That was quite a lot of insight, thanks for sharing.

Somewhere (SM probably) it is mentioned that they can use other species just as well. The reason for using humans as hosts is that the bugs will try to subvert the dominant species of an ecosystem.


Just like it is for the horrors right now. The question is whether one would be better than the other if both had free access to our wourld (which is what will happen if the mana level is high enough). Of course if horrors don't need humans the situation changes, then we could indeed become extinct and not just be degraded to cattle...not that the latter is much better.

If I remember right the Invae were limited to a small section of Barsaive (sp?) the NE or NW while the horrors were all over and even feed on the Invae themselves. So if I'm right the horrors are the better parasite?

Only read to that point in the thread so if someone scooped me, too bad.

If you open the wayback machine to 2002 and grab a copy of Threats 2, you'll find an oft-overlooked chapter called "Betrayal" in which it speaks of an Ares conspiracy to make animals and (including paracritters) into insect hybrid merges in order to make bad-ass attack dogs. No indication exists that that project ever stopped. But the big thing to take away from that is not an answer, it's a question: Why is that a bad thing?

The reason that we hate and fear the insects is because they kidnap humans and fill them full of spirit juice until they explode in order to pull more of their brethren from The Hive to Earth. They do that because they have identified humans as the most powerful species and they need to explode something to get to Earth (which they apparently want to do super bad). But as of Betrayal, there are apparently Hives whose hosting requirements apparently can be filled by 6-20 dogs and/or boars a year - which in turn is something with an actual nuyen value that isn't very much.

Flash forward to 2006, and crack open Street Magic to page 111. There you'll find a delightful story about Ares soldiers on the Eden space station having a gate opened for them to go blow up a hostile Queen spirit in her home metaplane. And they are using the capabilities of an unnamed magician to open the portal. Here's the thing though: that magician, has to be an Insect Mage. It's very clear, only Insect mages can open those portals. There must be an insect mage on staff in order to do that.

So yeah, Ares has Insect Mages on staff. They have Flesh Form Insect spirits on staff. But seriously, why is that a bad thing? The Invae are not the Horrors. They don't want to torture everyone to the point of near death to feed their lusts for sadism. They just need to ea one whole live, healthy animal for each spirit on their team. And that's actually something that you could cut a deal with. And by 2056, Ares Macrotechnology actually had. What precisely the terms are that were cut in Complex 68G in the Algonkian-Manitou Council are as yet unrevealed. But it also seems pretty clear that both Ares and the Ares-loyal Hives are getting things they want, and there's no evidence that anything objectively bad is happening to humanity at large because of it.

-Frank

OK, I realize it is somewhat odd to argue with one of the authors of the book, but...

The Firewatch team uses the astral link between an insect shaman and a bonded focus as a way to track down a queen spirit and blow that queen to kingdom come. But the link between a mage and his focus would certainly only lead to one queen spirit - the shaman's queen, which is the embodyment of his mentor spirit, source of his power, yadda dadda. Would any shaman help destroying this entity? It is also mentioned that the link has been rerouted several times, which sounds as if the creator of the link wanted to hide it, and not like it was intended for the purpose Firewatch has in mind.
In short, to me it sounds more like Ares captured a shaman during a raid on his hive*, and are not content with just whiping out this particular queen's earthly pawns for whatever reason...


*which IIRC also is the way they "acquired" the shamans for that guard critter project.

Actually, you're both a little off on the details!

In the story in Street Magic, the Ares team is following a re-routed astral link between a mage and a focus. Under the section about metaplanar quests in Street Magic, it mentions that one of the uses of a metaplanar quest is to conceal an astral link in a metaplane, meaning that someone tracing an astral link first has to go on a metaplanar quest to locate the redirected link and then follow it to the source. The mage with the focus used this method to create a sort of metaphysical homing beacon and hid the link in the Hive. Meaning that instead of following the focus' astral link straight back to the mage, they first need follow the redirected link to the Hive (in this case, the Ares team plans to take a little detour while they are there).

