You're a font of hilarious stuff, are you not?

FYI Horrors adapt and corrupt human achivements way faster than dragons do. Lasers, gauss rifles and whatever don't do much against spirits, and Horrors are badass spirits on steroids from an endless plane that is completly filled with those fuckers. Sure, we will wipe them away. Unfortunatly, after a very short period of time will a lot of armies be corrupted and twisted and they will start using that uber tech against the rest of mankind. That will be fun.


Buahahaha.

Really great technology. We don't really know what it does, or why it works, and our science runs against walls trying to explain it every 5 minutes or so, but yeah, we rule. We rock. No one in the goddamn universe DARE to even think of challanging us. And no, you are not even permitted to fantazize about stuff that is better than us. Weehaa!

But seriously? Even our weapons suck right now. We are bad at killing ourselfs, so I don't expect us to be better a killing stuff that does not even obey the laws of our reality.

Okay I'm about to break the Shadowrun wall real quick and paraphrase Elminster to show why dragons and IEs don't rule the world.



Not an exact quote by any means but put yourself in those shoes. Sure you can go on a rampage and kill a hell of a lot of people, but in the end you lose.

Now to bring this back onto topic. GW got lucky, real damn lucky. He attacked a place that really was noones. So noone made a really big stink about it. Now let's say he attacked DC, Atlanta, whatever the capitol of Aztec is. He'd be dead. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. He'd have gotten curbstomped by someone's military. So it's not so much noone can kill him or other greats it's they haven't gotten pushed far enough to do it yet.

Edit- Spelled quote wrong 3 fragging times.

Hang on, triple As have virtually "infinite" resources and are almost impossible for runners to take down. Thus I declare:

Ares Macrotechnology is a god! Anyone who portrays Ares Macrotech as being this powerful is ruining SR!

Okay a little heavy on the sarcasm, but the point remains. There are some enemies which are just too big. Now perhaps the UCAS could be a threat to a GD, but it would take a huge amount of resources and would leave it far too vulnerable... just as if they were taking on, oh I dunno, a triple A. Simply not worth the effort.

As to Horrors, we have far more heavily crowded and bustling cities with dark corners which are almost impossible to see into. We're making their job easy for them. Still the true test won't come until or unless it actually happened. Barring them making a spin off game "Deadlands Hell on Earth" style, I really don't think we're likely to find out.

Plus it doesn't matter why or how things were done in the past, all that matters is what players and GMs make of it. Even if a plot device requires retcon fixing it still has value.

Also nothing forces you to use dragons or IEs in any particular way, one of the strengths of the SR setting is you can pretty much ignore them if you like and focus on the corps. On the other hand you can in theory make a campaign which focuses heavily on such things.

Correct.

I recall a thread that dealt with modern weapons vs. Horros. Anyone interested in that topic should search for "can we beatt the Horrors" and read through the 30+ pages.

Yes. Well, except for the matrix. Earthdawn had aircraft, it even had giant magical flying battleships with enough firepower to kill a an Ultimate NPC GD. Even better, it had teleportation. As transportation and communication intrastructures go, a bunch of wizards setting up teleportation booths is far superior than mere jet travel.

During the height of the Theran Empire, it is almost certain that they has all of these things, with high magic being used in place of high technology, though magical telecommunication are limited compared to the matrix or even the internet. In the Fifth and Sixth Worlds, people basically use technology to do what everyone during Earthdawn and pre-Earthdawn used magic for out of necessity simply because magic is not yet powerful enough to do these things.


As to the Horrors, all I have to do is point to Bonecrown the Usurper. Given his MO and powers, he wouldn't attack directly but would work his way up the corporate/political ladder until he was at or near the top of an organization that controlled had power over millions of people, and for every 5 of those people he's have a point of Edge.

Once you have a character who can buy a million successes on any test he makes and do it around four million times between refreshes, there really is no way to stop him.

