In this new age of magic there is a unchecked power....think of a horror that could manipulate the matrix. By the existince of the horrors it's very possible. From what I have read the horrors are like nightmares, like Freddy...but way cooler since they physically manifest. So if the horrors start popping up in the 6th world...and some decker somewhere has a nightmare about a horror in the matrix...KaBOOM New horror in the matrix. The G.O.D. is gonna have a field day with that thing.

just remember people Named hoorors and named dragins have something in common... if you kill it... it is gone.

Major point if someone finally goes and scores those 2 million Legend points for killing Verjigorm (or if someone did it last cycle) no more Verjigorm ditto for almost all the great horrors. Except Nebis but with the nebising amount of magicians with astral capabilities in SR and the sheer nebis of such adept types that can see astral, unlike in the fourth world, then even the most nebis skeptic has to agree that nebis is out nebised in this 6th NEBIS. and if anyNEBIS has the NEBIS to argue this NEBIS with me then i will NEBIS the NEBIS NEBIS

**rolls on the floor twitching and drooling**

Keep in mind that Draconic legend suggests that snuffing Verjigorm may cause the sudden and immediate termination of the world.

~J

Too fucking bad. When opportunity knocks, metahumanity will just have to find out.

Humanity has always been best at ensuring its own destruction.

~J

Then obviously we suck untold amounts of ass at everything, since we have never even come close to managing that, nor are we making any real progress towards that goal.

Really? I thought we were doing quite well.

~J

We're still here ... we still thrive despite large amounts of stupidity and self-destructive behavior.

We are more populous than ever and we are getting ready to colonize space. I would say we are exceedingly inept at destroying ourselves.

We're closer to rendering this planet inhabitable than ever and I'd say we're quite far indeed from colonizing space to any sustainable degree.

~J

draconic legend says that and the original Hypothesis for the Manhattan project said it had a 50% chance of ignighting the atmosphere of earth, killing everything...

Wasn't there fears about the first particle accelerators, that they might cause the university to collapse or some such BS?

Not sure if this has been brought up or not, and I'm not steeped enough in Earthdawn lore to really understand the Horrors...

But... Dissonance anyone?

Both of which are quite true. The sun isn't a good comparison, though, because it isn't actively assisting its downfall (that we know).

~J

Sure it is. It keeps burning that limited supply of hydrogen. When will it ever learn that being a fusion reactor means burning out?! Oh, the solarity.

Yes. They're both technically true but not very accurate.

I could die tomorrow. Or I could get Leonization and die a century from now.

Humanity could wipe itself out next week or last several thousand millenia and then "ascend" or some crap.

As for rendering the planet unihabitable, I don't think that humnas could actually do that. We may be able to make it unihabitable for us and kill most of the life on the planet but eventually the planet would clean itself up and life would start over. It could take a few million years but but it would happen.

Sure. But that helps us how again?

~J

Then the human race will be reborn.

Only this time as perfect beings with feathered and forms of pure energy?

~J

It seems to me to be just a general comment on humans rendering the planet "uninhabitable", not a comment on HvsH. Killing all life from earth would require us to get rid of the oceans and the topmost 10km+ of the earth's crust, and that just isn't going to happen very soon. Most life, easily. All life, nope.

[Edit]Oops, uninhabitable indeed.[/Edit]

Again, it isn't terribly meaningful to humanity that cockroaches will survive. It isn't even particularly meaningful to them if all life survives save humanity.

Two errors in my earlier statement: first, I obviously meant uninhabitable, and more accurately I meant uninhabitable to humanity.

~J

You do know that people have always been whinging on about how civilization is crumbling, humanity is doomed, and "things today just aren't as good as they are when I was growing up," right? I mean, pretty much since the beginning.

And if you look at history, civilization has a tendency to crumble relatively regularly. Only now we're affecting the entirety of the atmosphere/etc., not just a local area.

~J

The last shreds of the Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire. The big one, the Ottoman Empire. Democracy in its modern form is too recent a phenomenon to have examples of its collapse (for instance, the US is a mere two hundred and twenty-two years old, far younger than any of the above examples even at the start of their decline), but if you’ve got a rationale for why it is more resistant to such I’d like to hear it.

