I agree, the whole issue with favouring shamanistic/pagan/holistioc approaches to magic (and fringe religion) over the alchemical/paranaturalist scientist approach (and established, large, especially monotheist religions - you don't have to like them, but acknowledgeing their existence would be great!) has ticked me off too.

Well, not in great detail, just generally. Also, while SOTA expanded the hermetics nicely, I still kind of feel the shamanic, intuitive side of magic is a bit over-emphathised in SR.

Yes, but those three you named came out how long since SR began? Until recently, they paid minor lip service to religion and magic. To be fair, I can only imagine the reasons why it was a good idea for FASA to not discuss religion and magic together for the longest time. But after a decade, it's a safe bet that they could discuss it without some of the backlash they would have faced back in 1989.

And this favoritism is another indication of why I dislike his writing style. I much prefer an author who can actually write about something they personally don't like without coming off judgmentally. Or, to put it another way:

“When you write about somebody you hate, write about them with love..."
-- Hubert Selby, Jr. (now there's an author).

I completely agree. There should be more on the subject of angels, demons and priestly magic. They could easily cut down on the amount of shamanic traditions to make room. And somehow I suspect we will see a lot of the stuff from the SotA books in the main 4:th ed book, so that might not be a long shot.

Fine. But these things should be clearly stated and handled in the same way as shamanic traditions, and the catholic church should be a major player when it comes to things magical. It has so much potential to be totally menacing in fiction.

Yes they did. Now let´s see that being developed in the new edition. Giving world religions a place in the core magic system. Let´s take this discussion to the new thread I created, instead of taking this one of track.

[Snip Crimsondudestuff]

Well, here's my personal thought and thoughts as it relates to SR:

There is no soul.

As for Alice, the explanation for her existence can be explained rationally, as a couple of my co-gamers went through a great deal of work to explain when an Otaku was killed, but still "lived." and is now roaming around the Matrix. The human brain is a wonderful machine, and the fact that Otaku brains can be rewired to interact directly with the Matrix belies the strength of the brain and its parallel processing abilities. In the case of said Otaku, and Alice, what is floating around the Matrix is not the real person. They're dead. What is floating around the Matrix is a collection of autonomous parallel processes (like the Network, but just in the Matrix) and data files which contain the memories of Alice along with the extensive psychological profile and learning that Mirage did. What Alice is, simply put, is an idealized abstraction of what these processes and data packets have infered what her thoughts and actions would be--which aren't that limited given that the parameters of her traits and motivations rest mainly around a single purpose: Revenge.

If Alice was more "real" then perhaps she would also be involved in other projects, from escaping (The idea of The Network is not exactly born of Deus' great genius) to contacting Kyle, to actually giving a damn about events in the Matrix beyond Wonderland. The processes and memory bits which serve as the only existence of Alice are most effective wen distributed over multiple hosts running operations parallel in order to most effectively replicate the thought processes of a human or an AI, and is the same way Deus works in the Network, only instead of purely machine hosts he is using their own brains to facilitate the processing of his code. But in both cases, all they are is information. There is nothing mystical or magical or spiritual to them. They have achieved critical mass as to the sheer amount of processing power they have harnessed to be capable of intuitive learning, but they are nothing more. Alice, in fact, probably only seems as human as she does because, like I said, there would be an extensive psychological and background investigation material on her for her databases to pull from and make logical, and eventually intuitive, suppositions about her behavior. She may even think she's human, but I cannot accept for a second that she is anything more than information packets and processor cycles.

The whole shaman vrs hermetic thing is a lot like the street sam vrs the adept.

What I mean by that is, that the more "western" point of views are being downplayed. If you believe in science, and not blind faith in magic, you are just going to come up short in the long run. There are many cases of shamans going all crazy and doing huge magics, but when has there been anything like say the GGD done by hematics?

can somebody confirm or disprove that the GGD involved only shamans? it's not like every Awakened person in the NAN would have been a shaman.

The Grimoire has a notation about how Arthur White Eagle might have participated in the GGD, and he's a mage. AFAIK, there's no proof either way.

i was going to post that, but as i recall, Kilimanjaro was not a hermetic-only event. as a matter of fact, i recall it saying something about importing an entire tribe of shamans from somewhere. though that could be the cough medicine, or the screaming, flying weasles that come with the cough medicine.

Meanwhile back on subject.
I've got too many plausible theorys as to why the matrix would crash.
This is my fav: The crash virus in its new AI form pretends to be the somthing called the dissonance in the same way that deus pretended to be the resonance.
Crash Virus plus pissed off otaku equals dead matrix.

On a side note read the brief stuff on the new matrix again.
Screams the network on a larger scale to me.

To continue off topic. Do we consider the events of the novels to be cannon? If so then there have been two GGD. In the 3rd SR novel published Sam what's his name arranges a GGD with the help of Howling Coyote.

Thanos

i think that's part of the whole 'dark future' thing, penta. you can't have a massive, well-funded, entrenched, long-standing organization that's good without seriously cramping your dystopian style.

Thank you NightHaunter!