The rest of your post was an angry rant against Synner and applying randomly chosen obstructions to one side of a conflict because you didn't like what's in the book. I'll address two points that are fairly real since you are offended that I did not earlier.
1) Spell selection: Minimum int of 13 (actually higher). He didn't party in Denver the same day he showed. Signs indicate that he had support from Dunkie's minions (although none openly during the fights). He knew what to know.
2) Countering spirits: Most kinds of spirit have a much stronger and older pact with Ghostwalker than any mortal conjuring ritual. Your spirits are more likely to go join him than follow your instructions to attack his spirits. Even if watchers, bugs, blood spirits and ancestor spirits still obey, that's a greatly reduced useful combat potential. As for selective use of powers against the mortals, Confusion has no direct damaging effects, and if above force 4 virtually incapacitates anyone by SR3 rules.

Now, I have countered. I already know your response, you reject both points, not because they disagree with the books and other source material, but because you disagree with the books and other source material.

You don't get the difference between a modern industrialised information age society, and a fantasy society. Earthdawn was a fantasy society, made for heroic fantasy roleplaying. It wasn't a modern media society, it had no rapid tech and mage research curve. There was no SOTA. Not everyone could use magic as well - you had to weave threads, and only adepts could do that (IIRC), for the stronger stuff. Tech today everyone can use.

You can make rules up about edge use of horros all you like, the same way I can make rules up about future nanoweapons, and magetech stuff that simply kills horrors. Like a magical bullet. Or some anti-horror FAT strain. Or paracritters created to hunt horrors.

Given 200 years of research I don't give Horrors much of a chance to wreck the earth. Humanity will have a greater presence in space as well by then, which will be a safe base of operations outside mana fields.

Add Great Dragons and their knowledge about Horrors to it, and I am positive the Horrors will face weapons tailor-made to kill them once they show up. At least I can't see how anyone thinking Great Dragons are that uber won't accept that given those intellects, experience and knowledge, and the ressources of a triple A megacorp, and humanity's new drive in research, will not be able to develop ways to kill off horrors easily in the next 200 years.

It's not Earthdawn. We are talking about an industrialised society, and research on a level far, far beyond the "lone mage in a chamber" stuff we see in fantasy.

A megacorp is not a single living being. I object to having single living beings able to walk the earth, laying waste to armies, without any fear of getting killed.

Also, I don't expect runners to take down great dragons - I expect the military to take down great dragons, just like security can take down runners.

And I think GW should have been killed for taking on Denver because I consider this far enough for an action to be taken.

And you conveniently ignored the part I said about a military possibly being able to pull it off, at the expense of making themselves vulnerable to everyone else in the process.

To kill Horrors you have to find them. Just like you have to find a runner to kill them. What makes you think they would be out in the open? If bug spirits can hide long enough for the UB to be a problem the Horrors can.

Plus for all we know setting up on other planets might create a manasphere there, completely negating the safe haven idea. We just don't know.

As I said even if there were serious screw ups you just run with what there is now and make what you can of it, or you ignore it. Complaining like this isn't going to make them errata books which are probably long out of print, or retcon the story to say they actually did kill GW after all.

So either adapt things to how you want them and move on, or find another game. Simple, problem solved without actually having to lift a finger. You probably just spent several dozen times as much time arguing about it as it would take to fix it to your liking in your game.

Well to be fair, Bonecrown's ability would translate into gaining and spending Edge in Fourth Edition. Also I'm not so sure that the Mana Void of space would protect humanity from all of the Horrors, remember that the only constant rule about the Horrors is that they break all of the rules. (And THAT is why they are going to eat all of our souls when they return.)

Also I don't buy the idea that the Dragons or Immortal Elves will ever get their heads out of their asses and warn humanity about the threat before it's too late, remember that with all of the magical drek that has already happened in this Mana Cycle no-one knows when the Horrors might break through, all anyone knows is that the warning signs are appearing sooner then they should have. (And if I remember correctly at least one named Horror has already used one of the Mana bridges to cross over.)

Although I tend to agree with you more-or-less about Ghost Walker getting squashed, the simple fact of the matter is that the named Horrors are gods in their own right.

dude, mage research is useless. it doesn't advance anyone except for the mage doing the research. if i research my way into grade 17 initiation, people can't pick up my notes and use magic like a grade 17 initiate. they can't even directly follow my path to grade 17.

Unfortunatly, Horrors corrupt and ultimatly take control of everything that comes into contact with them. That's not fluff, that was a rules mechanic. The FABs would very soon hunt everything but Horrors and the critters would become Horrors themselfs. One of the really big nastys back in the day was a very powerful earth elemental summond by several Dragons to fight Horrors. You can't fight Horrors. You can only avoid them, and disrupt their presence.
Also, the most successful method to get rid of Horror taint is to be corrupted by an even more powerful Horror or to die. Even death might not be enough with some of them.


