Well, apparently the answer Red Brick has reached is that yes we can beat them... but the Earth isn't going to fare so well in the final battle: http://www.equinox-rpg.com/

You mean beatt he them.

I just finished reading this thread. Whole.


One thing I did not find mentioned is that all of the Earthdawn Sourcebooks (except Thera) take place in Barsaive. Barsaive is one single province (former) of the Theran Empire. All of Barsaive is contained in the Ukraine area.

Thus, all of the Named Horrors (Chantrel's, Taint, Nebis, Ubyr, Bonecrown, et al) including Verjigorm himself are simply those WIDELY known about in Barsaive in the Fourth Age. The Horrors Sourcebook is written as an explanatory text, giving an overview of known Named Horrors active in Barsaive at the time.

There are many more in Barsaive, let alone across the world. There are some hints that the Barsaivian region (and Thera itself) were targeted more heavily by the Horrors because of the levels of magic in those areas, but the world is a large place, and there were many, many more horrors across this planet.

I believe Ressurect (Thread) is an 8th Circle Nethermantic Spell...

.conal.

Re: the idea of 3 days vs. 2,227 years

Considering that the Horrors can only freely cross over once mana levels reach a certain threshold, and seeing as how mana is created and sustained by life and living beings, then I postulate:

(Population [in billions]) x (average amount of mana generated per person, usually 1) x (mana cycle flux multiplier, i.e. what position in the mana cycle we are: 0 = no magic AT ALL) = current overall mana level (greater than or equal to 1 means an Awakened period)

I may be wrong, but I'd like to think there are more people living on Earth in 2070 than there were in the Pre-Scourge days: the 2070s have more technology to feed people, keep people alive longer, and the culture is more sexually oriented than it was in the past and thus producing more babies on average (and thus more population).

So, let's say that mana cycle needs to reach an overall threshold of 10 in order for the Horrors to pass through. Let's also say there were 2 billion people in the world when the Book of Harrow was found, and the mana flux was around a 4:

2 x 1 x 4 = mana level of 8

Then, a few hundred years later, the mana flux increases to 5:

2 x 1 x 5 = mana level of 10 = Scourge occurs

Fast forward to 2011, pre-Awakening. Population 8 billion (estimated):

8 x 1 x .1 = mana level of 0.8; mana cycle is far too low for Awakening to take place.

Then, Post-Awakening, 2011:

8 x 1 x 1 = mana level of 8
8 x 1 x 1.1 = mana level of 8.8
8 x 1 x 1.2 = mana level of 9.6
8 x 1 x 1.3 = mana level of 10.4

Scourge 2.0 happens without the mana threshold needing to rise very high at all.

Which means, by extrapolation when magic rises to 4th world levels (and factoring in a few billion casualties from Scourge 2.0):

6 x 1 x 4 = 24

...which is more than twice the initial Horror threshold. Looks like if enough people manage to survive through the inital stages of Scourge 2.0, as the level of mana continues to rise, the hole between our plane and the Horrors' plane will become so large that Verjigorm and all of the worst Named Horrors ever known will be as tame puppies by comparison.

If my theory is indeed valid, I'd be pissing my pants about now.

Well, although I'm in the camp that says the Horrors would eat all of our souls and would use our pretty technology to help them do it there is a flaw in your logic, namely that pre-Sourge Fourth World Magic had probably done at least as much as Sixth World medicine to help the population so we can't base any meaningful numbers off population.


However with that said, remember that the Mana Cycle has been actively fucked around with in the Sixth World, starting with the Great Ghost Dance and only getting worse, so the Horrors could start crossing over enmass at any time, probably sooner rather than later since the Bug Spirits were the last sign of doom in the Fourth World.

Magical healing aside, I can't even fathom the pre-Scourge 4th World being anywhere NEAR as populous as the 6th World. Think of how many people lived on the planet just 200 years ago (1 billion) vs. how many live on the planet NOW (7 billion) vs. how population growth estimates figure there will be in 2040 (9 billion). There is a BIG disparity between those numbers. Even factoring in how many people died in the VITAS outbreaks, that's STILL a lot of fragging people alive in 2070.

Magic just doesn't given you the capability to grow more food which limits what you can realistically do. Anyway the descriptions of the 4th world point to a fedual/renassince society. Giving a population of ~600 million.

