Yeah, "tactical air force" - flying ships you mean. And where's the progress? It took us 40 years to go from military airships to jets in the 20th century. Another 20 years and guns were replaced with missiles.

Cyberware - ditto. How fast does crystall stuff progress? How industrialised is its production?

Same for the production of said high-end energy weapons. How many, how fast, and how much progress?

For all those ED savants: If ED was a civilisation on par with the modern, industrialised world, why didn't it progress much further and faster? Where's the SOTA? The rapid advancement?

And how did it almost completely vanish just a few thousand years ago so that we did not find anything from them, even though we found lots of ruins from all ages, and skeletons from all time epochs. No lizardmen skeletons, no windlings, no orks, trolls, whatever.

Did someone go over the world at the start of the 5th age, and wipe all traces off?

ED is a cheap, tacked on "history" of SR that does not really make any sense at all.

As much as I hate agreeing with Synner, I have to give him full credit for providing the real deal this time

Yeah, and he did prepare that all in the time it took him to fly from Washington D.C. to Denver.

In case you have forgotten in ED tghey had just recovered from a near extinction level event. Our best minds predict several centuries of recovery from such an event before our current civilisation could make fast progress

aand as to the flhying ships, well use a spirit with a movement style power and you get high speed flying ships



craftsmen make it, true, but they can knock it up fairly rapidly. And it is more than comparable to 2070 tech SR cyberarms. Hell the basic model gives matching Agility reaction and body scores, and makes the average human stronger than an average troll. Not too shabby?



there were enough for about 1-2% of the population to have them. How many Jet fighters does the US have?



Look at above near extinction level event. Also ED Magetech had progressed to the stage of ressurection devices capable of being used by anybody. SR can't match that in the medtech field



1: Thera sank, the evidence left is in myth and legend.
2: In australia Kaers have reappeared, apparently they had been sent into the astral for the duration of the 5th age.
3: Many IEs made damn sure that a large part fo the history was forgotten
4: most of that tech was mased on magic and used materials that just cannot exist during a downcycle. other items were hidden away, such as dragons.
5: we have found very little of pre babylonian civilisation, even though babylonian records talk about much older civilisations.
6: windlings are in Paranormal critters of Europe
7: we recently unearthed a dwarf skeletion IRL (although the media dubbed it a hobbit )
8: how exactly would you, right now, with your real life resources, identify a magical sword?

So? in the end, the Devs killed Dunk. That is true of every canonical death in the setting. From the biggest dragon ot the smallest dwarf. All get the same dev protection. They are protected until it seems more interesting to kill them

Why not. If you assume at least a basic level of knowledge about the world of the time, it is quite reasonable for a being who can watch 30 trid screens at once and understand them all to think up plans thta fast

If you don't assume that level of knowledge, how did he find Denver? How did he know which part of the world he came out in?

Some half-baked dev fiat, like the entire plot.

There would be ruins around, and skeletons all over the world. There weren't.

A magical sword? I wouldn't. I would, however, assume a archeologist would be able to notice that there's something odd finding an iron or even steel sword dating back to the stone age.

All traces of the 4th world gone? Without a trace? for millenias?

"It's magic." strikes again.

It is a fantasy game. Those who do not like fantasy should look elsewhere.

Shadowrun is a roleplaying game set in the dystopian near-future of 2070, a world where cyberpunk meets magic.

And those who play a fantasy game shouldn't try to use the fantasy game to base their justifications for an event in another game on.

Fine, so I misremembered the timestamp. As for the not-quite-explicit talk of support (and the whole thing of why only Azzies fought back), YotC page 62, much is in Shadowtalk, but some is official known setting history. Also see Pipeline's input on page 63. Actually, if you would just bother to read "Ghostwalker 1, Denver 0" to the end of the Ghost Stories section you will find a lot indicating pre-planning of some sort, which either means that a) he could chat with someone from the metaplane; b) Dunkie expected this behavior and set up the groundwork; or c) something else, and while I knew I had a third possible option when I starting writing point b, I lost it entirely since then.
I thought I read something more explicit, but I will cite Shadows of NA page 78, comment by Firelight until I find what I remembered. Toss in the "terribly loyal to Ghostwalker" bit in Psyche's comment on 75, and the character definition that Ghostwalker is the most potent conjurer of all great dragons, and you start to see a trend, but I still think there was a more explicit statement.

If such a level of foresight is possible, why don't the GDs rule the world?

*points up* My point was that they can die, not whether or not they can be killed, though I was unaware of the suicide angle. where was this explained? I would be interested in reading it.

