Indeed... Dunklezahn was not assassinated, He committed Suicide... Apparently the hotline was jammed with callers.

Or, just like how a cat when it falls tries to cover it up by acting like that was supposed to happen, the Big D WAS assassinated, but not thoroughly and his spirit then acted like it was a ritual suicide on our behalf just to look good because even Dragons pay homage to the Rule of Cool.

Ummm... Dunklezahn killed himself... how is that an assassination?

See, it all depends on whether or not you consider the Dragonheart Trilogy to be canon (suicide) or not (assassination).

Hell, even if it is canon, most of the people in the SR universe don't know about the events depicted and still believe it to have been an assassination.

Exactly, let's not forget there are more than a few novels that played the edge of reasoning/canon, like Black Madonna which needed a few novels after to clean that mess up and change some parts to get things back on track.


Again, I am not saying it was assassination, but even if it was I wouldn't be surprised if the Big D could still capitalize on it to some degree for his own ends.

Belief, however, does not make it so... Fact is, Dunklezahn offed himself.

If and only if you consider Dragonheart to be canon. Some people don't. I do, because of Rule of Cool, but I don't consider War! to be canon (Storm Front I haven't made a decision on, but it feels like an extension of War!).

Since it was put out by FASA, in the Shadowrun Universe, why would you not consider it to be Canon? Any such ruling would be a Houserule(?), and not a basis to form a common ground. I do understand people not liking it, though. But saying it isn't Canon because I do not like it is like saying the Ares Alpha isn't Canon becasue I don't like it. It Does not wash with me.

War! does not bother me as Canon (though some of the stories/premises have the capacity to offend, no doubt); I am still plowing through Storm Front, so no real opinion on that yet.

Wow, I'd reach across the table and throttle both the player and GM in this case.

Indeed... Pretty much an Epic Fail all the way around.

Actually, I think that player was kind of a hero, given that almost the entire group was out to get him, the GM was throwing around god-level NPCs like a dick, and he managed to bring down said God-NPC not once but twice.

Three times, actually.
1) Destroying the Plane of Force
2) Turned off psionics in his own demiplane
3) Mobbed the BBEG with ever-healing construct minions

Heh... There is that too... The shenanigans that occurred are just not my cup o' Tea any longer. Of course, many years ago (Early 90's), I did something similar with a Champions 4th Edition game, when I was told that there was no way that I could create a a 200 Point character that could not be controlled. Challenge Accepted... Did not take long for THAT idea to be disabused. Was asked to not play Champions with that group again.

I've always felt: NO GAME is better than SHITTY GAME. I've heard horror stories like that and went, "Why were you playing with them in the first place?"

I mean, play with yourself instead.



....wait

... You mean the literal explanation of the rules? I'm simply more creative than many people. And no, not all GDs and IEs at once. Maybe not even all of them in sequence. But two F15 spirits? Yeah, I gots dis. And maybe (probably) one GD.


Actually: radiation exposure, thor shots, and nuclear weapons are things that simply state that a thing dies outright. No stats still dies because it's a kill effect.

Except that with Twist Fate, the GD is pretty protected from stuff like that.

Twist THIS! *fires death star*

I liked what this guy did. The group truly didn't want to add anyone else to their group, why they advertised for someone is beyond me. I think the player did everything right, the GM and other players were out of line.

Gotta agree. Also, points to him for doing the whole thing with consistent characterization.

I agree; Twist Fate is a bullshit game mechanic that makes me see red.

If you're not big and scaly enough to survive on your own, you don't get to break the normal mechanics of the game for everyone else in order to force your survival. This isn't Call of Cthulhu, you don't get to automatically eat 1d4+1 Shadowrunners per initiative pass.

If you're a Great Dragon and you piss off the entire world badly enough for a major warfighting power to declare open season on you and you then get into an open field battle against them, your life is now in the hands of the dice, same as with everybody else.

Frankly, I hate the Azzies, but I'm glad that somebody put the Great Dragons officially on notice that they were not the dominant species on the planet anymore.



