This is a radical take on an alternate Sixth World. In canon, it helped a lot that Big D went on live TV and explained what the hell was going on after the Awakening. And if not for Thais, there would have been no Great Ghost Dance. So, that’s this world. The Awakening comes around and no one alive has a damn clue what all this magic stuff is and why babies are suddenly being born with pointy ears.

This world is our Earth, up until December 21st, 2012 when everything changes. I call this one The Wayward Earth.

What I have right now is more of an outline and I’d like to solicit comments.


Overview of Changes

• No Dunkelzahn means that no one goes on TV and tells everyone about the mana cycles and what’s going on now.
• No Thais means no Great Ghost Dance (though with the point of divergence being in late 2012, there are no Native Americans in concentration camps, either).
• No Great Ghost Dance means no spike in the mana level so Goblinization would be a more gradual process and there wouldn’t be Bridges to let the Horrors in early. The Invae and Shedim should also be kept at bay for much longer.
• No immortal elves means that neither Tír Tairngire nor Tír na nÓg will come about. There’s also no Harlequin, for good or ill.
• No Lofwyr means no Saeder-Krupp, or any of the other shenanigans he got up to.
• No Hestaby means that Mount Shasta stays a ski resort.
• No Schwartzkopf means no dragon teaching magic classes at Charles University of Prague.
• No Ghostwalker means that Denver stays part of the USA.
• No Celedyr means no dragon muscling into the telecommunications industry.
• No Lung or Ryumyo means none of their rivalry spilling all over Asia.
• Humanity will have a very nasty surprise coming in 2,300 years as the mana cycle reaches its peak.

Honestly, when I look at this list…it sounds like a way better world already!

Let me know what you think.

Would the supposition in SR that indigenous peoples who had kept up traditions related to shamanism then still be (some of) the first to catch on to Magic?

I can see some follower of Aleister Crowley shock the shit out of themself when one of their incantations actually worked!

So technology has not developed in the way it does in SR, but perhaps some things are further advanced than in the books?

No Warren Burger past 1986 means no Shiawase and Seretech decisions.

Strong US government leading research almost certainly means rapid establishment of magical superiority in the military and mage-assisted mass surveillance.

Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision decides that Mindprobe is permissible as evidence and as a law enforcement tool. Initially restricted to cases of national security, the scope of acceptable use is steadily widened in successive cases until within twenty years the standard is essentially unrestricted.

~J

Well, that would be probably anyone with a magical tradition, whether ancient or modern. Native American shamans? Certainly. Spellcasting neo-pagans? Would likely get a shock, yes. The funniest ones would the New Age "crystal wavers," who would soon be insufferable.


Nope, as I said it was our Earth up until the Awakening, so take a look outside for how advanced technology would be in 2023.

Nope, there wouldn't be full corporate extraterritoriality. Though if you look at what the big multinationals are getting away with even without it...


I kinda doubt that would actually pass constitutional muster (for instance, SCOTUS has ruled that even scanning a home with an infrared camera without a search warrant constitutes an unreasonable search barred by the Fourth Amendment). So, scanning your mind?! Wouldn't fly. And you can't even get polygraph results admitted in court. Used unofficially as much as they can get away with? Oh, yes, absolutely.

Remember that that decision came down in July 2001 under a very different climate, without Alito (who in my not-a-lawyer-or-legal-scholar view seems more deferential to law enforcement in these cases than O’Connor was), and it rested on Scalia’s "device that is not in general public use" test which could very possibly be met by a spell potentially available to the entire spellcasting population. I’m very dubious that the Supreme Court would keep this under wraps.

(But even if you’re right, I would expect parallel construction up the Wazoo.)

~J

The Amazing Randi once said something along the lines of this "the only thing a polygraph can reliably detect is an orgasm." Which, I guess, is a great argument FOR using them more in courtrooms. Proceedings there tend to be so DULL, right?

As for the OP; while I have a great many issues with the metaplot, I feel that deleting dragons would make the world less interesting. Very simply put, _my_ SR world is a dystopian hell for the 99.99%, a logical result of unchecked capitalism (a core theme of cyberpunk), and dragons embody nature's way of saying "So, you like your shiny toys, eh?". The (Earthdawn-related?) metaplot with horrors, terrors and other baddies du jour are completely unnecessary, IMHO. The world is bad enough as it is, there's no need for a Cthulhu monster to gobble up the whole thing - that just makes everything meaningless, and I'm not THAT enamored of Nietzche.

For me, this is my favorite part of the SR/ED universe. The juxtaposition of the old world tying into the new world and an ancient enemy that must be battled some day in the future.

The twist here is that all of that is still true...but no one left alive knows about it.

My prediction for the Scourge, even ignoring my doom-and-gloom over civil liberties up above, is absolute catastrophe.

In this timeline I predict we will have massive technological and magical powers, enough to let us defeat the Scourge. Horrors will come through, and we will largely defeat them as they come.

And we will study them. And classify them. And name them. And speak their names.

And then they will win.

~J

I disagree there. In this instance, I'll quote Pacific Rim:

"I've never believed in the end times. We are mankind. Our footprints are on the moon. When the last trumpet sounds and the beast rises from the pit - we will kill it."

My argument is specific to the nature of Horrors, and the way in which learning about and speaking of them gives them power and renders the learner and speaker vulnerable to Marking. The instant we apply the techniques of science and intelligence gathering, we lose, and because we don’t have anyone to tell us not to use the tools that have served us so well we’re going to use those tools.

But we’re still three months and change too early to resurrect Can We Beatt he Horrors?

~J

Nethermancers can find and erase Horror Marks, and Horror Stalkers can isolate Marks and turn that against the Horror. So, Horror Marks aren't the "I Win!" button the Horrors think they are.

We'll kick their asses. My personal vote? Nuke their metaplane.

Then go after the Invae and the Shedim. We'll have a good, old-fashioned genocide and end the threat forever.

Which could be pretty handy tools if anyone was around to teach Nethermancer or Horror Stalker techniques, or even to warn that such techniques needed to be developed ahead of time

~J

Sounds kind of boring. Like without the corporate intrigue, immortal shenanigans, and the political drama of a fractured USA, I don't see what the metaplot is about.

It just turns in to urban fantasy. Then we're just playing World of Darkness or Dresden Files. Don't get me wrong, that shit is awesome. But I really like all the nonsense that comes with Shadowrun.

Someone had to develop them for the first time in the Fourth World and they survived the Scourge mostly intact. If a bunch of Pre-Industrial yahoos can figure it out, so can modern metahumanity.

Well, I would argue that the intrigue and shenanigans would continue, but be different from canon. Though I've put a lot more effort into another timeline where the Fourth World people are still around as usual, but the point of historical divergence was at the Awakening. You might like that one more once it's finished.

There are plenty more knock-on effects: No Dunkelzahn means no company called Gossamer Threads (which was set up by him), which means that Acquisition Technologies never wrote a virus targeting that company, meaning no first crash. That also means no Echo Mirage, no black IC derived from the crash virus code, no Mirage/Psychotrope, no former members going into the private sector and inventing the cyberdeck. And no David Gavilan becoming Damien Knight and staging the Nanosecond Buyout with support from Dunkelzahn, so no Ares Macrotechnology.