The "Lore By Night" podcast began to branch out into the Chronicles of Darkness, the sister line to the World of Darkness late 2021/early 2022. They started looking at the newest line of those games, "Deviant: The Renegades" (which is true at the writing of this bio). They were asked to run a game of it on the Onyx Path Twitch Channel, titled "Live Without You". Onyx Path Publishing are the developers and publishers of the book.
In Deviant, you take on the role of mortals who were taken in by conspiracies for a reason, a reason determined by you and the Storyteller. These conspiracies, whether it being a small or large company or cult, abused your trust and did something or somethings only to empower themselves for their own gains. Something went wrong, breaking your soul and causing a Divergence to occur as you border the line between supernatural and human in how you behave and look. In short, Deviants are very much human, but they paid a terrible price for their supernatural powers.
You manage to escape from your makers, your Progenitors, and the rest of the game follows where you and a cohort of Deviants have gone Renegade, wanting to fight back and fuck up some assholes, as you come to terms with your new existence, hiding from the public whilst also trying to uphold your crumbling Humanity.
With such a description, it gave me a lot to think about. I chose a series of chords that, in the context of the key of the piece (B minor), don't usually work together, using closed harmonies played on a synth pad to create tension and an uncomfortable feeling. Alongside this, a piano copies this, as an energetic drum machine rattles on beneath, creating a duality of human and mechanical responses from the listener. Static buzzes and cracks that travel across the stereo field, some louder than others, serve to agitate the listner, much like the carefully written trauma & ableist tones found within the book.
At the end of each loop is a loud dramatic diatonic choir, not terribly synthesised in sound. It's a proud declaration that, at the end of the day, these Deviants are still human, despite looking very different to the average Joe, a sentiment we, in the Real World, could take to heart...
credits
from It's Showtime!,
released November 11, 2022
Composed, arranged, orchestrated, performed, mixed, produced & mastered by: Jack Le Breton
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