Dvilgaynon, then?

I do know this: Dvilgaynon is not her true name. It is an approximation of something closer to Tva-il-guya-noon, which in a Cathay language translates to the rather poetic Burning Orchid.

I don't know what they're planning, but Dvilgaynon asked what I thought of the wind patterns around the cloud of Horrors covering Stormhead. I told her they had to be strongly magical, not having changed in thirty years excepting an occasional gust to the north. She asked me a few more leading questions in her completely calm manner, like it was an everyday occurrence to chat about interfering with wind patterns and Horror clouds. If she was trying to rattle me, it worked.

Indeed. I'm honestly surprised no one ever seemed to catch the links.

Indeed. I'm honestly surprised no one ever seemed to catch the links.

Indeed. I'm honestly surprised no one ever seemed to catch the links.

In addition to the matching physical description, there's more.



Burning Orchid. Sunset Blossom. Pretty similar, don't you think?

So that would imply that Sunset Blossom is Burning Orchid is Dvilgaynon is Nyimabumo, the State Oracle of Tibet. So when those dots are connected, there's more...



Dvilgaynon was very interested in the Horror Cloud of Stormhead and its wind patterns. Interesting, then, that Nyimabumo spends much of her time studying the Maya Cloud that surrounds Tibet.

What would make Sunset Blossom responsible for the Despoiler is that she led the dragon magic ritual that encased Vivane in a dome of Elemental Air in Barsaive at War. That ritual attracted the Horror Cloud that had sat at Stormhead and it was that Horror Cloud that Vestrivian disappeared into.

It is also worth noting that Dvilgaynon acted as a magical advisor to Krathis Gron, the ruler of the Ork Nation of Cara Fahd. Nyimabumo acts as the State Oracle of the nation of Tibet. Also, Dragons notes that Mountainshadow (Dunkelzahn) is one of Dvilgaynon's few allies in Barsaive, since he convinced her to come to Barsaive and lead the Vivane ritual. It should not be too surprising, then, that Dunkelzahn possessed the Seal of the Green Gloves, one of the Five Seals that allows safe passage through the Maya Cloud that surrounds Tibet.

Fascinating ... so Shadowrun just gained a Great.

It's been alluded to there being different kinds of blood magic, some horrifically evil, others less so (such as the Amazonia and possibly Tír Tairngire reforestation), though not without debate about it. I seem to remember from somewhere that feathered serpents are the foremost (or only) users among dragonkind, but I can't for the life cite a source.

Barsaive at War was published in 2000. Atzlan was published in 1995. The original comments could in fact refer to Vestrivan. At that point, he was, supposedly, alive.

I do agree that Thais seems a more likely culprit though. He is part horror, matches the description and should be off the radar of most people involved in that discussion, with the exception of Harlequin.

Fascinating ... so Shadowrun just gained a Great.

An amalgamation of fanwankery describing soldiers who are so invincible and patriotic and well-endowed and pure of heart and [...] that reading anything related to it causes severe cerebral damage from head-to-desk syndrome.

Haven't seen a good ED/SR conspiracy thread here in awhile, and I love the conspiracy discussion, so here's a topic for talk: corrupted dragons in SR.

Besides the rumors of a corrupted dragon being involved in Aztechnology, which go back to the Aztlan sourcebook, what about other ideas to chew on?

What about the Children of the Dragon and the Children of the Dragon Reborn? I have to wonder if there's anything more behind these groups, including the possibility of something sinister. There isn't much to go on, but any cults of dragons always make the hairs on the back of my neck stick up when I read about the Cult of the Great Hunter in Earthdawn, which served the Horror Verjigorm. Verjigorm wanted to corrupt dragons, and collected both dragon eggs and dragons for that purpose. A cult to dragons would serve his needs, on the surface. However, there haven't been many links to support this in the Shadowrun books, that I can think of.

And what about Ghostwalker? He hasn't seemed to garner much suspicion from the other Greats, but his arrival was very suspicious on its own. If you read the journal entries from Hefara on pages 51-54 of Secret Societies of Barsaive, there's an account of a Verjigorm-corrupted dragon being visited through a rift to the astral, where it's astral form was cocooned and corrupted until being set free by the cultists. No one really knows where Ghostwalker was before he returned, but he did exit through an astral rift, and he did bring with him some "wormy" and "slimy" spirits who gave off a "bone-numbing 'I'm going to tear away your sanity' feel" (quotes from the Ghost Stories chapter of Year of the Comet). Some of them were likely shedim (which are suspicious enough on their own, especially if you read about the armies of undead in Barsaive in Chaos, which are actually puppets of a type of Horror), but who knows what else might have been among them? Doesn't really seem like Ghostwalker was in a happy part of the astral while he was away. So if he was in a bad place, gotta wonder why he was there, and what was going on all the time he was there.

