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jmecha
"Dunkelzahn's spirit eventually used that artifact to prevent the metaplanar invasion of the Horrors so early in this cycle. Dunkelzahn's spirit yet remains,bound to a cyberzombie and guarding the metaplanes from early intrusion by the Horrors. Dunkelzahn possessed three lairs, one in the Caucasus Mountains, another in Tir Tairngire, and yet a third outside of Denver."


Huh? Big D is a Cyber Zombie? can you help me make sense of this?

I been trying to play catch up on the last 2 decades of SR Fluff and when I read this tid bit on your ancient fils it caught me off guard, could you please give me a cliff notes of what happened here?
Ravor
Trust me, you really don't want to know.
jmecha
bull shit...I can handle, now what happened
Ancient History
It was the Dragonheart Trilogy. Dunkie's spirit survived the death of his physical body, but had amnesia. It possessed a cyberzombie, where it got stuck because of the enchantments keeping the damn thing alive. Eventually the possessed cyberzombie was translated directly to the metaplanes.

...yeah, reading back on that it sounds like some Rifts/Exalted crossover, but I didn't write it.
jmecha
I've always had for shit luck with novels based off of RPGs.....are the SR novels worth reading?
FrankTrollman
QUOTE (jmecha)
I've always had for shit luck with novels based off of RPGs.....are the SR novels worth reading?

Some of them are (Choose your Enemies Carefully, 2XS), some of them are Dragonheart.

It's really a crapshoot.

-Frank
Bull
QUOTE (jmecha)
bull shit...

I did no such thing! wink.gif
Buster
QUOTE (Ancient History @ Jul 29 2007, 03:27 PM)
It was the Dragonheart Trilogy. Dunkie's spirit survived the death of his physical body, but had amnesia.

Explosive amnesia? biggrin.gif

If Dunkelzahn turns out to be Harlequin's long lost twin sister, I don't want to know.
Ancient History
QUOTE (jmecha)
I've always had for shit luck with novels based off of RPGs.....are the SR novels worth reading?

Some are good. The anthology Into the Shadows is generally well done, as is the collection of Michael Stackpoole's Wolf and Raven short stories (if a bit dated). I would put Charnette's Secrets of Power Trilogy near the top, and many swear by Nigel D. Findley's novels 2XS, Lone Wolf and House of the Sun. Opinion is much more divided on Nosferatu and Worlds Without End. Black Madonna is exactly like The Da Vinci Code except better researched, better written, and actually entertaining at points.
hyzmarca
After Dunkie won the UCAS presidential election he had someone plant a giant bomb under his limo, intending that it explode while he was inside, killing him.

His plan worked. His limo blew up and he died. Everyone is shocked by the assassination and no suspects are ever found.

But you see, Dunkie had himself blown up as part of an elaborate blood magic ritual, one so powerful that it tore a giant hole in astral space which remains in the middle of D.C. to this day. People who go near it tend to drop into comas due to their astral bodies being sucked into the metaplanes, even if they aren't magicians. Those that return tend to be insane.

On a happier note, Dunkie's brother's astral body came out of the rift during the Year of the Comet.

Anyway, this blood magic ritual was the last component of an even more elabotate enchanting ritual which created a giant orihalcum heart which acts as an absurdly high rating Power Focus which doesn't have to be bound and can be used to manipulate the flow of mana on a massive scale, including destroying or creating background counts and mana spikes.

Dunkie's intent was that this Dragonheart be used by Ryan Mercury, Dunkie's physical magician drake protégé who often plays with Nadia Davier's brown nipples, to smooth out all of the world's the mana spikes so that the Horrors can't use them to build a bridge.

The heart, however, is stolen.

During the Dragonheart Trilogy (novels), an amnesiac free spirit known of Lethe is introduced. It is later revealed that Lethe is actually Dunkie himself (transmogrified into a spirit somehow, possibly a ghost). Eventually, Lethe gets his old memories back and possesses a cyberzombie named Billy. Of course, since it is impossible for spirits to leae a cyberzombie's body he's stuck forever.
But, he has access to absurdly powerful Dragon Magic dating back to the Second and Fourth worlds as well as possession of the single most powerful magical artifact ever created and a buttload of free spirit powers. These facts make things that are impossible for any metahuman magician or summoned spirit almost trivial for him. So, he shifted his entire physical cyberzombie body to the metaplanes, along with the Dragonheart, and is busy smoothing out mana spikes and fighting Horrors and otehr fun things.

It is possible that he is also keeping in touch with his brother, Ghostwalker, and his most trusted agents (including Ryan Mercury and Nadia Davier), though there is no direct evidence of this.
Some theories place him as the driving force behind the New Revolution's publicly failed yet actually entirely successful coup against his handpicked presidential successor and the UCAS's lawfully elected government.
No one really knows what he is doing now, except for those that he may be in contact with. But, when he was alive he had his fingers in many pies and he has long term plans that some other powerful dragons disagreed with. He's set dozens, perhaps hundreds, of balls into motion and has countless long term plans that can probably don't require any direct intervention from him at all. The reprecussions from his death and his will are still being felt and probably will continue to be felt for centuries, even without him.
Ravor
Well that is the "good-guy" view, but something to remember is that Big D was also one of the people who ran Big A behind the scenes, so you have to wonder exactly how much cyberzombie research, Astral remapping, and other "Summon the Horrors early" stuff he either knew about and did nothing or perhaps even authorized.

