You are right. Survival and winning are 2 different things. They beat the demons - that's winning. They are still around - that's survival. The planet being destroyed does not factor into either winning or survival. They could have won but not survived. They could have survived but not won. But they won and survived. The demons aren't around and they are - that sounds like humanity won, chummer.

If their numbers are limitless, how is there even vegetation once the people come out of the Kaers?

It seriously don't stack up - if the number of eaters was limitless, every square meter of earth would have had an eater in it, and those eaters would have eaten everything, but the inhabitants of the Kaers come out into a wilderness, not a blasted wasteland with no organic products at all (which would have killed them fairly quicky with the absence of any way to get more O2 into the atmosphere.

It's the same for the elves, if their defences held out the number of opponents wasn't limitless.

Given those two things didn't happen, it's pretty safe to assume that their are not actually that many horrors (there might be hundreds of millions maybe? probably less?), and many things have happened in history that are actually more destructive. The impact that created the Manson crater in the US for example. You'll need some evidence to back up the claim that their numbers are limitless, or even in the billions, otherwise the rate of consumption would have exceeded the rate of replinishment and all organics would have been consumed.

Given that many of those horrors in those millions don't know how to operate a ranged weapon, humanity can probably win.

An enormous number of horrors don't have physical presences. Those who exist only as mana will come through, corrupt the minds of those controlling the giant hellfire machines, and your plan stops working. Oh, and now some Horrors have control of your giant hellfire machines.


Based on what we currently know about strains like Deinococcus radiodurans and the mechanisms by which it is able to repair its DNA, it is highly unlikely that those mechanisms could be applied to every single organism on the planet, or even "every animal and plant." [Applying these mechanisms to only animals and plants would quickly lead to a world devoid of life, since without bacteria - including bacteria present within the animal and plant organisms, such as the cyanobacteria which make photosynthesis, and thus all complex life, possible - nearly all life would cease, very, very quickly.] Then there's the question of delivery: how are you going to get these modifications into every species? Some sort of retrovirus? And do you think there's a single retrovirus that could be applied to every single type of plant and animal? Or are you going to engineer different retroviruses for every one of hundreds of millions of species, or tens of millions of different types? Then you still have the question of the non-radioactive effects of detonating not one - since they don't come out all at once - but several nuclear devices in succession over the course of thousands of years. There's nothing about this plan that's practicable.


That's not what they did.


No, that's not at all what occurs.


They could use magic just fine. Using raw magic, without shielding themselves from the horrors with robes or spell matrices, gave the horrors a route of entry into their minds, as it did for everyone at the time. [With the possible exception of Great Dragons, who had access to a type of magic unusable to the other races.]

I can't believe someone named "Cthulhudreams" thinks this problem can be solved with force. These are immensely powerful entities from the farthest reaches of the metaplanes, beings of evil and darkness whose nature we can only begin to comprehend, who show every sign of being, collectively, vastly more numerous, powerful, and intelligent than metahumanity. They bring madness and death wherever they walk and are inimical to the nature of life, embodiments of entropy and decay. I don't believe they're all-powerful, but the notion that they can be destroyed with these sorts of solutions flies in the face of all published information about their nature, their number, their behaviors, and the levels of sacrifice necessary to do anything more than hide from them.

And there's really no guarantee that in the tens of thousands of years since we least encountered them, they haven't built hellfire machines of their own. Technology ain't just for metahumans.

It seems there are some different assumptions from the getgo. To restate them...'

1) We know the planet was overrun, presumably completely overrun by Horrors.
2) Reading the dragon creation myths, it is said that Verjigorm creating effectively an infinite number of horrors, suggesting either true infinity, or so many it's beyond counting.

Any plan that assumes a finite number, especially a number fewer than the number of humans, is, almost by definition, underestimating the enemy and, for the sake of good strategizing, should be discarded.

3) Horrors are tremendously diverse, and feed on a range of different things. Some feed on rock or bananas or plants. Some feed on other Horrors. Some feed on physical pain, some on emotional pain, or treason or whatever. The one unifying factor is they are destructive and 'bad' and even this rule isn't completely true since dragons are, strictly speaking, Horrors, and all name-givers (i.e. metahumans) are Horror spawn. So the lesson here is they offer a staggering diversity, so much so that we cannot easily anticipate what sort of tools will harm ALL of them.