~J

Ah, it appears we have a completely different understanding of what it means for a civilization to crumble. By "civilization" I mean "a relatively high level of cultural and technological development" [held by a certain population, of course], and by "crumble" "to break down completely".

Indeed what was left of the Roman Empire by the 6th century was but shreds, and that progress had started at least one hundred years prior. The other two are simply great empires which were broken up into several successor countries -- the civilization held on. The nationstates which sprang up or were formed in the areas and for the peoples formerly ruled by the respective empires were as highly developed culturally and technologically as the empires had been.

I do not wish to discuss the mechanics of different political systems at length, at least not here, but the reason I mentioned democracy is simple: so that there would be examples from societies which are similar to our own current ones.

If you compare the Ottoman Empire at its height to the current-day Middle East and don't call that crumbling, well, I'm not sure what to say.

~J

The point is, we're still here, despite generation after generation of hip, trendy, cynics all shouting about how the sky's falling and how humanity's about to wipe itself out.

Yes, we have biological and chemical weapons that could wipe out every human. But guess what? Thog, the first guy to hit someone with a stick, had an amazing military advantage over all his contemporaries, too, and the race managed to stumble on despite it. Ditto with Grum, who was the first guy to hit someone with a sharp stick, and Oog, who was the first guy to throw a stick. Any one of those legendary giants had the capability to hypothecially kill every other human being -- but much like the state of nuclear/biological/chemical weapons today -- it didn't happen.

Why keep insisting humanity's so amazingly skilled at wiping itself out, when we haven't managed to do so after thousands of years of trying?

In all the cases you mention, the practical ability to kill everyone was not present. It is now, and is becoming more and more common.

~J

I disagree, but I guess on this point time will tell.

~J

And when your irradiated, disease-wracked corpse is shoveled into a pile next to his by the Master Bugs, you can leer at him through your decaying lips and zombiliy shout, "I TOLD YOU SO!"

There's some bets, chummer, you just don't make.

There are some bets that you simply CAN'T.

I just wanted to say, I think the drop bears are going to beatt everyone.

You just couldn't resist, could you?

Drop- Drop - Drop-

DropBears HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!

I wasn't refering to the Drop Dumplings as much as the ressurection of this particular thread on this particular day.

Can we please try to be serious, at least vaguely?

~J

I have come to the conclusion that we can defeat the Horrors if we have two things, preparation and unity. First, we'll need the Rites of Passage and Protection or a similar barrier to protect us from the masses of unnamed pack hunters. Those are the most dangerous due to their superior numbers. The Named horrors are powerful and dangerous but they are also solitary and divisive. Heavily armed adepts with eight or nine threads woven to their Named main battle tanks can take out the most powerful of Named Horrors rather easily. However, quarantine precautions will have to be enforced strictly to prevent a Horror from gaining entry into a warded area via a marked soldier and the rediscovery of the spell that allows one to erase a Horror Mark is essential to humanity's long-term survival.

I do not expect the Horrors to be stagnant. I expect our interpid warriors to face sentient corrupted main battle tanks with arms and legs and giant rail guns which look and act sort of like G2 Megatron and all sort of other cybermagical monstrosities. I expect Horror Otaku and Horror Technomancers to ride the information superhighway into seemingly safe technokaers. I expect either Bonecrown or Nemesis to already be here gathering political influance and control, but they are politicians rather than destroyers and their leadership might actually allow humanity to outfox their more malignant brethren.

i'd expect to see digital kaers--whole populations converted into machine ghosts, living in heavily- (magically-? otaku-?) encrypted offline solar/magic-powered hosts.

In space !!

We don't need any horrors, we take care of destroying our world and make people suffer on our own.

But we aren't doing it fast enough....we have had thousands of years to destroy ourselves and we are still here, hence the horrors. We failed our job of self-extinction, so the powers that be had to hire a team of horror runners to come and geek us. We are simply the targets of multi-dimensional wetwork.

Silly question, but I have been playing old material and my own campaigns for some time. I have a general idea what the Horrors are but could someone provide a link or something to more information about them, the Kares and so on?

bam!