Demons came early to Hollywood to exploit its potential for Covers, Pacts, infiltration and sabotage. A very perceptive stigmatic cineaste might be able to chart the secret war between demons and angels through the movies produced by Hollywood from the 1920s through the present, but it’s nearly impossible to say who won or lost with any given film. For instance, The Wizard of Oz was not a huge success when it was first released. It only gained its hold on the hearts and minds of a generation once it began playing on television. Curious then, that it was that generation that started “looking behind the curtain” to see who was really running things, a mode of anti-authoritarianism and deep questioning culminating in the Watergate scandal that brought down a President. But whose victory was it? Demons or angels? The end result is a deep cynicism about politics and an inability to change anything. Is this the liberating road to Hell or a circular prison of angelic’s making?
Los Angeles is more than just Hollywood, of course. Other parts of the city have also had a huge impact on the national psyche by way of entertainment. More than one demon has tried to claim credit for the west coast rap scene; although those demons also have to admit that corporations free from demonic influence have sponsored the acts that have had the biggest global impact. Is this cultural appropriation on an industrial scale a program of the God-Machine, or are human beings just becoming sufficiently advanced to look like it?
Local Agendas:
Inquisitors: The puzzle of Los Angeles and its complex cultural and subcultural makeup has drawn many Inquisitors over the years... but many have been distracted by the bright lights and the cameras. How does mass entertainment seed the behaviors desired by the God-Machine? How does the God-Machine plan out the intricate chains of causality that turn a piece of schlock filmmaking into a template for a complacent population? L.A.’s Inquisitors are deeply involved in deciphering the cultural codes that program humankind.
Integrators: The romance of L.A., as depicted in movies and even detective novels, is a place where, no matter how down you are, no matter how deep in the gutter you’ve fallen, you can “be discovered” and raised up to the ranks of the Elect (i.e., movie stars or the incorruptible shining knight detectives). Perhaps these stories are also the God-Machine’s way of offering amnesty to those who wish to redeem their errant ways.
Saboteurs: While Inquisitors wrack their brains trying to decode the God-Machine’s mysterious ways amidst L.A., Saboteurs get their hands dirty by making movies — competing on the God-Machine’s own turf. They’re the directors, screenwriters, actors, and even special-effects geniuses who fight the system from within to derail it.
Tempters: L.A. attracts more Tempters than any other Agenda. The place is thick with them: Hollywood producers, rap stars, YouTube sketch groups — anyone who builds an entourage and millions of fans. It’s so damn easy to attract and manipulate the legions of wannabes who come to L.A. that the Tempters easily become the tempted, so eager to build their entourage they fail to miss the operatives who infiltrate them. It’s not a leaked sex tape that will take them down, but that single angel who shows up one night amidst their crew.
Demon Agencies
ARC: The Arcturus Ascendant
Begun in the 1950s by the stigmatic Norman Castle as a UFO cult based on revelations he claimed to receive from “intelligences from Arcturus,” this religious group, ARC, has survived long past its founder, some still listen to his audio tapes as holy scripture. His wife led the ARC into the acid-drenched ‘60s and beyond, building a large following; helped in no small part by the fact that she was a Psychopomp. Although Shirley Castle eventually chose her own successors and passed away, every single one of them has been a Cover identity of the Psychopomp who calls herself (among demons) the Starchild.
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| ARC Temple in Hollywood Hills |
The Arcturans believe that L.A. is the epicenter of a master operation that is a linchpin for a multitude of God-Machine plots. If they can decipher it, they can hijack it for their own ends. This isn’t sabotage, inquisition or integration — it’s cooptation. Their aim is to supplant the God-Machine. The ARC temple is headquartered in an old mansion high in the Hollywood Hills above Franklin Canyon Park.
Subrufa: A demon member of Arcturus Ascendant and a true believer in the visions of that Agency’s human founder, she has spent as much time as the Starchild deciphering their meaning. She can be found in odd places at odd times, confirming strange premonitions or intuitions she’s received from her study of the cult’s prophecies. She sometimes shows up just in time to save a demon from an angel, but has also attracted angels at inconvenient times for those demons she interacts with. She’s a synchronicity magnet, attracting meaningful coincidences.
