Editing Demon: The Descent (section)

==So what is this Cover thing, anyway?==
The first thing you have to remember is that while angels are ephemeral beings like ghosts or spirits even when disguised as humans, demons were forced into a physical form when they Fell. Obviously, a biomechanical horror like a demon in its true form is massively obvious to both the God-Machine and everyone else, but when the Fall happens part of the Infrastructure that supported them as an angel goes with them. 

This effectively dupes the universe into thinking that the demon is an ordinary human, with anything that would support that human's existence popping into existence as needed. However, weaker Covers aren't quite as convincing. 

For example, a demon whose Cover is low might live in the basement of a building that doesn't have a basement, or all their suits might be identical right down to the coffee stain on the sleeve- it gets the job done for a short time, but unless they can strengthen it even a little bit of investigation by mortals will make it clear that something's not right. And of course, the God-Machine's agents are always watching. 

In practical terms, Cover can be used as your supernatural tolerance in the place of Primum (your normal power stat), which is good since it's easier to raise your Cover rating than your Primum. Additionally, it can be used for "spoofing", giving a fake reading to anyone trying to use supernatural powers that would identify you as non-human, and 
can trigger its Legend to temporarily gain skills and Merits that you don't have which the Cover's identity would be expected to possess (at the expense of a negative condition that only gets resolved when you get those skills or Merits for real). 

Unlike the typical Morality/Integrity system, the main source of cover loss (or "compromise") isn't doing bad things- it's doing things that make people suspect you're not who your Cover says you are. Acting "out of character" for your Cover is the most obvious one, as is assuming demonic form, but the use of Exploits and some Embeds also risks compromise as well. Naturally, letting information about your true identity get leaked out is a compromise as well- all the more reason for demons to keep their real identities as secret as possible. Luckily, it's possible to possess more than one Cover, so you can always switch them out in case you need one of your identities to lie low.

All that being said, if you're really and truly fucked, you can destroy the Cover to "go loud", unleashing the full strength of your demonic form for a short time. It's temporary, but highly potent and a powerful weapon of last resort. Just try to have another Cover ready after it wears off, though- an exposed demon will very quickly become a dead demon and that power boost doesn't last long. 

Interestingly enough, there is actually a whole section in the Demon Storyteller's guide that offers alternatives to this system and they can dramatically change how the game feels and plays. For example, one suggestion is to make players only have one cover, but this one cover is rock solid and can't degrade. Your cover rating instead represents how connected you are to you local agency. Doing this allows you to play a game that feels more like a James Bond movie than anything else. One other option suggests going in completely the other direction and scrutinizing ''everything'' players do for compromising actions, up to and including meeting with other Demons if they wouldn't be someone your cover would normally interact with (although it specifically says to exempt all of your players' characters from this in regards to each other to avoid Skub). Doing this turns the game into a very hard Cold War espionage story where allies are thin on the ground and trust is very hard to come by.

===That's great, but how do I get one?===
Obviously, the simplest way to improve your Cover is to live in it and do things your Cover would be expected to do. The longer it stays a part of the world, the more it'll be accepted by the world. 

But sometimes that's too slow. That's where pacts come in. Put simply, a demon can make a pact with a human to give them something they want, and in return the human gives up a little bit of their life: a former roommate, an unsatisfying job, and so on. That connection with the world then gets transferred to the demon's cover, making it that much more "real". Only the demon and the pactbound remember the original relationship; everyone else assumes the demon was always in the place of the pactbound (though even then sometimes evidence of the original relationship can emerge, which can be troublesome if it falls into the wrong hands). Initially all these disparate pieces grafted on cause some inconsistencies within the Cover, but with enough "patch jobs" such a Cover can become nearly impenetrable.

And if they're desperate enough, a human can be convinced into selling away their soul. It doesn't damn them in the conventional sense of the word, but when a demon calls it in, the pactbound individual will be effectively erased from existence- which the demon steps into, effectively converting the pactbound's entire life into a Cover without any of the usual weirdness associated with the workings of the God-Machine. The catch? It doesn't transfer any of the pactbound's memories or personality to the demon, so they had better know the pactbound's life like the back of their hands before making it their own. Otherwise, the resulting compromises will make that cover all but worthless. Oh, and burning them in order to go loud creates an Echo- a ghost that can use Embeds against you and will do all it can to make you miserable. Turns out that most people don't like having their existences stolen and then used up for a brief power boost. 

In theory, you can make pacts with the other spooks that inhabit the Chronicles of Darkness. In practice, this is a bad idea for two reasons. 
* You can only get aspects of their mundane lives. No trying to dip into anyone else's powers, and you can't take away their weaknesses either. 
* If you're stupid enough to make a soul pact with one and call it in, you take aggravated damage based on their supernatural tolerance stat due to the incompatibility of your respective supernatural natures. (An analogy for this would be trying to run a program meant for Windows on an Apple II; the hardware was never meant to work with that kind of software, so to speak.) Even if you survive, all the caveats to normal soul pacts apply. Given how convoluted the societies of other supernaturals are and the inability to replicate their powers, that's a recipe for disaster.

Some Demons choose to create Façades, very basic covers that use the absolute minimum of detail needed to maintain themselves (and so can fall apart even from sufficiently intense questioning). Pacts which create Façades use only trivial aspects of a mortal's life and last for a limited span of time (e.g. a demon gains access to a person's summer home for a month, and uses that to make a Façade in the form of "the house sitter"), but doing so spares more important Covers from scrutiny.