So I was perusing the Big D's Will and found this,"To the corporations and governments of the world, I leave the formula for an infant vaccination that should be administered to all children born after 31 October 2060. "

So the qeustion remains what happened on Halloween in 2060?

Nada. The vaccine was destroyed. Didn't you get the memo?

It was laced with Dragon-Blood.
So some humanis jerks who want pure blooded humans destroyed it.
The Story was more or less detailed in one of the Novels.
The one with the police dog shapeshifter and the Jane Doe Elf-woman who could not remember stuff for more than some hours . .

Really? I hate it when I miss things like that.


Stupid Humanis who knows what it supposed to help against.

Well, on the bright side Lofwyr thought it was going to turn people into a draconic servitor race.

I can't really think of any reason a dragon would want to be helpful. The very best you can hope for is that whatever he decided to do to all of humanity with this serum was not especially harmful to us. Since he basically planned his own death, and his return (or that is my belief), looking at the long road is entirely something I would expect from him.

Ok, but this doesn't explain why Lofwyr would have wanted to prevent this. As a dragon a new servitor race would come in handy, no? Also considering it would consist of an entire generation of humanity that would be a lot of servants, and since servants add to one's power base, and dragons seem to like power, I don't understand why he would have prevented such a thing.

Just because some of the Great Dragons are complete asses to metahumanity, doesn't mean that all of them are.

There are several Greats running around playing nice with us in the 6th world.

Lofwyr got to be number two among the Great Dragons because he understands humans better than most of his peers do (with the noteworthy exception of Dunkelzahn). Turning the whole human race into draconic puppets would make him lose this edge.

Also, they would probably not have been HIS servitors, but the big D's.
Now imagine a Dragon seeing another Dragon appearantly planning to turn 1 Billion People on his side . .

So Big D. resorted to plan B instead: he hired a bunch of writers to create an RPG picturing him as the nice guy

Bingo, also if memory of ED crap is correct Lofwyr is more or less responsible for the IE's so he could take quite a bit of offense to Big D trying to one up him, or he may have figured that IE's were a debacle, drake's arn't much better, and decided to preserve the status quo.


Also, Big L is the number 2? Since when? Hestaby snagged the Loremaster title but I don't think she's anywhere near L in power or prestige.

The exact date part always worried me, what was the significance of that date if any?

Just to make us believe that he can read the future. Here is the horrible truth: ALL the dates in his wills are either random or jokes.

As far as prestige goes among dragons (we don't care about what lower forms of life may think, don't we ?), she won the Rite of Succession, she's Number One. Besides, Hestaby let Lofwyr the Jewel of Memory and the Loremaster title.

Forever Drug, I believe.


It's his world, too. Dunkelzahn was always unique among his kind in terms of the pains he'd take to benefit all metahumanity, and not just himself. ED and SR are full of references to this; he was basically the one "really nice to people" Great Dragon.


My impression is that the first Children of Dragons [IEs] were created by Lofwyr's brother, Alamais, in the 2nd world. This proved quite useful, and more-or-less everyone who could do it, did do it. Then Alamais' number one chica decided she didn't like slavery, and rebelled, leaving him a scar he still bears. Dragons outlawed the practice, but this didn't stop certain Greats from creating more children, some elven, some dwarven, some human, during the early 4th world.

Icewing* [now Ghostwalker], however, disdaining the usage of metahuman slaves, created the Dance of the Blue Spirits, which created Drakes, much more closely bonded to their Dragon patron. This proved much more popular, and this technique has persisted until modern times. Dragons seem to love this solution.

*Dunkelzahn's brother, and I believe now the oldest living being on the planet, the two of them being the oldest spawn of All-Wings, the first dragon. But this is all off the top of my head, and sometimes I get confused.

Not all

The interesting thing about Dunk is that he influenced other Greats to follow up his work after him. See also Hestaby (whose motives are a lot more questionable than Dunk's) and Masaru.

I'm sorry, Dunkelzahn fanboy here, but he just seems like he was a cool guy. Cool until you ticked him off though.

Didn't he die in August of that year? Apparently his will indicates he planned to die months earlier...