I thought you already believed that they do.
Also, I think Earthdawn had some fallout still of when the dragons did try to rule over all other name givers. Toss in that even greats sleep when mana drops and all the bits of angry IEs going hunting in the 5th age, and many of the ones that lived have probably concluded that it is not in their best interests to rule the world.

No, I think that they do not rule the world, so I think they cannot be as powerful as some people make them out to be.



And they assume that the IEs won't hunt them anyway?

Jealousy? Ego? I'm sure you've noticed how hard it is for humans (metas) to work together in RL or in games. Sure they band together if threatened but afterwards, bicker bicker bicker. The same would be true with dragons, only magnified. Imagine that kind of raw power and the ego behind it. I've always figured they have little or no trust between then. You also have to figure some of if not all the dragons think of metahumanity as "beneath their concern". They might see us as ants, or even less than ants. Tools to be used and disgarded, but that's about it. You also have to consider they have a longer view of things than we do.
They probably know that should they just step in and rule the world by force, then what? They would all be staring across from each other waiting for one of them to screw up so they can tear his/her throat out and then go back to staring until the next one falls. Granted that is most likely what they are doing now, but less openly.

Dragons play chess, not Global Thermonuclear War.

Not especially, but Sirrug took some time to eat IEs that had been involved in downcycle hunting. As the aftereffect, IEs are less numerous, GDs are less numerous, and mostly the ones that are left are the GDs that didn't irritated the elves as much and the elves that didn't try to kill of the dragons.

Dragons don't have a common agenda. As I tried to explain to you, they don't have a society. Just rules how to avoid killing each other. How do you rule the world, if 30 other dudes disagree on you ruling the world? Not that easy.



No kidding, it's magic. In a game about magic. Now, that comes as a surprise and can certainly support your claims.

How many ruins and skeletons exist from around 15000 BC or so? How many Bones too big to be human would be tossed away a "huge extinct bear", or "misshapen midget"? The magical sword would stop beeing magic in the 5th world and after some time it would be rusted debris. Also, ED is not stone age. More like bronze age and I don't remember much on the topic of metalurgy in ED, so there might never have been any steel swords to rise any eyebrows. Or if they were, the test dating it way back before steel was invented would possibly be declared faulty and it was dated to a time more fitting. Most interesting is, that something like this happens now and then in real world archeology, when stuff is found that cannot have been possibly manufactured at the time it was supposed to be from.

The traces of the 4th world did not go away without a trace either, but everything tied to magic shifted out of reality (or something) and starts reappearing in SR, like the Deep Lacuna in LA for instance, and all the ruins they start digging up in east europe (yes, that is Bersaive, all right) that have not been there a few decades back.

Argueing on the topic of how realistic fantasy is so funny. You can explain everything in-world and nothing can be really disproven with real world logic. But people sure try hard. Why exactly are you playing a fantasy game like SR, when you seem to dislike it so much?

That has neever been explained, since nobody knows what happened at the end of the 4th and the beginning of the 5th world.
Ah yeah, forgot: the GD and IE know it. It's their fault.

A big appeal of Shadowrun for me the fact that it's not just modern world meets magic and fantasy, but also that it is magic and fantasy meets modern world. Just as humanity suddenly has to deal with spirits, magic, and creatures thought myth, said creatures and spirits suddenly have to deal with technology they don't know about, and a humanity with more options than they know about.

What I dislike very much is that in many aspects in canon, the modern part of this mix is not given its due. It's almost always magic trumping technology, and almost never some magical critter discovering that his hide is not as invulnerable anymore as it thought.

It's very one-sided, in my opinion, and GW would have been a perfect example to balance it out. He could have been the poster boy for "Hah, world, tremble at my migh... what's that? a flying metal shack? Where's the spells keeping it aloft? And what's that moving thin.... "

Instead he was yet another cheap plot device/dev pet.

Okay, so here's the one thing that you seem to disregard, Fuchs.

Technology has rules, limitations, defined methods of operations. They obey the existing, known laws of physical reality.

Magic has this nasty tendancy to obey metaphysical laws, which flat out ignore or break the existing, known laws of physical reality. That's why it keeps trumping. Until Technology can match what Magic can do, point for point, then Magic will likely always have an edge. That's true in this setting and many others.

Hell, you don't even have to use "magic" as the comparison. Use mutations, superpowers or any number of other things. Check the multitude of other sources out there and you'll see the same recurring theme. Tech is good, Magic/powers are better. I'm not sure it's your intent, but you're tearing down SR as if they're the worst/only offender of this, and this pattern has been going on for decades even before SR was a concept, let alone a game.

