I've seen a subject where Franck Trollman said that if the horrors would come back in Shadowrun, they lose (into the OSSR he and AncientHistory did about the Tirs).

He put down raw numbers about population, number of mages, weapons.

However, while totally theorical of course (since it's fictionnal anyways), I wouldn't have such faith.

The stupidest of horrors may have a hard time, yes. And that's still debatable because :

A- they corrupt the astral space to a point where mage cannot even astrally perceive without suffering pain (and risk beeing marked).
B- the ones who manifest from the astral space can disrupt your tactics greatly (how to shoot missiles when your opponent appear at close combat range).

But they may lose. However :

Now consider that the really intelligent one can take control of you, corrupt you from distance and stuff with an horror mark. Give them one, one goal: nourrish from people's pain and terror.
Now corrupt people that can launch mass-damage weapons and mankind could be very close to extinction. Add to that chaos that you can manipulate the events to raise tension between nations and things go even worse.


I wouldn't bet on a win of mankind.


(still it's a useless post (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) )

We've never had anything resembling stats for the Horrors, so no way to know.

Not in shadowrun, but there's some thing existing in Earth Down (though not the same system, I admit)

Seems odd, I would imagine ED had many more adepts (includes mages) pre-Scourge than the 6th world does now.

Post-Scourge, there are still tons of adepts around because the mana levels are 'stuck'.

Yes we have—they've been statted in several editions of Earthdawn. That doesn't permit a precise comparison for a variety of reasons, but ED Horror stats can be compared to ED metahuman stats, and the difference between ED Horror and ED metahuman stats can be compared to the difference between ED metahuman stats relative to the difference between those same metahumans in SR.


I'm not sure I've seen the argument that you're talking about (I'll have to dig it up), but I would concur—most "Horrors are screwed" arguments I've seen depend heavily on assumptions about how unified metahumanity would be and how quickly they would recognize threats. In particular, I don't think I've seen any compelling argument about how the Horrors whose powers would be magnified, some exponentially, by the environment of the Sixth World (Bone Crown in particular).


Keep in mind the total populations. Powerful Awakened seem much more common per capita in Earthdawn (keeping in mind that ED Adepts probably correspond more to mid-grade Initiates rather than standard SR awakened), but the Sixth World has an awful lot of capita.

~J

We have one Horror stated in one of the paranormal creatures books. A Wraith I think.

Didn't Dunkelzahn or some other immortal estimate that metahumanity still needs a few centuries before it is ready to face the Horrors?

PP 456-506 EarthDawn 3rd edition Gamemaster's Compendium.

IDK about Dunkelzahn, but I know Lofwyr has had a few things to say on the issue. Most recently, to my knowledge, in the video game Sahdowrun Returns: Dead Man's Switch.

Which has absolutely NOTHING to do with Shadowrun. *shrug*

It's the prequel series, and is compatible, albeit not directly. If you're going to be such a purist as to exclude it, then horrors don't belong in your game anyway.

compatable is arguable, while the fluff is similar the mechanics strayed quite a bit at times so it makes comparing ED & SR sort of like arguing SW vs ST sometimes.

I personally wish SR magic worked more like ED, but we all have our whims. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)


As for survival, it depends a lot on just how hot it gets. ED lore speaks of tides of creatures stripping the land bare (think tyranids with mojo tossed on top for good measure, though with some limits as they don't kill the world entirely) and this was just the lunkheads.

VS singular/smaller forces humanity could probably give the Horrors a good showing, but when the walls of reality themselves start to bleed and the waves from the endless sea comes crashing through, it could make for warm times.

The comforting thought is that the Horrors really can't come back proper until the mana levels are in excess of what they were in Earthdawn - and that means pretty much everyone and everything is magical at that point.

The Dragons are clearly aware of the threat posed by even a "mini-Scourge", and if I'm not mistaken they already dealt with one - the Insect Spirits of the Universal Brotherhood are lesser kin to the full Horrors. For all that it's easy to treat the Dragons as being senseless power-hording monsters, it may in fact be that their plans for exploiting Humanity are to slowly shape and prepare it for a coming Scourge, so that this time the dragons won't have to all go sleepy-by again while the mortal races huddle in inadequate cairns.