4) All Horrors seem to be stopped by the methods used for Kaerns. Kaerns are a mix of magical technology plus physical barriers, so there are probably a finite number of actual attacks Horrors can use, although the precise number is not known to us. We do know there are some astral-only Horrors, and some physical-only Horrors, so shooting them all with gauss cannons is not going to be 100% effective.

5) We do not know what effect a background count has on a Horror. We DO know Horrors need a high astral to come over, and a lower astral count to stay here/survive. They can't go to space, and presumably places with no life at all are safer (although Earth has its own manasphre, which is very strong, so the assumption that killing all life on Earth would eliminate the Horrors is not a safe one).

6) Horrors can turn our own people with near-perfect efficiency and discretion, so depending on our people may be a dangerous assumption.


I think the single greatest step to protecting humans is to rediscover the secret of kaerns which, I suspect, has not been completely lost. Rediscover that and you have a baseline. Unlike before, we have the technology to efficiently set up many powerful kaerns, and to also invest in space. This gives us a baseline, however it will certainly exclude 90% of humanity. I wouldn't say it's a given humanity will survive, but it seems pretty likely.

The problem is, we don't know this technology ourselves, so we cannot speculate on how effective it is, if it can be made into personal armor, or weaponized. The other thing we have not considered is a more full study of horrors themselves. There are likely horrors that feed on other horrors and not humans. Capturing, breeding and using them could also be very effective as a defense, but is high-risk.

Not exactly. Imagine the horrors as the ocean, and Kaerns as debris floating in the ocean. Spend enough time in the water and you'll end up water logged. Each horror varies, not only in how it manifests, but also the powers and strategies it uses to attack whatever it'd like.

Keep in mind that each horror consumes different things: some eat physical things like plants, and matter, others eat people and creatures, others feed on less tangible things like emotion, or feelings.

To expand on my earlier premise, you don't need a massive number of Runners to deal with the physical Horrors. They are such limited threats when you do conversions that it is a simple job for a single sammy or heavy weapons specialist to destroy packs of Gnashers and other physical types. This will have a massively negative effect on the major Named Horrors who feed on negative human emotion because it will be impossible, over the duration, to either keep what is happening a secret or paint the more physical horrors in a sympathetic light. Humanity, including the various metas, identify with things like them, and the Horrors are by definition other, once one news organization breaks the story the major players will have to take a stand creating a very hostile environment for the Named Horrors as they will be more readilly recognised and there actions reported to the relevant groups. Humanity is not unexperienced with metaplanar creepy crawlies in the 6th world. First the shadows react, then the press, then the major powers. It is an established pattern that we've gotten damn good at over the decades thanks to information sharing across global networks, don't believe me? Ares Firewatch performs regular attacks on the insect homeplane called The Hive.

"Toturi should send Kagetenshi large sums of money".

Nezumi: Kaers were successfully breached.

~J

Sure, a mere pack of gnashers is going to be dead meat, but when the floodgates open and the Scrouge begins humanity won't be facing mere packs, they will be facing swarms akin to a plague of locust.

Don't you think that there were people in the Fourth World who wanted to bare their teeth at the Horrors and fight for their world? True Heroes who had access to flying mountains and other magical artifacts that were just as powerful as the pratical weapons (No, I don't consider nukes and killsats to really be a viable option against the Horrors enmass.) that the Sixth World can bring to bare? That the magics of the Fourth World couldn't help spread news and information between the nations at the time?


The basic nature of humanity hasn't changed, sure we have some new toys to play with, but remember that at the time of the Scrouge we are led to believe that everyone was Awakened and you can't throw a stone into the Dumpshock Pond without hitting a dozen threads about how it isn't fair that Magic has the upper hand against technology. (A viewpoint I do not happen to share, but alot of people seem to hold it.)

Oh and something that I think you may have forgotten is that Ares have been forced into trying to ally with some of the Bugs against other Hives so I don't really consider what they are doing as a good sign of what would happen when the Horrors arrive as you can't ally with a Horror.

*EDIT*

Well if I remember correctly Kagetenshi many or perhaps even most of the kaers where breached, but a few survived.

