I personally liked the normal Quickness of 15.

The Harlequin run books have numbers for Frosty, but those stats are a bit different between the two...

My understanding is that she is also a relatively new IE.

honestly, mr campbell, i am inclined to ask why an immortal elf is pawnded off on ED gm's? it's canon and heabily believed to be from the second age, so immortal elves were immortal even in ED.

and yes, an immortal elf is really badass, on par with dragons in some instances. i personally believe that harlequin could go toe to toe with any non-great dragon as well as any great feathered.

imagine all that karma from down cycle hunting and the like. figure taking out a dragon every hundred years or so for five millenia. plus another two of fightng horrors and their constructs as harlequin is at least 7000 years old.

ya know i'm gonna play around with that high double digits thing a bit cause i woke up early with nothin else to do.

herald, do the frosty stats mature or are they conflicting? i would assume that they advance the same as any other, just that they can do it over millenia. but does the given info suggest she is advancing abnormally fast?

and whoever thinks of introducing something like predator omega needs cockslapped and donkeypunched.

Donkeypunch! The Power, IN YOU! NOW!



Sorry, totally off-topic, but it's sort of a reflex now.


L:

okay, so i've learned that the nsrcg just isn't up to immortal elf standards. also, i very much regret not having any programming applications installed to do the math with an equation.

but all that aside, i used calc and the assumption that harly initiated a total of 75 times (a nice round number for high double digits) - 30 with the knights of the crimson spire, the rest by himself. no ordeals, so pretty straightforward karma costs.

he would need nearly 10k karma (9090) just for the initiations. this assumes he ignored everything else, which we know he did not, since the knights of the crimson spire were knights after all. so let's say magical initiation was two thirds of harlequin's focus, that means he's sitting on something like 15 thousand karma.

okay, more calculator action. assuming he spends around 3000 karma on attributes (~500 each) he ends up adding about 11-12 to the racial modified limit, so somewhere between 20-25 would be fair attribute guesses.

i don't have DOT6W or any shadowrun books for that matter, but i think that would put him on par with much of what i have seen for some great dragons.

I thought you couldn't go beyond x1.5 your racial max. There for he'd have 9-12 for all his stats and skills in the 20+ range. Also, I would leave at least 10% of that karma for enchanting, bonding, and so forth.

Okay, okay, for the tree huggers out there: what if we use the nukes sparingly? We could use Fuel Air Devices

I don't know the math but I bet Austere Emancipator could put some numbers up here for us. IIRC, FADs provide a similar amount of destruction w/o the radiation and thus no ensuing Background Count. Or here's another thought: A FAD combined w/ FAB...not sure if the FAB would get fried, though...

Human ingenuity all the way, baby!!

Mostly what I'm trying to establish is that humans have ways to (quite easily) deal w/ the "foot soldiers" of the Horde. The generals...well, I do advocate more Kaer research.

About those microbe things: is thier power level the same as a metahuman? I don't want to get into the whole "does size matter" but...does it? I know a dwarf and a troll have the same essence and therefore the same Magic but would those little guys fall into the same rules? Or are they "magic in nature"?

I'm not trying to nitpick (on that one); just curious.

I'm glad eveyone enjoyed the Pred Omega thought!!

When I said that they are on par with a grade 3 initiate I wasn't kidding. In fact they are on par with one that has great stats (6+ in all mental attributes). They aren't capable of summoning (or at least weren't in ED). I assume they are magical in nature because spellcasting Horrors don't suffer from drain.

Horrors don't suffer drain!? Oh crap.

Fuel-Air Explosives certainly don't pack the punch of nukes. Nothing made by humans does. Nukes are insanely powerful. Consider, for example, that no nuclear warheads are mentioned in terms of anything less than kilotons, and one kiloton is a thousand tons or one million kilograms of straight TNT in explosive power. Hiroshima was twenty of those. The 500 megatons is 500,000 (five hundred thousand) of those.

Still, any conventional explosives would certainly kill those small, physical Horrors, too. 300kg of C-12, average for decently sized missiles, does 208D+26.

Don't Fusion warheads cause much less radiation anyway? My Google-Fu is getting weak, I couldn't confirm.

i don't really think that an attribute max would apply to an immortal. but who knows?

also would horrors grow in power? i mean hehe, i got the horrors book out, yum!!!

hey wait, maybe herald or AH can help me with this. didn't the horros book keep the standard ED practice of listing the attribute steps rather than the attribute values?

but anyway, that would mean they are stronger than they were in the 4th world. i get the distinct impression that dragons and IE's grow stronger, so why not horrors, i got the impression that they continually fought amongst themselves when not devestating earth.

Well, an IE would not be the equivelent of a horror foot soldier. More like a horror colonel. So there wouldn't be any great concentration of them, they'd all be hiding.
Okay, I'm going to stop arguing over our ablity to actually destroy a horror. Humans are really good at thinking up ways of killing things they don't like. My only problem with the excessive use of force aspect is that the horrors are just as capable of it as we are.

Yay!! We won the Shadowrun!!

Kidding Actually, all this Horror/Kaer/Earthdawn talk has fueled my desire to pick some books. I was gonna blow my Xmas cash on Sr but now I'm thinking maybe I'll give ED a try...

Returning to the original topic: Modern Kaers.

To answer a much much ealier question, someone asked what the problem was with sea-kaers in earthdawn. The answer is, sea levels changed. Earthdawn also has a large lake of lava on the surface. (magic is involved, don't ask). Said lava rose up above the level of the 'exit' to the Kaer. If you can't get out of your Kaer, it doesn't work.