However, most living stuff in the world is bacteria. Seriously, there is so much bacteria it makes everything else irrelevant. Add in fungi, and you're talking enough biomass to cover the earth 40 meters deep. As you can see, the number of humans is completely irrelevant.

Also the 6th world would clean the horrors clock so hard it hurts, unless the horrors lucked out and got the nuclear weapons switch first, but that would just result in a nil all draw.

If the humans knew they were coming, well, gatling laser rifles with unlimited power being beamed off orbital satellites is just better than swords.

We have decoupled sex from baby-making. If anything's going to drive something like "more babies", it's probably going to be the massive drop in infant mortality; today you get a family with two children instead of a family with nine children, two of whom survived childhood.

~J

Umm Cthulhudreams you do realize that only some of the Horrors would even care about your "laser rifle", and some would die for a time before simply getting back up again.

Hell, given the nature of the Horrors, you can't even claim that space is denied to them, sure they might not be able to cross over in space now that Fourth Edition has made it a Mana Void as opposed to a Warp of alien mana but the physical ones at least could live there as easily as humans can.

As for going the nuke route, ... sure ... scroached Earth is always the way to go, even if it doesn't do a damned thing other than remove the Horror's favorite food source from the planet. Good work.

Most of the Horrors don't seem to be inteligent at all.

They swarm over eat their fill and leave when the magic level drops.

It is like they are bugs waiting for the fruit on a peach tree to get ripe.

When it does they swarm in till nothing remains but the pits.

Now what happens if the peaches started swatting the bugs back?

They would find a different tree to go eat at.



I mean before Metahumanity was limited to the magic talent they had available to them.

Now it has mass production baby! Ares proved with the Bugs.

Now the Mundanes using drones and the like can do some serious harm even before you start talking nukes.



The bad part would be the really smart ones that were powerful enough to come over early and stay late.

The ones that are expert at taking control of their victims.

If they can take over the key people they would do unholy damage to the entire world.

I could almost see them wanting the Kaers to be built. It gave them play area none of the lesser horrors could penetrate and after a harvest you always make sure there are enough seeds left for the next harvest.

I will also say one thing. Playing against someone way under your weight class doesn't prepare you for a serious game changer.

The Horrors have had their way for cycle after cycle.

Now technology is changing so fast we can not keep up. You expect a dark spirit to be able to? They can not even enter the Matrix and they can not rig a drone. They would have to work through tools.

I wonder if the Matrix crashes could be someone trying to prune metahumanity before they get too far a head of the curve.

Uh-huh, only problem is that the Horrors aren't spirits per say and that the only way Ares "deals" with the bugs is by allying with some of the hives "back home".

You have to realize, the only Horrors on record are those that were experienced AFTER the Scourge-level of mana went down. In other words, even 100 years after the Scourge, only a few of the Named Horrors were able to stick around. Ghost only knows how powerful the Horrors were that ravaged our world at the very peak of the mana cycle, before the ebbing of mana forced most of them to return to their home plane.

So to extend the metaphor, the peach might fight back against the bugs, but it won't be long before human-sized, human-intelligent bugs come, step on the peach, and then laugh maniacally about it while kicking its crushed remains across the burning orchard.

Except, given the numbers in my equation, a metahuman produces 1 unit of mana. The amount of bacteria, fungi, etc. that you would need to produce 1 unit of mana is a staggering number. A whole colony of a billion mindless, mundane bacteria would only produce perhaps 1 trillionth (or less) of a unit of mana.

Also, the amount of bacteria, fungi,and other flora and fauna in the world all relatively remains the same, since the course of nature tends to even things out due to predator/prey habits. But humanity, we're the only things that keep growing exponentially because we have no real predators, none that we can't devise some technology to easily defend ourselves from. So in this sense, the world remains the same; it is only ourselves (and the number of us) that change.

Damn, I thought the dead weren't supposed to rise for another week and change.

Wow. As long as you're going to do that, you also owe it to yourself to look for posts by someone called Creepwood and his proposals for a more "realistic" way of playing Shadowrun, from many years back. There's some pretty awesome stuff in the archives of DSF.

That's correct and we are the metahuman bugs that will come along to step on the Horror peaches and burn down their orchard.