The problem is, Ravor, that the first years of Horror activity on any real scale will be the smaller, more tangible Horrors as the mana level needs to be higher for the Named Horrors and others reliant on more abstract means of existance to simply cross over. And you'll note I mentioned a single Sammy or heavy weapons specialist being able to take down packs, a fullscale team of runners (rigger, hacker, sam, mage and fire support) is the equivelant of a 4th world army, a rigger with drones is a massive force multiplier, as is a hacker coordinating the team over a tactical network, a mage acting in a support role can keep the firepower (heavy weapons and street sam) up and atleast slow down the opposition with well chosen spells. Metahumans may not be "better" than they where in the 4th age, but they have refined the techniques and technology of warfare, the science of splat, if you will, beyond what even the epic heroes of the 4th age could consider. Sure magic was more prevalent, but by the time the Named Horrors are an issue it will be in the 6th age as well, and in every other way 4th age was jumped up monkeys whereas the 6th age is fairly populous with heavilly augmented bastards with PhD's in Mayhem. It'll be a fight, no doubt, but in the end Vergis-whatsit (Seriously, do they come up with these names by slapping the keyboard with an open palm?) might as well change it's name to vegamite, because it'll be about as feared.

Uhm, can I get a source on this? Not to be that guy.

Street Magic , sidebar in the threats section and scattered in the fluff throughout same book. I don't have anything that says they have made pacts with other insects to do so, and if such is the case it is noteworthy in the fact that this is what Ares is willing to do to follow the enemy back to it's home and take the offensive, which as General Patton would tell you is the only way to win a war.

I think you are seriously underestimating the people of the Fourth World, they were hardly "jumped up monkeys" and I disagree that a team of Runners is even close to an entire Fourth World army. Remember that the Fourth World is an age before our history and they supposedly had a fairly complex and "advanced" culture albeit using manatech as opposed to true technology. The "jumped up monkeys" as you call them came after the Scrouge when the Mana Levels faded to the point that everything simply stopped working and mankind had to start from stratch.


And sure, you'd have strange entities crossing over before the Scrouge, and I'd argue that the "Shadow Spirits" and perhaps even the "Shedim" are the first signs of the coming Horrors but pointing out humanity's reaction to the Bugs is not promising at all as the only people really fighting against the Hives have at least in part been co-opted by them. Hell, the Bugs were coming were the last warning sign that the Fourth World had before the Horrors started showing up and the Sixth World hasn't even started working on the kaer warding rituals so one had better hope that the damned book turns up and soon.

And remember, the Scrouge is probably gonig to come much, much eariler in the Mana Cycle this tiem around because of all of the twisted stuff that has gone on like the Great Ghost Dance (Which was taught to the NAN by a Half-Horror/Half-Immortal Elf scumbag.) and the Astral Remapping that Big A was doing, probably at the behast of Big D, so do you really trust him to keep the Horrors at bay when at the very least he had to know what Big A was doing woudl hasten the return of the Horrors in the first place?

Kaers, but yes, many of them did provide effective barriers to Horrors, although many were breached during the Scourge.


Definitely not. Much of the underlying "technology" is the same as that used for Great Dragons' lairs, which they certainly will know how to do still. And the non-dragon survivors of the 4th world will certainly remember the principles, as well.


The Horrors don't need to remain secret in order to feed on negative emotion, and they certainly don't need to "paint the more physical horrors in a sympathetic light!" Pretty much everyone in the 4th world knew exactly what the Horrors were, but that doesn't stop you being marked, and it sure doesn't stop you feeling negative emotions.


Somewhere in the ED/SR canon mythos is a statement something like this: the home metaplane of the Invae [or insect spirits] would feel like a warm bath in comparison to the metaplane where the Horrors live. There is simply no comparison at all.


Are you not familiar with Earthdawn? I ask because 4th world armies, at the height of the magic cycle, include people who can, you know, decimate square miles of landscape in a few minutes, all by themselves. If you read Barsaive at War, you'll see the level of sacrifice necessary to defeat just the few Horrors involved there, and the levels of force 4th world armies can bring to bear. Yes, our technology is impressive, and one-on-one, an SR character should be able to whup hard on the equivalent ED character, but our most powerful individuals are...well, they're the most powerful individuals from the 4th world, too.


Okay. I guess it's pretty clear what your level of knowledge on the subject is.

