Can we beatt he Horrors?, It needed its own thread. Options

[kenji]

oh sweet merciful crap, no more.

ok, short answer: not as depicted in the ED setting that i'm familiar with.
and that's in an "everyone's an adept" setting. with seemingly geometric "level" advancement.

*Danger Rant Robinson Danger!*
long rant: why the hell are we still relating the two products? because someone somewhere got the bad idea to link them in canon? and we've had to endure IEs and Dragon Politics ever since. what ever happened to the novelty of a fantasy-derived gritty cyberpumk setting?

hell, in the ED setting, with what little play time i spent with it, it seems pretty apparent that the Horrors were simply 1) reason d'etre for the exploration / kaer thing. (and don't i wish someone would have run a first-flight-of-the-earthdawn era game, instead of a Barsaive era.) and 2) the Almighty Bad Guys <tm>. hey, that'd make a good band name.

anyways, they weren't really detailed or motivated beyond villainy, and Being a Plot Point. wouldn't introducing them to SR either necessitate converting them to either a) just really mean monsters or b) the plot point that is the Scourge and humanity hiding? if all you're doing is adding more beasties, well, i'm sure the lower rungs on the SR world ecology say "f you too." and if they had limbs and stuff, hooo boy.

[Earthwalker]

I havent votes as yes and no doesnt seem enuff so I will post instead.

I do feel the next time the horrors comes we wont be hiding away trying to just stay alive. I do believe it will come to fighting and we will for once have advantages over the Horrors.

Of course we might fight but I really dont think we will win. The best we will do is hold them back and keep our own. Of course there is always time for humanities own insticts to take over as well as we still keep trying to kill each other before th horrors get the chance.

Yeah we will have nukes but its hard to nuke creatures of astral space. As well as bigger and better technology we need bigger and better magics to. Of course we have no idea how many horrors there are in the world for all we know there 10,000 horrors for each man womand and child on earth. I would say thats a tuff fight.

So my answer is no we wont win but I do feel that humanity will fight not hide

[kenji]

[Reaver]

[Shadow]

Here is how it's going to go down.

A horror comes through to the world. The -12 essence level 56 Physical adept open up with his twin Guardian's that do 1000*10D and blows it back to hell.

To quote Bill Murray,


We came, we saw, we kicked it's ASS!

[toturi]

[Austere Emancipa...]

In the Kaer thread, the consensus was that Horrors survive everything, including Mana Warps. The consensus between the "Horrors r0x0r and will killinate everything"-people, mind you, but consensus anyway.

True enough, if they are harmed by Mana Warps, they'd be rather easy to kill/destroy/whatever. Apart from the fact that they Damage Shift any damage they might ever take and can't ever be killed, of course.

[northern lights]

personally i think the long nights in alaska have had their effect on our friend shadow. i mean no disrespect, but you are so far out there in your post that i have to assume it is either a joke or that you haven't slept since the night/day cycle was normal.

i think we referenced as best as we could that horrors would survive mana warps.

as it sits, this topic has been beaten nearly to death and i am going to say that we will fight, then realize the futility of it as it escalates and hide out the worst.

i would like to point out though that i get the impression that a lot of people here are not that familiar with the horrors and their effects on the previous worlds. i would strongly suggest that they familiarize themselves with the earthdawn universe so that they understand what a destructive force the horrors are meant to represent.

yes we could argue that "earthdawn is not shadowrun" and cry wolf about how this all sucks like mike. (which the man does have valid points about it being poorly done in places) but it is still there and no one has taken it out. we still see canon references to the scourge and horrors as well as legends, characters and artifacts from earthdawn. so until the day comes that the official word from the shadowrun side is that there are no relations, then we must continue to accept the fact that the two are linked.

aside from that i am pretty much done.

[Austere Emancipa...]

[Moirdryd]

Just to drop a voice in form old blighty. Isnt there the old Harlequin set that mentions the Horrors and what they are doing and more importantly i think weve left a big part of the Sixth world out of the equation when it comes to dealing with a Horror insurgence, namely Dragons and specifically Great Dragons, they are no friend of horrors as i recall and how powerful are entities such as Lofwyr, Hestavby and Ghostwalker, that backed with the tech levels and newfound abilities of the <meta> humans of the Sixth world and of course any free spirits, immortal elves etc, i think theres a very rea chance the Horrors could be in for a bad time of it... a Really bad time of it.

[Nargrakhan]

I know I said I’d let this go but… :P

Shadowrun aside, given the progression and advancement of technology, I've always assumed within a thousand years or two, humanity probably won't even a need a planet to survive. Just ditch the Earth, make the sun go supernova, and explore the universe.

Or something like that…

Thus so far, it seem more people believe humanity has the edge (which could easily change) – and since this is an opinion based poll, I don’t see why people are getting so edgy about others disagreeing. We all have our own viewpoints – assessing the two sides strength and weakness – then making the decision on it. We might as well argue if God really exists in Shadowrun – it probably be just as “definite” in overall terms.

In a way… this sorta reminds me how the Catholic Church argues about interpretation of the Bible. Some take things verbatim from the canon work of the Bible (the pro-Horror side), while others will extrapolate from additional works or philosophical view points (the pro-Metahumans).

Damn it... I'm rambling again... :P

[toturi]

[GunnerJ]

Thre points/questions/whatever:

1) Stilll waiting for info on Artificer using nukes.
2) If Horrors can survive a mana warp, can they survive in space, and if so, why do they have to wait until the mana level rises to enter our world? Wasn't the Fifth World basically a big mana warp?
3) I think that the "pro-Horrors will kill us all" people need to stop blithely reccomending that we "study the Earthdawn sources on Horrors" and actually give us more than a few concrete examples of why we're so fucked, because frankly, I don't have the time and money to hunt down a bunch of obscure, probably out of print source books from game system I don't know how to play. Or, more simply, "put up or shut up."