Only in your wildest dreams.

Precisely true, since Horrors can only exists in metahumanity's wildest dreams. In the tamer dreams, Horrors don't even dare to show up.

Thanks ya'll just made my day.

Good luck hoofing it to whatever sick and twisted plane the Horrors come from.

I'll make sure to give your meat body a proper burial, and I'll send your ma a note saying you went out a hero.

Sorry, my ma's little boy's bringing back for his ma a necklace made from Horror heads. She loves such things. She's already got a pair of dancing shoes from Horror leather.

And that sick twisted plane? It'd be coming here, that's how the Horrors can cross over, so no worries about the commute to work.

Unfortunately (if understandably) the mods deleted the true gem, the "What Would Xena Do?" thread that was a beautifully incomprehensible call for the community to engage in mass piracy.

I do want to reiterate the observation that I made some time ago that faith in humanity's victory seems to be inversely correlated with knowledge of Earthdawn. I mention voting for the humans on the first page; let's just say that that was no longer my opinion by the time this thread reached its climax on New Year's (or was that the Kaers thread? I'm too lazy to look up the dates). This may be a message of some kind.

~J

The plane of the Horrors doesn't come here, per se. There is a barrier or a gap, if you will, between our world and the Horror's plane. As the mana level rises, this barrier gets weaker (or the gap gets smaller, depending on what metaphor you prefer), and eventually, the barrier is weak enough that the Horrors can pass through from their plane onto ours. And the way I understand it, you cannot walk through the tear from one plane to the other, as it's more akin to an astral metaplane than a parallel, physical world. Thus the only way to reach the Horror's plane is by passing through the barrier astrally, and -- in a sense -- undertaking a metaplanar quest to the Horror's plane.

Now, what I don't think you understand is that Horrors taint astral space to the point that even casting magic (in the meat) in a tainted area without a spell matrix can make a magician go completely mad or even kill them. This is the same reason why magicians in the 4th world couldn't astrally project (you can access astral space using various spirit powers, but that's a different story). It's not that magicians COULDN'T project, it's just that the Horror taint in astral space would kill or irreparably twist even the most powerful of magicians.

Now, imagine that the very presence of a Horror in OUR astral space polluting it to the point where you go mad (or worse) just leaving by your meat body behind where the taint occurs. Then, imagine crossing from this plane to the Horror's plane, where suddenly you've gone from a few specks of Horror-tainted astral space to an entire metaplane fills with twisted creatures. Not even taking into account the mana twisting that has surely driven you mad a dozen times over, this is akin to a drunk mouse slathered with fish oil walking right into a fenced in yard where a million cats live.

No matter how many dice you roll (and keeping in mind that your astral form has already gone completely mad), there is no way in hell you would ever survive that.

And no, you can't bring nukes with you on the astral.

Oh, but I do understand.

What you don't understand is that metahumans are already perfectly capable of tainting astral space ourselves and we do not become mad or perhaps we are already mad. If they come over, they become just as mad because our taint is not their taint, the taint is aspected to metahumanity. Metahumans are more than capable of twisting and tainting without the Horrors, if they do cross over, it is even better! 4th World magic is not 6th World magic. 4th World magic didn't have to deal with the aftereffects of the Holocaust and nuclear explosions. You are assuming that Horrors can even survive in our tainted 6th World. Well, it is buttfucked time for Horrors, we have already made our World a living hell. It is not that we cannot cross over here, it is when they do, they become sitting ducks. Literally our World is the anti-Horror metaplane. Pain and suffering is the hallmark of metahumanity, Horrors don't get to choose to inflict pain and suffering, but metahumanity chooses to do so and we make our mortal lives full of pain and suffering. The Horrors are simply a pale shadow of the reflection of metahumanity's evil. Not even taking into account our mortal twisting of mana that has surely driven them mad a dozen times over, this is akin to taking a bevy beautiful naked women into bar full of horny drunken men. The only thing is to decide is the manner of intercourse. We have already won, Earth just need to be destroyed to convince them of it.

The Earthdawn rules are not SR rules. And SR rules keep on changing and evolving. By the time the Horrors can cross over, we have already changed the rules again. No matter how many dice they roll, they can't ever survive that in this hell we call Earth.

