"When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses not zebras." You’re proposing several exotic explanations that are much less likely than the more obvious, simple and straightforward ones. If it wasn’t a mistake, Horror-influenced subtle sabotage is the next most likely explanation. As for the Therans actually wanting to keep some Horrors around, there’s just no profit in that. Horrors see metahumanity as dinner and a show, and they’ll happily eat and torment the Therans just like anyone else. Thera devoted generations of effort and much of their wealth to making absolutely sure they could keep Horrors out during the Scourge. I have real difficulty seeing their genius plan to be “Hey, let’s keep some Horrors in the world, and then open up the shield that keeps us safe from them, so that they can get in!” I repeat, they’re not good for business, and won’t cut the Therans any favors.



I’m still trying to track down some definitive proof in ED canon for just what did happen at the end of the Fourth Age. I may end up trying to ask the developers directly, if I can, though I’ve repeatedly run across the exploding pillars and/or volcanic eruption explanations on the web. The Minoan Eruption is probably meant to tie into the end of Thera and the Fourth Age, but the Fourth Age ended on August 12th, 3113 BCE (if we believe Ehran), while the eruption was somewhere around 1642-1540 BCE, so those don’t quite tie together.

As for orichalcum – that is a very good question. It’s been called “utterly absurd from any metallurgical point of view,” so one might think it “collapses” into its mundane components in the absence of magic, but we have no reports in canon of anyone taking orichalcum-enhanced foci into magic-dead zones and having it “collapse” in such a fashion. The best guess is then that it’s stable enough to simply become an inert, difficult-to-determine metal in the absence of magic.

I suppose if the pillars were still on Santorini then they are either buried under volcanic ash and stone or else at the bottom of the Aegean Sea and covered in coral just waiting for some enterprising diver to notice they are man made and interesting. Another possibility is after Thera fell someone else came along, thought the shiny pillars looked nice and either hauled them off whole (unlikely but I suppose possible) or else chopped them up and hauled them away in pieces, perhaps to melt down to cover a new palace or something.
Personally I hope they are still in one piece and just buried or hidden away. Maybe Ehran or another IE got a crew together to hide them.

If they didn't directly explode, but got caught in a very violent volcanic eruption ("one of the largest volcanic events on Earth in recorded history"), then I guess it depends on how tough they were, if they're each still in one piece.

I would agree with the bad for business concept as a defence against people doing stupid, except humanity has repeatedly done the stupid thing when there was the thought of profit/personal gain over someone else, despite facts showing that the price was too steep or just wasn't going to work out they way they planned.
I mean that pretty much is the entire theme of the majority of the Aliens movies, crazy corps trying to control a beast that ends up eating tons of faces.

Most recently in SR mechanics would be the Matrix built on Foundation. A fascinating concept and actually very intriquing, but honestly would every megacorp turn over their systems and all of the interwebs to be built atop something they honestly don't really understand?
The answer is sure they did, which is why there is so much shadow work revolving around cracking that proverbial nut because whoever does will own the Matrix, but it could well backfire on them as I suspect Foundation has a helluva lot more going on inside than most realize.

Foundation should have been more eased into, like a shadownet running alongside the mainstream Matrix that has the Corps sending out spiders and other digital feelers to explore the capability of this emerging system, not just say 'welp let's all upgrade to Windows Foundation everyone....'

The theme of the Aliens franchise (and James Cameron's movies in general) have been strawman megacorps that behave in an unbelievably stupid manner, so that his working-class heroes can smack them down and "stick it to the man." It's long since gotten very repetitive, so now he relies on flashy special effects, in lieu of any actual story (see Avatar).


Foundation? Is that some 5e stuff?

Logical razors don't work that well with fiction. The writers are under no obligation to chose obvious, simple and straightforward explanations. We really only know that the Therans are likely responsible for the stabilised mana level. That leaves a huge space of possibilities. But even with a background so precisely described that there really is just one conclusion left a writer could come up with a contradictory solution or just retcon a bunch of stuff. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) As far as I know from Shadowrun there are never definite answers behind the scenes but different ideas and scenarios of how things could play out.