Again, that statement has no meaning in a discussion about Horrors, since they themselfs have no real society other than "I smack your brains in". That's all they really seem to do while at home. They are able to wreck serious havoc, because they adapt lightning fast to metahuman achievement.

And to conncet this back to dragons... dragons are Horrors. Thank you very much. Less powerful, kind-of-mortal Horrors, that is. Like in ED metahumanity in SR is borked. Maybe even more so thanks to technology.

Earth Dawn is for heroic fantasy- what?!

WasIa playing a different different ED? I seem to remember it being pretty goddamn post apoc and I was getting eaten by all kinds of things all the time.

I also never got a luxury lifestyle in an ED game nor did I enjoy the delights of hot sim AR SEX.

It's heroic, because even experienced characters get shredded by zombies.
To this day I wonder how a 2nd circle group can stop the Mist, who is backed by a 5th circle nethermancer and a few goons. Heroic is diffrent, IMO.

The post apocalyptic part was the only thing that sparked my intereset in ED, since fantasy tends to be pretty boring for me.

If I want to play CoC, I play CoC, not SR.

You have never played CoC, have you? That statement does not make even a little sense.

CoC and SR seemed like very compatible systems and world views.

Meaning, if I want to play in a world threatened by "elder gods" I'd play CoC.

I'd like to jump back a bit in time. There was a really big country that was in a staring contest with a tiny island that had a primitive (by their standards) military. Outdated guns, airplanes, ships, you name it. The big country (the good ol' USofA) was in training to go to War with Japan. They ran drills, prepared for invasion, and even beefed up security on islands between here and there.

The Japanese came in and took out our fleet. Caught us with our pants down. Now, some people say that we knew, same say we had no clue. I'm not even gonna go there. The point is, they came in and wiped out Pearl Harbor. Yes, the US took out some planes and a couple of their peewee subs. Yes, in the end, we defeated them.

But, Pearl Harbor was a resounding victory for them. Why? Because all the training in the world is not the same as the real thing. Because if your not prepared for it, expecting it, and been through it before, you just aren't ready for it. Period. Yes, the sailors in Pearl Harbor fought back. And yes they took out a few of the enemy. But in the end it didn't make a difference.

Fast forward a few decades. A dragon and his spirit allies go into Denver and start taking out targets. He uses the magical equivilent of hit and run tactics (which is what the Japanese did). He makes sure to move around and keep the enemy guessing as to his exact location and the exact numbers of his forces. Add in the fact that no on wants to pull out the big guns for 3 reasons: 1) they aren't supposed to have them and, therefore, may not have them in a convenient location, 2) they don't want to start a war with anyone but GW and there is a good chance that if they bring them out thatis exactly what may happen, and 3) they don't want civilian casualties, especially since it will all be televised live.

Sure, they could have taken GW out. But at what price? They would have caused a great deal of damage, civilian casualties, started a war, and possibly left Denver uninhabitable / useless.

Blodgett on Jackpoint:

"Ghostwalker, Pearl Harbor in the Sixth World?"

I like it, I like it a lot. It plays well with the other reasonable explanations given for GW's success.

Then you better get that CoC book out. Shadowrun's setting has officially been threatened by Elder Gods since before ED when Bottled Demon came out.

Cut the indignation. It's misplaced and erroneous. The fact that you seem to know nothing about ED and the Horrors is cute, though. You are of a magnitude of wrong I can't even comprehend at the moment.

Oh, and space is not safe. Any sufficiently area in space populated with life will have a manasphere. I direct you to Street Magic. If the KE strike team can travel to the metaplanes from space, then the metaplanes can reach the KE team.


Whoever said that if GW had attacked Washington he'd be squashed doesn't know what they are talking about. The city isn't that safe, and least of all in SR.

Ignoring the fact that he came out of the Rift a whopping seven (and these are short blocks. Nothing like New York) blocks from the White House. The only thing that saved that city was GW's utter lack of interest.