Maybe I should rephrase, in terms of strategy, tactics and coordination, all acknowledged force multipliers, the denzens of the 4th age where essentially ignorant, their ranged weaponry was essentially dark ages where it was not magical and the ability to project power across a battlefield that modern firearms and artillery, especially the man portable variety is another massive force multiplier. Much has been made of the fact that the Scourge is going to come early this cycle, the problem is that atleast some of that has been mitigated by the fact that there is a new guardian at the gate in the form of the Big D himself, this stops nothing but it does give metahumanity time to prepare. Metahumanity will likely lose several initial battles, there is little doubt of that, but refinements we have made to our combat sciences will be the differance, and these are not things the Horrors will be able to easilly replicate, the constant state of internal strife amongst the Horrors between scourges is in fact a drain on them. It reduces their numbers, promotes a fundamental discord that makes high-level coordination effectively impossible and deprives them of time to consider new strategic and tactical methods. While individual Horrors may or may not show up with new abilities on the strategic level they'll be playing the same game they always have whereas humanity will be playing a game a couple generations foreward on the development curve.

Admittadly 3278, I play alot more shadowrun than earthdawn, mostly because the world makes more sense to me, but taking a comment at the end of my post as an example of my knowledge when said specific comment ws meant more in jest than anything else.... bad form. While individuals in earthdawn could level areas, these are fairly unique individuals IIRC, destruction on that level is industrialized in shadowrun.

And once again I'll restate that you are vastly underestimating the abilities and intelligence of the Fourth World 3278 wasn't overstating things in his post above.

As for Big D, once again do you really trust him as "The Gatekeeper" when he had at least a semi-active claw in the very research that was appearently designed to hasten the return of the Horrors in the first place?

*EDIT 1.1*

Also I'd question the effectiveness of nuking or even carpet bombing areas, seems to me that the Toxic Landscapes that would be created would cause far more troubles for humanity then they would for the Horrors.

A warrior fights for himself, and by himself--a soldier fights for the guy next to him. That is one of the biggest differences between the armies of the pre-roman era (Do they ever describe how the 4th world armies fought) and post. In medieval times the warrior came back to some degree as the knight, and you also had the Japanese Samauri (Pre-mongol invasion).

Except I'm not underestimating them, Ravor, there are undoubtedly powerfull beings in the 4th age, but modern combat science isn't about brute force (it's just a usefull tool), it is about the ability to coordinate, respond, support and attack fluidly through the use of advanced communications, tactics and training that simply don't have a 4th age equivelant. That is why the 4th age are, comparatively, jumped up monkeys, that is why the horrors are an obsolete threat. And yes, on this instance I'm giving a dragon (heavens forbid) the benefit of the doubt, because there is no logical reason for the actions as stated in the books except for him to sincerely be trying to hold the pass as a delaying tactic.

Samurai and knights are both examples of combat elites in leadership roles, both where forms of nobility (or atleast an elevated class) specially trained to physically lead as well as being specially trained in strategy and tactics. The fact they often engaged in combat was more a matter of psychology than strategy. Of course, the benefit of such psychology is that seeing leadership fighting is often a positive for the morale of the rank troops, and as Napolean famously believed, positive morale is a force multiplier.

True to an extent, but the problem is that all of the combat science in the universe won't save you and your squad as the lines of communication break down, supply depots are overrun, ect, even modern armies have problems with rushing hoards and the answer is seldom to nuke your own people.

As for Big D, it seems to me that if he wanted to "ascend" to the realm of the Horrors, but wanted to carve out his own terms then the events of the books pretty much covers how one would do it, however, I have a really hard time giving him a benefit of a doubt when he was at the very least aware if not actively involved in Big A's research that helped hasten the Scrouge in the first place. One cannot have your cake and eat it too.

*EDIT*

Also something to consider is that even if Big D was one of the "good guys", not even Great Dragons are immune to being Horror Marked and it seems to me that he would fall to said marks sooner rather than later.

I stand by it. Nothing you've said thus far convinces me that you possess a particularly thorough knowledge of the Earthdawn setting in general or the Horrors in specific. And there's nothing wrong with that! You don't have to know a lot about ED, but if you don't, I can't possibly take what you have to say on the subject as seriously as I would if you appeared to know more about what the Horrors are and what they represent. I could start talking about how nukes are the best ways to kill Elder Gods, but if I don't know that much about Elder Gods, it would be pretty ridiculous of me to start making claims about what will and will not kill them.

And how do the Horrors cause such breakdowns when the methods by which the transfer of supplies, communication and the like are absolutely forieng to them except as abstract concepts? The element of surprise will help them, that is why I'm willing to admit that they'll initially win battles, but they are missing several steps in the development of combat science and technology, this is a major problem. I'm not saying they are stupid, but even military minds like Eisenhower and Omar Bradley had difficulty comprehending the brilliance of Patton (who serves as the basis for much of modern military strategic and tactical thought) and they where his contemporaries. The Horrors have too much catchup to play over the duration.