Also I don't think that for example the option, we don't want the mana level to drop too low and we can live with the diminished horror threat (and even better many others can't), is that exotic.

Well, spreading their solution is where Theran wealth came from. It's what among other things got them the orichalcum that might be crucial to locking the mana level. So their devotion might as well stem from that prospect. Of course they want to survive the Scourge but that doesn't mean they are willing to forgo the opportunities that come with access to the horrors. Remember with the exception of Marac they deal okay with the horrors for a hundred years during the time of the stabilised mana level and Thera has reopened a hundred years before that at an even higher mana level.

All that said. For some reason I keep forgetting there is another very explicit hint in the Theran Empire sourcebook. There are towers that reach into the sky in Vasgothia and nobody knows who built them. This is accompanied by a written down dream. So once again deniable stuff. In the dream some horror-dragon hybrid speaks of a "Theran beacon" and that they want to stop the cycle and that the horrors will have their own beacon (likely implying that's the towers' purpose) and stay in the world forever. So it puts the idea out there that the horrors did something similar to what the Therans were doing. The other possibility is that this is some kind of horror space elevator which brings us almost back to the expanded theme of Earthdawn spaceships.

If nobody else, the Atlantean Foundation has been all over Santorini I believe for decades at this point. So if the pillars are still there, they probably got them.

It's a poorly understood process (probably of the technomagical variety) running deep in the matrix underbelly and the new matrix protocols are implemented on top of it. I can offer a rant:

@JanessaVR
Data Trails pgs 83-85 and 106-120 for more on this.

I’m saying that if the world is truly so fragile that one person can, with their own magical resources in the middle of nowhere, open up a portal and doom the world, then the world is doomed. A WMD might wipe out one city, but the world goes on. The Invae are nasty, but they’re a sideshow compared the main attraction. The Horrors are a whole different league, and turning all of them loose on an unprotected, unprepared world is a planetary TPK. The game could go on if Denver got nuked. It went on after a good chunk of Chicago got eaten (and then nuked). But if the whole world gets eaten, that’s all she wrote – no more SR campaign setting. If anyone’s left, you’re playing Mad Max in the ruins, and even that’s iffy.

Are you talking about Daniel Howling Coyote? Because he didn't work alone. In fact many ghost dancers died during the Great Ghost Dance.

No, I was referencing this post, which was referencing an Evil Dead scenario - find a grimoire in a cabin in the woods, open it and read it, goodbye world. If that's possible, then my argument is to count on the end of the world sooner rather than later, if it's that simple.

Ok, I've skimmed over the first part. This is yet another reason to stay with 4e and pick up only a few bits here and there from 5e.

Actually, I think they do work. Unless I see signs that some particular game developers have a habit of pulling some very weird explanations out of thin air (which is a problem with some gaming companies), I tend to assume that they demonstrated at least some reasonable sense in writing a campaign setting. And so far from what I’ve seen, at least of the older Earthdawn material that I’m mostly sticking to, they seem to have taken at least some good degree of care to weave the setting together cohesively, so I think I in turn can reasonably give them the benefit of the doubt. I’m going to continue looking for more definitive answers, but until then, my call for when I’m GMing is the simple and straightforward explanation. I am, however, going to incorporate Jaid’s suggestion that the Horrors subtly sabotaged the mana stabilization effort, as I agree that this makes more sense than the Heavenherds getting their calculations wrong.



Except that we saw no sign of that. After the Scourge, Thera abandoned all of their “we are your only shield against the Horrors” protection racket in favor of more blunt tactics. When they returned to Barsaive, they rolled into town said, “Your lords and masters have returned, now get down on your knees to kiss our feet. What, you refuse?! Well then, I guess we’ll send in the military to lop off your heads and take all your loot, then.” And then they turned the Theran war machine loose on them. Theran arrogance, post-Scourge, just didn’t see the need to bother with anything but direct solutions to accomplishing imperial or even just commercial aims (I wonder if they’d just form their own megacorp if they were still around in the Sixth Age). So I see no reason to believe they wanted or needed any Horrors to stick around. As I keep saying, they’re just bad for everyone’s business (at least post-Scourge), and again, the timing of their actions makes their intentions very clear - wait out the Scourge then lock in the high magic as soon as possible afterward.

