It's been brought up a couple times, so I felt it was worth commenting on real quick. Agree or disagree, I don't care much.

1) Ghostwalker is arguably the most powerful Great Dragon in Shadowrun. Obviously, there's no stats, but I believe he was/is inteneded to be at least on part with Lofwyr, if not more so, physically. Considering his mastery of spirits, it's not that much of a stretch to say he also probably the powerful in terms of Magic.

2) GW is a master of Spirits. We saw this when he took on Denver. He didn't do it alone, he had spirits. A LOT of spirits. a lot of BIG spirits.

3) Go read Invoking Great Forms, SPirit Pacts, that sort of thing. Ghost walker can do all of that, at high numbers.

If Ghost Walker rolled into Denver without at least 30+ points of hardened armor, I'll eat my copy of YotC. At the very least, I'd bet GW can pull off a trick similar to a Possession Tradition mage. And even with a Baseline Great Dragon (Magic 12), Summoning up a Force 12 spirit (Far less than they can do on thier own), that's and extra 24 points of hardened armor right there.

Plus, I think people over-estimate how much military hardware that was available. I always got the impression that each sector only had a token militray presence, per terms of the treaty (at least in terms of heavy hardware), and everything was over long before anyone really had a chance to respond with external military support.

Bull

I think if any of the respective militaries involved had felt like rolling into a city full of civilians and unleashing hell, then Ghostwalker would (eventually) be a smear.

Operative term is "eventually." And the civilian casualties would make Nagasaki and Hiroshima look tame, in my opinion.

That was my impression too. There was mention of light panzers (Lobos I guess) taking off, Aguilar choppers in the air and missiles being fired at him as well. But all the really big stuff would have been outside of Denver proper. This whole thing was why Aztlan lost the Yucatan, because they had to pull military forces away from that conflict to deal with this one.
Doesn't the news bit also talk about Ghost Walker tearing a large blood spirit in half? Yea I figure he must be pretty damn tough. My impression was that his absence was why some of the other greats were getting away with the things they were. Or not.

Agreed. I'm not saying he would be completely unkillable (Though, by the rules, once you hit about 30 or so Hardened Armor, not much is going to touch you outside of something REALLY big, like Main Battleship weaponry, Thor Shots, or Nukes). Just that in less than 24 hours, with civilian casualties to deal with, it's completely feasible to me that GW rolled in, annihilated some of the primary light military defenses, sicked a few dozen spirits to Confuse, Fear, Accident, etc the rest, and made everyone pause long enough to go "umm, ok, maybe we should talk". Then he cut a couple backroom deal with a couple of the primary countries, and that was that.

As Patrick said, anything else was basically going to be the death of just about everyone in Denver, one way or another, and be an epic PR disaster.

If Ghostwaker had been just chilling out in the middle of the desert or something, with no people around, and the Azzies, or the UCAS or whoever had a fill military regiment ready to go? Sure, GW would eventually lose if he decided to stick it out an fight. But it would be really, really, REALLY damn costly for the military forces involved. And GW's not gonna just sit there while people poke at him from long range. If nothing else, Force 24 Improved Invisibilty SPell to get the hell out of dodge (Or even more effective and possible, he has a free spirit pact and can use the Astral Gateway Power).

Bull

I really wonder if the Sixth World Almanac will address this. If SoLA had come out, it would have been clear that Aztlan did not lose the Yucatan. But it didn't come out, so the last canon material on the subject makes it look like Aztlan was on the ropes there. With the recent freelancer fallout and with pieces of 6WA being rewritten, I'm not sure how that subject will be addressed.

But one thing is clear: Aztlan did not shift significant military forces to Denver. If they had, the outcome would have been much, much messier than it was. The public relations problem is part of the reason they didn't; Aztlan may have been able to cover-up the war in the Yucatan, which most of the Sixth World doesn't care much about, but they would have had a harder time covering up a shock-and-awe campaign on Denver. And then there's the whole issue of an Aztlan army crossing the border (which they have to do to get to Denver) kicking off a major international war.

What bugs me about Ghostwalker is not that he wasn't shot out of the sky when he first appeared. He caught everyone flat-footed and he's no doubt very powerful. It's how very little anyone has done since his coup. Here's a city that was apparently so important that it had to be divided up among numerous national governments and they all handed the keys to a dragon who appeared out of nowhere. What kind of sweet deal did he cut with these governments, exactly?

