What's the purpose of Ghostwalker?, The wizzworm doing what? Options

[mfb]

well, dragons are one threat among many. i'm quite certain that almost every serious military on the planet, in SR, has a plan for dealing with rampaging dragons, though i doubt most of them (except may the Tirs and other 4th-world-rooted governments) differentiate between greats and regular dragons. they probably train for it as best they can, once or twice a year.

[Bull]

feathered serpent? I thought he was a western and the one that worked with that other mage chick, the assasin, was a feathered serpent. Hmm I'd like to see stats on some of the novel characters. That'd be pretty cool

I admit it's been ages since I read the book, so I could be mixing it up with something else. And I don't have a copy of the Secrets of Power trilogy anymore to double check (Damn flooding in the garage). I'm fairly sure about the feathered serpent part, but... Maybe someone who has the books can double check for us? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Bull]

For the record no book is approved by FASA, they're approved by the IP/copyright holders who happen to be Wizkids.

YOu're closer to the source than me, but... I was pretty certain that ED was pretty much the one property that didn't go anywhere when FASA closed down. IIRC there is still a FASA in existance, on paper somewhere, that Mort Weisman still handles for the ED license. COuld be wrong though. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/ork.gif)

[swirler]

what's up with Earth Dawn Link
I have the trilogy, but I have to locate them.

[Grinder]

What is your average military more likely to deal with; angry anti corp rebels, rival corps interests, shadowrunners, bug spirits, or dragons?

Dragons of course. With all the dragons (Great or not) flying around and conquering cities, which military force would focus on anything else?

Or mabye: every military force probably has plans how to deal with rampaging dragons, but they're seen as one of many treats the military has to deal with. Eventually.

[Nath]

In my mind I see this big bookshelf with hardcopies of military doctrines for various situations. "Fighting a Rampaging Great Dragon" is probably just left of "Limited Nuclear Exchange", "Grey Goo Rogue Nanotech", and "Azzie Blood Spirits Eat Everyone". All three of those things exist in the realm of possiblity, a couple of them have happened, but they hardly get touched compared to, "Quietly Depose Rebel Leader Using Orbital Lasers"

Which, when you remember who did lead the rebels in, say, Amazonia, Yucatan, Northern California, Kurdistan and Philippines, would be more on target than you wanted it to (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

[DocTaotsu]

Ah well I did overlook that fact, but what I was trying to get at is that knocking out a great or otherwise dragon is only a portion of winning an overall fight. I guess I'm just looking at these solutions for killing a dragon and it just seems like all that effort would be better spent elsewhere... You blow 20 billion nuyen on an anti dragon taskforce or you spend that money on building up and training your regular forces to deal with regular threats like rebels and what not. Dragons show up every couple of years and stomp on various peeople but in between it's not like the fighting stops.

Eh, but whatever I use GD's like mega corps so the exact working and interactions are something that are above the level of my players and my plots.

[tisoz]

Count me as another silent minority on Fuchs side. I argued this few times and it resulted in me feeling played by Synner and got me mod warned versus Pistons, the author of the story being discussed. I felt played by Synner after Dot6W and SR4 came out, because they closed many of the ways I argued a great dragon couldn't do it all and at massive levels, plus how a free spirit could own them.

I also noted that I considered your exercise futile (especifically playing off the premise that a prepared great dragon would face a modern military in a battlefield environment). I still believe it is, because no great dragon is that stupid - and the average great dragon is more intelligent and savvy than the most intelligent human being on Earth, and, with a few honorable exceptions, all the greats have several hundred years of fighting human forces, studying human psychology, and working on (or paying someone to work on) responses to those vaunted advances the military have been making for the last 60 years.

Wasn't Ghostwalker stuck on some metaplane, shut off from any and all news of progress in the world? I think someone once tried to answer this by saying he sent out spirits. I say false, no could escape that plane. Someone said new arrivals updated him. I will say false as according to the rules, someone cannot join up with you later on your astral quest. You must all start out together.