~Umi

They don't belong in Shadowrun, that is very true...
As for Prequel - That is a matter of taste, and has not been true for years, now. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/eek.gif)

The most potent of Horrors feed on pain, misery, and despair. All of those are provided by the way in which meta humans treats one another. The Horrors already won. Dystopia...

as i understand it, insect spirits aren't really related to horrors at all. it's more like "insect spirits require a moderately high mana level, and their presence suggest that the coming of the horrors may not be very far away if the mana levels continue to rise at their current rate".

honestly, i rather suspect that the endless wave of near-mindless consuming beings won't be that big of a deal, over all. they can't be negotiated with, and they leave land pretty unusable and are probably less controllable than most NBC type weapons anyways, so nobody is likely to support them. the barrens will get trashed pretty hard, but apart from that, i rather doubt they'll hold up well to, say, full auto machine guns with suppressive fire and APDS rounds or similar that they'll face if they try to hit anywhere important, and if they weren't even devastating enough to depopulate plant and animal life entirely when the main opposition they could have faced was out of the picture, i doubt they'd do *that* much beyond the first surprising wave.

but i don't think the intelligent ones would be all that easy to deal with, as has been noted by others.

Exactly. Earthdawn != Shadowrun, and the systems are not nearly as compatible as folks are suggesting.

Not to mention that given the rights ownership issues these days, it's an open question if ED is even actually a prequel anymore.

The two worlds were still built to intertwine, and share the same basic conceit of "Ages of Magic".

Now, sure, as game systems they don't directly compare - they're pretty much as different as you can imagine mechanically - but to suggest that the Lore no longer matches up just because of current legal ownership idiocies? That's kinda dumb.

Now, if ED or SR got rebooted somehow and given a new canon to work with? Maybe. But ED doesn't look like it's going to be getting any updates any time soon (why do they even sit on the property then? are they hoping it will eventually become valuable somehow?), and SR doesn't seem ready to reboot itself in the near future either.

So yeah, new players to SR5 don't need to know anything about the Horrors, because the game doesn't deal with them. But from a game universe standpoint? They're still canon, and they're still a major point of the lore, right next to things like the Cycle of Magic and Dragons.

~Umi

Against a finite number of horrors? As has been pointed out, metahumanity's biggest weapon against the dumb horrors is their biggest vulnerability against the smart ones. We rely on a very centralized infrastructure, with lots of points of failure. Comparing our modern day world, a coordinated hit against a few of our power stations is enough to bring 80% of the US to its knees for years. That sort of thing can't beat horrors. Independent, resilient communities could probably manage it, but that's not where Shadowrun is. If they had a few decades of wind-up to transition over, yeah, they could probably weather or even beat that storm.

An infinite number of horrors? Infinity almost always wins. Could metahumanity establish their own caerns and weather it out? Yeah. But you can't really 'beat' infinity.

Earthdawn doesn't really work as a precursor to modern-day earth. All the tie-ins to Shadowrun were nothing but developers making cute little references and in-jokes.

The horrors, hard to say. When magic has risen to the levels that attract them, humanity will have had centuries to develop magic and will still, presumably, have technology - which will also be more advanced, assuming that high mana levels don't mess it up (like nukes in Shadowrun). But will metahumanity be able to present a cohesive front against them? I imagine the Shadowrun world in the distant future will still be fragmented into various power players, as it has been since the beginning of recorded history. And human capability will still have hard limits. Look at how great dragons and immortal elves break the very setting, because of high, uncapped Magic ratings, and then imagine stuff even more powerful. I could see humanity surviving, but winning? Nah.

Why doesn't it work? What about it causes any sorts of problems?

You can't just excise the Earthdawn structure without crippling things. Too much of what is vital to the soul of Shadowrun is directly shared with Earthdawn. Trying to cut out the Earthdawn aspects would cause far more problems than leaving them in ever could.

You can't really have the Sixth Age without having had the Fourth Age. If magic "returned to the world", it by definition must have been here previously. The Dragons were around then, they're still around now - they didn't just appear from nothing. Ditto for the Immortal Elves. The various metatypes of humanity are all essentially identical to their Fourth Age counterparts, minus the obvious cultural disconnects. (Except, of course, when those disconnects have been repaired - such as Dunkelzahn helping to revive Or'zet, and the Immortal Elves reviving Sperethiel.)

