Commiting suicide, because the last 3000 years were more than terribly boring, with no magic around, so that they shouldn't even have survived till the begin of the sixth world.

I don't think I'd want to meet a great dragon whose inhibitions are lowered

Well, Damon will probably cut back on the sauce by the time he hits that time of life, so you shouldn't have too much to worry about.

oh the horror...

Which kind of makes it a bit unrealistic that they are still powerful. In my campaign, any such immature immortals would be flattened by the megacorps without much effort if they acted up. The only ones that matter are those who play the corp game, which means Lofwyr mainly - the immortal elves, if they even are immortal in my campaign, are pawns, not players, left behind by the modern world and its conventions.

Actually, that would apply only to dragons and spirits... the other immortals were around the whole time just fine.

To second Rotbart's comment; I don't understand why so many people seem to think the Immortal Elves would be afraid of technology; they're all incredibly intelligent, adaptable (by necessity) people who have been alive for the entire industrialization of the planet. Take a look at Leonardo/Brightlight; certainly noone can argue he's on the wrong end of the technology curve.

There's no reason at all to assume they're out of touch. If anything, in my mind, the centuries they've been through and the massive changes they've seen would prepare them more for the steamrolling pace of technology than your average suburbanite; I mean, they've seen far more technologies come and go than you or I. Why wouldn't they be more adaptable, having realized just how short-lived most paradigms really are?

And there's one other advantage that they had when it came to learning the advanced stuff:

Time to really soak up the basics.

I have a friend who is an engineering major; he thinks, at the rate we're advancing, we're going to have to start teaching calculus in high school, if not junior high or middle school.

But they were around for those discoveries and had plenty of time to learn and integrate them into their understanding and knowledge. It's one thing to have a year to learn all there is to calculus and then have to rush off to the next stage of more advanced math--it's quite another to have a decade to learn it all and study all of it's implications and then leisurely make one's way over to the next mathematical or scientific discovery.

I graduated in 93, and Calculus was an available elective for Seniors. What I think Bibliophile20 is saying is that it won't be long before one is required to take and pass calculus in order to graduate high school.

so we may have hit a point where the total knowledge is to much for any single person to absorb in a lifetime? that we may need to being specializing from a very early age?

somehow i have a feel that a dragon reading up on stuff would be like data from star trek. always telling the computers to display the information faster...

The IEs are master manipulators and schemers. They never show their real faces to the mortals around them. However, the other immortals know then so well that they can simply let their hair down and be themselves, this is very freeing, but also very dangerous. The know each other well enough to hate each other. In general, there are enough rivalries between the IEs that a physical gathering would probably result in bloodshed. So they snipe at each other over the matrix because they are, at the same time, best friends and worst enemas. The anonymity of the screen give them an extra layer of protection.

That's why Microsoft donates software to students.

There's a commercial over here in Oz (concrete, irrefutable evidence, I know ) that states that today's 8 year old has been exposed to more information than our grandfathers were in their entire lives.

Makes you stop and think.

There's "not that clever" and there is "How stupid are you? And all your helpers? Even rocks are smarter than that!".

As long as the immortal elves are portrayed as teenagers with superpowers I won't use them. They are simply not believably written.

We try not to talk about Leonardo. That was a Dark Time, he's gone now, and the game's better for it.

Kinda like Quicksilver from Imago.

Shadowrun's own Clone Saga.

err, was he in the game, or was he a character from the novels?

often the novels seems to play fast and loose when it came to what can and cant be done...

And this is the point where, in Stargate message boards, I get up on my soapbox and tell everyone that there is no such thing as linear technological advance, particularly with respect to time.

Technological advancement, generally speaking, fits a need-fulfillment-exploitation model. A need is identified, someone invents a novel way to fulfill that need, and someone develops novel ways to exploit the new invention.

If an invention does not fulfill an existing need, it will fall by the wayside of history. The available needs that an invention might fulfill are limited by the culture in which that invention is developed.

A good example is the steam engine. The steam engine was invented sometime between 10 AD and 70AD be a fellow known as Hero of Alexandria.
But what, you say; the steam engine was invented by Thomas Newcomen and Thomas Savery in 1717. Yes, it was. It was also invented by Taqi al-Din of the Ottoman Empire in the 16th Century AD and by Giovanni Branca in 1629.

But, inventing the steam engine and starting the Industrial Revolution are to completely different things. Without a socioeconomic need for the steam engine, it will fade into obscurity. Globe-spanning Naval Empires just happen to have that socioeconomic need in a way that single-continent empires just don't have.


Black Madonna, the big Leonardo novel, is basically The Da Vinci Code with substantially less suckage.

hyz, I understand where you are coming from. I was just commenting / agreeing with the idea (mentioned earlier using Calculus as the example) that over time, the more advanced things of today become the basics of tomorrow and that such was exampled in Stargate: SG-1.

I wasn't commenting on how practical / sensible the presentation was in Stargate.