[Earthwalker]

I am not Pro horror but I do feel it will be a tuff fight.

Now if by the time the Horrors get here we will have moved away from earth then this whole point is a none issue. The situation in the shadowrun world as it is one of haves and have nots. If we did reach into space would just the nice corpoates go forgetting the proles back on earth the sinless and other scum ?

If the horors do come when we are so much more technologically advanced would some of the work to seducing parts of humanity and getting us to use our superior technology against ourselves. Hey agents for them did for a long time have major influance in one of the big 8 corpoations as was.

I can see us making weapons that can beat the horrors I just dont see us uniting in a common effort to destroy them before its too late.

Sure we will fight them this time and survive I just dont think it will be an easy victory. And I think its a matter of what we want to call a victory.

[GunnerJ]

Let me just add something to my thrid point: on the previous thread, some people did post examples of both minor and major Horrors. That's great, it gives a basis for actual discussion of how hard it would be for 6th World metahumanity to deal with them. But I'm tired of seeing this "You just don't understand how powerful the horrors are, the ED sourcebooks on them prove that out pooch is screwed, go read them, end of discussion" crap. That's a cop out. If there's some proof in the ED books that we can't win, kindly summarize it here so there can be a real discussion on it, because not everyone is fortunate enough to have access to the Horrors Sorucebook.

[Austere Emancipa...]

If the Horrors really do survive in space, then escaping into it won't help a whole lot. If they don't survive in space, killing them will be really easy.

Also, some would argue that Horrors happen everywhere. So they'd pop in on every planet, on every stretch of space, etc. All the alien civilizations of the universe would be forced to build Kaers, too...

And I, for one, am certainly not trying to claim it would be an easy victory. Anything that takes massive amounts of nukage to beat isn't an easy victory, if indeed it can be called a victory at all. But destroy stuff we humans can. For example, the logic that Horrors will use what we metahumans have created against us, such as nukes: I think we're doing just fine as long as Horrors are forced to learn from us in the ways of destroying stuff. ;)

[GoldenAri]

I'm not going to add to the debate so far. I've said most of my peice in the other Thread, I voted 'No' because I felt we would eventually run and hide (into space, underground, onto other metaplanes, whatever). But I think at the end of the day humanity will find a way to survive.

I just wanted to through a curve ball in here and take things to the other extreme. What if we win...and I don't mean hold them off. I mean gravity cannons, and quark imploder munition are just too much for the horrors. We mount an overwhelming defense. What then? Does the UCAS send the 3rd Astral Carrier Group, the 101st Airborne Cyberzombie Division, and the 3rd Armored Hermetics across and do a regime change on Verjigorm?

[Austere Emancipa...]

[GoldenAri]

I'm going with near-unlimited number (equal in number to the number of living things on this planet), and only some can survive in space. Thus AE your damned if you do and your damned if you don't.

Just because no one rule applies to all horrors doesn't mean that most rules don't apply to most horrors.

[Austere Emancipa...]

The number of living things on this planet is very limited indeed. And after the first nuclear strike, wiping off the topmost 200 meters of Earth's crust, that number would be massively reduced...

[Kagetenshi]

[Playing Games]

[Moonstone Spider]

So far from the arguments I tend to think the pro-humaners hold the upper-hand. The only things in the Kaer's thread they haven't shown how to kill are:

1) Infinite number of horrors.
I haven't seen any canon proof that the Horrors are truly infinite, this seems like a copout. We may not know how many there are but infinite's an awful lot.

2) If we win, the Universe is destroyed.
Again, this is not canon at all but based on a Dragon creation myth and can hardly be taken as gospel.

For everything else the pro-humaners have shown that Shadowrun era weaponry can kill the physical horrors, and FAB-III can kill the astral ones before we even consider the power of metahumanity's magic, the abilities of dragons and Immortal Elves, and the powers like Deus. And while there's exceptions to the rules for some horrors if you take out 98% of them the remaining 2% are going to be the ones running and hiding.

Last couple of arguments:

Artificer wasn't built by horrors, it was conjured by dragons and then corrupted. Even if Artificer can use technology that's not proof Horrors have the slightest comprehension of even the Lever, Wedge, and Wheel because Artificer is not a Horror and was not created by them.

Space isn't a true mana warp, it's the absence of all magic. While horrors might live in an area of corrupted mana, that's a big difference from living without mana at all.

[Req]

I voted RUN AND HIDE, and it's not because I think we couldn't kill horrors. We kill things good, and we'll be killing things better and better every year. And I'm not presuming that Horrors Can't Be Killed. I'm just a firm believer in that whatever we can do, they can do. Either directly or through corruption of metas with access to such uberkillodeath techweapons.

That's the real key for me. It's not Horrors vs. Humans lined up on the battlefield. More along the line of half of the humans fighting with the horrors, Horror Marked and controlled. Our command and control would go to hell right quick. When you're a field commander and you're recieving two sets of contradictory orders from on high, and one comes from the president (who happens to be silently Horror Marked), are you guarenteed to make the right decision?

Would we win in the end if we enter an all-out war against the legions of the Horrors? Maybe. Maybe not. I lean on the "not" side but it's certainly not a given. But it wouldn't be easy. And if it went badly, it would make the last scourge look like a picnic in the park. The only saving grace is - all the big nasty horrors want us to stay alive, so they can feed on our suffering and fear...and we're not bound by any such limitation. We can go striaght for genocide.

[Reaver]