Target: Wastelands noted that Ares had about Thor Shots in the ol' arsenal, to drop when needed.

One took out Art Dankwalther.

Two more are said to have been used, but I can't for the life of me recall where.

ANybody have a clue?

IIRC, one was used during Operation: Reciprocation. There might have been two shots.

There was one used in the House of the Sun Novel by Nigel Findely if memory serves

Right, in Hawaii. Was that the Bug Hive, or was that just tangental?

I think it was on the hive..that was being fronted by Hawai'ian Nene Shamans

Didn't one hit a dragon who killed a bunch of (Muslims?) in the middle east (and he survived?)

Not that I recall. Aden DID level Tehran and use it as an Aerie

Hmm, ok.

There is this entry on the wiki I didn't see mentioned yet

July 2063 - Ares launched Thor shot at the Proteus Romo arcology, blowing it off the Danish coast, in retaliation for strikes against their Thule facility.

Ah ha, that's probably the other Shot. That was written up in the Shockwaves!!!, a German only adventure with details on Proteus AG, a euro-AA corp.

There was a brief summary of the campaign posted on the Shadowrun site, but dunno where that would be now.

As I recall, a Dragon did get hit by one (and was said to survive, which is BS) but it wasn't Aden. Maybe Nachtmiester?

How can a dragon survive being shot with the insta-gib Thor, but not a humble six armed grenade launcher maniac? Or even a one-armed grenade launcher maniac?

Plot Armor.

Dragons are much less scary/special if you acknowledge how deadly some of these armaments are/would be.

Yeah, I hate that "reroll hits" ability the greats have (and negating edge) though.

Against a grenade launcher I have no problem with reroll but against a weapon which doesn't kill someone but just obliterates an area it just doesn't make sense. Nothing should survive a nuke/nuke substitute.

You're thinking Alais, Lofwyr's brother who was a backer of Winternight (oops!). He didn't get hit by a Thor shot, however... he took an orbital laser to the chest. Got a NASTy scar from it, darn near died, but pulled through.

(He doesn't see much use, in general, but he was the one Dunk used to play Fruitcake Tag with every year.)

Thanks, that sounds right. Alais is basically Llofwyr's loser anarchist brother, right?

And that, barely surviving with a nasty scar against an orbital laser, seems a lot more reasonable.

It wasn't an orbital laser, I believe it was tank or aircraft mounted.

And that's what I love about the Germans. In euorpe dragons can be killed by military force even if that force has to be strategic in nature, in America Ghostwalker stomps into a major North American city and dictates terms to national and corporate powers because he's got cool Dunky's brother plot armor.

Hey, over here the city only had token military forces. Ghosty* kinda did show up with a full retinue of spirits and sustained spells. I mean really, if you're a 2000 ton dragon with magic capable of obliterating a city block or two, you tend to armor yourself up pretty good (Force 12 Armor anyone? Oh, and that's before overcasting).


*Hehe, calling him this makes me giggle like a little school girl.

Well, Ghostwalker jumped Denver, a city that doesn't really have a staggering military and corporate presence. He also had a FLOCK of spirits with him, which helped.

Heck, SIrrug was fought off by *one* *guy* when he attacked a plane. He won and shot the plane down, but, he *was* held off for a while.

Mind you, his recent work in the War! suppliment show that his magic's gotten a weeeee bit stronger since then.

(And then, of course, we have Aden, who blew up Iran single-clawedly.)

Wonder what would happen if someone *did* manage to cack a Great Dragon? The ones that have died so far were from other Greats (Nachtmaster) or uncomfirmed (Firewings getting lit up by teh German Air Force, then crashing into the uber-radioactive SOX and still rumored to be alive) or, you know, Dunk.

Wonder what would happen if, say, the Mysterious Third Great Dragon of Amazonia just got flat-out SLEW sometime? Dragonslayer's old group still exists and are sure to have killed a few Drakes and a Lesser or two. What happens if they have a good day and actually bag a Great? How would other Dragons react? How would other countries? Or megacorps? It'd probably take a large military force, or some crazy powerful magic, but, you know, Edge being Edge, some guy could just get dang lucky and gank a Great while they were in metahuman form and, thus, vulnerable.

I don't mean a Lofwyr or Rumyo or the othe rmetaplot dragons, but ... wonder what'd happen?