I had forgotten Just Compensation earlier, but that book wasn't set too far before he returned. And in it the FedPols and military got stymied by a few mage agents provocateurs and paranoia/magical operations security that involves one tank shooting another on the Key Bridge because its crew might be influenced by magic when they actually just got stuck or lost or something. Yeah, the Greats are dealing with a bunch of professionals all right. Professional idiots.

Altough I'm almost sure you don't get the diffrence, CoC is about the sanity of the protagonists treathend by things man was not supposed to know. And ED is not a world thretened by "elder gods". It's about surviving the aftermath and retreat of said "elder gods". That's why your argument does not connect at all.

Are you out of swords, King of Heroes?

It's finally become clear to me that Fuchs has no idea what he's talking about.

He hates dragons. So do I. The only difference is that I don't revolve my games around them, whereas he seems to hate them to distraction.

In keeping with my desire to stay the fuck out of this debate because I really have almost no opinion one way or another... I don't want to say much here. But there are some statements that need correcting, just based on my own needs to see history presented in a clearer light.



The Imperial Japanese navy was hardly outdated in any regard during the start of the pacific war. While it's true that some of their small arms were subpar, nothing of the sort can be said about the fleet or its aircraft. The level of error in assuming that the IJN was outdated or primitive cannot be understated. They were massive, well-equipped, well-trained, and organized. Please do not make the mistake of assuming that they were primitive due to their nation of origin. Also, please do not make that mistake about the SDF now either.

Like you, I'm not gonna get into the history of Pearl Harbor, but I believe your argument is guilty of a does-not-follow in likening it to Ghostwalker, due to the fact that Denver didn't even know Ghostwalker existed. A single entity you don't know exists is very different than a nation you've signed a non-agression pact with.

I neither agree nor disagree, I just think there are more differences than similarities.

Anyone ever considered that GDs and IE are so successful in what they do and in their longevity because we as stupid humans have nothing better to do but argue and bicker of what GD's and IE's are doing, and how they have survived that long?

They prob sit back and laugh knowing that they don't have to do anything, because ultimately our bickering will escalate to a fight, which will escalate into a war, and eventually all the people who were bickering will have killed each other over an idea or the thought of what SOMEONE ELSE was actually doing or not doing, and how they did it or didn't do it.

I'd say GD and IE are pretty smart in that regard because they know we as humans will ultimately cause our own destruction. They survive and prosper because we are too busy arguing with each other about how they do and have what they do.

At least that's how i justify their "god-like" state they have been so affectionately dubbed.

But i digress...

Interesting points. Does anyone know offhand or does it say how long "GW's" (HA!) rampage lasted? Also where cna the info be read? I've seen some of it but not all I assume. Did it specify what areas where hit? I always been under the impression it was closer to surgical strikes than all out "stomp stomp smash" Godzilla tactics. At least when looked at in hindsight. Again I am no expert on the subject that was just the impression I had been given.

I'll argue this one. ED had jet travel for the elite, if not masses (sky ships) and the truly elite have access to teleportation-style movement. They had advanced health care (craploads of magic healing) and blood-magic items that were living "cyber." Much of the magic was accessible to the masses in the form of "common" magic that was non-threaded or relied on blood-magic. Anyone could get a hotpot, cool cloak, death-cheat charm, blood pebble armor, and targeting eye to work.

The Matrix is a bit of a tosser, although the magical lines of communication are probably on par with 1940s telegrams. ED was capable of building something matrix-like, but the setting was in the rebuilding phase following World War -15. A blood-magic datajack and/or headware memory is quite possible.

A single mage could, and did, shrink an entire city down to fit in a bottle. The mages at that level, which admittedly were few, rarely put themselves in the same league as the great dragons. "Regular" dragons, sure, and the GDs acknowledged the archmages as more powerful than the "immature" members of dragonkind.




That alone says how little you know about ED. The base book was about change. Change from a thousand years of hiding. Change from isolated pockets of "civilization" coming back together. Part of the out-of-box concept was that you would find missing societies and tell them they could come out. The question of what kind of society evolved, assuming anyone survived, is inherent in that approach.

In the greater metaplot, you had Barsaive's quest for independence from Thera. Barsaive was led by the dwarves and their recently drafted drafted constitutional monarchy, IIRC, with Thera as a caste-based meritocracy. The basic ED "metaplot" was as much about the paradigm shift from a "land of obligations" to a "land of rights" with the Horrors as a backdrop.