My second beef with Ghostwalker is less about Ghostwalker and more about the whole plot line. I don't have an issue with a dragon declaring a major city as his fiefdom, it's a pretty cool idea. I just don't think Denver was the best city for it and in the process Shadowrun lost a really interesting sprawl that had a lot of potential on its own.

That's more or less how I feel about it. As Bull mentioned earlier, I figure that the trick to killing a GD would be targeting them in the first place. Great Dragons almost certainly have access to some seriously jacked up illusions that would make a high grade cat shaman green with envy. For all we know many of those spirit sightings were actually the result of mind manipulations and phantasms. That's not to say he doesn't have real power, of course, but you have to consider the possibility that a GD and his high powered spirit servitors may very well be capable of making their force look quite a bit scarier than it actually is-- the fog of war is bad enough without Great Forms and Spirits of Man running around whipping up mental manipulations and phantasms in addition to the purely physical havoc they're quite capable of creating. Such things aren't foolproof, of course, but suddenly turning a big portion of your enemy's army into a batch of unreliable witnesses would definitely sow a lot of confusion.

So I guess I can sorta buy into the idea that a particularly powerful Great could an unprepared opponent over a barrel and cut a good deal in the short term, particularly when you consider all the other crap that was going on in the background of this particular incident. It's just after the nations in question have a chance to regroup that I think it gets a bit sketchy. The gubmint deciding to honor a bad deal just isn't something that happens very often in my vision of the Sixth World.

Correct me if I am wrong though, bit didn't a Canon Great Dragon take an Orbital Laser and Survive? I mean Really, isn't that just a little excessive there... Something that would wipe out a city is only a nuissance to a dragon? Really? Come on now, all that does is establish that the Greats are not something that can be removed from the game... they reek of Plot Device, which is okay with me, but that being said, it should be admitted that that is what they are there for instead of denying it and saying that they are just fairly powerful characters... they aren't, they are Plot Devices...

Keep the Faith

The great dragons have always annoyed the hell out of me. They never seem to be anything but overpowered author Sues. A great dragon should be something that can challenge a team of prime runners, not some overblown plot device in NPC form that can shrug off orbital bombardment, ravage modern cities, etc. The IEs are just as bad, although fortunately those have been played down in SR4.

The trick here is that two of the nations, IIRC, decided to back GW completely. ANd we're never told why. The UCAS and one of the Amerind nations, IIRC (The PCC?) threw their weight in behind GW. I'm guessing the rest of the countries just decided that it wasn't worth fighting over.

In my mind (And this is in no way canon), GW traded magic "secrets", and/or piles of gold. Maybe he continues to offer a yearly "tribute".

And more importantly, he's more or less become a figurehead in Denver anyways. He may consider it his domain, but he's left the city to run unmolested since then. So at the end of the day, none of the other countries lost anything, really. Nobody else is gonna fuck with Denver while the big white wyrm is watching over it, and they still run their day to day operations as usual. THe question isn't so much "Why have they left the Dragon in place" as it is "Why would they bother gambling to change a system that's working in their favor"?

Personally, I think it was a bit of a lost opportunity. There's a lot of potential in a city run by a dragon. But the changeover from FASA to FanPro really derailed the plotlines, and I think any planned followup was more or less dropped. There had been talk about Denver getting more of a focus post YotC at one point.

Bull

No, they totally are Plot Devices. And I don;t think anyone's ever claimed otherwise. That's why they have no stats, in general (and I've always said trying to give "baseline GD stats" was always a mistake).

I'm not sure about the Oribital Laser, I don't remember that one all that well, but Orbital Lasers aren't something that's ever been statted up or really described in any detail either. I don't remember any killer, city destroying lasers mentioned in SR anywhere though. The closest they've come is the Thor Shot, and even then I think the best those have pulled off is ships or small buildings.

