Let me start by saying that I’m fascinated by the Horrors. I’ve purchased every Shadowrun adventure and novel with them in it that I could find. I got into Earthdawn because of them – haven’t actually played it, but I keep buying the books…

I’m also fascinated by kaers and the technical details of them, but then I’m a geek and things like that fascinate me, so just go with it.

Anyway, the biggest problem that I can find with Horrors is that, as presented, they’re an ELE. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELE for further details. If these things are really eating *the entire biosphere* every time they show up, there’s really no recovery from that. But that’s what they’re presented as doing, which means they’re a broken game concept. BUT, they’re too cool to lose, so they need revision. My take is as follows.

The real problem is the mega-hordes of “mindless eaters.� These have to go – there’s just no way around that. Humanity still has to hide from the more sophisticated “I inflict pain and misery on you and feed on it� types of Horrors, but those guys don’t seem to be interested in eating up the entire landscape in between periods of feasting on your agony and suffering. There could even be predatory horrors that do ravage *some* of the landscape, but their numbers are going to have to be reduced down from the billions/trillions level down to something the ecosystem can deal with, or at least eventually recover from (note that their ravaging is going to keep going on for 400 to 500 years…).

And I actually have another bit of a problem with the Shadowrun/Earthdawn timeline, which is (presumably) supposed to go like this:

1st Age: No magic, but presumably life comes into existence through whatever means.
2nd Age: Magic comes ‘round! And with it the first Scourge at the height of the cycle.
3rd Age: Cycle’s over, no more magic for a while.
4th Age: Magic’s back! And the Earthdawn era Scourge occurs.
5th Age: Our time, no more magic for a while.
6th Age: Magic’s back again, but it’s early in the cycle. Some nutjobs are trying to hurry the Scourge along, but they haven’t been successful. Yet.

The problem I see is – how did the 2nd Age survive the Scourge? It should have hit them with no warning. The second Scourge in the 4th Age had the Books of Harrow – described as unbelievably ancient and presumably left over from the last Scourge as a warning. I’m just wondering how anyone survived it to be able to write it (yes, I know it was dictated to a Dragon by a Horror), but how did the rest of the races survive?

My $0.02 on the topic, at any rate…

I don't think I've fallen off my chair laughing in quite some time. Thank you.

I've just never run across someone that wants to "fix" this particular thing-that-doesn't-require-fixing before, and it amuses me. Also paraphrasing a line from somewhere you're probably unfamiliar with. There is a problem with the "Ages" as they currently stand, but they've been discussed to death already and nothing new has been added in this thread so far.

Hey! No paraphrasing The Laughing Man on this board!


I think you may be confusing "The Books of Harrow" with "The Book of Scales" (see Legends of Earthdawn). LRG says that in the East, the people survived the Scourge under the protection of the Great Dragons, although how is not specified (presumably a varient of the magic used to create a dragon's lair). As to exactly how the world survived the Second Age Scourge, that has been left mysterious. I just assume they created the Rites of Protection and Passage, and the Books of Harrow were their "notebook", so to speak.

Janessa: go to earthdawn.com, under "forums", then "for players". Look for a thread called "Accounting for geological history in earthdawn". I asked a similar question, and a fellow called Mataxes answered it nicely.

Link to the post Zhan Shi mentioned: http://www.earthdawn.com/forum/index.php?topic=454.0

Thanks. The more I learn about the "meta-meta" plot the more fascinating it becomes.

Briefly: a horror took control of a dragon, forced him to rip out his own scales, and made him write all sorts of vile knowledge on them, using his own blood as ink.

You might also want to check out this thread:

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...pic=18748&st=50

You could just say that the last age was 5000 years ago, but not all ages are the same length of time. The 1st age could be the time when animated life first took over the oceans or when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, millions of years ago.

You could also say that sometime during one of the ages, the sentient races transported themselves from this earth into some pocket realm deep in the astral to escape the Horrors. Therefore no fossil records or artifacts. Nice and neat and fits all the facts. Maybe they never left their realm and only come here in soul form to be reincarnated as humanoids. I think there was a religion or a South Park episode that was kind of like that...

If the "mindless eaters" (or any other horror) ran out of food, I would imagine they'd return home, then look for another world to devour. If you're planning on bringing the Horrors into your campaign, they would be from the Deep Metaplanes, and may not suffer evannescence; in Worlds Without End, I seem to remember Harlequin saying something like "They need a certain magic level to cross over; they don't need it to remain." Or perhaps they do suffer it, but have to use some special ability to keep their forms anchored in the gaiasphere; as I recall, the Rites disrupted the Horrors "concentration", and hence they had to run away or be forced back to their home metaplane.