I'm a big fan of the dissonance being a fragment of the crash virus, and it's plans leading to the new crash. From the way things have been going, it seems clear it will play a role in the crash, as will Deus and probably (hopefully) the Resonance.,

Now, if any of these entities are going to survive the crash depends on the severity and nature of the crash. Is the fundamental infrastructure of the 'trix going to have to change due to crash, or will they rebuild based on the same hosts after cleansing whatever things cause the crash? Indications point to the latter, as if it is a crash severe enough to require all new infrastructure there is no way 5 years is enough time to rebuild the system, especially if huge amounts of the data that makes up the matrix is lost. Given that things sound mostly recovered in 5 years, I would say the crash isn't that massive and the AIs will survive it.

that's two seperate issues, there--the not making sense, and the similarity to past rants against catholicism. for the first issue, if the same rants have been made for the past century and a half, they obviously make sense to somebody. for the second issue, long-standing conspracies are what make catholics fun to non-catholics. if not for those, catholicism would be just another group of christians. how many cool stories are there written about baptists?

Hey now, the RCC is using the Templars to liberate Catholics in repressed nations the world over. It saved Italy from being eaten up the the corps, and has been acting as a balance between metahaters and metalovers since the new pope came into power.

My personal theory is that the crash comes from whatever the Network rebuilds. In addition to the Network persisting in it's own pseudo-borg type of hive mind existance, I see four things possibly coming out of the Network.
1) Deus. (duh)
2) Megaera (slightly less duh)
3) Something new entirely (with the two AIs instruction sets constantly clashing, they could create some new amalgamation AI that has much of Deus' power, but maybe inherits some human perspective or morality from Megaera)
4) Morgan. Morgan's code was raped to create Deus. Pieces were torn out and incorporated in him. Megaera is what was left of her. Between the two of them, there exists absolutely every piece of Morgan, if she just gets reassembled correctly by the Network.

It could have something to do with the jedi, I mean Otaku, finding out the darkside, I mean dissonance, was stronger.

OMG, the dark side isn't stronger.

Quicker, easier, more sedcutive, but not stronger! Your sith lies won't work here!

Ah...my young padawan, we shall see. When Deus pops out its gonna be a slaughter and any resonance users will assimilated (wait which movie are we using here...)

I think you might have missed this part:

No organization is a repository of Saints. I dun think anybody was claiming that.

I certainly wasn't.

But SR is working around some very, very sensitive nerves. This is even more the case in the US than in Europe, because of the different histories.

I'm of the view that the RCC, IRL and in SR, is not much worse than the rest. Yes, there will be "filth", as the new Pope so bluntly put it in his Way of the Cross meditation this most recent Good Friday. There will be corruption.

There will BE things that maybe don't feel right.

But it doesn't go down well when you have things like are posited in SR. (The IEs claiming they were Jesus was not cool, and they did write that...), such as with the NSOJ, the New Templars, etc.

OTOH, yes. The Church now has honest-to-God temporal power. This can be enormously seductive.

But I'm going to posit some things.

1. The Church probably doesn't want that power, but is running the new Papal States because there would otherwise be no authority. The past century and a half IRL have bred out of the Church any desire for it, because Nothing Good comes of it, usually.

2. Beyond absolute essentials, don't expect new Orders. That's not how the Church has worked since...Hell, for a century now.
---
There's some reason for a different tone than what we've seen.

SR's publication style, being the output of those on the fringes, will naturally be somewhat anti-religious.

But in the real world, beyond the fringe?

It could be argued (and, indeed, the entry on Lung in DotSW seems to imply this) that in some fundamental ways, religion has been all that's kept things from going truly off-balance.

Look at Aztlan and the RCC as different points on a spectrum.

Aztlan is temporal powers using religion for their own benefit. This is generally a bad thing, and in Aztlan's case is actually Corrupting.

The Church, on the other hand, has been there. It does not want temporal power. Unfortunately, the shattering of Italy in SR means that it has had no choice but to take up that burden. At the same time, it constantly fights the battles that having such power puts upon it.

As a temporal power, though, it's become somewhat distracted. It's had to maintain (to a limited extent) a bureaucracy (beyond the Curia, which IRL is actually really small - some 2k-odd people as the central authority of 1.1 Billion Catholics), a military (the Swiss Guard is only 120), and all of those things.

The Popes of SR would have come into the priesthood maybe just during, just after John Paul II and Benedict XVI (if one assumes that that is as IRL, which I will for argument's sake).

That's not a clergy used to temporal power. It's a clergy that has done its best to keep its independence, but otherwise avoided "things of the world". Solidarity wasn't so much managed by the Church as something that just sort of happened, inspired by it.

Meanwhile, I'd recommend that anybody considering the topic peruse the encyclicals Pacem in Terris from John XXIII, Populorum Progressio from Paul VI, and (as might be expected) a small horde of encyclicals from John Paul II: Solicitudo Rei Socialis, Laborem Exercens, Fides et Ratio, and Centesimus Annus. Also helpful would be the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes.

If anybody has additions or comments on that list, speak up.

Now, there's a fun thread which presents itself on speaking more in terms of this, but I'll let someone else put that forth.

Well, that's the thing. This past 150 years (more or less) has been rather traumatic. (And we're speaking of two very different definitions of old ways, too.)

Between the 1860s and...hell, I suppose you could say the 1960s, the Church was banned and otherwise harassed in a lot of the world...Often because it claimed secular power.

When it didn't, life got a lot better for it.

did it, Penta? sure, fewer people rallying against it--but it also lost a lot of ability to directly affect the world. the Church has goals, and secular power helps it achieve those goals. by giving up that power, the Church loses much of its ability to achieve the goals it sets for itself. it's a trade off, a balancing act, and it's not hard to imagine the balance swinging back the other way.

Aztlan is most definitely not Catholic. Catholicism is the religion of the rebel, in Aztlan--the RCC is officially banned.

_Mexico_ was heavily Catholic, Aztlan is heavily um... Aztec-y.

Yes.