I don't believe that. I mean we're not talking machines here. Real people feel emotions, have regrets, abhor change, memories linger.
Even Loftwyr probably misses the old days now and then and Dunkie even if he didn't agree with him.

I think the strong immortals occasionally have ennui now and then, it's just that it doesn't last very long or affect their "A" game as it where. Or they're just damn good at concealing it.

i don't mean they don't have regrets. like you said, i just don't think it stops them from doing things with their lives.

So you're saying Harlequin invented emo?

but those six thousand researchers aren't sharing with each other. they don't all benefit from every hour of research that each has performed. ten guys who are all experts in different subjects are not as impressive as one guy who's an expert in all of those subjects.

Heeey exactly. Great minds and all.

Btw my topic was supposed to be about dragons. How the hell did we get to IEs?

Yeah, IEs and Great Dragons are kind of joined at the hip. Talking about oen will almost always spill into talking about the other.

Let's say, just to amuse me, that we used teh cap of 6 (9) in magic for humans, 7 (10) for Elves, and 12 (18) for Great Dragons. Let's further suppose that Immortal Elves have a magic rating of 8 (12), and that any of them could take the Magical Apptitude (Magic limits is +1) Quality thing.

What you get are human magicians who top out at Grade 9, with the Black Lodge guy getting a 10 because he's all Prodigy and such.

You get Elves stopping out at 10, where they can be all Princely over people and snoot.

You get IEs at Magic 12/Initiate 12, who know stuff that no other magician knows, and Harlequin, a Magical Prodigy IE, who has 13/13 and is thus the most powerful Magician around, one who can shake hands with a Dragon and get away with it.

You get the normal dragons, all in the 7-12 range, then the Great Dragons who could be as much as Magic 18/Grade 18 Initiates, which gives them power levels so high that they might as well not even have stats. A couple (Dunk and Lung) probably have Magical Prodigy as well, pushing them to the 20/20 level where they just kinda *drip* with magic.

Creates a nice platform.

Thor shot'd kill any dragon.

Heck, they *nearly* got Alamais with a laser. He escaped by teh skin of his teeth. (My Edge! YIKES!!! *burnburnburn*)

It's a dragon, not *Superman*.

Nah, it's not retribution that stops them from being killed.

It's the silly need for Invincible Plot Hammers™.

A plot device laser fired by plot device characters.

Would you let Butch and Sundance kill the Bolivian Army with a Thor Shot?


Another thing to consider is that IEs and dragons don't have Initiate Grades the way normal magicians do. IEs have Circles in various Disciplines and I can't fathom what dragons have.

No, but Butch and Sundance were the unstoppable heroes, who made one minor mistake and ended up facing a lot more than they thought.

Which in SR, IEs & GDs would just win the fight in that instance.

Well one certainly existed in ED, Garlthrik who wasn'r dying because he was afraid to. The Earthdawn Journal had an adventure where you fetch an amulet that preserves mental faculties for himto stop him going senile. I seem to be the only person who thinks he survived to SR and is calling himself Adam Alone, a famed ork artist, who among other stuff introduced Nadja Davier to Dunk.

Becasue he was afraid too? That's priceless! I love it.

Crap there's a challenge, he's "photoed" in SR2's color section (the culture on in the magic chapter) and mentioned in the Dunk write up by Tom Dowd that appeared in Dragon about ten years back and was reprinted in, I think, Super Tuesday. Thats about it, i think. Mostly I work from two very similar pictures on in the ED first ed book aty the start of the GMs section (again I think) and the aforementioned SR2 piccie. Not much at all to go on but the idea of an immortal Ork thief turned artist. The Alone name(should have an accent on the e, so read as A-Lon-ay), I think ties in with Garlthrik being the big solitary, selfish thief,only caring about himself.

yes, but man-hours of research has--not to be unduly harsh--no actual bearing on the topic, which was 'how magically powerful are GDs and IEs?' FrankTrollman's point was that GDs and IEs aren't necessarily all that powerful (or at least, that they're not unbeatably powerful) because the sum of their magical knowledge can be reproduced by a bunch of less-powerful mages. and while it's true that their knowledge can be reproduced and even surpassed by the world's population of magical researchers, not one of those researchers will have consolidated as much magical knowledge--or, rather, magical power--as a single IE or GD.

for several examples of not-usually, check out just about every action Lofwyr has taken agaisnt another immortal. Lofwyr actually strikes me as one of the easier immortals to take down, because he's so... active. he takes risks and acts openly, where most of the others hedge their bets and work behind the scenes--even Harlequin.

If you tickle an IE he laughs. If you prick an IE he bleeds. If you poison an IE he dies. If you shoot an IE he also dies; the same goes for stabbing, immolations, disembowelment, evisceration, and even beheading.

The trick is successfully doing these things to an IE. Aside from their Leet 4th World skills (Most are 10+ Circle in several disciplines. Harlequin is both a highly skilled Swordmaster Adept and a master of several magician disciplines, at the very least. He may also be a light bearer of some sort. Alachia has leet 2nd World Magic skills that put many IEs to shame, including the ability to ReName things on a massive scale ), they also tend to have a great deal of secret political power and the scads of bodyguards (fodder) and intelligence sources that go with it. Paranoia also figures heavily into it because pretty much every IE hates the guts of, at least, one other IE and is hated in turn. When you have immortals plotting vengeance upon you over the centuries you have to be paranoid and when you have upstart mortals who are vying for the political power that you have accumulated over the centuries then you need to be even more paranoid. This is why I assume that Alachia and the rest have custom spells that eliminate the danger of using toilet paper that is coated with the most deadly contact poison in the world and other embarrassing but quite real hazards.

If you pull a gun on an IE you'll almost certainly trigger some sort of anchored magical defense and be reduced to your component atoms shortly after. If you aren't then you''ll probably wish you were. Since they have no skill caps and have had dozens of grades of Initiation since before it was called Initiation, +100 Increased Attributes aren't impossible. One may as well assume that any IE has an infinite dicepool for dealing with standard threats while batles with other Ultimate NPCs are just GM fiat.

Poison, shoot, stab.... those are great suggestions I think everyone should try and utilize them.

See you can justify plot points anyway you want but they're still just plot points and not characters.

Yes yes anchored magical defenses yadda yadda... my team has nukes, several as a matter of fact. I'm sure if I sent one to a IE in a normal game it wouldn't work, it'd get sent to the wrong place, etc. GM damn fiat and handwaving just because these people are not characters, they're plot points.

I loathe Ultimate NPCs, they lead to MacGuffins and Deus ex Machina like you wouldn't believe, which is just crap writing/plotting.

Uhh, actually I'm 90% certain the immortal elf package includes Immunity to age, pathogens, diseases, and poisons.

well, given the typical stats for an IE is "can't be killed, and always succeeds at whatever they're doing", i'm going to say it's irrelevant.

i'm also going to say that no, you don't gain any power from cutting off their heads, because they aren't the kind of immortals from highlander, they're a completely different thing. and twice as annoying.

While I imagine that IEs listen to a lot of Queen, they don't actually get a quickening every time they chop the head off another Immortal Elf.

They do mostly know some Blood Magic as it wasn't considered weird back in the 4th age to use that stuff. So many IEs can probably gain some of the powers of a fallen comrade by eating them aboleth style. Not all ofthem can do that, but it makes the immortals uncomfortable around each other.

-Frank

Was using castle figuratively, there.

Have these guys, or even the location, ever popped up since? Or were they just props for a single scene?