The problem being point of refferances, I have no doubt that eventually the more intelligent Horrors would learn, but to do so they first have to awknowledge they need to do so and apparently time and again they have just curbstomped metahumanity with impunity. If you are a vastly intelligent being who has never been defeated by the same foe you are currently facing, you'll expect to win and with good reason, adjusting to the mindset of needing to catch up is a major adjustment. Then the Horrors need to form connections between relevant experiences in their past (in the situations where such relevant experiences exist) and due to their largely solitary nature this will be a much longer exercise due to the fact that they will have an effectively limited pool of experiental resources and lines of reasoning to use. They simply don't have the points of refferance to quickly assimilate and use modern combat sciences.

Okay, I give up.

The destruction from within is the big threat and it is a nightmare one too. But the Horrors failed to stop the spread of knowledge for the creation of the Kaerns. Still with Nuclear or Biological weapons they could do damage on a world wide scale.

So either they will destroy us from within or not.
But lets assume they were not able to prevent at least some preparations and creation of the Kaerns or an outer space refuge .

And Dunkelzahn sacrificed himself to buy us enough time for that by removing the mana spike areas that would be their first bridge head.


Obviously enough Kaerns survived to quickly bring up the population to ED levels.
And obviously many of the Kaerns did not make it.
Still I have to think a clear majority made it. Maybe between as high as two out of three to as low as seven out of eight.

That means that the Kaerns can hold back the horrors, so we know there are existing methods that do work (most of the time).


I bet that the 4th world while powerful did not have mass production or a matrix to speed the flow of ideas.

Just given FAB and the other anti astral barriers out there is going to give them a big head start even if the Horrors proved immune to nukes.

They were also limited by how many had the level of magic talent for the higher magics plus they had to maintain their civilization using magic.



We can feed ourselves, preserve out food, care for our sick, and even fly without magic.

The Therans had to work hard to get people to build the Kaerns.

We can communicate at the speed of light and educated or skill chip our population faster than they could have dreamed.

If anyone could mass produce Kaerns it would be us. And we still have space to flee to.


One major game changer is that only the front line magic talent has to worry about Horror marks and they have the best chance to handle it.
No way to mark the rigger of a drone.


Add in to that the sheer number of metahumans (which even with magical technology has to be vastly greater than the 4th world population). Say between five to ten times.

And physically we could deal with the lower non astral horrors with a fraction of our population including the support infrastructure (thanks to drones) so population doesn't matter that much for that.

But that also means that we have five to ten times the number of serious magical talent then the 4th world ever had at one time plus all the technological might.
And we can educated them faster. And they can spread research through the Matrix.

And they are the decadents of the 4th world so you know evolution has been selecting for greater magical talent each magic cycle.


That has to provide at least some hope.

Look Sixgun_Sage I'm trying real hard to keep being mellow Ravor here and considering what a certain pretty young lady said to my daughters last night I'm still holding on, but I still ahve to call bullshit on your latest line of thought, the Horrors are nothing but versible, hell, Earthdawn made it quite clear that no two Horrors are exactly alike, AND we have an example of a Horror who feeds by being in a posistion of Leadership, in Fourth Edition that woudl translate into getting an Edge Rating of per "X" number of followers.

Also note that Ghostwalker who was in the exact same boat as the Horrors had no problem whatsoever with "military science" when he took over Denver and the last time I checked no-one has been able to kick him out.

Besides, although I totally disagree with your position that the Horrors wouldn't be able to understand military science, even if they didn't they wouldn't have to in order to overun supply depos and command centers, the mere presence of humanity would draw them in.

Why fight us, mortal? We offer you knowledge in exchange for your ignorant. We offer you power for your weak. Wealth for your poor. Immortality for your dying, your sick and your elderly. We will raise you above all others for the sacrifice of your children. I am Noierpyh, the Horror of Light: summon me to your server and I will make you a god.

This point really needs to be reinforced. At least two dragons have already demonstrated their ability to individually run roughshod over Sixth World forces, one of them in a high-tension area important to essentially every major world power except Japan (or at least most of them, my politics of the 2050s is rusty). There's a certain amount of transitivity that can be expected in cases like this.