My point was just because you know about something, prepare for it (and possibly know it's coming, that was a can of worms I was trying to avoid), doesn't mean that you are 1) prepared for it or 2) can effectively fight it. WWII is just the biggest example of that I could think of.

And you're right, the IJN wasn't completely backward, but that was the US's attitude (maybe not the military's attitude, but the average joe on the street's attitude). People forget that the more troops you have, the more assets, the harder it is to get them moving successfully.

Personally, I think the troops at Denver were as ready as the troops at Pearl Harbor, i.e. what the heck is that? Oh, crap! We're done for! (Basically, nobody knew what the heck was going on at either place until it was far too late. But that's my opinion.)

Blodget your general point about GW utilizing total surprise to come out on point still stands. I did miss the bit about the Imerial Navy being outdated because that's fairly untrue, They did just get done kicking the snot out of the Russians. But you're right, Americans and by extension the military just didn't take into consideration how advanced they Japanese were at the outbreak of the conflict.

My point was that if he started attacking just the UCAS, CAS, Aztec, or the NAN. He would have gotten stomped because there would be no need to have the kiddie gloves on. He attacked Denver which is effectively no man's land. None of those militaries wanted to be "that guy" and start a war none of them wanted because they missed a GW or they hit him and ended up messing up someone else's sector of the city.

I didn't think it was much of a rant. To explain, he started a topic about killing a great dragon a few years ago. In hindsight, it looks to me like he took the information about viable or even questionable ways to kill the dragon and included new rules in Dot6W and SR4 that negated those solutions. Strengthening dragons even more. I felt played.

[applying randomly chosen obstructions to one side of a conflict because you didn't like what's in the book.]
What was random? I thought what was in the book was a partial account, and just like people were saying GW probably did this and used these tactics, I tried showing some consequences of taking such actions.

If a shadowrunner magician started slinging huge illusions of a Great Dragon terrorrizing downtown Seattle (or any city), it is going to draw attention. In any game I have been a part of, astral magicians are going to investigate. Astrally, they can see it is an illusion pretty easily, and can see through most of the tactics people were claiming GW used to avoid being seen. I also tried to point out some limits to masking and foci use that were ignored. That information is in the book.



I am going by YotC.58-59. GW exited the DC rift New Years eve (that is 12/24 and I am assuming in the evening or that night as the witness was there "partying") and news coverage of the rampage started at 12/25 00:21:13, or shortly after midnight. (Actually, that is the timestamp for when the transcript of events got posted on the matrix, so it may have been over before midnight, making it the same day.) That is minutes to hours later, not days later.

Without something to back up your claims, I am going to figure the rest of your assertion is as reliable and unbiased.


Where are you pulling this from? You may as well say any metahuman is going to fall in love with and join him, too.


I wholeheartedly agree, and GW is a single entity. The city and the corps in it have many more mages and his rampage is going to draw all their attention. The reduced combat potential is going to hurt GW more.


GW is mortal, right?

Drawing this attention makes it harder for GW's spirits to differentiate targets from onlookers. Every onlooker that gets collateral damaged converts onlookers to adversaries. New adversaries are likely to send watchers for more backup from HQ (HQ in this instance being LS, corp, SR hangout. Then hundreds and thousands of additional worldwide, astral reinforcements can be there in a matter of seconds.)


I thought I was pointing out actual rules and source material many seem to want to overlook when dreaming of the great power potential of a being like a great dragon. I tried looking at it as if it came up in a game and the likely response and follow-up response.

Just imagine it is a SRer who can do some similar things and the swift, overwhelming reaction it would incur. Then, put GW back into the mix to counter how the inhabitants of a city are likely to respond - even if GW is still successfully hiding.


It is in Year of the Comet, the section titled Ghost Stories. A report on 1/26 refers to attacks over the past few weeks.

Something to remember is that Dragons aren't really Horrors anymore then metahumans are even if we believe their own creation myth, they are at best the first Horror Spawn. (Provided that I'm not misremembering their myth that is.)

tisoz's notes about the whole incident do indicate that GW had no foreknowledge of the sixth world before his attacks on Denver.