There are wildly divergent views on how much military force was in Denver, some sources had it as mostly ceremonial some sources indicated it was quite considerable and potentially a flashpoint for a major military conflict. In any case in a world of cruise missiles, orbital artillery, and mach capable aircraft getting military force to the fight with ghost walker should have been a non-issue outside of collateral damage or political concerns, neither of which the Azzies have historically cared a great deal about.

I had pretty much a whole thread about how I felt a dragon needs to get killed by military force. I still do feel that every time we have a dragon acting unilaterally against corporate or national powers the game gets one step closer to magicrun/earthdawn with guns.

The most capable war machines in the Shadowrun universe are the Shadow Runners themselves, so why not have your group go up against a dragon and include the result in the fluff/backstory of future campaigns?

Magic

I thought it was Alamais, not Alais. And it was an orbital laser, as I recall.


Yeah, I think it's only fair that even GD's can be killed by the military, but it wouldn't succeed every time; the margin of failure would be big enough to make generals pause and think "But what if we miss? Then he'll be after us!"

Haesslich (I think it was him) was quite unceremoniously killed by ONE guy in one the the Secrets of Power books...

And going by RAW, a creature with Magic 20+ is quite close to invulnerable. And doesn't even need combat spells, F40 Magic Fingers + F40 Combat Sense should already solve most problems...

For the various and sundry of this thread -

The Shockwaves!!! adventure summary I mentioned beforehand (with a thanks to Crimsondude - thanks Crimsondude!)

Alamais from Dunkie's Will:



Finally, can we not with the Ghostwalker arguments? Again? Please? No one is going to get an answer they're going to like and everyone's going to go nuts trying to prove themselves right. It's been done. To death.

Doesn't even have a focus in this thread. Go argue in the Spy Games topic.

Man i'd forgotten about that thread, I don't often miss Frank but dayum.

LOL, i especially don't miss him after reading that thread.

The dragon you're thinking of (I believe it was Haesslich) wasn't a great. He was so low on the totem pole he war largely irrelevant.

He was the head of security for a tiny subsidiary of Sauder-Krupp. I.E. he was Lofwyr's bitch.

I think that was more of a "suprise, quick sucker punch" than a real fight.


I dunno, it's difficult to realistically imagine dragons as a serious threat to, say, supersonic jet fighters. Magic's the only thing that makes it even reasonable. Even then, if say Aztech wacked a dragon that came into their turf, I can't imagine anything even the Greats could do. After all, the only thing the Corps can agree on is that they should have all the power and that doesn't include dragons unless they're shareholders. If the dragons seriously started to mess with Corp execs, even discounting SK and maybe NeoNet (thanks to Celadyr) there's more than enough firepower to wipe out every great on the planet (heck, there's enough firepower to wipe out everything on the planet a couple time over.) Some of the Greats might cause problems but would in necessarily be worse than what an Azzie or Ares exec faces every day from other corps?

The most reasonable explanation I can think of is that if you want to fight a great dragon, you either need to accept a lot of collateral damage or you need a very specialized force with very specialized equipment. The kind of force that's very expensive, small, and doesn't get sent out unless they NEED to be. Besides, even then, who picks a fight with a Great?

As for Denver, I kind of imagine all the countries/corps sitting down after GW's takeover,

UCAS rep, "So Ghostwalker took over Denver. Does anybody really care?"

Azzie rep, "Yes!"

Everyone else, "Nope"

UCAS rep, "Ok"

Sengir:
Nope, even per the silliness of Magic RAW, I don't buy that 20 Magic=trillions of dollars of sci-fi tech. Heck, I don't buy that 1,000 Magic=trillions of dollars of sci-fi tech.

Well, since we're a-driftin' ...

Aztechnology is *ticked* at Ghostwalker.
Ares is "The Mili-Corp" and is called in for all kinds of work.

Do you think either of them is working on some sort of anti-dragon gear? Normal heat-seaking missiles don't work too well on a living target and radar doesn't really love 'em, either. There's no "Magic-proof metal" that they could slap onto a tank, so that's out as well.

Wonder what they, or any other group, *coul* cook up in terms of dragonslaying tech?

(I suppose you could use a "One Less Drago spell but, you know ... good luck with that.)