But Frank is mostly right on what this means. Since Street Magic also says that the only way to get to a Deep Metaplane is to be guided there by a native, that means that the mage who originally hid the astral link there needed to be guided to the Hive by a native spirit of the Hive. This basically means one of two things: that mage was an insect shaman who was guided to the Hive by its Queen/Mother or Ares somehow coerced an insect spirit to guide an Ares magician to its home plane.

Needless to say, Ares' relationship with the Invae is complex, to say the least. We know from the old Tom Dowd story Hunter and Prey (which can be found on the Ancient Files) that there are certainly Invae Queens that want to kill Damien Knight. And we know from the story in Street Magic that Ares appears to be sending people into the Hive to kill some Invae Queens in return.

You're discussing turning a parasitoid/prey relationship into a more symbiotic relationship. We are here hampered by a few effects. Specifically - we're looking at an extremely high mutation rate (in that, over the course of a few years, we're turning these parasitoids into a semi-domesticated animal). That makes things highly variable and dangerous. We are not certain that we can prevent regression (imagine you have a 99% success rate of turning dogs into super-smart bug guard dogs - you still have that 1% who are 'not'. Imagine also, comining this with the high mutation rate, above, and you have the worse case of a 100% rate, going public with it, THEN shifting down to only a 99% success rate). Thirdly, you have the sudden reliance on an unknown set of biological processes. What if our dog/bug hybrids serve as a gateway animal for diseases we've never seen before?

The primary problem in all of these stem from knowledge. The mutation rate is predominantly thanks to us and our meddling. If we understood them better, we could control those mutations better. The risk of unknown threats is also a case of knowledge. Greater knowledge makes this process safer.

Oh yes, there's also the fact that we're dealing with a sentient species, and humans have a tendancy to dick people over, so... you know. There's that.

Now, accepting that, the idea of harnessing a totally alien creature and making them symbiotic with us is not only not bad, it's fantastically good. We've seen other cases where symbiotic relationships have made for extremely effective species. It's theorized that the sting of a wasp, which gives it one of the best defenses in the natural world, is the result of a symbiotic relationship with a particular virus or bacteria. Cows are able to digest a wide range of extremely harsh food primarily through a symbiotic relationship with a whole load of bacteria in their gut.

Imagine for a moment that we do harness this sort of magical hybrid technology. Thaumtech, if you will. We can create super-intelligent species. We can make every human magically active and twice as strong. We may be able to survive off astral energies, like a spirit, rather than food. We may be able to create specialized subspecies, like the horrors have.

Or, you know... we could create the bug apocalypse.

Bugocalypse!

Biased little thing that did that, then, since it had no qualms about Israel turning most of Libya into radioactive slag! While a loaded subject, I firmly cannot believe any supernatural being helping Israel use NBC-ballistic missiles (at least if SR Israel resembles RL Israel) to be remotely good.


My two cents: Good is inside of you. It's a desire to help others without getting nothing in return, preserving the planet, practicing unprovoked kindness and generally Doing The Right Thing™. In SR, as in now, it is about good individuals acting for good, or - on a good day - many good individuals banding together to accelerate the process.

I don't have any of my books or references in front of me, but the nuking of Libya happened before the Awakening, didn't it? The thought is that something happened after the Awakening that changed nukes.

Personally, I've always thought that whole line of Shadowrun canon was clumsy, weird, and unnecessary.

Yep, Lybia and Israel were pre-awakening.
And in System-Failure, evil religious germanaziterrorist organization actually uses magiks to improve nukes so they don't have as much of a radioactive fallout and blast but more EMP than they should.
and i still think that complete whole story was a dumb idea for the change from 3rd to 4th and to wireless setting -.-

Alright, I assumed they had some way to trace a shaman's astral links back to his queen spirit, because the story says that the link would lead the team to the spirit Ares wants to exterminate.
Who wrote that story by the way?

Actually, that wasn't the goal of System Failure. In fact, some of us (like myself) had most of our System Failure writing done before we even knew there was going to be a Fourth Edition! I had to rewrite one section I had already written when I learned that techomancers would now exist.

I wrote that story.