Shadowrun, on the game mechanic level, is balanced. Magic does not trump tech there. A group with magic and no technology is weaker than one that has both, and arguably on par (as far as sucking goes) with a group that has no magic, but hacking and cyber). For every advantage magic provides, tech provides an advantage. Same for disadvantages.

So, I see no reason why the background should lean so heavily towards magic being top dog.

I've seen it go both ways, though. Using my own group as an example, the GM we have loves running the magic side of the game. I tend to be the more tech-savy guy in the group. That said, even against drones, spirits and goons, we virtually walk all over the competition. Our (now retired) heavy hitters were nigh unstoppable, just because of *how* we worked together. Technology wasn't doing anything to even slow us down, let alone stop us. That group comprised of a physad, mystic adept, an aspected mage and a full blown, spirit-focused, mage (my character). The characters were originally SR3, and we recently converted them to SR4 for a couple of one-shot games. They required over 600bp to make the conversion properly and keep them at the power level they'd achieved in pre-retirement. For the record, our GM tried to avoid completely overpowering scenarios, like multi-level initiate magical guards and such, though we occasionally did run into them.

Point is, that I've seen magic wreak havoc and run willy-nilly over tech. The only time I've seen the reverse is in SR3 when the chipped up Sam went 3 times before the mage even blinks. SR4 did away with that (which I'll STILL never understand, faster reflexes don't make you go AFTER everyone else), so now Mages can drop an entire group of mundanes in the blink of an eye before they're in any really serious danger.

EDIT: And the reason it leans so heavily towards magic is because the game designers decided that's what it should be, 20 years ago. They, however, realized some (like you) would REALLY dislike that, and so they included the lovely text that encouraged you as a GM to flat out ignore, change or improve upon any information/rules within the book. You don't like Magic being so powerful. We get that. Unfortunately, you're seemingly not in the majority, and all the ranting won't change anything. I respect your opinion on how you think things should be, even if I don't agree with it. There comes a point though, when someone needs to realize nothing will change and their own opinion won't sway others to their side. I think we passed that point about 6 pages ago.

Well, mundanes can also drop an entire group of mundanes in the blink of an eye before they're in any really serious danger. Throwing grenades or sending killer drones with their 4 initiative passes and wide burst fires will do the same. The same holds true for a group of awakened guys. They die the same way.

That is actually a nice point. Awakened creatures being surprised by tech is something not explored very far in the setting. The game focusses on the metahuman side of things. From the attrition rate of dragons in this world, they seem to adapt pretty badly. Icewing has to summon a few Sage spirits, and presto, he has all knowledge he needs. Any mage can do it btw. "Any knowledge skill" involves things like "Aztechnology Military", "Tactics of the 21th century", "Research on Dragons"... just cope with the fact that very few magicians are at the power level of a GD.

When I said that it is a fantasy game, I meant SR, not ED. Technology still gets to cope with the law of diminishing returns, while magic gets to be on the up-cycle. Malicant made that point better than I would have, so no need to revisit it.

Uh, Magic does trump technology on game mechanical level. You seem to be warping simple facts here. Just look at Stunball and show me something technological that can match it's efficiency. Show me some tech, that reads your mind like an open book, or controls the minds of countless people. Or closes your wounds in few moments. Or lets you move objects at will ignoring laws of physics. And so on.


I'd say we reached that point like 6 threads ago.

this is a point that has been countered several times. dragons are powerful in that they are very difficult to kill. to some extent, they can use that offensively--they can beat military forces in limited engagements, for instance. but being hard to kill doesn't otherwise translate into great power in other areas, which is the conclusion you keep leaping to with zero supporting evidence.

example: Lofwyr is pretty much the baddest motherfucker on the planet. great dragons eat everything else for lunch, and Lofwyr eats great dragons for lunch (some of 'em, anyway). he's at the top of the food chain. but one of his greatest competitors is Richard Villiers. Richie is human, through and through--no dragon backing him up, no free spirit on the board helping him out, nothing. just one guy with balls the size of Kansas.

the point that you really seem to be missing, Fuchs, is that this is not D&D. the ultimate measure of power is not who can kill who. GW blew up half of Denver, and what does he get? did the UCAS surrender to him? did the CAS capitulate and name him King GW the First? no, GW got an advisory position on the Denver city council. he is, for all intents and purpose, the mook holding a baseball bat who stands behind the real boss. and he didn't even get that much just by blowing shit up--he got that by blowing some stuff up and then telling everyone except Aztlan exactly what they wanted to hear. the UCAS, NAN, and CAS gave GW what he wanted because GW had given them what they wanted.