Pretty much everything to do with Shadowrun's magic draws from Earthdawn. And Shadowrun is nothing without the Magic. It is the lynchpin concept - "what would the world look like if Magic came back to the world in the modern day and people had to try to reconcile a technological dystopia with supernatural craziness?" So trying to ignore or exclude the Earthdawn aspects of the Shadowrun universe would require completely rewriting that core idea of the world from the ground up.

It's fine that Shadowrun doesn't openly acknowledge the greater Earthdawn structures it is built upon - in fact, for legal reasons it's actually necessary that this be the way of things. But the simple fact is it isn't Shadowrun without the Earthdawn elements.

~Umi

Actually ED is getting a reboot/new edition, but with another company, under the reborn FASA here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/783548...awn-4th-edition

But again as it is a different company handling this, do not expect much in the way of cross-overs.

Why Not? I can run an entire campaign without EVER referencing Earthdawn. I see nothing Vital there at all. Earthdawn is a waste of exposition in my Shadowrun, were I to run it. Why would eliminating Earthdawn cause ANY problems? I just don't see it. Yes, You CAN use the Earthdawn information to make a richer world (since all that exposition has already been done for you), but it is so far from necessary that I cannot believe we are even debating its merits. *shrug*



My 4th Age does not have to include anything from Earthdawn. Not one iota. So Magic existed once before... In my Shadowrun, Magic existed in the 5th Age too, but not at anywhere the current levels of Shadowrun. My Dragons are not beholden to the Whims of Earthdawn, nor would I want them to be, assuming I was running a game. Yes, You have some entertaining tie-ins, should you have both game lines, and there are some entertaining references that can be used as in-jokes, but they are hardly necessary to the Magical Cycles of my World. The 4th Age is not, nor has it EVER been delineated in Shadowrun. There are vague references, and that is all. And those references can be something else entirely, should I want them to be.



I completely disagree. They systems do not work anything like each other, so why should I have to give a nod to Earthdawn at all? I am perfectly capable of explaining Magic in the 6th World without ever having to consult a single Earthdawn book.



And I call BS on this. It is Perfectly Shadowrun without ever needing to acknowledge Earthdawn whatsoever. Shadowrun is a game where Magic Meets Man and Machine. Nothing in that description requires that that Magic be from Earthdawn.

So it's somehow still Shadowrun without Dragons, Immortal Elves, an earlier age of Magic, the metatypes having existed previously, et cetera? Or those things are somehow not directly from Earthdawn?

You seem to be suggesting that you can somehow have all these things in Shadowrun while magically managing to have them not be part of Earthdawn. That in your version of Shadowrun, there was no "Earthdawn Chapter of History", and yet oddly enough everything that would have cropped up as a direct result of that nonexistant "Earthdawn Chapter of History" still actually cropped up anyway through separate unexplained coincidences, or something like that?

No, I'm sorry, that's just stupid.

If nothing else, major Shadowrun characters directly stem from the "Earthdawn chapter of History". Harlequin is a relic of the Fourth Age. He was a Knight of the Crimson Spire, he fought Horrors in the Fourth Age, he fights against their return now in the Sixth, he was an Ambassador to the Blood Wood elves, et cetera. He is a direct link to the world of Earthdawn - he was there to witness it. His great rival, Ehran the Sage, is likewise from the same chapter of history, and is an equally important character in the world of Shadowrun.

Or, heck, the Dragons are also relics of that same age, and they too help the Earthdawn world and the Shadowrun world to intermingle. They dredge up artifacts and codexes, they teach the Earthdawn languages to the mortal races... I mean come the fuck on!

You want to have everything that originates in Earthdawn, but not call it Earthdawn for some bizarre reason? You want to take characters and events and languages and artifacts and places from the Earthdawn lore which have had sweeping impacts on the world of Shadowrun, but just pretend that they're actually somehow separate in any meaningful way?

No, I'm sorry. The two worlds are one - they always have been, they always will be. What you're arguing is like having Frodo Baggins and Bilbo Baggins not be part of the same Middle Earth. It's complete nonsense.

~Umi

The fact is that you can have a previous age of magic without referencing Earthdawn, which is what GMs who have bought the newer editions of Shadowrun and have never even heard of Earthdawn do. I liked it better without the Earthdawn crap shoehorned into it, especially the twinkly Mary-Sue GMPCs like Harlequin.