The Moguls
Perhaps the most temporally ambitious demons in L.A. are a group of demon movie producers who influence movie studios in order to marshal their vast resources for their own ends. They tend to be mostly Tempters, many of whom are also Messengers. They have huge portfolios of Pacts and Covers waiting for them in case they are found out.
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| Cannes |
They each follow their own individual goals, working together only to combat common enemies or resistance to their collective power. They often clash with one another, especially when their pet projects are at odds. Instead of overt violence, they orchestrate minions to move against each other’s interests until one side cries “uncle.” They use much the same tactics on each other that their human competitors use against them – drawing away talent, undercutting funding, and so on.
But when angels are on the move or key Infrastructure is identified, grudges are put aside to deal with the more important threat. If need be, the producers temporarily flee town to “visit a location shoot” somewhere else, or to spend time on their yacht in an undisclosed locale, or to wine and dine at Cannes.
An honor code among them demands that when one of them has to forego her Cover and replace it with a new identity, her empire still remains in her hands. While thrusts can still be made against rivals at such weak moments, it is considered bad form to try to crumble a rival’s assets until her new Cover can reconsolidate them.
Discreet Distance, LLC (D.D.)
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| The Bradbury Building |
D.D. is a demon-run private eye firm that caters to entertainment companies and other large, entrenched businesses. That however, is only its public front. Its real goal is identifying Infrastructure and selling that information to demons in a position to do something about it, such as sabotage or infiltration. With offices in the famous Bradbury Building in downtown Los Angeles (most well-known for its appearance in Blade Runner), D.D. hires freelance demons to run down leads and spend tedious hours spying on targets.
Most of its detectives are humans who believe they are being hired to spy on Hollywood stars or to collect blackmail on executives. And they are. Their demon bosses — mostly Inquisitors — then sift through their findings and flag whatever catches their eye, whatever stinks of the God-Machine. Most of D.D.’s work is dull and never leads anywhere, like most detective work. Still, its demon owners feel it is necessary. So many false leads and dead-ends, and yet, sometimes, pay dirt: secret Infrastructure, and even a revealed linchpin now and then.
Surviving as long as it has by keeping a “discreet distance” from its own demon detectives, should an angel or other agent of the Machine catch one of their freelancers, they are difficult to tie back to the agency. Still, it has happened. The former offices were destroyed when an angel, pretending to be a freelance demon, traced back his employers. The firm changed its name (to its present D.D. configuration), moved to the Bradbury Building, and started over.
The Freaks
The Freaks, a hot rod club curated by demons, often face shunning for their flashy “hobby.” They specialize in truly bizarre tricked-up cars with paint styles inspired by Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. Their racing feats have become legendary to a degree where everybody thinks they’re just telling impossible tall tales. These stories actually record the weird capabilities of hot rods made from discarded Infrastructure: bursts of jet-engine speed, leaping low-riders, stop-on-a-dime brakes, lightning bolt-casters, and arrays of almost cartoonish weaponry.
The Freaks dare to recover abandoned Infrastructure and repurpose it for use in their custom cars — even though they often can’t predict the results. These are usually one-use vehicles. The club goes for a wild night out, engages the Infrastructure, and then abandons it as the angels come winging in to eradicate it. It should come as no surprise that most of the Freaks are Psychopomps and Destroyers.
Notable Personalities
The Pool Man:
An angel disguised as a pool cleaner to the stars, he dutifully and diligently cleans the pools of actors, producers, rock stars, and studio execs, although they all ignore him. He’s strictly background material, set dressing. Many a demon has fallen prey to the trap of ignoring the pool man while they’ve talked openly about demon matters, and then couldn’t figure out later how the God-Machine was able to find them.
Subrufa:
A demon member of Arcturus Ascendant and a true believer in the visions of that Agency’s human founder, she has spent as much time as the Starchild deciphering their meaning. She can be found in odd places at odd times, confirming strange premonitions or intuitions she’s received from her study of the cult’s prophecies. She sometimes shows up just in time to save a demon from an angel, but has also attracted angels at inconvenient times for those demons she interacts with. She’s a synchronicity magnet, attracting meaningful coincidences.