Bull

One of the elements we played with in the original Shadowrun story was that when the Great Dragons woke up they discovered a world - the 6th World -  that was radically different than any world they had experienced before. The combination of a low (but growing) mana level and technology meant that the Great Dragons were not the 'gods' they had been in their day. They were, in fact, disquietingly (to them) vulnerable. We hinted about pre-Awakening 'dragon hunts' connected to nuclear testing, which probably found a few of them. When they awoke even the dumbest among them realized that rolling out and just trying to take over was not a good idea, given the amount of firepower that could be directed at them. So, the majority of them dug in and created socio-political fiefdoms to not only establish power bases, but to protect themselves as well. They were still vulnerable, however. One example is the finale of my book Night's Pawn when the Great Dragon Alamais finds himself in the cross-hairs of a full-out combat mission backed by the 2051 equivalent of  AC-130 gunships packing battlefield lasers.

Something that we also thought about, but I don't think it ever saw print anywhere, was that any government or large military-industrial corp, would immediately be working up action plans for taking out Great Dragons. Given that a Great Dragon would be hard-pressed to affect anything in orbit, I can see a good deal of effort being put into developing orbit-to-ground weaponry to use against the Dragons... and that could have other purposes as well. The Dragons would be aware of such things, and would work to strike their own alliances to gain knowledge about how to protect themselves from these threats. (For example, it could be argued that one of the reasons that some of the Dragons spent as much time with a human appearance as they did was so that they would be harder to track via technological means. The theory being that a dragon-human in the boardroom is harder to hit from orbit than one that has to lounge under a tent in the parking lot.)

We also wanted to be sure that the Great Dragons became a power in the post 2050 world, not the power to be reckoned with. When writing this kind of fiction rampant escalation is something that you have to fight against all the time. Its very easy to fall back on simply making new things bigger and more bad-ass than what's come before it, but that quickly spirals out of control. What works best is that when new things are introduced they throw off the balance of what is already there, but do not necessarily dominate automatically. Is it feasible that in the 15 years since the Awakening a Dragon like Ghostwalker could exhibit the kind of power that he did and be ready willing and able to take on multiple, technologically capable (and magically capable) governments simultaneously? Sure. But the author in me is forced to ponder whether or not something else is/was going on...

Given everything that has been said (and I have to confess to knowing nothing special about the Ghostwalker situation), I would think a completely logical question to ask in-character would be why wasn't more specialized firepower turned on him at the time he took over the Denver area? And why hasn't anyone done much of anything since? (And given that within a very short period of time after showing up through the astral rift he was laying magical siege to the Denver area, it certainly seems like he had a plan and immediately went to it...)

TomD

(And while I was writing this, some other posters chimed in along the same lines. I will reiterate one of my points - it wasn't an orbital laser that hit Alamais, but a battlefield-grade one firing from an aircraft, and he didn't shrug it off. And remember, something firing from orbit doesn't have to be a city burners, in fact the likelihood is that a controlled energy weapon wouldn't be.)

An actual Thor shot would devestate far more than just a building or a ship, assuming the "telephone pole" sized rods typically discussed for this project... Large Tungston Rods of that size tend to weigh in the 5000kg Range and would have a High Level Tactical/Very Low Level Strategic nuclear yield at best, and higher ratings at worst... at least in theory anyways... while much smaller weapons (Crowbar sized Rods) could be used for more surgical strikes...

The resulting extreme force can be explained by the formula Ek = m(v^2)/2, where Ek is the kinetic energy, m the mass of the object and v its velocity.

Mass is about 5000kg
Speed is proposed to be about 36000 mps (though some place it as low as 9000 mps)

Doing the math (Using the Metric Scale): 3.24^12th of Kinetic Energy... that is a LOT of kinetic energy... Not sure how that converts to equivalent Kilotons of TNT, but it can't be a small number...

Keep the Faith

How ever its likely that the smaller rods of crowbar size are commonly used as the telephone sized ones are very destructive. It also gives thats there would be one hell of a rang of thor shots to cater for many diffrent situations.

The big problem is that if great dragons are this powerful, why do they even play games with metahumanity? As Death said in the most recent episode of Supernatural, “This is one little planet in one tiny solar system in a galaxy that’s barely out of its diapers. I’m old, Dean. Very old. So I invite you to contemplate how insignificant I find you.”

Because in the great order of things, they shrink to almost human size.