~J

Would you please stop thinking about SR for a moment? Pretty young lady, yes? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

What can I say, I'm addicted to these fragging boards, yes, I know, I'm weak and undeserving. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/cyber.gif)

Seriously though, for those who may be wondering the pretty young lady and I live an hour drive apart from each other so tis not as if my lurking on the boards detracts time away from her, per say. Besides, what in the hell do you think I'm thinking about when I'm mellow Ravor as opposed to cranky Ravor? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/cyber.gif)

This is thee easiest to counter. Detontate nukes around the area first, disrupting the astral plane so the pure mana creatures cannot flow through.



shadowrun genetic engineering doesn't work like ours does.



I love that the example used is that earthdawn had humans can devestate square miles at will. Have you looked around yourself? We can destory the entire planet at will. We have eliminated thousands of speices by accident. We are embodiments of destruction. We have done much more than the horrors ever have in terms of destruction!

Seriously, they have eaters that wander around and eat everything, and they didn't kill every plant on the planet. There was still multiple forests. If we went at it, the earth would sterilized for 40 meters deep everywhere. If their number and behaviours were as written, how the hell was their anything left for the inhabitants of the Kaers to come out into?



afaik, only one horror really understood technology, so it's quite likely that they haven't. Especially as their are probably less horrors than their are people.


The dragon thing doesn't stack up. It's been repeatedly pointed out here that all you need to kill a dragon flying around and breathing fire is a couple of mages with mana static and a whole bunch of SAM launchers.

And I assume that once you pointed that out an appropriate errata was issued for Year of the Comet?

Canon. It works, bitches.

~J

Those mages were all NPCs. The GM in the sky decided they were stupid. Not every character in the book has a player.

If every one of the characters in Earthdawn had a munchkinning player, we wouldn't have this thread, the Horrors would be an endangered species, and the only time you'd see one in Earthdawn would be at the freakshow in a travelling carnival. Gee... never thought I'd actually find a good use for munchkins, but hey... I know munchkins will definitely beat Horrors, and since munchkins are (meta)-human, we win.

Great plan. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/eek.gif)


Shadowrun still takes place in our world, right? With the same physics, plus magic? The only reason it ever differs is because rules are abstractions of reality. We grant that technology has changed, but reality has not changed [except for magic]. So unless you're assuming magic is going to take care of walking around putting D. radiodurans genes into every organism on the planet - or at least the ones we want, which is an awful lot of them! - I don't see how you can just let off multiple nukes over the course of several thousand years and expect things to go well for us.


No, we can't. We can't do that in Shadowrun, either. We can't even destroy "all living things." Probably couldn't in Shadowrun, either.


Read the Earthdawn sourcebook. Seriously. Horrors all desire an emotional torment in their food; plants don't really excite them. I'm sure some of them ate a maple tree or two, but there's just no reason to expect they'd get much of anything out of just running about eating every wheat, oak, and cyanobacteria they could find.


I assume you're talking about Artificer? It's hard to know. Anyway, where are you getting the idea that no other Horrors understood the technology of the time?

The fact is, no Great Dragons understood today's "technology," either, and yet the Dragons woke up and learned, just as the Horrors would do. As my man Alamaise would say, "If that asshole brother of mine can do it, Ysrthgrathe can."


What makes you think this is true?


Depends on the game. In ED, the Great Dragon - there's an important distinction there! - could will them all out of existence, although it might decide not to. In Shadowrun...well, a couple Great Dragons - the serious, many-thousands-of-years-old ones - have been thought to be killed, although it seems to always turn out that they either let it happen or they were just foolin'. So good luck with that.

For my part, I'm getting in the best Kaer I can find, and you're welcome to your nukes and radio-tolerant genetic engineering. See you in 500 years...maybe.

Yeah, the statistics are published, so it is very easy to measure what works and what doesn't. Basically dragons get 'plot power' sometimes from the GMs and win despite their inability to otherwise do so.

Other battleplans that would work: Improving cybermancy and making everyone into a cyberzombie

Also I forgot before: Any installation in space is effectively immune, even weakass wards have to beat down by the horrors, but if you ward the space station they have nowhere to stand to launch to attack from.