I'm going to consider Dunkelzahn a neutral point from here on out, even if we believe he is just negotiating from a relative position of power, this is a negotiation between beings that think and act on timescales far longer than humans, which is in and of itself a delay. Mind you I'm not saying I trust your point Ravor, I'm merely pointing at that they serve the same purpose.

Horrors cant' create, but they can (and will) learn/ aquire new knowledge. And marking a few people who have good knowledge about military tactis and stuff probably helps a lot.

Except the Horrors view people as food, some might learn a little about tactics and technology but I doubt it would be much, would you take military advice from your cheeseburger?

They're also not stupid. While the dumbest of them - Gnashers, for instance - are nothing but ravenous beasts, the most intelligent of them are vastly more intelligent than the most intelligent human who ever lived, or indeed than the most intelligent of Great Dragons. They are certainly capable of learning from any mind they touch, and capable of comprehending what they learn, and capable of using what they learn to continue their own existences. Many of them have been shown to do precisely this, Mordom and Ysrthgrathe among them.

The problem being point of refferances, I have no doubt that eventually the more intelligent Horrors would learn, but to do so they first have to awknowledge they need to do so and apparently time and again they have just curbstomped metahumanity with impunity. If you are a vastly intelligent being who has never been defeated by the same foe you are currently facing, you'll expect to win and with good reason, adjusting to the mindset of needing to catch up is a major adjustment. Then the Horrors need to form connections between relevant experiences in their past (in the situations where such relevant experiences exist) and due to their largely solitary nature this will be a much longer exercise due to the fact that they will have an effectively limited pool of experiental resources and lines of reasoning to use. They simply don't have the points of refferance to quickly assimilate and use modern combat sciences.

Okay, I give up.

The destruction from within is the big threat and it is a nightmare one too. But the Horrors failed to stop the spread of knowledge for the creation of the Kaerns. Still with Nuclear or Biological weapons they could do damage on a world wide scale.

So either they will destroy us from within or not.
But lets assume they were not able to prevent at least some preparations and creation of the Kaerns or an outer space refuge .

And Dunkelzahn sacrificed himself to buy us enough time for that by removing the mana spike areas that would be their first bridge head.


Obviously enough Kaerns survived to quickly bring up the population to ED levels.
And obviously many of the Kaerns did not make it.
Still I have to think a clear majority made it. Maybe between as high as two out of three to as low as seven out of eight.

That means that the Kaerns can hold back the horrors, so we know there are existing methods that do work (most of the time).


I bet that the 4th world while powerful did not have mass production or a matrix to speed the flow of ideas.

Just given FAB and the other anti astral barriers out there is going to give them a big head start even if the Horrors proved immune to nukes.

They were also limited by how many had the level of magic talent for the higher magics plus they had to maintain their civilization using magic.



We can feed ourselves, preserve out food, care for our sick, and even fly without magic.

The Therans had to work hard to get people to build the Kaerns.

We can communicate at the speed of light and educated or skill chip our population faster than they could have dreamed.

If anyone could mass produce Kaerns it would be us. And we still have space to flee to.


One major game changer is that only the front line magic talent has to worry about Horror marks and they have the best chance to handle it.
No way to mark the rigger of a drone.


Add in to that the sheer number of metahumans (which even with magical technology has to be vastly greater than the 4th world population). Say between five to ten times.

And physically we could deal with the lower non astral horrors with a fraction of our population including the support infrastructure (thanks to drones) so population doesn't matter that much for that.

But that also means that we have five to ten times the number of serious magical talent then the 4th world ever had at one time plus all the technological might.
And we can educated them faster. And they can spread research through the Matrix.

And they are the decadents of the 4th world so you know evolution has been selecting for greater magical talent each magic cycle.


That has to provide at least some hope.

Look Sixgun_Sage I'm trying real hard to keep being mellow Ravor here and considering what a certain pretty young lady said to my daughters last night I'm still holding on, but I still ahve to call bullshit on your latest line of thought, the Horrors are nothing but versible, hell, Earthdawn made it quite clear that no two Horrors are exactly alike, AND we have an example of a Horror who feeds by being in a posistion of Leadership, in Fourth Edition that woudl translate into getting an Edge Rating of per "X" number of followers.

Also note that Ghostwalker who was in the exact same boat as the Horrors had no problem whatsoever with "military science" when he took over Denver and the last time I checked no-one has been able to kick him out.

