He was one of the driving forces behind WMI, but other megacorps had a hand too.

Interpreting the whole System Failure debacle as actually a conspiracy to establish a new, more dragon-friendly Matrix...

Kaltenstein always seemed like a nice guy (for a dragon, that is)

Gives you ten minutes head start BEFORE he barbeques you?

I think if you had to pick a dragon for your character to work for, it'd have to be someone with a huge network already - Lofwyr, Ryumyo, Lung, Masaru (to a degree). That way he wouldn't be called on too often, punishment might be less severe and they wouldn't be called to some south American hellhole to negotiate.

I voted Aden. Closer I got, the more opportunities I'd have to kill him / her.

K.

Any particular reason? My runners actually found out there were working for Aden the other night and had a hand in deciding her fate a bit. (I'll tell the story but I don't want to go into campaign wank too much). The dwarf made heavy arguments in Aiden's favor that whether intentional or not she likely saved more lives then she ended by attacking Tehran.

Any plan that involves trying to kill a Great Dragon is a bad one.

or










BADASS!!!

Aden is the dragon that massacred the people of Tehran.

Which is straight up there with nagasaki and hiroshima.

on ways of letting people know you mean business and are not amused.

That seems to be standard operating procedure for most dragons. I wouldn't be surprised if on gaining adulthood as a dragon, they were given the classic "How to serve man".

Masaru

He seems to be more interested in metahuman equality. And while it may just be publicity and lip service, it still means you might be doing something more 'worthwhile' than raiding a corporation or threatening lesser humans. Plus I want to know exactly how he was able to get his hold over the HUK, fight off three triple A's and Japan, one of the strongest nations of the 6th world, not to mention stick it to another much older dragon who has extensive investments in Japan. All while being the youngest of his kind

Well, an AI is basically a living creature created entirely out of language, and language is Celedyr's raison d'etre. I wouldn't rule out some connection. It really depends on how you view the powers in the 6th World, but, personally, I could see ol' Stoney making drastic moves towards becoming the King of the Matrix and Lord of All Knowledge.

It's one of many scary possibilities.

no. The Ayatollah had declared jihad on metahumanity who had been existing peacefully. All the dragon did was take steps to prevent this. A lesser step, like eating the cleric, might have started a long drawn out war.

Don't get me started on Hiroshima. I believe it was justified and my family history is tied up in that. My maternal grandfather was in the navy in 1945 as a staff officer.

And for fairness sake, there's a few copies of Mythical Delicacies floating around. ;P
(Minor note: The book title is actually just "To Serve Man")

As was Teheran.

Right I agree.

Some guy declares a policy of eradicating a section of society and many hundreds of thousands of people are killed by Aden in objection. That anyone would condone that is disgusting. The government of Saudi Arabia is a disgusting regime that persecutes and supresses people every day and it survives entirely through the grace of the US government. The World Trade Centre bombing was a response to that. A couple of thousand people died in that. That too was a horrible, terrible act. Yet when the exact same principle is applied to hundreds of thousands of muslims, it is considered justified?

As to Hiroshima and Nahasaki, actual real world events... There is no justification. Saying it cost the US fewer lives that way than if they'd invaded the country in a conventional manner is not a justification for such an atrocity.

I am done with this thread. I can't hold a conversation with people who think slaughter of a population on a massive scale is a justifiable response to the statements of a religious or political leader. I have always strongly disliked the desctruction of Tehran in the Shadowrun cannon because I've always felt it was the result of a double-standard where a muslim city was regarded as somehow more casually dispatched without having to consider it so much. But I figured that was perhaps paranoid. Apparently not. Deaths of millions of people - justifiable, apparently. Presumably every person in 1940's Berlin should have been slaughtered in one night because of the elimination of the Jewish population. Apparently the population of two cities in Japan were right to be killed because Japan would have put up too much resistance to being invaded (no-one can argue that Japan was actually a threat to American soil or the people there at that point). Yes, all this is justifiable.

I am done here.

..... I am all for personal opinion and emotional feelings to certain acts. But other than the WW2 references, we were talking about a fictional event.

And unless it has changed since I last remember, he razed tehran, not commited the genocide of the whole people. HUGE difference. Yes alot of them died in this fictional event, but they were (not were going to) commiting genocide on several groups of people. Horrible yes, but rather poetic in its own horrible way. Plus he never did it because they were muslims or from tehran, he did it in a carpet bomb/shock and awe fashion. Hell he is even a huge influence and promoter of Islam in SR, being a major force behind both the IUM and NIJ.

Honestly, Hiroshima and Nagasaki have no real metaphorical/anecdotal relation. A better example would have been if a country had nuked kigali during the Rwanda genocide

In the fictional Sixth World, you poke a dragon (also a fictional creature) in the chest you are going to get your ass served up (fictionally...of course).

On a completely unrelated note, when on a run against Ares and a security guard gets shot while the runners are escaping...he had it coming...right?

You missed my point. Japanese lives were actually saved by Hiroshima as the cabinet was willing to allow Japan to die as a people rather than have them suffer the shame of being defeated. It was only Hiroshima and Nagasaki that caused the Emperor Showa to enter the debate and force the government to "endure the unendurable."
Considering the lies told to the civilian population in Okinawa by the Japanese government about the horrors of the American soldiers, this act probably saved countless lives of Japanese civilians. Conventional bombing in Tokyo and Hamburg killed more people but it took longer. The power of the A-bomb was the shocker-1 plane,1 bomb and BAM. The US could have invaded Japan and conquored but it would have destroyed far more of Japan than the 2 atomic bombs did. Again, my grand father was a navy staff officer at the time. This is a big part of my family history so I'm fully loaded up with lots of facts.

To work your analogy, maybe if some great energy had flattened a Nazi rally in Munich when Adolf started ranting against the Jews but before they started moving or as they started but before it spread beyond the rally stage to political power a lot of suffering would have been avoided. To bring this back to SR in the same way the Clerics came out against metahumans in Iran and that was squashed at once.

Strangely it did not happen in Japan which had the first Great Dragon and was heavily prejudiced against metas. That should tell us something about dragons.

The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were also demonstrations for the Soviets.

One decisive demonstration of power can dissuade a large amount of open conflict.