I have - that's what the intelligent ones want. The unintelligent ones like the gnashers just wander around and eat things. Once you understand that, it becomes clear that flowering plants (which REQUIRE insects to survive) atleast could not survive the scourge if their were lots of horrors -all the insets would have died, if not all the flowering plants themselves.

nuke the planet is only plan F. Given that their cannot actually be that many horrors, you can kill them all with hellfire from space in a couple of years tops as long as you bait them through.

This even has the attraction that they can never learn, because they'll instantly be blasted to pieces by the most powerful energy sources in the universe.

SR2, page 234. "Estimates only; individuals vary wildly." [If we're dealing with Horrors, I figured I had to reach back to the Horror days.] Now, in SR4, hey, maybe you can kill dragons with LAW rockets, or handguns, but there aren't any Horrors, either, so...this is all speculation.

What I can do is refer you to Dragons [the ED one, in this case] in regards to dragon magic. Good luck with the LAW.


Sometimes it's hard for me to tell: are you just fucking with me now?


Space is a great place to go to avoid Horrors, as I understand it. But sending everyone there is impractical. [Although I get the impression someone made a game about it...]


Horrors, page 7. "Even those Horrors that feed on physical flesh seem to share the need to cause emotional upheaval in their victims. It is interesting to note that, although the type of emotional disturbance each Horror seems to most enjoy varies, all Horrors cause some sort of emotional or psychic distress in their victims. The conclusion seems inescapable that the Horrors either need or strongly desire these powerful emotional energies."

Gnashers are the only apparent exception to this, to my knowledge, as they'll eat anything but each other. But there's no indication they ate every tree in the world, or that they preferentially would eat a tree over a rock, given the chance. [They do prefer Name-Givers to rocks, however.] Horrors, page 79: "Gnashers are simply killing machines, driven by a blind, insatiable lust to devour." Were there enough of this one type of indiscriminate eater around for a long enough period to eat every living thing on the planet? By your own logic, apparently not: some things were still alive after the Scourge.

To my knowledge, Gnashers are the only type of Horror that behaves this way. [Making one wonder why they aren't Horror Constructs, but, you know, whatever.] There are other "mindless, savage Horrors" [Horrors, page 93], such as the "wingflayers, baggi, dread iota, and so on," and all of them eat Name-givers, and there's no indication any of them eat trees, as well. But I'm certainly willing to entertain the possibility: I have literally all the Shadowrun and Earthdawn books, so if you've got a page reference, I'm more than happy to look it up.

How do you propose to do this? Bait them, I mean, to cross over in only one physical location? Assuming that there's a one-to-one correlation in physical space with the astral "bridges" the Horrors cross - and I agree there's some indication that this is true - they don't all come across at once, and once the mana level increases far enough, they're just going to cross over on multiple bridges, like they did last time. [Plus, they haven't just been using the site of the Ghost Dance this time; Hawaii and Crater Lake have already been used this time around, although those sites are now, I believe, currently nonviable.]


We have quasars at our command? Supernovas? Long GRBs? Man, you have a weird idea of how powerful humans are.

I don't know why I'm taking this seriously, or why it's driving me so crazy. In fact, you know what? This all sounds great, all this stuff you've said. Nuke the world, command from space, genetically engineer hundreds of trillions of organisms, make everyone cyberzombies, kill million-year-old beings with rocket launchers. Your table, your rules. Have fun! Play Shadowrun!

Me? No. This isn't going to fly at my table, but you're not at my table, so I just don't care. Or I'm going to try to pretend I don't care, 'cause this isn't going anywhere productive. Later!

As I said before, I am insane (see sig). And the guy you were arguing with is Cthuludreams. So once again what is your excuse? See, it may not fly at your table, but it is not supposed to. It is a Thor shot, it is supposed to crash in and blow that table up and crush the Horrors feeding there.

You know, having looked through several hundred posts on this thread, I have to say this...

First...It has definitely been entertatining...
Second... Who really cares?

Keep the Faith

Exactly! That's EXACTLY my point that you keep arguing against! They 800 years to eat the earth down to bedrock and didn't even come close. There were still flowering planets which require a complex ecosystem to survive. It really torpedoes any theory that the number of horrors is limitless, because if there was, their would be limitless gnashers, and they would have eaten the earth down to bedrock.