They also have, going by the SR3 rules, little chance, even channeling a giant spirit, with an armour spell as big as they can hope to have, and hiding behind a barrier, to survive a direct hit with a ship-ship weapon, let alone a serious cruise missile, aerosol bomb, or dragon-zapper sattelite beam weapon.

I read this and imagined a (very large) bug zapper with the logo and words "Dragon Zapper!" on the side and had to laugh.

So shiny... so shiny and blue... must have it... ZAP!

Well, as long as they were fired AT HIM, then he has nothing to worry about thanks to SR4's terrible scatter rules.

So Alamais wasn't caught by an orbital laser then? I seem to remember that from Nights Pawn but you wrote it so you know best.

On the GW thing I always felt that th Draco Foundation (whose head was UCAS VP...) fed him the info he needed since he was Dunkelzahn's brother.

HAHAHA!

4.2 * 10^15J/MT. So a bit under a KT.

My recollection was that the lasers were in the transports that the main characters deployed from, and targeted by a hand-held spotter unit. Could I be wrong? Hell yes - its been too long to trust my memory alone. I'll double check my copy of the book tomorrow since its currently in my school office. 

And that's a very interesting conspiracy theory. That then begs the question - Did the Draco Foundation know of his coming, in advance?

I do think I'd feel better about the whole plot if there were some hints in this direction, or some seriously curious shadowrunners digging into it. Like Tom said in his post, it's hard not to imagine there is more going on here, but there's been little material to indicate it.

For my own campaign setting I've essentially ignored everything pertaining to Ghostwalker. IMO, such a vulgar display of power is not only not very bright, but is beneath a Great Dragon. Instead I prefer to portray the Great Dragons as Machiavellian schemers who use manipulation and their incredible resources/influence to get what they want. While characters may from time to time work for a Great Dragon, they usually aren't aware of it because there would be numerous proxies between the two. Even the person who hires the runners may not know that it is on behalf of a Great Dragon that they are acting.

Conversely, most Great Dragons are so wrapped up in their own schemes and covert power struggles that the runners (thankfully) remain beneath their notice. However, should the runners errrrmmm, run afoul of a Great Dragon then I would likely pull a Kaiser Souze* on them.

OTH, my games also tend to be less run 'n gun and more run 'n hide so YMMV of course.





*The Usual Suspects

How does it go: "Never assume conspiracy when stupidity will suffice"? In this case the developer and writer....

I always got the impression that Ghostwalker was the blunt force instrument that complemented Dunkie's epic scheming. Had Ghostie been around while Dunkie was I bet he'd have been the "bad cop" who'd go apocalyptic on enemies, physically destroying them while his bro schemed them out of existance.

Maybe Ghostwalker was really, really unnerved by Aztlan's "blatant" misuse of blood magic that set him off...

Yes, though the details escape me - Dunkelzahn left instructions in his will, and Talon, in the epilogue of the novel The Burning Time, told them too, if I do not mix things up terribly.


Not entirely. The Godzilla entry was done by two other Greats - Rhownabwy [sic] and Feuerschwinge. While Rhowny came to senses and made reparations, Feuerschwinge was downed by the Luftwaffe. It is undoubtedly not very smart, though.


In my opinion this reduces dragons to a cliche. Dragons, while highly intelligent, have always been described as having a rather firey (horrible pun ) temper.

Yeah, but like I said, the problem was this was the last book that FASA worked on, and Rob & Co. ended up going in different directions with the metaplot when they took over with FanPro. So a lot of stuff just kinda got left behind. It likely should have been followed up on in Dragons of the 6th World, for one. Plus I think at one point there was loose talk about another Target style book, or a "Shadows of NA 2" or something that would have updated the Denver setting as a whole, and I'd assume that would have hit upon it as well. But... Developers and companies and priorities and directions all changed...



They knew at least something. After all, GW popped out of the rift Dunklezahn left behind when he died. We never bothered to define it, because it wasn't really necessary, but something had trapped Ghostwalker in some other Astral Dimension or another at some point toward the end of the Earthdawn era. So one of Dunklezahn's schemes for his death was a way for GW to escape (among a couple of others).