Though the dream story I just remembered proves the point about many possibilities. While it could be interpreted to mean the horrors somehow manipulated the Theran attempt, the most straightforward reading is that they had a competing lock and if you want to go with reasonable explanations it seems likely the mana level stabilised where it did as a result of both attempts. Before we didn't even discuss the possibility of a competition because we were focused on whether the Therans got it right or wrong. So simply by flashing the mechanism behind the lock out just a little bit, you get new narrative avenues for what really happened.

By the way, I think this may be the source of the whole siphoning mana speculation. Especially because the creature in the dream speaks of a "beacon". I could be wrong but I think this term was also used in describing the Ghost Dance mana spike. Because the question is what good does a beacon do in stopping the mana level from dropping?

Let me first point out, that when we speak about manipulating the world mana level it is likely that a small group of Therans probably the Heavenherds made the descision to do so. The interests of this group will not perfectly align with the interests of Thera or its empire. What I really think about first with maintaining access to the horrors is experimenting on them (there is some evidence the Therans do this), maybe finding ways to control them as the Maracans do. But even if it was a strategic decision: For example the Therans came to Barsaive fifty years after reopening. It sure helped that the Barsaivians had to deal with the horrors in the meantime. Though I recognize, that reassembling their empire might have been impeded by the horrors as well so it might cancel out their usefulness, and that they ultimately did not reclaim Barsaive.

Also please disregard that Thera opened up a hundred years before the mana level stabilised. It was a mere 16 years, got the dates wrong there.


Finally some quotes from Harlequin's Back regarding the question of whether horrors survive at the low mana level:


Note the options for "cabin in the woods" scenarios in this following one. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)


And on the insect spirits:

The way I see it:

- Even if we go with the Theran intention of stabilising the mana level as a given, we don't know it was them (or only them) that successfully did so.

- Even if it was them, it is not clear that they could stop the mana level at a precise point in the cycle and at any point in the cycle they wished to.

- Even if they had precise control and all the time in the world, there could be other considerations chief among them maintaining a high mana level.

- Even if getting rid of the horrors was their only consideration, the Theran lock could have been sabotaged by the horrors.

So that possibility comes in at the end there, but I wouldn't consider it a weird explanation if the truth behind all of this weaves around some of the other factors you can play around with. And that's only if the Therans truly had a shot at manipulating the mana level.


Also there is another wrinkle from Harlequin's Back, that is not explained yet. According to p.23 "The cycle will peak [..] the Enemy's window occuring roughly 300 years on either side of the apex." That gives us a length for the Scourge of 600 years. Actually that works with the history in Earthdawn First Edition where when the mana level stops dropping (after ~400 years) it is said "too soon by hundreds of years for the Scourge to have abated". Of course this is also likely the number that the Therans are suspected of getting wrong. Still Harlequin's Back is published after Earthdawn came out and the 300 years comes from Harlequin, who should probably know. So unless the Earthdawn and Shadowrun writers did not coordinate on this number, I would take it seriously.

The problem looks roughly like this:



The manalevel stops around 400 years after the beginning of the Scourge (sealing of Thera). At that point the first kaers open. But given a natural manalevel we are only a 100 years into the phase of waning mana. So we should be at a manalevel where there are not just some horrors still hanging out, but that is right in the middle of the Scourge. So we would be back to the question, where are all the horrors? Assuming the 600 years are not simply wrong, are 100 years of mana going up and another 100 of it going down missing? Or did the mana level stabilise within the window of the Scourge but somehow horror activity is far below what it should be?