Never deal with a Dragon, especially one turned spirit/cyberzombie. cyber.gif
mfb
QUOTE (FrankTrollman)
Some of them are (Choose your Enemies Carefully, 2XS), some of them are Dragonheart.

and some of them are Shadowboxing. augh, my brain! i promised myself i'd never think of that book again...
Platinum
We call that getting kicked in the mind privates.
Wakshaani
Say, while we're here, what *is* Nadia Daviar up to these days? The last time we saw her large brown nipples, they were in the White House and running the show with the DIM. But that was, like, '64 or so.

What's she been up to since?

(And isn't she a construct? Dunk-crafted and animated? Or is she supposed to be an Immortal Elf? Or ... what *IS* her backstory, anyway?)

-- Wak, really should read some of the novels sometime.
mfb
she disappeared during System Crash. though, really, with as many Nadja sex puppets as there are running around, it wouldn't be hard to hide in plain sight. as far as backstory, here it is: *vague blandness*
Critias
Mmm, teh dark brown nippels.
Rotbart van Dainig
The New Revolution tried to cut off some heads of state, and Nadia Daviar was vice president to NR-killed President Haeffner. That made her a target, too.

Of course, that means that at the DF, Aina is now running the show - so the NR got more than they bargained for.
hyzmarca
I like to think that the NR coup was staged specifically to give Angela Colloton a political springboard and to kill off both radicals and dead weight within the NR. This was secretly planned by the Draco Foundation under Dunklezhan's orders because Colloton is really Bonecrown the Usurper (the unidentified second Horror mentioned in Worlds Without End) whom Dunkie allied with in desperation after earlier Horror incursions (which Dunkie himself planned intending to spur the Immortals into action) failed to make the other Immortals get off their pampered assess and do something.
Of all the Horrors Bonecrown is the most metahuman friendly and Dunkie knows it. In fact, Bonecrown's nature means that metahumanity's best interest is also his best interest. A strong and happy metahumanity means a strong and happy Bonecrown. So long as he keeps his subjects loyal he gains, in SR4 terms, 1 point of Edge for every 5 of them. Assuming that he is planning to reunite the USA (the NR's real plan is long term) and eventually the entire world, more than likely, he'll be invincible by the time the Scourge comes and he doesn't want any of his siblings harming his extremely tasty people. Assuming that he is Colloton, he already has several million edge points, so he could probably smash Verjigorm into next Sunday.
Fortune
Works for me. biggrin.gif
Ravor
Yeah, but before you thank Big D you might want to ask the good people of Parlainth what life under Bonecrown is like. True, it may be the most metahuman friendly of all the Horrors, but if it were to rule supreme then Earth would very likely be a dead husk by the time of the Sourge.
Buster
At least he made the trains run on time.
Ravor
I'm not so sure that it managed even that. cyber.gif
Fix-it
wait wait wait...

Big D ran the A? someone wanna reference me that?
hyzmarca
He was on the Board of Directors. He had his hands in lots of stuff, which isn't uncommon.
apollo124
Just looking on the sunny side here, but could it have been a case of knowing your enemy, maybe? After all, who knows what the corp is doing better than the board? Being one of the few readily known sources of blood magic and cyberzombie tech in the 6th world would bear some attention. Not to mention the whole "building the bridge to the Horrors" issue.

And all of the Great Dragons have their talons in all kinds of pies. It's kind of expected when you have the kind of money and influence they do. Not to mention their personal power and damn near immortality.
Ophis
QUOTE (hyzmarca)
He was on the Board of Directors. He had his hands in lots of stuff, which isn't uncommon.

He had the shares that let him have a Seat on the Board of Directors, I always suspected he had a proxy that turned up for him. There's no eveidence anyone knew who owned his pile of shares until the will came out.
hobgoblin
dragons, go fig...
Kazum
There are a lot of good german sr novels.

"Deutschland in den Schatten" (Germany in the shadows) is a nice trilogy and all books of "Markus Heitz" are great. But i am not sure in how far any of these books has been translated into english.
ThreeGee
I'll put a word in for 'Burning Bright', the detailed history of the events leading up to the Chicago Swarm. Definitely worth a read.
Rotbart van Dainig
QUOTE (Kazum)
There are a lot of good german sr novels.

If you compare them to the german rules... yeah. They were good.
Chrome Shadow
I didn't realized that Lethe was Dunk...

Damn those large brown nipples...
Grinder
QUOTE (Rotbart van Dainig)
QUOTE (Kazum @ Jul 30 2007, 05:23 PM)
There are a lot of good german sr novels.

If you compare them to the german rules... yeah. They were good.

And don't get me started with grammar. biggrin.gif
FlakJacket
QUOTE (Ophis)
He had the shares that let him have a Seat on the Board of Directors, I always suspected he had a proxy that turned up for him. There's no eveidence anyone knew who owned his pile of shares until the will came out.

Did it ever actually put a figure on how much stock Dunk had in the Big A or was 'I leave my voting stock in Aztechnology and the board seat to which that entitles you' from the will all that we got? I have vague memories of other megas having boardmembers with as little - yes, yes, a relative term I know smile.gif - as five or six percent.
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