From the Shadowrun Timeline

November 5-6: Lofwyr attacks Alamais's GeMiTo compound with overwhelming force that consists of over a thousand metahuman mercenaries and shadowrunners, armored fighting vehicles, air support, twenty adult dragons, and the Great Dragons Lung and Arleesh. Metahuman shadowrunners score the killing blow on Alamais at approximately 1006 on November 6.

Where can I read about this in the books?

/A.

Storm Front, if you want your brain cells to die slow, agonizing deaths.

In case they aren't dead already just from reading that introduction.

You can also read the runup to that in Clutch of Dragons. It will torture your brain cells so they accept death more easily.

So, not a love for the Dragon War, then?

I have nothing against the idea itself - after all, Greats have dished it out before - but the execution is toxic at best in my opinion. Shadowrunners as frontline units? "It was all very systematic and strategic" (this sentence gave me a lobster)? Shadowrunners hired to loot the hoard horde of an exiled Great?

Question: Would you rather have had the plot directy involve Shadowrunners, allowing you to take the moment and plug your team into the action, or for the big final throwdown to be all NPCs with no Shadowrunner involvement there?

The answer is simple. Shadowrunners are covert operatives operating in small cells, whose main benefit for the employer is deniability. There is also a large number of world-class professionals among them, and often at rare skills. Thus, they should be used for the tasks that utilize those benefits the best; and it falls to the GM (and to a lesser extent to the writer) to find something for them to do.

I've actually written about this in Yuakut Shuffle, cause finding stuff to do for the runners on a battlefield is basically the same issue as the one at hand.

Runners scouting out the enemy beforehand? Sure. Sabotage, assassinations, taking POWs to be interrogated - all tasks for a shadowrunner troupe. Frontline combat is not, because if you try to maintain any semblance of believability, it becomes very random and very deadly. Standing anywhere near multiple Great Dragons engaged in direct combat is always a bad idea if staying alive is a part of your plans! If you want your runners participating in the "final battle" that badly, fine, give them a SAM installation or an artillery battery to control, or a small unit to command, or, hell, at least use them as long-range snipers and mages. Perhaps give them a LAV or something to buzz in and back out without dying. Just don't have them charging a Great Dragon with melee weapons over a fragging minefield (which is now canon)!

That said, I find the very idea of Great Dragons fighting a full-scale open war rather distasteful. Great Dragons are immensely powerful beings personally, alright, but their influence stems not from their personal power, but their intellect and wealth. Why is their war fought openly, rather than behind the scenes, precisely where the runners thrive? That'd eliminate the problem altogether - leaving, perhaps, a slight issue with the very final showdown, but I can't exactly remember the Golden Snout dueling with Nachtmeister personally or an interceptor wing shooting down Feuerschwinge raising any protests from the players that they didn't get to participate.

I would have preferred the big final showdown as something the runners are nowhere near at, like many before. I find the behaviour of the Great Old Ones inconsistent with established patterns, so the background does not make much sense either. There are multiple ways to involve runners, open conflict that you can bring the heavy toys for is not. Not if you have several large merc groups and your own army. Compared to past books like Corp Shadowfiles some parts read juvenile, both in the style of the book and what is happening in the book. (See my user name, there is a bias. But still.)

I have enough to go around - I can spare a few.

I've recently returned to SR after a long hiatus and found that dragons are having a civil war. In the old SR-days dragons was something that in that far, far background - something you used to scare the players with.

"Never cut a deal with a dragon" was never relevant, for they didn't ever meet any dragons. And they knew that if they did, something must have gone horribly wrong.

I read the Clutch Of Dragon and was baffled. Why would dragons go public with their conflicts like this? Sirrurg was a loose cannon, but the rest of them?

And if their primary concern was the extermination of dragonkind, why would they'd piss of metahumanity so much? Why pick battlefields in highly populated areas?

It just doesn't add up

And I agree with Fatum - runners are (at best) the tactical equivalent of special operatives. They have very limited usabilty on a fullblown battlefield.

/A.

Not for it's execution. The basic idea - a conflict between Great Dragons - was usable, the execution ham-fisted and the conclusion a complete disaster in every way, from the concept of the war being open as opposed to a shadow war (because it's not like shadowrunners would have had more opportunities to participate in the former) to the actual writeups getting canon badly wrong and coming up with idiotic ideas and mouthing individual authors' questionable personal beliefs.


I would have preferred a less totally dumb writeup and a differnet execution as a shadow war, not an open, all-out war (which, as Fatum has pointed out, runners have much less options to interact with). I would have preferred the Alamaise situation to involve runners in a way that makes some kind of sense. Not as part of a frontal engagement force (why use runners there anyway, has SK forgotten it's own armed forces and what a PMC is?), but in a preparatory role (recon) or in some kind of infiltration action - the kind of thing runners usually do. Also, the author should have tried to write the dragons in some way consistent with previous canon - they acted like hapless state-level politicans and not like super-intelligent immortal beings that also are individually very powerful magicans. As for Sirrurg's leg of the story, I would have preferred the author to have basic knowledge of American geography and keep his personal views in his pants. It was far beyond obnoxious.

Not as presented, no.
Giant, unthinking Godzillas great dragons are not. As presented, they're way too fucking stupid, and the whole shebang relies too much on suspension of disbelief rather than making any kind of sense. We had a pretty long and heated thread about that already two years back.

Killing a great? Absolutely not player territory.

It would have been ok if the corps sent giant robots to fight the great dragons.

And if it had been Shadowrun: Over The Top Edition

State-level politicians don't establish hunting grounds to feast on their subjects, nor directly attack their units made up of whom they believe to be subhuman. (Invoking Godwin's Law: hell, even Hitler used Jewish resistance in Palestine against the Britts, as well as Slavic and Caucasian divisions!)
The whole Alamais arc was beyond ridiculous, I wish it never happened.


PinkMohawkRun!

Isn't that PinkCrestRun when its for Dragons?

Dragons are just puny lizards compared to the true transhuman masters of the universe.