QUOTE (Bull @ Dec 11 2012, 09:09 AM)

Who said Zebulon and Yuichotol were different spirits? My take is simply that somehow or other Yuichitol became a spirit at some point prior to the 6th world starting. When she showed up in the 6th world, she was now going by the name Zebulon and became tied to Denver somehow. Considering that it's implied in YotC that Ghostwalker had a lair hidden near Denver, it's possible that's actually the place Zebulon was initially tied to, and was drawn to Denver later on. Then she Fractured. And Ghostwalker has been doing what he can to piece her back together ever since. (If you read "Already Here" section in Artifacts Unbound, you'll see Ghostwalker has been working toward that end for quite some time).
The Clutch of Dragons is not very clear on the distinction between Zebulon and Yuichotol in the past or present. For the people who do not have the book, here's the relevant excerpt from
The Clutch of Dragons:
QUOTE
The Clutch of Dragons, page 133
When Ghostwalker returned he brought Zebulon, the Spirit of Denver, back with him. She was first fragmented in 2017 when two magicians summoned her simultaneously. Zebulon is now greater than the whole of her fragments, and she is even more powerful than she was before her fragmentation. She has been reunited with the rest of the spirit of Ghostwalker’s deceased mate, which had been fragmented when Lofwyr tried and failed to destroy her several thousand years ago. In addition, she has gained the experience and power each fragment accumulated on its own over the last six decades.
In effect, Zebulon is a unique spirit that combines a great dragon’s astral form with the Spirit of Denver. While Zebulon’s physical body ceased to exist long ago, science and magic can do strange things in the Sixth World. It may be that she will assume a permanent physical presence once more—something that would greatly transform dragon society forever. For now, though, she remains a spirit, and she follows the rules for free spirits unless otherwise noted.
Zebulon’s trauma from being fragmented into multiple spirits that operated unchecked for decades has not yet been healed, which sometimes causes fluctuations in her mood that alters the local background count around the Front Range Free Zone.
It could be pointed out that Zebulon has been "
reunited" with the spirit of Yuichotol, and not simply "united". But it also reads Zebulon "was
first fragmented in 2017": not something you would write if the spirit itself was already the fragment of something else in the first place.
Having Zebulon and Yuichotol being the same spirit, or at least the former a part of the later, would help avoiding to make the story overly complicated. It would possibly require to retcon
Denver SB, since there are no particular reason for Yuichotol spirit to have been a city spirit before settling in the area that would become Denver (unless she had a first job experience when Ghostwalker found her an internship as Spirit of Throal at some point during the Fourth Age).
It worth nothing that 1) Yuichotol was a spirit without a body 2) Ghostwalker spend some time trapped in the same distant metaplane than shedim spirits, who are well known for their know-how on how to occupy dead body. Was he searching a way for his mate to get a new body?
QUOTE (Bull @ Dec 11 2012, 09:09 AM)

I will also note that CGL is not bound to follow Earthdawn slavishly. It's a benchmark, but it's not a bible. And with ED being handled by two other companies now (and has been for some time), it actually becomes slightly problematic to reference it too directly.
I would make a difference between Earthdawn books published by the original FASA and those published by Redbrick or Mongoose. The former were written by the same people who were writting Shadowrun, with a clear intent to tie the two games that came to be known by customers/players.
There are plenty of plots for which the planned outcome is lost because the original author is no longer around. Or even if a note of some sort exists somewhere, the current writers feel free to ignore it because it didn't made it into published canon (or because said original author threatened to sue if any of his ideas appear in a book...).
But for anything that was written down in a book, and read by customers/players, I'd expect them to make an effort to at least take into account what have been written, and if there must be a retcon, to be creative. Doing otherwise I think, is a lack of respect for those who worked on Shadowrun before them, even if part of that work was released under the Earthdawn title.
But, in fact, CGL is not even bound by its own books, if they don't want to.