Also as the mana level raises, astral space can become physical and given heightened mana levels, nuclear weapons can be shot right through into their metaplane.

Background count (i.e the warping of astral space by metahumans and/or the environment) and Horror-tainted astral space are not even remotely the same thing.

Sure metahumanity is no stranger to suffering, but they do not subsist on the suffering and pain of others. Some may enjoy it, yes, but you cannot EAT someone else's pain and suffering for breakfast (or lunch, dinner, afternoon tea, or otherwise). Horrors, on the other hand, thrive on causing pain and torment. They are the most sadistic entities that we even know of. A metahuman might experience pain and loss in the Sixth World as it stands, but just imagine a Horror's very presence causing you to suffer delusions so horrid that you want to peel your brain out of your skull with your bare hands, and you're driven to do just that. The kind of visions the crew members in "Event Horizon" saw don't even begin to scratch the surface. And the Horror doesn't just feed off of this mental anguish it inflicts. It strengthens the Horror. And the Horror enjoys it. The Horror LAUGHS. And then it kills you just for its own amusement.



When it comes right down to it, it seems to me your side of the conversation comes across more like fanatical jingoism than based on any actual, established game-world mechanics. Whenever I read one of these "We'll kill ALL the Horrors!" posts, I keep hearing in my head (to the tune of the "Team America: World Police" theme song): "Sixth World! FRAG YEAH! Here we come to save the motherfraggin day, YEAH!"

So we can't nuke them orbit to be sure? Darn. Someone work on Plan B.

How do you know that Background Count isn't Horror-tainted Astral space? You may be correct, they may not even remotely the same thing, Background Count may be worse!

Metahumans are the most sadistic entities we know of, the Horrors are simply metahumans' way of blaming someone else. And that in itself is another level of evil that metahumans are capable of. A Horror's presence is no more horrid than a BTL that can do the same and metahumanity does it for enjoyment. We enjoy it, it enables us, we laugh too. Then we slot another one just for our own amusement.

And that's the point. None of us has any Shadowrun rules to back our sides of the argument! Fortunately for me, I am insane (see my sig). What's your excuse?

Nuking from orbit works, you just have to destroy the Earth doing so. But what the hell... Earth was getting boring anyway...

Pardon me for applying logic to a clearly illogical situation.

See? You are already mad too! What's a little Horror to flavor our madness?

There are so many ridiculous things being said in this thread that I don't even know where to start. Some people need to reacquaint themselves with the SR and ED back-catalog, as well as some basic texts on planetary ecology and biology.

Well 3278 you could start by declaring which side of the debate you belong to so the other saide can tar and feather you.


toturi I disagree, looking at some of the seriously fucked up shit that has happened throughout the history of mankind, the only "real" difference between ancient man and us is that we have technology to do the same evil on a larger scale, the horrors of the Holocaust literally used to happen all of the fragging time whenever one village decided to wipe out their nieghbors, Twentith Century man just had the ability to round people up from a much larger area.

And tell me, in the ancient world, would the end result of "salting the wells" and razing the land have been any different if they had instead nuked the area?


So I guess the rambling point that I'm trying to make is that the people in the Sixth World are no more evil than the people of the Fourth World and in fact our "evil" would simply make us taste better to many Horrors, remember what Horror Marked actually does to people.

Of course we can win---Dunklezahn will save us!!

<This message brought to you by the Children of the Dragon>

Meh if Big D wasn't Horror Marked al-fragging-along he'll be by the time humanity sees him again.

I've been playing SR for about 8 years now, not exactly outstanding in such august company but I've been running it for 7 and can honestly say I can see exactly how my players would respond to the Horrors, and it is an attitude I think prevalent enough in the shadows where you don't need the AAA's or governments to resist these metaplanar creeps. That attitude is "I've lost my respectable job, had to chop my body away piece by piece, and do things for money that at one point I was convinced are evil. And I survived it all because I'm my own damn person, so if you think you can show me something new tall, dark, and gruesome... bring it. I'll still be standing." This is the attitude that defines shadowrunners, the casual disregard for the powers that be that from all descriptions the vast majority of Horrors would be incapable of dealing with. When you consider how innovative, how smart, and how pure deadly someone has to be to make it in the shadows, and the level of trust and social interaction implied in the fluff in the books, it isn't militaries or corporate SWAT teams that'll be kicking Horror ass, it's the bastards on Jackpoint who decide "Can't trust anyone Marked, and the only way to make sure no body is Marked is to send the squid-faced beasties packing."