So how did GW even know he would need to KNOW an illusion spell that worked against technological devices? Ditto any buffs/defenses soley to offset advanced firepower. How many Sustaining and Anchored focuses can GW have operating without losing magic to focus addiction? This puts a limit on all the buffs and defenses pretty quickly. Also, just how many points of foci and self can be masked? This is another limit on buffs and defenses as GW has to remain anonymous.

If, on the other hand, a great dragon choses to involve itself in urban guerrilla warfare, employs hit-and-run and terror tactics, attacks mostly soft targets, and applies its superhuman intelligence to maximize surprise, seed chaos and misdirection while doing so - a modern military (national or corp) fighting in an urban environment (even if it is its homeground) is pretty much screwed.

At the time this happened, you are saying no one even knew it was GW. That says to me that most first assumptions would be that it was some shadowrunners putting on an illusion (the same illusions you say GW was using.) I think many, many magical security forces, especially those that were actually being attacked as well as those that were illusionarily being attacked, plus magically active SRers, plus every curious person with astral perception was going to be interested in what was going on. In a city of 500,000 (someone mentioned), with 1 per 100 magically active (plus being a corp center, security zones, government centers that need security, I am going to say it was probably a higher ratio) that is 5000 people, say ONLY 10% investigate (absurdly low IMO for an event playing out like the WTC going down) that is 500 people that can see the astral plane and there goes your Illusion defense as well as Concealment/Invisibility ploy. As part of the magical defense preperation, there are going to be magical compounds taken that grant astral perception and spirit powers to mundanes, so the odds are only going to get worse.

Next, GWs spirits are going to get nuetralized by all the security mages spirit attack packs. Every magician is going to have 1 to 20 spirits of their own, maybe not Force 20, but for every Force 20 GW spirit there are going to be dozens. A strategy might be for an initiate to take a GW spirit out of the fight by trying to banish it. This locks the GW spirit into doing nothing else. The initiates spirits can rip it apart without the GW spirit being able to defend. In any event, the GW spirits are going to have hundreds of targets to try to affect because they have no way to tell which targets are the real targets GW wants hit and which targets are bystanders looking to see what is going on. The more wrong targets they use powers on, the more real enemies get drawn into the conflict.

[ Spoiler ]

This happened in SR3. SR3 anti-dragon plan. Have 2 Great Form Force 2 Free Spirits bound. The agreement is they will get millions of karma if they spend half of it as ordered and destroy a target to be named. Afterwards they will leave this plane and never return. Find spirits willing to do the deal/set others free.

When the dragon attacks, have a magician with some karma rerolls handy make the conjuring test to increase the ratio karma is given. Give a spirit a point of karma, which becomes 2. Have the spirit give the karma to the other spirit, doubling it. Do this 30 times and have over 500 million karma. (Do it once more for S&G. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) ) Force 10,000/Spirit Energy 10,000 is 200 Million karma. Karma Pool is 10 karma/point. Have 2 F10,000 spirits with huge karma pools. Set on dragon. (If you have the magician have Initiative buffs outside sustained on him to give 3 passes a turn, this will take 30 seconds.)

If the spirits cannot immediately locate with Search, have them use a few thousand karma to multi-grade initiate, thus being able to overcome the masking.

The point is, that by the rules, you can wind uo with nigh infinite karma to pump into beings that are your buddies and have no upper stat limits. They can default for a lot of rolls, throwing 20,000 dice.

[Fuchs]

Ah well I did overlook that fact, but what I was trying to get at is that knocking out a great or otherwise dragon is only a portion of winning an overall fight. I guess I'm just looking at these solutions for killing a dragon and it just seems like all that effort would be better spent elsewhere... You blow 20 billion nuyen on an anti dragon taskforce or you spend that money on building up and training your regular forces to deal with regular threats like rebels and what not. Dragons show up every couple of years and stomp on various peeople but in between it's not like the fighting stops.