The Silent:
This unnerving entity was once an angel but was somehow left behind when an operation reached its completion in the 1920s. Not Fallen, he simply remains, discarded, forgotten by the God-Machine (an Exile), and trapped in the Cover role he once played, a silent film star. He cannot speak, he wears a 1920s style suit, and his face is covered in white pancake makeup. He still tries to sabotage demons, but cannot summon help from angels. A demon once realized that damaging or trying to destroy the Silent draws the attention of angels (although they ignore the Silent), so word has gotten out: avoid him and do not engage. Some have speculated that loneliness drives the Silent, and that just the right amount of attention at just the right time might be enough to make him Fall.
Edith Stone:
A Hollywood stuntwoman and a Destroyer demon, she likes trouble and thinks she’s invulnerable. That means she can be hired freelance by just about any demon to help them in dangerous situations. She acts like she’s got a death wish, but has no actual desire to die. Her risky lifestyle enhances her sense of being alive, of her disconnection from the damnable Machine, but to keep that going, she now has to keep chasing the next high of near-death experiences.
Locations
4 Clover Lanes
An old bowling alley that serves as a watering hole and meeting place for independent demons. L.A.’s true sport isn’t football or baseball but bowling. There are much higher-class bowling lanes than the 4 Clover, but few with as much nostalgic flavor. It is a relic from the 1950s, not a recreation. It was once angelic Infrastructure in the ‘50s but sat abandoned through the ‘70s and 80s. Demons claimed it in the ‘90s before the city could tear it down. It still slowly leaks Aether, so there is always the danger of angels coming back to reclaim it, but that risk attracts the particular kind of demonic clientele who hang out here, looking for a righteous fight.
Chupacabra
A trendy nightclub with a seedy atmosphere — the spiritual heir to the Viper Room and can also be found on the Sunset Strip. Recording artists and movie stars mix with L.A.’s underground, as well as with the demons who call this place their home away from home. It’s a good place to hear rumors from across the class spectrum and from all over the map; parties begun here might adjourn to a star’s mansion in the Hills, where the night can get really wild.
Update: Since the year 1994, a brood of Beasts has come and gone for periods of time, staking it as their hang-out. Thus far, the demons have made themselves scarce when they appear.
The Home of the Unknown Star
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| Home of the Unknown Star |
An example of just how strange L.A. can get without setting off anybody’s weirdness alarm. This house on N. Roxbury Dr in Beverly Hills but doesn't have an address anymore. It is from the era when many famous stars lived along this street. The house is now vacant but somehow always looks well kept, even though nobody ever sees anyone go in or out. It appears on many Maps of the Stars and on star-gawker tours, but the celebrity who once is lived here never named. And yet, nobody seems to notice this absence. They “ooh” and “ahh” just the same as they pass by, feeling like they’ve brushed against past glory as they move on to the next home of the stars. So, just what is this place? Old Infrastructure? A glitch in reality? Was the movie star the Cover for an unremembered angel or demon? The mystery has yet to be solved.
The Lesser Wall of L.A.
A counterpoint to the Great Wall of L.A., the famed citizen mural that illustrates the history of the
city. The Lesser Wall is an urban legend, with most people who mention it never exactly sure where it is. It seems to change locations, sometimes in a dry culvert of the L.A. river, sometimes on the side of a building in Venice Beach, and then on a sidewalk in Monterrey. Its murals change with each appearance, and demons believe they convey coded messages about God-Machine Infrastructure and operations. Some have opined that it is the work of urban spirits, trying to warn others about God-Machine infiltration, and one demon even claimed it is a rogue intelligence created by the God-Machine but never released into the world; it has nonetheless figured out a way to bleed its code into reality.
Mt. Wilson Observatory
The observatory in the San Gabriel Mountains and the nearby antenna farm are both active —
Mt. Wilson Antenna Farm
although aging — Infrastructure. The antenna farm beams much of the city’s radio and television entertainment out into SoCal and beyond. Either the broadcasts or the antennae array itself are important to the Machine, and an angel called Gnomon is on constant guard to ensure no malefactor tries to interfere with the flow of communications. There are conflicting demonic urban legends about the antennae farm. Some say that the farm is somehow tied into a global communications Infrastructure and that a successful hack here could affect worldwide operations. Others say that, with the rise of the Internet and satellite communications, these old broadcast arrays are nearly irrelevant. And yet, the angel remains. Is he just biding time, waiting for a new mission elsewhere, or is there still a purpose at play amidst the antennae and microwave transmitters?