You do realize that flight took only a few seconds since it was Ghostwalker's astral form that came out of the Watergate rift.

As I recall (and it has been a few years), GW was astral most of that trip. He picked up his body outside of Denver. Yet another GD trick.

Personally, I use the megacorps more than dragons in my games. I have the Denver boxed set (and most of the 2nd & 3rd ed books). Honestly, I didn't use it much. I tend to stick to Seattle, with runs to other areas to mix it up. Makes life easier. I have too much invested in Seattle (1st through 4th ed for example).

I try to avoid the over arching story arcs that run in the back ground. They generally annoy me. Actually, the only one I liked was Chicago / Bug City and the Renraku Arcology stuff. Everything else drove me

Everyone of the dragon fans keep telling me Dragons are superhumanly smart, can plan on a level unsurpassed, and have tactics that can lay waste to everyone else. That's why I wonder why they are no ruling the world - after all, mere humans can't equal them, right?

But if they are not so superhumanly wise and savy, then they won't be that hard to kill either.

You do realise that all the smoke about how he could prepare and plan his assault looks even more "He's a dragon, he can do the impossible!"?

Stun grenade. Neurostun grenade. Gas delivery system. They do not even require line of sight, and are dirt cheap, talking efficency. No need to invest a lot of time in it either, and you don't take drain either.

Personafix chips can make you the most loyal follower. And it's far easier to distribute them without getting noticed than sustaining a large area effect spell. You can do similar things with VR tech ("Brainwashing").

There are nanites and biotech that improve your healing. Cyber and bioware can keep you going. And show me one piece of magic that heals stun damage. Trauma damper however... and we are not even talking about all the other goodies, sleep regulator, etc.

Or the matrix, and its possibilities.

Drones of all kinds.

Information networks, communication, all the domain of tech. Show me the magic that makes you travel faster than in jets or suborbitals.

If it fits on a foot, it must be a shoe.

Smart is not the same as wise. GW is lacking in the wise department for example, but he is still freakishly smart and commands armies of minions (spirits and stuff). If he for example tried to take over the world, Lofwyr would step in and the end of the tale would be most likely two dragon corpses. Or at least one very pissed survivor, who is too weak to defend himself against anyone else who challenges him at the moment.

It's like a cold war.

Basically, the GDs are like the CC. The rules are simple. Stay in your turf and don't disturb the status quo. If you do, your FFA.

dragons are superhumanly strong, too. that doesn't necessarily mean they can pick up a mountain. just because someone is smarter than everyone else doesn't mean they're smart enough to devise a way to control everyone else.

What you seem to be missing the fact that the tactics I suggested for his first attack would have been the exact same tactics he could have used back in the Fourth Age if he wanted to terrorize a big Theran city. They're not particularly sophisticated or play off the weaknesses of any particular military technological advancement. They are simple misdirection and intelligent use of massive spirit support coupled with the fact that Ghostwalker will assume he is light-years of any magic or technology an individual metahuman magician can throw at him.

Ghostwalker's also got the intimidation factor going for him (Just suppose the Aztech pyramid had a full 10 trained security magicians on duty for some reason. GW commences his attack. The security chief sounds the alarm. He turns to his 10 security mages as plaster rains down and says, "Okay guys, there's a 120-foot great dragon out there that no one has ever seen attacking our pyramid. Preliminary intel from astral scouts suggest he has strong spirit support. Air and tactical support is on the way. A 20-man unit of Leopard Guards is gearing up downstairs. We're counting on the 10 of you to hold the line until everyone else gets here... in about 5 minutes. This is what you've trained for. Call up all your spirits and go out there kick some great dragon butt." And every single one of them craps his pants - the last time anyone fought a great dragon their city was leveled, now its up to you and your 9 buddies).

After that first encounter with 21st century attack helicopters and fighter jets, Ghostwalker revises his tactics and starts his hit and run campaign, using even more misdirection and striking soft targets from surprise. It's not even his power level at play (well aside from the fact that he requires no additional weapons). In fact the military would have as much chance of stopping him as they have of stopping a domestic terrorist suicide bomber blows himself up in a shopping mall.

hmm
"if I assume X to be the case, this makes no sense at all. If I assume Y is the case, the whole thing makes sense and smells of hidden plots that are not openly described and which could be used as seeds for adventures."

Why are you so adamant on choosing X?