D'oh, you are correct, Libya was pre-awakening.

That said, there are a few, isolated cases where nukes have worked, post-awakening. That connected to a power of good, you think?

SNAFUBAR amirite?

India and Pakistan managed to have a plenty effective nuclear exchange in Kashmir in 2030.

Honestly, I think the fact that nuclear weapons don't aways work that well mostly has to do with them being like 60 years old and more in many cases when detonated in the timeline.

-Frank

Winternight and their modified nukes was seeded a long time ago. I got the impression that the events of System Failure were a long time coming, then set up to work with the change. After all , the wireless matrix initiative really started rolling in Shadows of europe which I believe was before the real push for SR4.

Back to the debateable motivaitons of the Dunk, one of my favorite examples is Anne Penchyk, a mantis spirit who was almsot president. Dunk certainly knew what she was, and he saw fit to set her up with a memorial fund which ended up labeled the "Empowerment Coalition" (you'll not similarities to such broad names like "Universal Brotherhood"). To add to that, the fund was named in memory of his former voice (who's name escapes me at the moment).

There were "questions" about his Voice's death, since he was shot by an assassin. Rather than trying to heal his Voice, or capturing the assassin for question, Dunk promptly killed him. His Voice was replaced shortly after by Nadja Daviar, his Voice until the Big D's own death.

Dunk's always displayed a willingness to leave some hats on the floor in order to meet his goals.

The Empowerment Coalition for example makes for an excellent way to make more mantis spirits. Female mantis always express as Good Merges, meaning they look like regular metahumans. Easier to infiltrate that way. And of course, mantis hunts other bugs. So there's his motivation.

And Daviar was a bad ass voice. Simple but to the point.
(We'd theorized that Nadja was an unexpressed Drake in our games, much like Mercury, since she also had a crazy name like Mercury/Ryanthasaur(sp?), and he snatched her up not long after meeting her, as dragons are prone to do with drakes. Might also explain why she "recently" dissapeared from the public eye).

But their fault-line nukes also failed to do much damage. Ever since the Lone Eagle Incident, nukes seem to suffer from strange problems...

The Kermak Blast on the other Hand worked as intended.

...also did very little damage, even for a subtactical warhead

Well, it was shot into a building/the ruins of a building and below a kind of magical shield.

Yeah, the real goal for System Failure was to wrap up a number of "unfinished" metaplot storylines we had going, like Winternight and Deus.

i'd much rather have seen a more or less all out corp war instead of OH MY GOD TERRORISTS AND WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION!
And of course, the AI's and their Otaku-Tribes fighting their own Shadow War within seems pretty dumb/silly to me too . . Sorry guys, i just don't like it at all <.<

No problem! We know when we develop a plot-line that not everyone is going to love it or want to use it. That's one reason why we vary the plots (aside from the obvious fact that doing the same type of plot all the time would be boring!). In the case of System Failure, we knew we had some open stories we just really wanted to wrap up instead of letting them just putter out from neglect.

All-out corp war is interesting but problematic. Blood in the Boardroom was a corporate-focused plot-line, though not a full-out corporate war. One problem with an all-out corp war is that there are systems in place to prevent that (that's largely the point of the Corporate Court and their Omega Orders). Also, there's the question of how to handle an all-out corp war without destroying the Sixth World economy.

Well, because the corps would be trying to save their business, they would more or less be targetting vital matrix nodes of their enemies.
And try to keep their own business up and running while at it too. The simple reason why i don't think a total war between 2 or more Megacorporations would have too much influence on the rest of the world:
Because they all will hold SOMETHING back so they are still there when the smoke has cleared out. They simply all can't afford to risk it all.

Subtactical warheads still clock in between 50 and 1000 tons TNT equivalent, and unless it is an EXTREMELY strong barrier, surrounding a nuke with something solid (Verdämmmung, dunno what what the English term is) will actually make it more powerful.

Of course explosive rules in SR are a different story, but the oddly small result of the Cermak nuke is also mentioned several times in canon

Check out Shockwaves/Schokwellen. Proteus gets it on with a number of corps, including catching an Ares Thor Shot on the chin.