Yeah, that GM was being a pure asshole, not shutting down Psychic Rape Boy hard and fast, and not shutting down the PKing and intraparty conflict the moment it started, and especially when he let one of the other players attempt to PK the wizard by BBEG. And then he was extra asshole, when he not only went along with the other player's asshole attempt to murder the wizard with the BBEG, but then retconned the BBEG's death twice (and shut down what would have been a second repeat of his first death by fiat,) rather than, say, awarding the wizard his 6,144,000 XP and figuring out where to go from there.

Because one is a novel, the other is a sourcebook for a game. If they want stuff to be canon, they'd better put a summary into an actual sourcebook, else I'll happily ignore it.

There's one thing strange about you Shadow. Everytime you discuss about great dragon, it's nigh like it's real fact. When it's just about how the set of authors perceive the universe.

If I was the lead-designer, GD would pull strings in the back. And those strings would induce shadowruns.

And not god know why epic battles.....

This.



Because I'm the one thing in the world that trumps the authors: the Game Master. Whenever I'm speaking, I'm speaking of how things are in my game.



Aye, that's how smart GDs should behave. Exposing yourself to violence means that those who are inclined to use violence will, and those are capable of employing more violence than you have the means to counter will turn you into a schmear of expensive exotic reagents in short order. Or just regular old viscera, if you're not made of magic; either way.

It is a good point to remember. The novels are sort of guided by the game, but not entirely limited to it.

Stackpole's Wolf Character from 'Wolf & Raven' is a good example of this.

He wrote this back in the early days when FASA had the reins so you would think everything in it was canon, but even Stackpole admitted that there was no real guidelines for what a shapeshifter/werewolf was or what it could and could not do, so he winged it and created Wolf on the fly doing what fit the Rule of Cool.

Even today he does not quite fit neatly into the rules as they are. True shapeshifters are awakened animals who can take a human form, but Wolf was actually Human who was blessed by the WOLF spirit (mentor?). A minor point but again it strays from classic canon regarding the shapeshifters. His transformation abilities come closer to the spell, especially in one fight where he takes a hybrid form combining both man and wolf features to maximize his fighting ability. A normal shapeshifter would not be able to do this (SR shifters don't have the hybrid form like WoD versions do).

I will admit that the Dragonheart series was probably intended to be canon, but it was such a mess I can understand why many players would rather forget about it, sort of like Highlander 2 (alien prisoners? seriously?)

*points at the remains of the moon*
how did you even manage to miss the planet with me on it and hit the moon instead?

AAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHH


I was still making payments on that!!

It's fine. It's not like I'm going to run out of ammo before you run out of edge.

Well, the time until you can fire a second shot is enough for the GD to summon a spirit of man that resembles a wannabe Jedi in an X-Wing

Wonder if a TM could brick the Death Star

I mean R2 was streaking through that system, locating folk, shutting down minor systems like trash compactors.

Granted some systems were wisely kept separated, but still....


Use the Resonance Luke!

I doubt dragons are that familiar with pop culture. Why would they care what the monkeys made before they, the centers of the universe, came back?

Dragons are Familiar with everything.

So they say. You believe them?

And I want a Dragon Familiar now!

If you've got the Death Star 2, you don't need to crank up for the full-power planet-shattering-kaboom blast. You can crank out the smaller, annihiliate-a-heavy-cruiser-in-one-shot composite blast and spam it until every GD on Earth runs out of Edge. It fires once a minute - they can't regain Edge that quickly, and then you can simply initiate Base-Delta-Zero with the lower-powered blasts. Or crank up the earth-shattering-kaboom, you know, whichever.

I think I'd spam until the dragons ran out of edge, then tell the monkeys that I'll blow up the planet if they don't deal with the damn lizards themselves.

Then I'll sell the results on PPV. Gotta recoup the price tag on the deathstar somehow, right?

Nah. Since you're flying around in the Death Star, clearly you're already the Empire. So you politely inform them that the planet Earth is now under Imperial rule, effective immediately. Any resistance will be dealt with harshly; effective resistance will be dealt with expediently (IE, from orbit.)

Dragons are fun to shoot. They're even more fun to make work for you.

Actually I stole it. Don't tell Palpatine, it's probably in violation of his restraining order against me.

I'm sure if you looked in the right places you could get one.

Wolf always statted out to me as a Mystic Adept with a fun take on things. He casts a healing spell at one point as well.

Yeah, Mystic Adept with Wolf Mentor always struck me as closest. When he jazzes up the reflexes I figure its the adept powers being turned on, cuz he mentioned it was like a switch.