Besides, although I totally disagree with your position that the Horrors wouldn't be able to understand military science, even if they didn't they wouldn't have to in order to overun supply depos and command centers, the mere presence of humanity would draw them in.

Why fight us, mortal? We offer you knowledge in exchange for your ignorant. We offer you power for your weak. Wealth for your poor. Immortality for your dying, your sick and your elderly. We will raise you above all others for the sacrifice of your children. I am Noierpyh, the Horror of Light: summon me to your server and I will make you a god.

This point really needs to be reinforced. At least two dragons have already demonstrated their ability to individually run roughshod over Sixth World forces, one of them in a high-tension area important to essentially every major world power except Japan (or at least most of them, my politics of the 2050s is rusty). There's a certain amount of transitivity that can be expected in cases like this.

~J

Would you please stop thinking about SR for a moment? Pretty young lady, yes?

What can I say, I'm addicted to these fragging boards, yes, I know, I'm weak and undeserving.

Seriously though, for those who may be wondering the pretty young lady and I live an hour drive apart from each other so tis not as if my lurking on the boards detracts time away from her, per say. Besides, what in the hell do you think I'm thinking about when I'm mellow Ravor as opposed to cranky Ravor?

This is thee easiest to counter. Detontate nukes around the area first, disrupting the astral plane so the pure mana creatures cannot flow through.



shadowrun genetic engineering doesn't work like ours does.



I love that the example used is that earthdawn had humans can devestate square miles at will. Have you looked around yourself? We can destory the entire planet at will. We have eliminated thousands of speices by accident. We are embodiments of destruction. We have done much more than the horrors ever have in terms of destruction!

Seriously, they have eaters that wander around and eat everything, and they didn't kill every plant on the planet. There was still multiple forests. If we went at it, the earth would sterilized for 40 meters deep everywhere. If their number and behaviours were as written, how the hell was their anything left for the inhabitants of the Kaers to come out into?



afaik, only one horror really understood technology, so it's quite likely that they haven't. Especially as their are probably less horrors than their are people.


The dragon thing doesn't stack up. It's been repeatedly pointed out here that all you need to kill a dragon flying around and breathing fire is a couple of mages with mana static and a whole bunch of SAM launchers.

And I assume that once you pointed that out an appropriate errata was issued for Year of the Comet?

Canon. It works, bitches.

~J

Those mages were all NPCs. The GM in the sky decided they were stupid. Not every character in the book has a player.

If every one of the characters in Earthdawn had a munchkinning player, we wouldn't have this thread, the Horrors would be an endangered species, and the only time you'd see one in Earthdawn would be at the freakshow in a travelling carnival. Gee... never thought I'd actually find a good use for munchkins, but hey... I know munchkins will definitely beat Horrors, and since munchkins are (meta)-human, we win.

Great plan.


Shadowrun still takes place in our world, right? With the same physics, plus magic? The only reason it ever differs is because rules are abstractions of reality. We grant that technology has changed, but reality has not changed [except for magic]. So unless you're assuming magic is going to take care of walking around putting D. radiodurans genes into every organism on the planet - or at least the ones we want, which is an awful lot of them! - I don't see how you can just let off multiple nukes over the course of several thousand years and expect things to go well for us.


No, we can't. We can't do that in Shadowrun, either. We can't even destroy "all living things." Probably couldn't in Shadowrun, either.


Read the Earthdawn sourcebook. Seriously. Horrors all desire an emotional torment in their food; plants don't really excite them. I'm sure some of them ate a maple tree or two, but there's just no reason to expect they'd get much of anything out of just running about eating every wheat, oak, and cyanobacteria they could find.


I assume you're talking about Artificer? It's hard to know. Anyway, where are you getting the idea that no other Horrors understood the technology of the time?

The fact is, no Great Dragons understood today's "technology," either, and yet the Dragons woke up and learned, just as the Horrors would do. As my man Alamaise would say, "If that asshole brother of mine can do it, Ysrthgrathe can."


What makes you think this is true?


Depends on the game. In ED, the Great Dragon - there's an important distinction there! - could will them all out of existence, although it might decide not to. In Shadowrun...well, a couple Great Dragons - the serious, many-thousands-of-years-old ones - have been thought to be killed, although it seems to always turn out that they either let it happen or they were just foolin'. So good luck with that.

For my part, I'm getting in the best Kaer I can find, and you're welcome to your nukes and radio-tolerant genetic engineering. See you in 500 years...maybe.