The problem with using high technology in designing and building a Kaer is that the inhabitants most likely need to retain high levels of education within the Kaer in order to maintain it. Given how long Kaers last, maintenance is a serious concern.

I believe we should ignore the 3000 years timelimit for the purposes of future discussion. Frankly, thats not very interesting, and it seems a shorter time period is quite likely given what Azlan was able to accomplish in just 50 years or so.

Here are some of the design criteria a Kaer would need to have in order to be effective. A Kaer is, in essense, a synthetic version of a dragon's home.

1) the Kaer would need to maintain physical integrity for hundreds of years. This means earthquakes, dynamite, etc shouldn't be able to crack the 'outer shell'

2) The Kaer needs to have magical protection to prevent the passage of astral entitites from the outside to the inside given deliberate and prolonged effort.

3) the Kaer needs to be able to house, feed, water, administrate its population (which may well increase) over the hundreds of years of scourge.

4) the Kaer must contain within it everything one would need to rebuild a civilization on the surface after the scourge is over. These supplies must last hundreds of years.

5) the Kaer must know when the scourge is over. In Earthdawn times, this was accomplished via a magicometer where the height of a ball over a pool of water was a function of the magic level of the world. This system failed, as the clock 'stopped' at some point before its completion. Sophisticated atomic clocks may be a good alternative. Simpler timing mechanisms as backups are probably also required.

In my opinion, while high technology can aid each of these things, simpler backups are required. Anyone who's played Fallout knows how something like a Kaer can go horribly wrong if one important device fails or if a backup of something irreplacable is absent.

It should also be noted that the -cheif- characteristic of horrors is that of corruptors. Simple horrors kill things, and make the corpses and their stomping grounds more corrupt. Inteligent horrors seak to torture namegivers to feed on the emotions and pain that results. The most sophisiticated inteligent horrors often corrupt individuals to do their bidding. While some posters have indicated that they feel people wouldn't fall for this again because there would be warning signs, I disagree. People may well ignore what is going on until it is too late, as folk often have in the past.

Consider:

~ A johnson greets your team, and offers them access to a new nanite treatment which will increase their firearms skill three points and their reaction by one die in return for sabotaging a secret underground construction product. They are to infiltrate a digging team, and replace the water control chip with a slightly modified chip. (it'll fail in 50 years after the underground instalation goes online.) The johnson is actually an agent of a horror... and if the players accept, they will be horror marked... would your players go for a deal like that, assuming the johnson was as smooth in presenting the deal as most johnsons are? Assuming the danger matched the potential payoff?

The body of knowledge about how to detect those who have been willingly or unwillingly corupted by a horror has yet to be recoverred. Only dragons, imortal elves, and certain escoteric magicians are aware of 'artisan checks,' and instituting art classes and art tests amidst 10 billion people is impractical...

I await your replies...

I spoke too soon....excellent.

Okay,

sorry bout that JC, but i have a bad case of ED withdrawl. it makes me unnaturally crabby about the subject.

as for frosty, she seems a bit undeveloped as yet.

Looks frosty from head to toe.... Looks like a fully mature woman to me.

Who does everyone think Horrors are suscepible to the mana warp? Certainly they were not discomfited by such things in the past.

Personally, I went by the assumption that they would be susceptible to Mana Warps at first because everything currently in SR is. Also, because of what Mana Warp represents (such as deep space), it would be logical that any astral critter would be harmed by it. It would be logical if Horrors adhered to even some of the basic rules of how magic and the astral space work in SR, like everything else does.

The Waste thing could be considered proof that they aren't harmed by Mana Warps, but it's certainly arguable whether the Waste actually is a Mana Warp, because of the (apparent) inherent differences between the ED and SR magic systems. Thus we cannot go by the assumption that Horrors are harmed by Mana Warps, but (with only the Waste as a proof) we should not completely ignore that possibility.

Then there's the whole "aspected background count" thing. The Waste could just be a horror-aspected warp.

~J

Then you really should actively take part in all the Character Tweaking Challenge threads. Those include math way beyond that. Anyone who knows the basics of both nuclear warheads and SR explosive rules could've done it in an instant.

Though I suppose the meaning of the word "geek" is not easily translatable between our two cultures. Knowing what a square root is or being capable of shifting a decimal point doesn't still quite make you a geek in Finland, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did in North America.

knowledge scares most people, AH. Thats why they call us "geeks".

But it also works for some people, too.

Happy New Year, omea. You're my staunch ally against the Horrors.

"Geek the mage! Geek the mage!" - Famous last words

That wasn't supposed to mean that people are less educated in North America, although now that I read it again I can see it could be interpreted like that. Sorry. I only meant that I have the impression that getting branded as a "geek" is much easier in the US than it is in Finland.

[Edit]So even if everyone were math geniuses, people might be afraid to show it because they might be branded as geeks. Or something like that. Not as severe, but you get the point, hopefully.[/Edit]

Ah, that's cool. Geek culture is the 'in thing' nowadays. Well....let's say one of the in things, anyway.

Get 'em AE!!

The height of the nuclear arsenal was not capable of destroying the solar system. It was not capable of destroying the earth. It was capable of destroying every major city on the eath (directly killing 80% or so of the earth's population), and the fallout would lead to increased cancer rates in most regions of the earth (leading less than 1% undamaged, but at least 10% liveable).

The height of the nuclear arsenal now. Give it a while.