Yes, an Evil Dead scenario preceded by " Creating a bridge is not something that might happen" (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Because DHC and the Azzies clearly did more than just reading aloud from a book they found.

Yes, the Azzies put in a lot of effort. They not only had expert guidance (Darke), but they really had to work at it as well. Their magical WMD wasn't exactly assembled or deployed overnight.

My point was, if none of that is necessary, if all you need to do to end the world is to find an old grimoire in a cabin in the woods, read it it aloud, and the world is gone...then the world is going to be gone. That state of affairs is so fragile that it'll happen sooner rather than later.

It's dumb.

Just another offshoot of the technofetishistic iTranshuman writers trying to make magic and tech the same thing in defiance of the basic principal of how SR magic works.

Ignore it until it gets retconned in 6e, because they're not going to elaborate on it at the rate they're publishing.

And my point was that this "if" isn't the case. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Well then, it would seem we have no argument on this point.

@lokii:

Sorry for the delay in responding to this, but it’s been a busy week and I’ve only been able to steal brief visits to Dumpshock every now and then. Also, I needed to read through the section in the Theran Empire book on Vasgothia.

I must admit, that is some good detective work there regarding the point the mana cycle was locked at; I’ve never seen those facts/measurements put together before. And you’re right, if the mana level was locked at the 400 year point of the 600 years-long apex, they would have still been in the middle of the Scourge! Somebody call Bill Cipher, the party’s still going on. That can’t be allowed to stand, or it cancels out the ED setting as they would have been stuck in their kaers until the end of the Fourth Age. I’ll need to house-rule the lock point at…what, a decade or two until the dwarven “magic meter” ball of True Earth would have been lowered into contact with the bowl of True Water? That’s pretty close to the projected end of the Scourge, but still not quite over yet.

But this also highlights what I mean when I say that I’m being forced to make fanon corrections to resolve some mutually exclusive scenarios that have been presented. The other issue, as you and others here have noted, is whether the Horrors require a certain mana level to survive, or just to be summoned. This is where SR is trying to have it both ways, and it can’t. If the ED account of events is true, then lower mana levels = the Horrors must leave for home, as they can’t endure them. If the SR account of events is true, then lower mana levels = only a problem if you want to actually summon the Horrors early in the game, and once they arrive they can survive just fine in a mana level not even one century past the Awakening. Only one of these scenarios can be true – they’re contradictory. And if SR’s account of events is true, then it contradicts the entire ED campaign setting, as the Horrors wouldn’t have had to leave until the end of the Fourth Age (when they completely ran out of mana), and the people of the Fourth Age would have been stuck in their kaers until for millennia until the magic went away completely. As I happen to like the ED setting, I consider that unacceptable, so I’m forced to nullify any accounts of the early return of the Horrors, unless it’s clear that any that cross over so early in the Sixth Age can’t leave the area of the spike point they crossed over at; it would be like stepping out of a space station without a pressure suit. That said, it could still happen, but any such Horrors are effectively “caged” by the boundaries of the spike point. Doesn’t mean they can’t still be very dangerous within those confines…and encourage people to make more such spikes. Sometimes (blood) sacrifices just have to made, right?

Now, regarding the Theran Empire book, I’ve read over the section on the towers you mentioned, and I really have to thank you for bringing them to my attention. I said I wasn’t willing to consider more exotic explanations without a specific reference, and…well…you did deliver!

From the Theran Empire book, pp. 155 – 156 (this is from the chapter on the country/lands of Vasgothia):

“Astral space throughout the Towers and half a day’s walk of the surrounding forest is completely corrupted.”

Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!

“The trees are stunted and twisted, with patterns in their bark that resemble the screaming faces of souls in torment. The leaves and needles of these trees are so poisonous that a scratch from one brings on illness for several days. The area is as silent as the grave; no animals roam in it, no birds chirp, no insects buzz.”

And someone actually continued further to record more observations?! Well, it’s just an incredibly nightmare-ish Horror-infested forest that practically has a sign at the edge reading “Abandon All Hope All Ye Who Enter Here,” so hey, what’s the worst that could happen? Pack a picnic lunch and invite the family along for an outing.