Just a thought, but one thing GW probably had no knowledge of was cyberware. All he saw, after coming home from a long, harrowing ordeal through the metaplanes where he had to deal with God knows what, is a bunch of metahumans with less than 6 Essence, sometimes so much less that they were practically dying inside. Now, GW's been living in a hole for a few thousand years, so he knows of only a few things that could cause Essence loss of that magnitude:

-massive, widespread, severe drug addiction ==> POSSIBLE HORRORS
-somebody (or many somebodies) making extensive use of Essence Drain ==> POSSIBLE HORRORS/BLOOD MAGIC
-a bunch of trash and POSSIBLE HORRORS

So what do you do when you come home after a long, LONG, stressful commute, and you see a colony of red ants moving in on your front lawn? You shout "Oh no f*cking WAY!" in your head (or maybe aloud), and you reach for the hose and the bug spray.

That's what GW did.

Initiation itself was researched. New spells, new metamagic techniques, new summoning techniques (watchers) were researched, all within a few years (SR1 to SR4).

Of course you still have to learn the stuff, but you can build upon what is there. And it's very much easier (and safer) to learn techniques and spells someone else researched already than to do it yourself.

I'd say that the likelyhood ofr a war breaking out over a fight with a dragon is almost zero, since it's really hard to miss such an attack.

"Sir, Sir! A missile just detonated on our frontyard!"

"I know son, we're tracking a fight between a dragon and the security forces in the next sector, and getting ready to intervene if the lizard flies over to us."

Again, don't assume everyone without scales is stupid. Not to mention that most modern weapons used against a dragon won't do that much collateral damage. Not that much more than a "typical" firefight chase of a few runners/smugglers over a highway involving a few yellowjackets and drones.

And what he should have been killed for, attacking without a clue, and without any knowledge of the technology present, or anything else about the 6th world.

I played 1st Ed. ED for years. Horrors were still present, and the sanity of the namegivers or what the hero races were called was in danger when they were involved with horrors, due to their corruption.

I don't use Dragons in my game, they don't fit in runner operations, and Lowfyr and co. won't noticably meddle on the level my runners are at.

And what you don't get is that you're using ED as a basement for your deductions, I don't. Of course, going from the ED rulesset, made for heroic fantasy gaming, you'll end up with a lot of different asumptions about a world than going from SR's modern gameplay.

Do you have any explanation as to why your idea of what Earthdawn is and how their society/mindset works than everyone else's ideas of the same?

Beats me. In hindsight, the whole setting was pretty stupid - the whole climates of the world all present in a country as small as part of modern ukraine, not much detail about the world outside barsaive, rules that did not jive at all with SR's world (despite a much higher mana level astral projection was not common, healing spells were not common either, and summoning seemed more limited too, no watchers, spells took longer even with raw magic, people were slower too, IIRC the round times from ED and SR correctly). And my personal favorite: the windling race described as having a ratio of 1 woman to 10 males, monogamy, and generally having a single kid per couple. Did the author even spend 1 minute thinking this stupidity through? Windlings would have died out in a few generations simply because their numbers would have shrunk by 90% each generation.

So, judging by this "quality" of the setting, I don't see why some people consider ED anything more than some rather cheap and illogical fantasy campaign set cobbled together from a few original, a few "cool" and a few stupid ideas.

*shakes head*

People might do well to understand that ED was a game setting. Their rules were made for a game, not to explain a world. The best example is range of spells.

In ED, spells had a very short range. No range to line of sight, like in SR. I understand why this was the case - in ED, magic with the range of SR's magic would have made spellcasters overpowered. But it does result in the simple fact that in "weak mana SR", spells had a far greater range than in ED, who was supposed to have more powerful magic. And the reason? Game balance, not some deep, background fluff explanation. Simple game mechanics.

That should show that one cannot simply take ED, and apply it to SR by comparing. Both "worlds" have had rules put in that were not made for worlds, but for game balance.

Trying to reason that since X does Y in ED, it should do Y in SR would be building upon a flawed base already. Game balance works a lot different in ED (or D&D) than SR.

A number of people still don't see this, they assume that the rules were made to describe a world, and extrapolate from that, forgetting that often rules and mechanics are there just for a game reason - usually game balance. Remove the game reason, and the fluff or rule loses any justification of existence.