I think you completely forget that one goal of having a military is making sure no one feels like attacking you. Even if a GD only surfaces once every few years, if your military can take it out, and your neighbor's focused on stomping rebels, then the dragon may attack them, and not you.

How much is your security from a dragon attack worth? Especially if, as you say, a GD is treated as a megacorp by you, why would not every megacorp train to handle a GD, just to make it go after someone else?

[Herald of Verjig...]

[ Spoiler ]

This happened in SR3. SR3 anti-dragon plan. Have 2 Great Form Force 2 Free Spirits bound. The agreement is they will get millions of karma if they spend half of it as ordered and destroy a target to be named. Afterwards they will leave this plane and never return. Find spirits willing to do the deal/set others free.

When the dragon attacks, have a magician with some karma rerolls handy make the conjuring test to increase the ratio karma is given. Give a spirit a point of karma, which becomes 2. Have the spirit give the karma to the other spirit, doubling it. Do this 30 times and have over 500 million karma. (Do it once more for S&G. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) ) Force 10,000/Spirit Energy 10,000 is 200 Million karma. Karma Pool is 10 karma/point. Have 2 F10,000 spirits with huge karma pools. Set on dragon. (If you have the magician have Initiative buffs outside sustained on him to give 3 passes a turn, this will take 30 seconds.)

If the spirits cannot immediately locate with Search, have them use a few thousand karma to multi-grade initiate, thus being able to overcome the masking.

The point is, that by the rules, you can wind uo with nigh infinite karma to pump into beings that are your buddies and have no upper stat limits. They can default for a lot of rolls, throwing 20,000 dice.

There are no rules for spirits giving karma to other spirits. Idiotic feedback loop plan fails at step 2.

[Redjack]

The goal of stating your military trains and prepares to fight a dragon is a great one. Having a goal and obtaining it are two different things. We aspire in 2008 to stop all terrorism and protect our aircraft. Reality is that there were several terrorist bombings last week and yet again somewhere in the US airport security failed to stop testers who got through security with pseudo bomb parts.

At the end of the day, wanting something is just not always enough....

[Prime Mover]

Been reading over posts here and seen mention of Dragonslayers and mention of "DIVE". What book is that from?


EDIT: Found it, took me a sec to realize LA stood for Loose Alliance's.
EDIT 2: Also in case anyone wondering "Ghost Stories" are in Year of the Comet.

Since 4th edition, gettting rusty on referencing past books thought put up edit in case I'm not the only one.

[Demonseed Elite]

You're all arguing over a storyline that appeared in Year of the Comet. That book was a bit of a mess, a real scattershot of wacky ideas. There was very little discussion of the long-term future of any of the plot lines, including the one I wrote on General Saito. People have brought up before how unsustainable Saito was as a long-term plot, and they are not wrong. It's just the way that book was put together.

[Bull]

You're all arguing over a storyline that appeared in Year of the Comet. That book was a bit of a mess, a real scattershot of wacky ideas. There was very little discussion of the long-term future of any of the plot lines, including the one I wrote on General Saito. People have brought up before how unsustainable Saito was as a long-term plot, and they are not wrong. It's just the way that book was put together.

Indeed.

That was one of the other goals behind YotC, actually, was not so much to provide the metaplot, but to provide a whole pile of plot seeds that writers could pick up and run with in the future if they wanted. I know I dropped down one myself in the new Paracritters section that I'd hoped to be able to follow up someday, but never got the chance to (A comment about Doc Patterson, the guy who "wrote" the original Paranormal Animals of NA and Europe books, being missing in the Amazon).

Unfortunately, between FASA closing down, the massive delay in getting it out the door, and the changeover to FanPro, a lot of the stuff from YotC got forgotten about or ignored as Rob and Co tried to pick up the pieces of Shadowrun.

Ahh well. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Maelwys]

I still hate you bastards for what you made me do to Yoshiko for that Gencon Tournament.