Excellent point Sixgun_Sage and I agree whole heartedly with it, but the only problem that I see is that there aren't nearly enough Runners to be able to turn the tide, remember there are maybe a few hundred Runners in any given Sprawl and an untold mutlitude of Horrors swarming over the same area.

Yet, the scale of the atrocity perpetrated has a quality of its own.

Well, salting the land and poisoning the wells does not often create mutants or toxic monsters.

Well, my point is that people in the 6th World are capable of much more evil than the people of the 4th, in only because there is so much more mischief they can be up to.

Remember the Blood Elves managed to make themselves unplatable to many Horrors. Horror marking simply creates a bond between the marked and the Horror. Eventually the Horror kills the marked. If a Horror actually likes the taste, then it would act to preserve its Marked, since they keep tasting better and better.

Knowing exactly what the Blood Elves did, I wouldn't recommend it as a method of defense. It's a case of the cure being worse than the disease.

As for a horror liking the taste of a marked...well, that's spot on. And they can keep it up for a looooong time- witness the novels Scars and Worlds Without End.

Nah, the correct route is to deliberately punch the barrier in once specific place. Then the horrors have to come through there, then you kill them all as they stream out into you. If laser rifles arn't enough, you turn the power sats away from their intended targets and towards the hellmouth so they pour out into solar fire. If the horrors have a physical presence they will be unable to survive that.

If you were particularly nasty you'd gene engineer every human and animal and plant to feature the radiation resistance from some of the more tenacious bacteria that can reassamble their own RNA/DNA when attacked by radiation, then nuke the site, or the area around to site so the horrors cannot escape. The radioactive material in the ecology won't harm you as you have the resistance of organisms that live on the walls of nuclear reactors and eat plutonium and feed on energy from radiation.

Then you keep pounding away with whatever it takes as they cannot break out of the killing field. Whats more by using power sats you cannot even run out of ammo. You only need a solar array 850 kilometers across to hit ground zero with one seriously large nuclear weapon (10 times more powerful than nagaski, and 30 times more powerful than hiroshima) every second, which is probably achievable!

The horror kept it up a long time because it needed to. Killing your source of food when it is your only source of food is stupid. They like the taste of the marked but it is not because of the mark that the marked taste better.

And knowing the Blood Elves, the cure was worse because they screwed the cure up.

Unless the Horrors cross over now, the fact it is 4th Edition rules now doesn't really matter. Actually until the writers choose to add the Horrors into the setting, it doesn't matter which edition it is, which brings me back to my earlier post. I am crazy, are you?

Thats the other thing - if the blood elves can survive by reducing their essential spirit, all humans in Sr4 have to do is install a heap of cyberware.

toturi I would argue that salting wells and razing land would create the same types of monsters that chemical wastedumps and nukes do in the Sixth World, albeit probably shorter lived as the effects go away sooner. Good point about scale matters, I agree but I'm simply not convinced that the "greater mischief simply because of greater numbers" would do anything to the Horrors given the nature of what the Horrors are.

However, the Blood Elves did have an excellent idea, but they just went about it in the wrong way, you probably could get a simliar effect by making the Pain Editor part of everyone's DNA. Of course remember that although the Blood Elves did survive the Scorge, they weren't immune to the Horrors and if I remember correctly their "kaer" jsut barely survived, which is not the same thing as being able to win.

Cthulhudreams there are a few problems with your theory, firstly your "Hellmouth" would only be a tempory fix since as soon as the mana levels rose high enough elsewhere the Horrors would simply cross over everywhere and woudl simply ignore your "killing field". Secondly if you had to starty using the killstats which I believe you would have to against the really nasty Horrors you are talking about causing widespread damage to the enviroment, I'm not sure that using lasers to "nuke" an area repeatable for ~800 years is viable without causing some really nasty worldwide side effects, even if the Horrors had to cross over in that one spot.

*EDIT*

For those that might not know, the Blood Elves used magic to create painful thorns all over their bodies, that way the Horrors who fed upon causing suffering mostly passed them by since there wasn't really much the Horrors coudl do to increase the Elve's painwracked lives.