I loved the banter between Wolf and WOLF, that strikes me as what a mentor spirit should be like.

A very, very grumpy and homicidal mentor spirit, yes.

But he likes baseball (now) so it's all good.

Back to topic, please.

Ignorance does not make it non-Canon. *shrug*

Indeed, that Is how I always saw him as well. Wolf is fun indeed...
Too bad that Doc Raven and Gang have not been consulted on what to do with the Azzies.

I would not be too worried by the recent string of 'wins' for the Azzies just yet.

Yes, they have shown off some nice anti-dragon tech, but I am sure a few other corps have been running similar programs.

Right now I wager a lot of people are just sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop, as in how are the dragons going to respond in general to this?

Of course, since dragons operate on a different time table than most, we could be looking at plans taking generations to come to fruition.

But in the meantime, expect a lot of shadowwork as everyone will be wanting schematics for the new toys.

Plus we still don't know the full effects of the Blue 22826 and that may well bring it's own woes to come to roost with them.

You can pretend no wrong doing. Like the other corps...

I'd say it'd be appropriate for the return of the Big D, but I just don't think they could do him justice in-game, without falling to the temptation to go "He was just a ginormous, manipulative bastard all along and there was nothing noble, myah!"

I'm also concerned that some among the creative staff will fall to the DBZ-esque escalation of power paradox. If things in a dystopian world are getting too organized and too powerful, then the best route to maintain status quo isn't to kick it up to 11, but to tear it back down to 5. The world, economy, society, life in general follows a sort of cyclical rhythm. Rhythms of success, and rhythms of failure. Rhythms of gain and of loss. Some established power structures are showing significant cracks in SR5, moreso than in SR4. Aztechnology possibly overextending themselves against Ghostwalker over an issue of pride, Ares Macrotech losing in one of their signature markets while infighting damages the power structures, signs that bugs and/or horrors are on an upswing, etc.

The corps will be struggling not to cave in under their own respective and figurative weights. Shadowrunners symbiotically NEED those corps to survive and infight. What would happen if the AAA giants collapsed, leaving a multitude of A-grade-or-less corps and former subsidiaries to fight amongst themselves and pick up the slack? While the Dragons aren't particularly disposed towards humans, as a general rule (with some exceptions), they ARE interested in surviving the next great Age of Rocks-Fall-Everybody-Dies, and the current corps tend towards being their tools for augmenting their survivability (I hear Lofwyr is partial to a lunar getaway).

But that tends to fall into the myth of 'Too big to fail' where we get convinced everytime some megacompany steps in it and then demands to be bailed out because if they go under they swear it will drag others down with them...The Airlines and Banks are good examples of this.

Yes, Mega represent a bit more coordination, but to say that we NEED AAA's instead of just A's to operate is the worst kind of fallacy.

Plus the Dragons have probably noticed that when the corps reach AAA they start to believe their own hype and think they ARE essential and therefore better than the rest, which makes them chafe if someone as silly as governments/dragons/other groups try to tell them what to do. Having them broken up a bit more actually can make them more malleable to external manipulation as they are not quite so stuck on themselves as to believe they can operate in a bubble of their own making. The classic keiretsu operates up to a point interweaving those companies to make a greater whole, but even then they can fall prone to inner rot that is amplified at the mega level.

The Dragons would probably prefer most of the AAA's knocked down a notch or two, just to have that much less potential opponents, leaving them in smaller bite sized pieces for them to swoop in on when they want while the monkeys squabble among themselves with the infighting. Up until now it has been tolerated, but with the Azzies bloodying some noses and the metahumans realizing that maybe dragons are not the end all ubercritter and can be taken down, they will want to disassemble some of that organization a bit so if push does come to shove it will not be as organized as what the AZ pulled off.

Shadowruns will still go on even at the A levels, indeed in actuality we are doing A level runs as most of the time your not breaking into Lofwyr's main facilities in Germany, but those A level businesses he has under his umbrella.

People will always want to cash in on other people's work, sabotage said other work, play their little power games and such, and that means work which is where we will be.

More malleable to, say, Horrors and Bug Spirits? Less able to cooperate against the coming threats that GD's blanche at? But wouldn't that make the world even more... dystopian?