[Critias]

Equally unfortunately, though, it's all still "real" and canon. Whether it was a mess that got thrown together and was meant to be a pile of "we'll explore and explain these more later" or not, a book's a book.

[Demonseed Elite]

Oh, I'm not trying to rationalize it. I didn't like YotC much, not while I was writing for it and not after it was published. It was a big reason why some freelancers pushed for more mid-project collaboration and discussion. Peter (Synner) strongly considers long-term ramifications whenever he brings a plot up for brainstorming and he's really good at gathering our opinions and ideas on it.

I'm just trying to put some perspective on it. When you ask what the purpose of Ghostwalker is, Bull is correct that at the time, Ghostwalker was mainly considered a new and cool thing to do to shake up Denver and mimic some aspects of the original Awakening. If you want to know what the long-term purpose of Ghostwalker is for the metaplot, I don't think anyone knows, because that question wasn't really asked during development.

[Fuchs]

"It's a dragon, so it's cool" is correct then.

[Ryu]

"It's a dragon, so it's cool" is correct then.

How could that ever be wrong?

[Grinder]

I don't have a clue.

[mfb]

Wasn't Ghostwalker stuck on some metaplane, shut off from any and all news of progress in the world? I think someone once tried to answer this by saying he sent out spirits. I say false, no could escape that plane. Someone said new arrivals updated him. I will say false as according to the rules, someone cannot join up with you later on your astral quest. You must all start out together.

wait, wha? i don't think it's ever been confirmed where GW was or what he was doing there, though the prisoner thing was strongly hinted at. i certainly don't remember any information concerning whether or not 'that' metaplane could or could not be escaped. i'm also not sure the rules for astral quests are applicable here, since there's no possible way that GW could have survived a quest that long.

"It's a dragon, so it's cool" is correct then.

that's not quite what was said. in fact, you could say that's not at all what was said.

[Demonseed Elite]

I want to say there was some Steve Kenson novel where it was hinted at that Ghostwalker was inside an astral prison, but it was never overtly said. Someone would have to confirm that, though, because I never read the novel in question and only heard about that part second-hand.

If I recall right, the reference didn't even mention Ghostwalker specifically, but that Talon or whomever was on an astral quest came across the astral prison, which had been torn open. Or something. I only vaguely remember it.

[Critias]

I want to say there was some Steve Kenson novel where it was hinted at that Ghostwalker was inside an astral prison, but it was never overtly said. Someone would have to confirm that, though, because I never read the novel in question and only heard about that part second-hand.

Wow, you think someone's gonna admit to reading one of his novels on a public internet forum, where just anyone that wants to can come along and quote them, documenting their shame and poor taste forever?

I kid, I kid.

...mostly.

[Angelone]

In said novel,

[ Spoiler ]

Talon learned his mentor in magic and umm... pleasures of the flesh, Jase, was trapped in some kind astral prison. Which was iirc strongly hinted at being Hell, and his ally (fire?) spirit who apparently Talon didn't love enough was involved. Anyway, once he gets to said prison and free's Jase the astral form of a pale dragon shows up and flys out of there. IIRC, it was about the time GW shows up.

[Bull]

It was never officially stated, so this isn;t canon in any way, just an idea that was tossed around during the brainstorming session.

Basically yeah, the idea was that at some point toward the end of the 4th world, Icewing was sealed up in an astral prison. Dunkelzahn, being the long-plan type of dragon that he was, killd more than one bird with a single stone when he killed himself. The Astral Rift that formed in the wake of his death wasn't just an after effect of the magic used, but it was also a weakening in the barriers that led to the plane Icewing was imprisoned in. With the temporary boost to the mana levels during the Year of the Comet, the portal that Dunkelzahn had created was strong enough to reach Icewing, and he tore his way through the metaplanes to reach Earth. Of course, he brought friends with him. And other things (Like the Shedim) used that hole to escape as well.