While Ghostwalker is definitely more straightforward, I wouldn't say this is a really appropriate . It's more that Ghostwalker just wasn't familiar with Humanity, nor was he familiar with exactly what they could do. Ghostwalker was lucky, I'd say, because Denver was probably one of the handful of major cities that he could attack and not have to worry about serious firepower being available immediately. Ghostwalker was intended to be more a bit more "old school", so to speak. He has less interest in playing game by modern standards. That was one of the points of the Survival of the Fittest adventures, is that GW shows up and sees that the Dragons have adapted to Humanity, and have abandoned some of their old traditions, and he basically goes "Umm, WTF are you guys doing? We're DRAGONS!"

I imagine he's settled down a bit over the last few years though, as he caught up with things a bit better... But I still like the idea of GW as a Fuedal Overlord.

Bull

Thanks kzt

Assuming the original math is correct, even that is still pretty significant...
I will check it on my computer instead of my calculator... but thanks for the KT calculation... But I am Curious... that 3 1/4 Trillion Kinetic Energy... I assume that it is in Joules, Yes? Been out of my science classes a long time...

Will come back with an update shortly

EDIT: Yep, 3.24^12th... that is a lot of explosive force... lets see if this works... 3240000000000/4200000000000000= 7.7142857142857142857142857142857e-4 kt... which is .007714 kt... Does that look correct? That sounds pretty insignificant for the damage potential that is discussed in theory for these devices... Hmmmmm................


Keep the Faith

Jerry Pournelle's original concept was as a tactical weapon, for anti-armor or anti-fortification use. You just don't get enough KE at orbital speeds to huge amount of damage unless you use a huge amount of mass, like tens of thousands of tons. But since SR writers and developers don't seem to understand how orbits work (based on the idiocy in System Failure) I have no idea what insanity got printed in the various SR fiction.

Edit: Ninja'd by the author. That's awesome.

I think that first line is something that describes a lot of my thoughts on YotC in general. And the good Mr. Levine already covered my thoughts about wasting the great character of Denver on that particular storyline. I think Ghostwalker's core concept of taking over a city was great. I think Denver was the wrong city to pick.

Ghostwalker is bad writing, everything since then has been after the fact justification. Once again the science of a far future setting has been rendered defunct so that someone could wank about Earthdawn and magic. Anyone citing a lack of military equipment in the denver area (ridiculous and unsupported) completely leaves out stand off weaponry such a aircraft, ortillery, cruise missiles and other such systems Aztechnology and the Aztlan military have at their dispal, all of which could have been active in the area within hours if not minuets of ghost walkers little rampage. The point of the matter is they did have a chance to expand on the denver situation or even make it more plausiable in both SONA and DotSW and blew it in favor of more Ghostwalker related masturbation.

Also for those who state that the military didn't roll because of the potential casualties, it's Shadowrun since when have the powers that be given a fuck about casualties. It would have been simplicity itself to blame the casualties on the dragon or justify that one city was a small price to pay to stop a dragon rampage.


Honestly if I were line developer tommorow I'd get GW involved unilaterallly in another major overaching plot, because after all nothing but other dragons has proven even a remote threat to him up to this point, for the sheer pleasure of having one of the megacorporations laser him to death. To make things even better I'd devote about a paragraph to the whole affair max just so there's no chance of him overriding the other story as someone suggested in another thread.

The problem with that is why should they bother at all if they really don't give a crap about the people/property in Denver? Reclaiming the city could very well lead to a rather nasty pissing match with the Azzies, after all. I'll cede the point that Shadowrun authorities tend to be a ruthless, but I've also noticed that they're most ruthless when it comes to covering their asses. For example, the Bug City quarantine was also a response to an unknown magical threat. But rather than really show overwhelming force and a willingness to risk things of value (E.G. a full-on invasion force), they rather showed a willingness to cut their losses and let the civvies take the brunt. As you said, one city is a small price to pay to stop a dragon rampage.

Fully agree. A dragon taking over a city or corp through manipulation, scheming and plotting? Nice idea. A dragon taking over a city through open force? Bad idea.

As long as the damage can be blamed on something else, the corps can do what they want. A lot of runs are done to set up some eco group or other as terrorists, so the corp can go on a rampage.

Here we have godzilla coming to town. Would have taken anyone with a brain just 5 minutes to pull footage from Tehran from the archives, and even a 75% destroyed city is better than a totally wrecked city.