Anyway, as to the Forever Drug, the will states that the knowledge needed to create the vaccine was to be handed out to every corp and gov on the planet. Forgive me for not digging into the related fiction, but it seems the genie is out the bottle here. How would destroying one batch stop every corp in existence from testing it out in some isolated case studies? How could any one/thing stop a corp like Universal Omnitech (whom Mountain Dunkie dropped 120 million nuyen on in his will,) from juicing an entire baby farm with this stuff? Maybe two or three baby farms just to make sure it goes down without interruption?

I'm not really into all this Earthdawn stuff, so this may be a stupid question...but who populated the First World if all metahumans were created by dragons? Odd numbers seem to indicate periods of low mana, so dragons as we know them would be out, right?

This is just another reason why I completely and utterly ignore the novels. So full of Crap™ stories and borderline (or over the top in several cases) Mary Sues.

Because only Jane Doe was in the Knopw.
Yes, the Elf who did not remember who put her to bed the next morning.
Who did not remember her very own name.
They interrupted a magical mind link ritual, where she tried to pass on this knowledge directly into the heads of several dozend high key scientists.
And then the Big L either ate her or took her away, i am not sure right now, been some time since i read that particular novel.

I just remember after seeing this discussed a few weeks ago and thinking that the vaccine may have something to do with the comets arrival, It really seems to be the only thing in the time frame of any importance in the SR timeline just a year later.

In all likelihood it did. He probably had a "cure" for changelings, but it only worked on the very young for whatever reason. Or maybe it was an accelerant to bring about the expression of t'skrang or other race of old from a combination of dormant genes that require far more magic and the comet's passing. Either of those would have been far more interesting to me and far more appropriate to Dunkelzahn's way of thinking than the novel crap.

Course, he actually was assassinated in my take of the setting because, frankly, the Dragonheart saga is fucking stupid. XD So to each their own I suppose. I've had way more fun creating runs and metaplot reprecussions based upon that than I ever could with the Mary Sue "ooh, look at my super awesome drake character!!!" crap.

Very possible.

What about this: a whole "vaccine" thing was a decoy, to distract Lofwyr (and/or Humanis/corps/govs)? And then something another was done in 2060 by Draco Fundation under everybody's nose?

the point of that particular passage was that he was being erased for a period of 10 days, during which the subject in question would be on the run: anyone who tagged and bagged him got his assets, if he made it through he got his stuff back. it was payback for screwing the big D over.

so yeah, that particular date was probably either arbitrary or an inside joke. the fact that the gentleman survived was just his own good fortune, and an outcome D had prepared for in the will.

I won't lie to you, Big D is one of the more confusing and convoluted item's in the Shadowrun world.
What if Jesus was Big D in disguise? (and not an immortal elf)

Metahumans weren't all created by Dragons, only the Children of the Dragons, these immortal metahumans who became that way because they were descended from Dragons in metahuman form. The origins of metahumanity are lost to time - read: several conflicting legends are given in ED - but they'd have been created, as I understand it, in the "zero world," before the first mana downcycle. Again, this is from decade-old memory of conversations with the ED line developer, and I often forget what I ate for dinner the day before, so I could be talking utter crap.

Way early on, the implication was that the First World was the age of dinosaurs, of whom the dragons "awakened" from, with each of the time periods. The mana cycle wasn't always done on a 6,000-8,000 year basis, apparently, as the "Zeroth" World where everything allegedly began was less than 50,000 years ago if it were. Which is kinda contrary to actual historical evidence and whatnot.

Anyway, I don't think there's been much reference to that since then, though, in favor of Horror creation myths and whatnot. My memory is pretty fuzzy on all of it, too.

Interesting. That's not something I'd ever heard, in any myth or legend or background information. Do you remember where you might have heard that?

It was waaaay long ago in the first edition of the game. It may have been something my GM at the time mention, but I vaguely remember reading about it somewhere from the developers. I don't think it was ever official, just an early concept for the various Worlds.

On a side note, I really respect the guy who game up with the basic idea of the game's mechanics. He put a lot of thought into making it work and, while clunky, the philosophy behind a lot of the rules were spot on. I find it humorous that Wizards of the Coast gutted some of the better ideas and tried to pass it off as completely original and innovative on their part. Like the whole "healing surges" bit or linear dice mechanics.