Just assume that the earth regenerated itself during the downcycle. Or maybe when the mana returns, it has a rejuvenating effect. Or maybe the dragons performed one of their Big Badass Dragon Magic rituals.

Does every mystery need to be explained?

Maybe some horrors are smart enough to keep some food around for next time.

In the Dragons book from ED they mention that he Horrors also devour themselves. In fact Big V ( The big daddy of all Horrors, and Dragons for that matter...) like to just sit back and watch everyone fight and devour themselves, and then just create more for them to fight/devour. So perhaps as some point the Horrors turn on themselves and enough of the the world is left to eventually repopulate/regenerate the world.

The is also a "species" of Horror mentioned in the Parlainth box set. It has found that other Horrors make more satisfying prey. Can't remember the name, but they were clearly influenced by Kali, the Hindu deity.

Well, until the Earthdawn developers come up with a concrete explanation, we'll all just have to wing it. It's fun to speculate, but don't let that gap ruin your gaming experience.

I'm not sure the billions/trillions number is exactly accurate. Unless you want to buy into the idea that they attack more then just this world.

I think the answer is a combnation of things mentioned here. That Many Horrors attack each other, that the smarter Horrors keep the dumper devourers in check to some extent ( everything I have read leads me to think that he devourers are at the bottom rung of horrorland, and those that feed on emotions are higher and more powerful ) as well as the fact eventually they will eat the mana levels low enough that they cannot function as well.

And then there is Big V, who love to see alot of death and destruction, even amoung his own horoi.

I agree with Fortune. Good idea, Lago. I'd never considered that.

Hmmm...we never really get anything even approaching a hard # for these things, but the descriptions tend towards "incalculable," which is fairly bad. And actually I believe they just tend to be forced back home when the mana level is too low.

Another question that occurs to me, while we do have beasties which just eat everything, where does that substance go after that? Presumably its defecated out, so it's just turning rocks into pebbles. Depending on how its gut works, it could still support micro-organisms in there, or even more complex things like moss (or at least moss spores).

As has been said, large areas would be protected by horrors which rather enjoy having a healthy biosphere, or who feed off of creatures that need that biosphere. To a degree, I'd be more worried about an area of healthy animal life than a barren wasteland. At least with the barren wasteland you can be pretty sure the predator isn't especially discriminating and so isn't too specialized.

Don't forget that Gaia/Earth is also considered to be alive by many people in the SR world (as she has an astral presence). If that's true, then she could potentially recover from anything but total annihilation.

I also like the theory proposed by Lagomorph a lot.

Re the incalculable thing, I've considered that - that the #'s were perhaps exaggerated by a bunch of beseiged people seeing a LOT of things coming to eat them, but the books tend to use words like "tide" and "vast swarm" that make you think these things are just practically covering the globe. Given that, it would seem that some leeway is very possible in deciding how many of these there really are to come through for a given campaign.

It does seem to be a tough # to hit, even roughly. Enough that people really need to get away from them, but not so many that in 400 to 500 years there is no biosphere left at all to regenerate from. A tall order. If you solve that one before me, let me know.

Really? I looked at it completely differently. I thought of it as some horrible nasty littel thing, sinch, you know, their horrors and all. Now , bear with me and all, because I had the idea from going off the pic in Living Room Games Scourge Unending. I should probably know better, what with it being their excuse for art and all.

Any way, they gnashers don't seem to have very big bodies, just big mouths. So I always figured them like gold fish. ie they would eat and eat and eat everything around, completely gorgin them selves. If they couldn't process it fast enough they would just eat them selves to death. If they didn't die, they'd just eat, procreate, and move on and repeat. Keeps their number s in check, and to me, the idea of something devouring everything in sight until there's nothing left or it's stomach bursts is pretty disturbing. Again though, not really basing it off of anything.

Not as disturbing as stepping in big steaming piles of Horror doodoo.

just a thought, but i'm hearing a lot of "the people who saw them didn't count" or whatever...

precisely how many people do you think got a chance to count? because i'm thinking that the people who were around to see anything wouldn't have left *any* description of their enemies unless it was a relatively small number. the scourge is not known for leaving living witnesses around other than the ones who never actually see the scourge, per se, and who can therefore only describe what is left.

To my knowledge, the only mention of actual numbers is in Harlequin's Back. In the backround text, it says something like "thousands, perhaps millions of these monsters have invaded earth in the past."

Also from Harlequin's Back (I'm paraphrasing here): "The Enemy are not spirits in the sense that inhabitants of the Sixth World understand the term. They're much more physical." I take that to mean they have blood and have...um...certain biological prosesses they need to take care of.

Think these would count as "exotic materials" for enchanting?

Horrors poop in the Astral. That's why it's so polluted in Earthdawn.

(Let's see how many ED mages will try casting Raw Magic now.)