One of my prior employers has a weapons development division. When I worked with them, we were allowed to use some of the simulators for fun, as a way of working on the math and modeling. So, when the whole "Ghostwalker frys Denver" thing came out, we played some games. He lost.

Modern crusie missles have ranges in the several thousands of miles. It has been shown that as of 1991, a crusie missle could leave the West Coast of the USA, and go through the goal posts of Giants stadium in NY, with enough firepower to level a building, and that doesn't count the special ones.

The original approach to the Great Dragons, prior Ghostwalker, makes sense. As Tom said, they woke up, realized that technology made them vulnerable, and adjusted their game plans.

Post GW, not very rational within the game universe. I think it is very much a case of later writers trying to make their super bad ass dude more powerful than anyone else's super bad ass dude. This happens all the time where some super really bad dude that no one could stop was finally beaten at great cost. Then someone else comes along who makes the first dude look, well, wimpy.

-M&P

Your math is off, though your formulas are correct.

A 5e3 kg rod at 9e3 mps has about the same kinetic energy of 48 tons of TNT (TNT weighs in at 4.18e9 Joule/Ton).

At 36e3 mps it has the kinetic energy eqyuivalent to 774 ton TNT

Not bad, but not that funky either

Shadowrun is a very near-future setting, actually.


Thast's roughly a MOAB, which is still pretty impressive, mushroom cloud and all.


Chicago is different from Denver because military action in chicago was an internal UCAS affair, while military action in Denver, no matter by whom, would have pissed off all other major powers there and might well have cause a much larger war. Better cut the losses and move out. My personal opinion is that GW could walk over the Azzis there because first they held back and then everyone turned on them and they just wanted out.

But I agree, it needs to be pointed out that a Great can be taken out by the military. Maybe have Aztlan shoot down Sirrug with a combined naval/air task force? Of course losing one carrier in the effort.

That would even be Earthdawn fanwank, as Lurker would put it.

Would really love to hear current line developer, Jason M Hardy's take...

I have no doubt that the various Treaty nations have enough firepower to take down Ghostwalker. None at all. Aztlan alone has enough firepower to take down a great dragon, which is one of the reasons the dragons keep a special eye on the Azzies.

I do have some doubts that the Treaty nations would lob cruise missiles towards Denver. Denver has always been a fragile diplomatic game between a number of nations, if one steps up and starts lobbing cruise missiles at it, it's likely to start a war. The Pueblo and the Sioux were in the best position to do something militaristic, because they wouldn't have to cross another nation's borders to reach Denver, but even that would have been touchy.

But again, it's the whole "what now?" phase that irks me. So none of the nations step up immediately because of the risk of international war, okay. Now there's a standoff with a great dragon that refuses to budge. At this point, I would expect the national forces to start talking to each other to work something out so they could dislodge the dragon. But they don't. The PCC could have rallied up the ground forces and given overflight permission to the CAS and UCAS...but there's nothing but a quiet acceptance of Ghostwalker's claim to rulership. Some kind of deal had to have been made, but no one knows what that is. And unfortunately, like Lurker mentioned, neither SoNA or Dot6W took the opportunity to explore that and make some sense out of it. How could the Nexus, which sits right outside Denver and now operates under the permission of Ghostwalker, not be digging into that?

And I still miss the old Denver, which was a unique center of international espionage, a sort of Cold War Berlin throwback. Now it's a feudal monarchy run by a dragon who has outlawed smuggling and is actually enforcing it with his own military. What, no smuggling in Denver? That makes me sad.

I think the really craptastic part if that Ghostwalker is the dragon least knowledgeable about the miltech and tactics of the Sixth World forces he engaged against. This isn't Lofwyr or another great dragon that understands the capabilities and limitations of the tech as well as having had time to study the situation and the tactics that would be used to counter his rampage. Instead, we get what appears to be a big beast having a poorly planned tantrum - and everything just working out fine for him. Ghostwalker must be a PC.

No, a DMPC.

But as a politician, which would you rather have offered...

GW: I'll accept your surrender and take your city. You'll be *my* servant.

or...

GW: I'll take your city and you die.