Yeah, the statistics are published, so it is very easy to measure what works and what doesn't. Basically dragons get 'plot power' sometimes from the GMs and win despite their inability to otherwise do so.

Other battleplans that would work: Improving cybermancy and making everyone into a cyberzombie

Also I forgot before: Any installation in space is effectively immune, even weakass wards have to beat down by the horrors, but if you ward the space station they have nowhere to stand to launch to attack from.




I have - that's what the intelligent ones want. The unintelligent ones like the gnashers just wander around and eat things. Once you understand that, it becomes clear that flowering plants (which REQUIRE insects to survive) atleast could not survive the scourge if their were lots of horrors -all the insets would have died, if not all the flowering plants themselves.

nuke the planet is only plan F. Given that their cannot actually be that many horrors, you can kill them all with hellfire from space in a couple of years tops as long as you bait them through.

This even has the attraction that they can never learn, because they'll instantly be blasted to pieces by the most powerful energy sources in the universe.

SR2, page 234. "Estimates only; individuals vary wildly." [If we're dealing with Horrors, I figured I had to reach back to the Horror days.] Now, in SR4, hey, maybe you can kill dragons with LAW rockets, or handguns, but there aren't any Horrors, either, so...this is all speculation.

What I can do is refer you to Dragons [the ED one, in this case] in regards to dragon magic. Good luck with the LAW.


Sometimes it's hard for me to tell: are you just fucking with me now?


Space is a great place to go to avoid Horrors, as I understand it. But sending everyone there is impractical. [Although I get the impression someone made a game about it...]


Horrors, page 7. "Even those Horrors that feed on physical flesh seem to share the need to cause emotional upheaval in their victims. It is interesting to note that, although the type of emotional disturbance each Horror seems to most enjoy varies, all Horrors cause some sort of emotional or psychic distress in their victims. The conclusion seems inescapable that the Horrors either need or strongly desire these powerful emotional energies."

Gnashers are the only apparent exception to this, to my knowledge, as they'll eat anything but each other. But there's no indication they ate every tree in the world, or that they preferentially would eat a tree over a rock, given the chance. [They do prefer Name-Givers to rocks, however.] Horrors, page 79: "Gnashers are simply killing machines, driven by a blind, insatiable lust to devour." Were there enough of this one type of indiscriminate eater around for a long enough period to eat every living thing on the planet? By your own logic, apparently not: some things were still alive after the Scourge.

To my knowledge, Gnashers are the only type of Horror that behaves this way. [Making one wonder why they aren't Horror Constructs, but, you know, whatever.] There are other "mindless, savage Horrors" [Horrors, page 93], such as the "wingflayers, baggi, dread iota, and so on," and all of them eat Name-givers, and there's no indication any of them eat trees, as well. But I'm certainly willing to entertain the possibility: I have literally all the Shadowrun and Earthdawn books, so if you've got a page reference, I'm more than happy to look it up.

How do you propose to do this? Bait them, I mean, to cross over in only one physical location? Assuming that there's a one-to-one correlation in physical space with the astral "bridges" the Horrors cross - and I agree there's some indication that this is true - they don't all come across at once, and once the mana level increases far enough, they're just going to cross over on multiple bridges, like they did last time. [Plus, they haven't just been using the site of the Ghost Dance this time; Hawaii and Crater Lake have already been used this time around, although those sites are now, I believe, currently nonviable.]


We have quasars at our command? Supernovas? Long GRBs? Man, you have a weird idea of how powerful humans are.

I don't know why I'm taking this seriously, or why it's driving me so crazy. In fact, you know what? This all sounds great, all this stuff you've said. Nuke the world, command from space, genetically engineer hundreds of trillions of organisms, make everyone cyberzombies, kill million-year-old beings with rocket launchers. Your table, your rules. Have fun! Play Shadowrun!

Me? No. This isn't going to fly at my table, but you're not at my table, so I just don't care. Or I'm going to try to pretend I don't care, 'cause this isn't going anywhere productive. Later!

As I said before, I am insane (see sig). And the guy you were arguing with is Cthuludreams. So once again what is your excuse? See, it may not fly at your table, but it is not supposed to. It is a Thor shot, it is supposed to crash in and blow that table up and crush the Horrors feeding there.

You know, having looked through several hundred posts on this thread, I have to say this...

First...It has definitely been entertatining...
Second... Who really cares?