The real question would be that if Ghostwalker were corrupted, why haven't the other dragons taken note of it? Or would they stop him? Afterall, in the Fourth World, Vestrivian was a Horror-marked dragon, and the Greats never banded together to destroy him.

The last interesting note is Calozerca, a newly released dragon near Poland that is mentioned in Dragons of the Sixth World. What's interesting about him, despite the fact that it seems like he was locked away for a reason, is how similar the entry on Calozerca's release is to the account found in the Cult of the Great Hunter entry in Secret Societies of Barsaive. In that entry, the Cultists use a staff to assist in freeing a corrupted dragon from one of Verjigorm's cocoons in the astral plane, and they open the astral rift to the cocoon in the Thunder Mountains (not far from the same mountains where Calozerca was released). In the entry on Calozerca, a staff is used in a ritual that is not observed, but shortly after Calozerca is terrorizing the countryside.

Makes one wonder!

Got it from https://earthdawn-the-age-of-legends.obsidi...haracters/28443

But he (Vestrivian the Despoiler) might have been seen by some Boast-smthng in a Maya Storm (WHEN???).

The only thing i failed to get - whether Vestrivian was a Western or an Eastern Great.

So, yeah, I know that doesn't make the answer entirely clear, but I don't think the writers ever intended to clearly answer that question. At least not yet.

So, yeah, I know that doesn't make the answer entirely clear, but I don't think the writers ever intended to clearly answer that question. At least not yet.

Could it be the Tibet Cloud isn't a Veil, but indeed the 6th world manifestation of the Horror Cloud? Did you have this in mind when writing the Tibet section of SoA?

I second what bannockburn says. Hopefully, this will never be fully explained. While Shadowrun is a pretty dense world, lore-wise, it always left gaps that are purposely left mysterious, like 40K has it's two missing Primarchs. Those are, I think, important for a living, played RPG universe, as they allow each GM to weave their own stories within the lore's framework, and allow unique and epic stories to be told despite the setting being pretty well-defined.

And I hope they never do.
It's one of the main selling points of the SR universe that these things are ALWAYS left for your personal interpretation.

I like those glances behind the curtains, where you can nail down specific things, but the overall mystery needs to be maintained, IMO.

The real question would be that if Ghostwalker were corrupted, why haven't the other dragons taken note of it? Or would they stop him? Afterall, in the Fourth World, Vestrivian was a Horror-marked dragon, and the Greats never banded together to destroy him.

Hm. Barsaive at War offers three explanations of the Horror Cloud:

a) It is a horror base hidden behind a veilm of sort.
b) It is, essentially, a hellgate to the horror planes.
3) It is unmanifested, sleeping Verjigorm. "The Egg of Verjigorm".

The short answer is: yes, I definitely had it in mind when I was writing the Tibet section. But that was a question I didn't have an answer for and was better left a bit of a mystery. It's possible the Maya Cloud is some sort of Sixth World manifestation of a Horror Cloud.

When the French France sourcebook was written, the authors exchanged with FASA on a number of plot points. Some of them were to possibly pave the way for future metaplot if the book was going to be translated. The book does some connection between the Book of Harrows, a bad guy with ties to Aztechnology and "nasty things hidden in the astral plane" and the Brittany Mist, a hundreds kilometers-wide supernatural fog that literrally dissolved people and astral form that entered it, with a comment clearly describing it as a "cocoon". After several delays, the book finally got out in 1997. It was never translated, and FASA had changed its plan, aiming at putting an end to the Horrors metaplot with the death of Dunkelzahn.

The Mist was downplayed a lot by the authors of Shadows of Europe (it sometimes appear over small or large part of Brittany, and sometimes people disappear). At the time, we thought it was just some crazy, over-the-top idea from the French authors, we only learnt years later that some part were clearly suggested by FASA people at the time.

Nigel Findley's death was one of the great tragedies of Shadowrun. He was obviously working towards something special with that Aztlan book and with so many tendrils worked through the system I really hope CGL picks this arc back up.

Nigel D Findley? The one that wrote for AD&D? I had no idea...