I'm not particularly which part of this you don't get. Maybe it's the fact that 1/100th of infinity is still infinity, so even of gnashers only make up 1/10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000th of all horrors, there has to be an actual number of horrors. Thus, horrors are not limitless. Thus it is entirely possible to kill all of them.

But if I remember correctly, gnashers were actually pretty common. They showed up a fair bit and could across the barrier pretty easily.

The exact quote in the book is that 'Legions of these mindless entities swarmed across the world, devouring everything in their sight and leaving posioned wastelands in their wake'

So they are pretty common, and they did eat everything. So lets assume that they comprised 1% of all horrors, the total number of horrors has to be pretty small. Evidence? Assume they could eat 100 square meters of material a day, that means that in 800 years the gnashers could all organic material and soil on each if there was 3.8 million of them (approximate).. meaning that there is what, 380 million horrors? Heck, even if I'm out by a factor of 10, that still only gives you 3.8 billion horrors. Which is a lot no doubt, but not even as many as people.

Incidently, that is the number that would render the earth an inhospitable wasteland. As it patently didn't, we're talking 1/10th or 1/100th of that number of horrors. But I'm pretty comfortable with an estimate of less than 400 million horrors. It stacks up, is a seriously credible threat and doesn't wreck the earth. Maybe I've over estimated how much they can eat and it's closer to 10 square meters. Which isn;t true as the exact quote in the book is "These jaws allow them to eat their own weight many times over in mere minutes'

To me this gives a consumpation rate MUCH HIGHER than 100 square meters in 24 hours, so my estimate of total horror numbers is very conservative.

Either way, the number of horrors does have to be in that 400 million ballpark. It could be much less.

Seriously the 'destructive impact of the horrors' is approximately that of a 4 miles across asteroid or the volcano at yellow stone exploding. Very big, very dangerous, but definable, countable and beatable.



Err, all these things are stars, and my point was that using only a tiny proportion of a star's energy is unimaginably more destructive than the horrors themselves. The horrors are not that scary. They are actually frikken piss weak. Large rocks are more numerous and more dangerous.



This gets the biggest lol from me - clearly you just make an even bigger mana spike, and go disrupt the other big sites with permanent background counts by building a nuclear reactor or toxic waste dump. This is the easiest part - you're trying to create an early bridge so you can fight them where you want - if you haven;t killed them before they all come over, you're going to need to start trying to send biological or chemical weapons back the other way as fast as you can.

I can't believe it, I'm actually starting to get bored with the topic, but I will say this, you are making an assumption that I don't think holds water, namely that the Horrors or their Mana Bridges care about Background Count, remember the state of Astral Space in the Fourth World and it didn't seem to bother the Horrors one bit.

Background Count may well be one of the Horrors.

Edit: lest someone think I'm making a baseless and generic statement, I'm talking about Ristul here.

~J

I'm assuming that horror space is an aspect-ed domain to horrors - it's horror tainted. Not sure that's a huge assumption, given that it kills mana spike/ambient mana, which is what you need to know.

Meh, "Horror Space" acted in the same manner as Background Count did and I don't remember anything talking about how it was possible to "override" the Horror's polution in the Astral and drive Horrors away by torturing entire villages in the most henious ways imaginable before torching them.

So yeah, I don't agree that your assumption holds water.

Fair enough. To be honest, I partly agree with you - the suffering caused by torturing people would be horror aspected. But I do think there is grounds to assume that the taint caused by suffering is different from radiation or the hazing caused by a cyberzombie because we know these domains are aspected differently. But either way, even if you cannot contain the mana forms, killing all the physical forms is quite achievable, then you just have to deal with the mana ones! A corps of cyberzombies would be the best plan, if you have a couple of hundred years to perfect the technology. They are dual natured so it's much harder for the astral forms to hide.

Sure, you could kill any great dragon just by knowing where it is and applying enough explosives. The thing is, what happens when the rest of the dragons get word that some contingent with very powerful (and therefore very traceable) weapons is out to exterminate dragons like pests? Bad things happen. It's a suicide course, straight up.

Same thing applies here. You somehow manage to kill one horror, and you just earned a lot of attention.