They also seemed quite obsessed with the idea that a war with Japan would be a battleship to battleship melee in the central Pacific. Not an air war and a distracting island-hopping south pacific campaign to keep MacArthur (who really was the worst kind of inept cretin officer WW2 did manage to heavily weed out) busy that it turned into.


And my point stands. He would have ruined Washington in a day. And then the next provisional capital. And the next. And so on. I have no doubt in the world about that.

BTW, the word rampage means nothing. School shootings have been headlined as rampages. But none of them resulted in the destruction of a city. It was in the context of a news report. Suprise! The media embellishes. Who'd have guessed?


I don't believe you.

No one who played it for years could get so much of the setting, the rules, really everything as wrong as you have in this thread.

So either you're lying, or an idiot. Given the sum total of this thread, one seems more likely to me.

I played ED when the first edition came out in German. No other sourcebook was out by then. We had two of the Obsidimen, and they were not very amused when the race sourcebook came out and made them sexless. One switched to T'skrang afterwards.

I saw when the talent knacks were introduced in the magic book, and game blance took a hit (Spell riposte anyone?).

We reached about 10th circle when the campaign ended, including some multi-talenting and multiclassing (My human wizard had some nethermancer circles as well, and threading talents of the other traditions.

Spells had short ranges. And spells were slow - in SR, you could cast several more in the same time frame. A number of spells used by SR mages were not present (attribute boosts, f.e.), and some of the spells worked differently too (permament spells, or "duration" spells, not sustained.

(Going from memory of the sessions over 10 years ago, I think an ED round was 10 seconds, compared to a SR1/2 round of 3 to 5 seconds, and even raw casting, an ED caster could not equal the spell casting speed of a SR mage. The differences got even worse once reaction enhancers came into play (through spell or talent). Another example why one should not blindly transfer ED stuff to SR.)

Now, I would say I am surprised to see you stooping to personal attacks, but that would be lieing.

I do find it hilarious that you take offense at the SR treatment of L.A., yet blindly defend SR's take on GDs here. What about using some of that tisted logic and "since it was written, it is true, so let's find a reason for it" to the L.A. Water?

Personal attacks are a violation of the Dumpshock Terms of Service. They will not be tolerated from any parties regardless of the situation. The moderators have been forced to closely watch this thread for some time due to the attitudes being taken by users in it. We don't like having to closely watch a 12+ page thread. If further violations of the Terms of Service show up in this thread, it will immediately be closed.

"And the matrix memory crystal died with him

It does prove the whole 'Dev protection is not absolute' angle

Or are you going to say Dunkie decided to suicide, despite the Dev's plans, just to get back at them?

But Dev protection is absolute. It's not like some secret killer made it through the Dev protection. Dunkie offed himself. It wasn't an external threat. It wasn't some normal everyday mundane human schmuck with a fertilizer bomb. Nothing killed that Great Dragon accept a Great Dragon (that just happened to be himself).

Listing a suicide as a normal death statistic just doesn't make any sense, sorry. If you're reading a magazine article, lets say, on safety and crash statistics of a certain model of car...would you expect to see a death statistic that included people who happened to be sitting in the seat of that car when they shot themselves in the head? Is it a factor in the crash-rating of the automobile, just because someone died? It's not like that sort of death has anything to do with the anti-lock brakes not working, the car's center of balance being off so that it rolls during a sharp turn, or an airbag failing to deploy.

Dunkie killed himself. Pointing to his death and saying "See? Great Dragons die all the time!" is ridiculous.

You could make an argument that Dunkie saw no other way to achieve his goals, so he had to kill himself. In that sense, his failure to find alternatives killed him.

That is due to limitations o fthe human brain and that ti has trouble learning new things past a certain point. Immortals may not have such limits.



Just a few things about the 4th world.
The Major nations in the 4th world had access to:
Cyberware (crystal limbs)
High end energy weapons (elementalists)
Tactical Air force regiments (thera and Throal each have a standing Air force, and the Mountain trolls also maintain many small, Viking style, Air forces.
WMDs (call forth the maelstrom)
Sudden reinforcements (call forth the army of Decay)
Tanks and similar (Horrors)
Radio communications (spells)
Non visual sensing systems (spells)
Technological sensors (artificer)


Nope, now will come the 'Earthdawn is nothing like the rome and grece you know' line of reasoning