Keep the Faith

Exactly! That's EXACTLY my point that you keep arguing against! They 800 years to eat the earth down to bedrock and didn't even come close. There were still flowering planets which require a complex ecosystem to survive. It really torpedoes any theory that the number of horrors is limitless, because if there was, their would be limitless gnashers, and they would have eaten the earth down to bedrock.

I'm not particularly which part of this you don't get. Maybe it's the fact that 1/100th of infinity is still infinity, so even of gnashers only make up 1/10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000th of all horrors, there has to be an actual number of horrors. Thus, horrors are not limitless. Thus it is entirely possible to kill all of them.

But if I remember correctly, gnashers were actually pretty common. They showed up a fair bit and could across the barrier pretty easily.

The exact quote in the book is that 'Legions of these mindless entities swarmed across the world, devouring everything in their sight and leaving posioned wastelands in their wake'

So they are pretty common, and they did eat everything. So lets assume that they comprised 1% of all horrors, the total number of horrors has to be pretty small. Evidence? Assume they could eat 100 square meters of material a day, that means that in 800 years the gnashers could all organic material and soil on each if there was 3.8 million of them (approximate).. meaning that there is what, 380 million horrors? Heck, even if I'm out by a factor of 10, that still only gives you 3.8 billion horrors. Which is a lot no doubt, but not even as many as people.

Incidently, that is the number that would render the earth an inhospitable wasteland. As it patently didn't, we're talking 1/10th or 1/100th of that number of horrors. But I'm pretty comfortable with an estimate of less than 400 million horrors. It stacks up, is a seriously credible threat and doesn't wreck the earth. Maybe I've over estimated how much they can eat and it's closer to 10 square meters. Which isn;t true as the exact quote in the book is "These jaws allow them to eat their own weight many times over in mere minutes'

To me this gives a consumpation rate MUCH HIGHER than 100 square meters in 24 hours, so my estimate of total horror numbers is very conservative.

Either way, the number of horrors does have to be in that 400 million ballpark. It could be much less.

Seriously the 'destructive impact of the horrors' is approximately that of a 4 miles across asteroid or the volcano at yellow stone exploding. Very big, very dangerous, but definable, countable and beatable.



Err, all these things are stars, and my point was that using only a tiny proportion of a star's energy is unimaginably more destructive than the horrors themselves. The horrors are not that scary. They are actually frikken piss weak. Large rocks are more numerous and more dangerous.



This gets the biggest lol from me - clearly you just make an even bigger mana spike, and go disrupt the other big sites with permanent background counts by building a nuclear reactor or toxic waste dump. This is the easiest part - you're trying to create an early bridge so you can fight them where you want - if you haven;t killed them before they all come over, you're going to need to start trying to send biological or chemical weapons back the other way as fast as you can.

I can't believe it, I'm actually starting to get bored with the topic, but I will say this, you are making an assumption that I don't think holds water, namely that the Horrors or their Mana Bridges care about Background Count, remember the state of Astral Space in the Fourth World and it didn't seem to bother the Horrors one bit.

Background Count may well be one of the Horrors.

Edit: lest someone think I'm making a baseless and generic statement, I'm talking about Ristul here.

~J

I'm assuming that horror space is an aspect-ed domain to horrors - it's horror tainted. Not sure that's a huge assumption, given that it kills mana spike/ambient mana, which is what you need to know.

Meh, "Horror Space" acted in the same manner as Background Count did and I don't remember anything talking about how it was possible to "override" the Horror's polution in the Astral and drive Horrors away by torturing entire villages in the most henious ways imaginable before torching them.

So yeah, I don't agree that your assumption holds water.

Fair enough. To be honest, I partly agree with you - the suffering caused by torturing people would be horror aspected. But I do think there is grounds to assume that the taint caused by suffering is different from radiation or the hazing caused by a cyberzombie because we know these domains are aspected differently. But either way, even if you cannot contain the mana forms, killing all the physical forms is quite achievable, then you just have to deal with the mana ones! A corps of cyberzombies would be the best plan, if you have a couple of hundred years to perfect the technology. They are dual natured so it's much harder for the astral forms to hide.

Sure, you could kill any great dragon just by knowing where it is and applying enough explosives. The thing is, what happens when the rest of the dragons get word that some contingent with very powerful (and therefore very traceable) weapons is out to exterminate dragons like pests? Bad things happen. It's a suicide course, straight up.

Same thing applies here. You somehow manage to kill one horror, and you just earned a lot of attention.