Actually, as far as history goes, "the last time anyone fought a great dragon", that anyone alone held the dragon at bay for a few minutes, before the plane was destroyed

"Ok, all you have to do is tell us where our drones and automated guns have to shoot at. You can do it using the fiberoptic cables here, or, if you need to go astral, use the armored glass observation posts. From what we know from our GD, railguns will take the guy down once we get a bead - and the wyrm is glowing astrally like a lighthosue, can't miss it."

Boomboomboomboom Fwoosh Fwoosh Fwoosh Dead Dragon.

Why is everyone so stuck on giving the military spit guns, no brains, and paper tissue defenses?

Because I don't like picking "everyone but dragons is dumb unless we need a reason why dragions don't rule the world, but for all effectrs, no gun or weapon ever will kill a dragon cuase we say so".

Why all the tech hate? Is it that inconceivable that Dragons can be killed by tanks?

This is not D&D.

Know your rules. The drones still roll like 6 dice for attack (Sensor+Targetsoft, capped by pilot which is usually 3). Not very threatening. It's hard to hit a dragon with vehicle mounted weapons, and man operated stuff does not enough damage.
But we digress, this is not about how military weaponry does squat against dragons or you having no idea how the rules of the game work.


The rules and fluff say it is. And that's how it is in SR.

I don't hate tech. I love it, actually. But you are a tech fanboy and that inspires in me the need to oppose you on principle.

you continue to make points that have been refuted previously, without bothering to respond to the refutations. please, either argue intelligently or don't argue at all. this is an interesting discussion, but if you're not going to hold up your end, i don't really see the point in having it.

Because Denver was a treaty town, and those sorts of heavy (and hard to hide) weapons were frowned upon. The Aztechs had to play a balancing act for the sake of keeping their part of the town. Even, if as suspected, they were hiding vast military resources, it takes time to uncover them and get them ready for use. You ever try and dig a Soviet jet fighter up out of the sand in the desert? Those things weren't designed to be deployed fast, just to be hidden from sight. Considering there were probably inspections of Treaty sites, their main building could house a full staff of military personnel.

I don't think its so much that people are discounting the military in this, they're just discounting your theory of what was feasible for the Azzies to under the fiction as it was written.

Disregarding for now the effectiveness of any such weapons and spells on a combat ready great dragon its good to know that in your world Azzie teocalis come equipped with rail guns and fiberoptic magevision systems - just in case.

This isn't an argument at all. It's more like picking on the weak kid, who retreats into his own mind and refuses to believe he's weak or beeing picked on. Pure gold for any internets bully.

But seriously, I wish he would try to back any of his claims with rules or something. the "It doesn't work that way in the real world" arguement is a little silly when magic, dragons or gauss rifles come into play.

Shadowrun never had any rules that had even a remote semblance to how firearms work, much less heavy weapons. So, it's no wonder its devs think of military weapons as something like ballistas from D&D. And never even consider what defense systems meant to shoot down missiles traveling faster than the speed of sound would do to a dragon.

That doesn't mean one has to swallow such rules and fluff without any thought. In my gaming group, everyone was in the military, so, we took one look at the ammo rules, and laughed, ignoring it. We also ignored range rules from the older editions - after shooting at 300 yards with assault rifles on the range, the SR1/2 max range was too stupid to use. Rate of fire we would have changed, if we'd have stuck to those rules.

And the idea that a dragon would be anything but dead on a battlefield fared the same fate.

well, good for you. if you think that's realistic, have fun. but you have not yet constructed a set of arguments logical or consistent enough to convince anyone else.

@Fuchs
I'm sorry, but the moment I start believing you have a better insight into firearms or heavy weapons is the day hell freezes over. So, as long as we discuss SR topics, we have to work with what SR offers us. And that is the rules.

If the rules were changed to resemble what you believe to be realistic weaponry, dragons would have to be adjusted accordingly, so your new rules still portrait them as nearly impervious to harm.

Andersrum wird ein Schuh draus, like we use to say over here.

In a world where dragons fly around, people are ready to take them down. That means gauss rifles and similar stuff are deployed. And I think I made it really clear that I do not think a dragon can shrug off shells of that calibre.

If you're in bear country, you usually carry a weapon to handle a bear. At least if your job is to protect people. That's just common sense. And the fiberoptic magevision system is old tech, dating back to 2050s. Why would a corp known for its magical power - in the old handbook, they said elite troops from the big A had 2 magically capable people per squad - not have such systems?

edit: oh, nevermind. i'm done with this argument until Fuchs (or someone) starts actually addressing the counterpoints that have been made.