Keep in mind that no politician will give up power willingly. They'll sell their souls to the highest bidder *AFTER* slitting the throats of their mothers. They are almost as bad as lawyers.

I definitely see some backroom deals having been made as part of the GW takeover of Denver. The bad part is, once you start playing the game by GW's rules, YOU LOSE. You don't win games by playing by someone else's rules.

I read GW as being a ruthless (even for a Great Dragon) bastard; the velvet metal-spike gauntlet wearing dictator. I also see him as being played in opposition of Lofwyr.

Also, part of the Missions storyline for Denver gave some stats for GW. They make him fairly beefy (Force 24 spells protecting him). Not to mention the spirits that serve him voluntarily as well as his own spirits that he's summoned.

As I recall from Earthdawn, him & Dunkie didn't always see eye to eye but they did work together to ensure they kept each other balanced within the world. Perhaps without the Big D, GW is a bit unhinged? Perhaps his tantrum (as some have put it) made him more aggressive and determined than he normally would be?

Besides, the lack of information on the followup means that we GMs can define the followup to be whatever works best for us, complete with the 'official' story and whatever 'real story' (or stories) we want as the 'chip truth'.

I don't see too many backroom deals made by a Dragon who had no clue about the world he entered. Of cours,e he could have been setting up the plot all along using ghost agents or so... Plot devices usually use such cheap ploys to get around logical problems.

Mitsuhama (or Renraku, I forget) has one pointed at Tokyo, although nothing is said on it's power levels (Maximum, I suppose). Probably enough to pick off at least a runner if they irritate the corp in question enough.

IIRC, I'm AFB. But GW used a combination of spirits, guerrilla warfare tactics, and probably powerful illision spells to conduct his war (I think it lasted a couple of days--at most a few weeks from what I remember. He can hide himself via magic so avoiding strategic assest that could hurt him would not be a problem. Also, most of his targets were very specific, and not directed at military targets. His most distructive act was to destroy the Tecoli in the Aztech portion of the city. He did focus on the azzies alot (I'm sure he communicated this to the CAS, UCAS, Sioux, Ute, and PCC.


Basically, GW told the Nations that control denver the following:
1. I am in charge, but I will leave the day to day running of the city to your council
2. That your forces in each sector will be merged into a single force. I will have final say as to the troops that will be in the force.
3. The internal city divisions will be removed.
4. The Azzies will not be staying. Their territory will be given to the CAS.

*PCC reaction to this offer: Cool, the Azzies are gone.
CAS reaction:Cool the Azzies are gone and we got more of denver.
UCAS: Hmm, this place has been a headache, we can pass the trouble of this place off to GW. So our response is this is a win win.
Sioux: While we don't like it, you really haven't done much. Besides were more worried about the UCAS rather than you. So we'll go ahead.
Ute: We don't approve but we have to vote on this, we'll get back to you.

Azzies: We'll fight you to the bitter end. Afterwhich GW goes after their assets and destroys the Tecoli. Azzies with the war going on in the Yucatan cannot spare the forces to fight in Denver. Nevermind that the PCC would probably interfere with such activities as much as possible. Call it a loss and move on.

*Ute Nation got annexed by the PCC after these events IIRC.

This plotline petered out and never was picked up again other than to mention yeah it is denver, it is controlled by the dragon. There was something about the "Spirit of denver" and how the division of it caused it to split into seperate spirits. I think on of GW's goals was to fix that spirit.

If the Nexus operates with GW's permission, how much would he like to see his secret deals become public?

Here was the deal: "Look, there's going to be a huge fight, instead, let's just all have a good old fashioned Mexican standoff. I'm nominally going to be in charge but otherwise it's just going to be business as usual. Just know that if you attack first then everyone else is going to turn on you and smack you down, then go back to staring at each other over the barrels of their guns." As far as I can tell, he's not really "running" Denver so much as serving as a figurehead for the various groups that are all in a tense standoff with each other.

"Well, why do you get to be in charge?"
"Because I'm neutral -- I'm not a part of any group, so nobody gets any sort of advantage over any other group. Not to mention a fight would be expensive."
"Ok, who's going to police this place?"
"Everyone. We'll have multi-force units so you can all keep a close eye on what everyone else is doing, so that no one has an advantage."