Or for a slightly different example with an Omega order, check out Novatech/Neonet in System Failure and their dealings with a certain mad investor.

Well, 1000t TNT is still 1kilo-ton, i would not consider that sub tactical warhead . . but then, what do i know?

Yes, i know ^^
And i think there was another Omega-Order mentioned in one of the Novels . . Possibly the one with the old Decker Sly and the Callaway Corvette Twin Turbo and the technology to tap into fibre optical wires to intercept and change data in there.
After the M$ Shadowrun PC Game Debacle i had the idea that someone hires the runners of the group playing to more or less take over Microdeck and/or at least influence William Bonney Gates the third, a kinda proto-otaku i think, to break into the mainframes of several of the Tripple A Rated mega-corporations to plant evidence that one of the others was close to making a major breakthrough that would tip the scales massively in their favour so they can more or less take over the rest of the world market. In the mean-time microdreck-funds were to be used to massively buy stock in weapons corporations to make a pretty penny with, because those would become horribly valuable with an all out war between the other corps.
And of course, in the end, all leads that show up lead to microdeck, which then gets an omega-order to be carried out by what ever is left of the AAA-Corps.
Using Bill Gates and Microsoft as the Scapegoat for wordwide total corporate war for making a fortune with stock in weapons sounded like the perfect way to deal with me being upset with Micro$ucks over the Game.

The SADM (not to be confused with the SADAM, who was more about chemical weapons) allowed the user to dial-a-yield between a few tons and one kT, all that in a nice 70kg package. Given that the primary delivery system for tactical nukes was the Starfighter, some people probably figured we needed a more reliable backup plan

I have to say I find an all-out corp war unfeasible. Corps do not have the manpower for more than semi-terrorist strikes, nor own the estate to make more than commando seek&destroy raid type attacks sensible. And the best way to hurt a corp is by destroying it's credibility, credit rating, and finances. Which involves pretty little weapons.

The closest thing I would consider feasible as a corp war would be something along the lines of the Opium War. Duking it out with a nation to force it's market open fortheir products. THAT could actually be fun.

I'd like to see a big, old-fashioned national war though. CAS versus Aztlan over an independent Texas fending for itself with Pueblo jumping in, being all cocky because things tended to drop into it's lap a lot. Secondary fighting between the CAS-backed manitou and Aztlan backed ALM, ect. Amazonia taking the chance and attacking Aztlan in the rear, the NAN splintering over whom to support or what to do, Pueblo throwing it in with the CAS, the UCAS maybe trying to enforce a reunification, that kind of action.

Good, old honest nation states at war. We've had enough of corp wars already, I think.

As for System Failure and the Crash 2.0: I think this was poorly executed,too. There needn't be a crash 2.0, anyway. The WMI would have taken on regardless, and it would be much more believable that anybody would finance it when the world economy had not collapsed entirely a few years back.

As for System Failure and the Crash 2.0: I think this was poorly executed,too. There needn't be a crash 2.0, anyway. The WMI would have taken on regardless, and it would be much more believable that anybody would finance it when the world economy had not collapsed entirely a few years back. I appreciate the trying to tie up loose ends, but I severely dislike how this was made into LOL new setting LOL.

And technomancers. Jeez. Hadn't you noticed Matrix was getting bloody old with the second movie? Not to mention that now, after AI ravaged the world thrice, everybody seems to love AIs. But that would be Emergence, so far the worst SR sourcebook ever released, trumping my old hate pet, Germany SB.

Well, Aztechnology does have the manpower for a standing army (considering that Aztechnology is an arm of Aztlan or the other way around, whichever you prefer).
Actually, I would like to see Amazonia taking over the southern countries, but this would be more a brazilian joke than anything.

I think you don't have to go any farther than events of the last decade or two to see how corps would wage war. Not on each other, and not for land (directly) or conquest. Take a look at how the IMF and the World Bank have manipulated countries' finances, delivering shocks to their economies upon which corporations have capitalized. The vast wealth of AAAs would allow them to manipulate political/military situations in this way.