However, they still had to be on consistant guard and other Horrors were still a threat that nearly wiped them out as I recall. It allowed them to survive, not to win.

Or just do drugs and BTLs.

Sure, but whats the other option? Wait for the horrors to eat all organic matter on earth?

What you're actually going to do is use part of the array as a solar shield to try and keep down the effects.

Finally, you're not going to need 800 years. Presumably the horrors all (or at least a substantial minority) come over to the earth when the barrier is down. Which means there is a definable number of them. Which means you can kill all of them. It might take a couple of months, but hey.


I mean heck if the blood thorns thing worked for the elves, there isn't enough horrors to cover earth so there is nowhere left to stand, which means there isn't really that many. Once you know how many of them their are and what they can do (and it's seriously not all that crash hot, the blood elves managed it, and laser cannons would screw them in about 5 seconds), it's just a matter of systematically killing them all.

Just make sure you're on to them coming before they come, because if you don't know where they are coming from it gets tricky.

Heck, if Equinox is the far future, we've already won.

Yeah it just seems slightly weird. The blood elves couldn't use magic because of the horror taint, so they seriously survive by poking the horrors with sticks. If you can fend off the horrors with sticks, you can certainly kill them with guass rifles. If you can kill them with guass rifles, what are the guys in equinox even doing?

Hmm, my post got ate, anyways, here's take two.


You keep forgetting that the Blood Elves did not win against the Horrors, they were able to barely surive within their "shield" of magical wood that in theory was supposed to grow as quickly as the Horrors could chew it up. The thorns were merely in place to help shield them against the typically smarter Horrors who fed on human suffering and were seen as more dangerous since they were normally the ones that were responcible for causing the magical wards to crash that protected the various kaers from the Horrors. Remember that the Blood Elves were never able to take back any territory from the Horrors, like any other kaer they were merely able to protect what amounted to a sprawl.

Hell, people in other kaers were able to survive too, although they typically used the wards that Atlantis (I forget it's Fourth World Name at the moment.) sold to various cities for slaves and other outragious prices. Still, no-one ventured outside and only the foolish ones let anyone back in, hell, even with the wards in place many of the kaers fell as the Horrors found ways in.

As for the numbers of Horrors, let's not forget that Big V supposedly spawns an ever growing number of Horrors to eat each other in a perverse survival of the fitting mold, all waiting until the Mana Level rises and the Horrors can come back home. Yes, you heard right, the Horrors are native to Earth and at best the Dragons and metahumanity are nothing more than Horror Spawn ourselves, which may be why we are so tasty to them. (The Dragon's own legends protray them as the closest in form to the Horror that spawned them and everyone else, but who can trust a Dragon?)

Also "something major" supposely already crossed over before Big D was able to close the last Mana Bridge, so let's just hope and pray that it wasn't something like Browncrown or we are already fragged even before the Scrouge starts.


*EDIT*


Oh, and people did still have access to magic, just not the "raw magic" that people can still use in the Sixth World.

This is assuming that the Horrors' numbers are finite.

And seeing as how they are not physical beings until they manifest in our world, I don't believe you can apply physical world logic such as the concept of numbers on such a race.

I've always pictures the Horrors, as they exist in their native plane, to be more along the lines of spiritual/astral amoebas: they simply divide into two, four, six, etc. different copies (or mutations) of themselves whenever they feel the need to have more than one of them in existence, and thus their numbers are limitless (unless it is even conceptually possible to collapse an entire metaplane at once, and good luck trying to figure out how to do THAT).

Maybe you didn't read the Equinox premise right: even with all of their Eighth World technology, humanity LOST the war against the Horrors.

Just because metahumanity didn't get wiped out in the 6th World's Scourge DOES NOT mean we won. It just means we figured out a way to survive long enough for the Horrors to go back home. A few thousand survivors in the 6th World would be more than enough to populate an 8th world future.

Maybe I have difficulties understanding English. So please explain to me what those words I underlined mean.

Uh, they won... by blowing up the entire planet! That sound suspiciously like someone blowing up their own house just to put out a fire. It may have worked, but losing their home doesn't sound like humanity won.

Survival and winning are two different things, omae.