Slay [Ghostwalker]

Meh, presuming you're talking about an Invisible, silly Camo'd dragon, you'd probably start by drenching the are with RFID tags. Not much the dragon can do about that, even destroying them will singly out it's position. There's plenty of current anti-armor weapons which'd chew through a dragon's physical defenses. Railguns come to mind. While Spirits are fast, I even astral forms are limited in how fast they can move/react. Supersonic weapons will probably render prevent them from directly stopping the missiles, unless they're loyal enough to be ablative armor. And even that won't stop some stuff.

Almost every GD has influence over at least one top-tier country or AAA (SK, Amazonia as the most obvious, but Dunkelzahn turned out to have significant stock in Ares, Fuchi, Renraku and Aztechnology too..)

Maybe the GDs discourage the lowly mortals from developing anti-dragon weapons? Along with warnings to heads of state that any attack on a GD will be taken very seriously by all of the GDs?

I mean, rivalry between GDs is one thing, but allowing some lesser species to pose a threat is intolerable...

Not used in the book, but detailed in the book. The shot(s) were used when the UCAS Pacific fleet was steaming back to Hawaii to reclaim the islands from the natives in revolution. The shots were used as warning shots, and worked.

This post is pretty much a checklist of everything silly with dragons.

You do realize that from a Dragon's perspective, all those things are quite reasonable.

I mean, if I were a dragon, I'd have my claws in so many pies that by the time you figured out what I was doing, I'd have already killed you last week and you just got the notice today.

Apparently my post got lost.

I said something about "if you were a dragon and could alter your physical appearance to be (meta)human, you'd probably not let on that you could, because it'd just get you killed."

Actually I was refering to GD's owning huge stakes in triple A megas. Lofwyr pulling that trick once makes sense, D secretly having secret controlling interests in several strains credibility but is more workable for him then most, but every GD secretly having major stakes in AAA megas, the SEC and the CC should go ape when they try and move that kind of stock around in off the books for precious metals transacations.

Well, as soon as the Awakening hit, the GDs had time to start playing. They could use Mind Control-type spells before the mundanes had really figured out those existed. They likely had some divination ability, too.

Then there's Crash 1.0; at least Dunkelzahn profited from that; he appears to have been the silent partner in the Nanosecond Buyout afterwards.

Dragons don't just do insider training (aided by Mind Probe, Divination, astral spying and general superior mental faculties); they can certainly manipulate events so that companies they invested in get all the "lucky" breaks.

They certainly didn't play fair; once they reach a critical mass of pawns like senior politicians, it becomes easier and easier to acquire profitable government contracts, favorable agency rulings and so forth. The ability of dragons to use corruption, nepotism and so forth is bigger than that of ordinary people because they're smart, they have a head start, and superior magic.

It's more surprising that there seem to be independent humans in positions at all, really. If they really are independent.

Don't forget their alien minds. We, as (meta)humans can't predict what they're likely to do, because they think differently than we do.

We did Big D run for president? Why'd he kill himself/allow himself to be assassinated just after his inauguration? (By that I mean "that moment" rather than "that event," we have some understanding of "why did he kill himself" but why did he do it then?) Why was he so interested in metahumanity (no other dragon has ever held that fascination)?

From a writing perspective there doesn't need to be a reason, as dragons think differently than we do and are incapable of understanding their motivations. Case and point: Why did Big D help Damien Knight in the nanosecond buyout at all?

So basically: if they want to manipulate the stock market, they'll do it in a way that makes sense to them and we, as (meta)humans won't be able to predict the outcome even if we know that the GD is manipulating the stock market.

Beating someone in the stock market is kinda hard when they can re-roll fate.





-k

Let's not try to pretend dragons are logical. Dragons are not but they're hardly the worst thing in SR. Dragons are in SR because shooting dragons with cybornetic grenade launchers is cool.

Some dragons should be Machiaveliuan schemers because that is cool. They should not control everything, because that is not cool.

They can seem like they control everything, because that is a conspiracy theory, and those are cool.

Dragons don't control everything in ShadowRun. Damnien Knight is beyond their influence, as are some other large corporations, but the dragons do have their claws in a fair number of pies, making it only seem like they call all the shots (and even though they control most of the megacorps, that's only on a high level, the dragons certainly don't dictate what Joe Wageslave does on a daily basis).