“I stood atop one of the Towers, the clouds far below me and Nidorcyl’s claws surrounding me. The writhing Horror head spoke to me, saying, ‘The Therans have their beacon, and we Horrors shall have ours.’ Then the Name-Giver head said, ‘They want to live forever, stop the cycle where it serves them. They think they are greater than the Passions.’ Then the dragon head said, ‘My brothers and sisters plan the elves’ punishment, but mine will outdo theirs. An eternity of Horror domination. We will live in this world forever.’”

And then there’s this little gem:

“I’ve heard that Theran magicians, especially the Heavenherds, are very interested in plumbing the place’s mysteries.”

And with this we get to the real meat of the matter. This is all but confirmation that the Therans are responsible for stabilizing the mana level, but it appears that the Horrors also had the same idea, and built their own mana-stabilizing artifact.

So, with all of this in mind, I now have a new ruling on what happened during and near the end of the Scourge. The Heavenherds really were as good as they thought they were. Infiltrated or influenced by the Horrors? Laughable – they include high-level Nethermancers who know how to check for (and erase) Horror Marks, and they were protected by the best damn wards in the world during the Scourge. Errors in their calculations? Again ridiculous – these are the top magicians in the world, and they had centuries to double-check all of their calculations; they didn’t make any mistakes. They knew what they were doing, did everything right, and meticulously accounted for every last possible thing related to their project – except for one little variable they had no way of knowing about – a competing project by the Horrors, constructed in Vasgothia.

And this was the fly in their ointment, the spanner in their works, and in conjunction with their own efforts, the lock was set about a decade or two earlier than they planned in the cycle, and so at least some of the Horrors could still stick around. I imagine this would have perplexed the hell out of the Heavenherds for years.

I contend that this ruling (and my one above about the required mana levels for Horror survival) make the least number of changes necessary to resolve the conflicting facts presented, and preserve as much of the canon ED and SR settings as possible.

P.S. You might want to have a look at this. It’s an interesting expanded fanon take on a timeline for the previous ages of magic. I stumbled upon it recently in my online searches. I’m really tempted to incorporate this in our House Rules timeline (even the if the dates need a bit of tweaking – he’s rounded it to an even 5,200 years for an Age, when a Mayan Long Count is 5,125.26 years).

That's interesting though I disagree with some of his conclusions. Specifically the loss of Windlings, Tskrang and Obsidimen. All of these can exist in the SR world through either being Changlings or Critters. Windlings are effectively Pixies and have been around since 2nd ed (Paranormal Critters of Europe as Sprites pg 94) while Tskrang and to a lesser extent Obsidmen, can be replicated by metagenic qualities. If you want your Obsidimen to be truly like the ones in ED rather than a troll with interesting dermal armour, then it's a case of the mana levels not being high enough for them to emerge from their rocks and there aren't any true Obsidimen in SR yet.
Are dragons confirmed as the source for Tskrang in ED? Can't remember off hand.

I do believe that there is an SR reference to at least one Obsidiman out of the Rock in either 4th or 5th Edition.

Well, sure, Windlings are clearly back as Pixies in the Sixth World, but they're pretty rare, so his idea about them all dying off and only surviving as recessive genes in other metahumans can actually work, depending on how you want to handle the first emergence of Pixies in SR.

As for Obsidimen, I just assumed they wouldn't emerge until the mana level rose higher, though as TJ pointed out, I could have sworn that one had shown up somewhere and was being called a Changeling.

To be fair, the Shadowrun line cannot call these creatures Windlings, T'Skrang or Obsidimen due to licensing issues. The lines have diverged ownership over the years. So...

Now you have Pixies and Changelings. Personally... I was happy to see the Earthdawn references stop in Shadowrun. While Earthdawn is a good game, I am far happier with them being diverged from each other than I ever was with them having a shared existence in the same timeline across the Mana Cycle.