They can bill me.

Hicks. Hicks right? would you talk... just talk to her?

I think we should take off an nuke the site from oribt.

*slight pause*

It's the only way to be sure.


No offense.

Hmm, let's see, first we need an Armor Foci. Frankly it's not that great a stretch from the Weapon Foci to imagine a Foci that provides some sort of Astral Barrier for the user.

Next we need a Vehicle Foci, something based on a similar Principle. Probably can't equip it with any projectile weapons so the vehicles will have mechanical arms and Claymores instead for Astral Combat.

Next, we send the First Armored Astral Corp into the Netherworld and raze the place to the ground.

Incidentally I disagree that Horrors don't follow the rules. They create certain new rules, yes, but they don't get to break the ones that already exist. For instance Horror Powers still require LOS, or a Mark, to work. They have to follow the magical linking-rules, they just have a new way to link via the Mark. Even so a Horror has to have a Mark, LOS, Ritual Sample, etc. They cannot simply target a runner without it. They no more actually break the rules than a Hellhound does because it has an inherent spell and doesn't pay drain for it.

I know I am gonna go way out on limb here, and probable get flamed to no end, but I have used a major horror in my game. Granted it has been played since SR came out, same world new players etc etc. So when I first introduced a the horror it was from limited info and I kinda built it to work with stuff that came out later, of course that meant bending the martial to fit. But what SR product isn't full of half-truths, quasi-facts, and out right lies. Anyways, there was a time I ran a SR the same time as a ED game. The plots were of course crossovers. In the ED game the players were horror hunters who came across a great Cathay dragon(eastern dragon in SR). This Cathay dragon has taken on himself to hunt the great hunter, Verjigorm himself. Bear with me. At the end of the campaign they couldn't kill Verjigorm, but the Cathay dragon decided to sacrifice himself to hold the essence of Verjigorm, thus trapping him in a physical form and limiting his movement. The players still can't kill him, so he survives. Know I would think the body of a dragon would be able to maintain the essence of a powerful spirit like Verjigorm. Heck look at Ghostwalker.
So Verjigorm survives the downcycle in the body of the great eastern dragon, and eventful comes to power as one of the powers behind Aztechnologies. Hence the eastern dragon with the corrupted aura in the Aztlan book. Also he, using the powers of Aztech has created his own drakes. Reason being in the ED books Verjigorm was collecting dragon eggs, I can't remember the real reason, but drake creation was mine. So I had the SR group steal a test subject how appeared as a little girl, they were hired by a corp worker who felt sorry for her...or so they thought. After they get the girl there Johnson gets killed and they are stuck with her. That was some years ago and she has grown somewhat and the players still don't know what is in store for them.

Oh yeah one more thing. With the SURGE effects you can "build" a T'skrang, all the relevant parts are there, scales, prehensile tail.....

Retreating to space to survive the Horrors may not be such a great idea. I'm not sure where I remember reading it, but I'm pretty sure it was in the first edition or early second edition stuff, but a mage talks about going to the edge of the Manasphere and right before he was forced to turn back, he saw....things looking back at him from oblivion. I always imagined it to look something like the monster from Forbidden Planet, barely visible in the blackness of space.

I think space is where the Horrors come from.

Horrors? No. But.. but.. things.. things that gibber and gape at the edges of your sanity.. horrible blurbling cacaphonies that are afronts even to the idea of madness itself... taloned, winged, tentacled things...

And at the center of the universe a mad god writhes to humming of the pipes, Oh god, the pipes... Ohhhhhhhhhh god............

Correct me if I am wrong but I think I read somewhere (magic in the shadows)that the background count on space stations is lower that in actual outspace. Theoretically if all moved to space, wouldn't the horrors be able to follow eventually as Astral space became more, i dunno, coherant in and around the space stations due to the increase in life?

I could be wrong but there have been many big mojo spikes. You have India, the Tir's. Both of those elven nations have used major mojo in the last 50 years, Mexico, and DeeCee.

Anyone knows what happened and is happening in India?

Are you thinking of Tibet? They have a giant wall of mist much like the Veil around Tir na nOg.

Well, yes..My bad. But who made it?Why?And how? I mean the Nog has some massively large players calling it their back yard. What does Tibet have?

Tibet has a drekload of monks adhering to ancient arts of self-mastery. Maybe not as ancient as some of the elves, but a whole lot less snobbish about it.

Regarding the...things in space, there's a real old SR adventure book, Eye Witness that includes a mage named Alghierri (as in the Inferno guy, because Dante would be too obvious) who attempted to astrally project outside of the manasphere. When he did, he say...things, and in order to escape from the horror of seeing them, ripped out his own eyes. When the PCs find him, he's in a room with walls covered in pictures of strange creatures. IIRC, in Earthdawn, this wasn't too uncommon a response, the basic thinking being that simply dealing with the pain of ripping out one's own eyes was trivial compared to comprehending the horror of what one beheld with them. Somehow, the idea of Horrors swimming in the void, with an insatiable hunger makes a lot of sense to me. Hunger always did seem to be the defining characteristic of Horrors.

One must also consider the possibility of the Dali Lama and its re-incarnations. It is possible that in Shadowrun history, the Dali Lama is actually a spiritual being similar to a Loa. While magic was low, it could do little more than impart knowledge and perhaps long life to the possessed. But now that magic has returned and whether the spirit is benign...

Now I wonder if Tibet hasn't been partially removed form the Physical realm, or simply in transition to such a state. Is Tibet a bridge to another world like Australia's Dreamtime? Or it the mist simply a wall built to protect something, or to prevent something from escaping...

heh, heh, heh...

Go Horrors!

A few points:

It just occured to me that no one actualy has enough experience with the mana cycle to reliably understand it, not even the oldest of Great Dragons. Being in the Sixth world means that Shadowrun is in the middle of the third mana cycle. With only two previous cycles, there is really no way to perdict how fast mana levels will increase this time, especialy since the decline of mana completly stoped for quite some time during Fourth World. There's also the interesting fact that the First World started in the downcycle.

My personal theory is that the dragon's creation myth is mostly true, and that there was a Zero World, when the mana level was constantly peaked and that Nightslayer's self-sacrifice powered the greatest of all blood-magic spells, which started the cycle keeps the Horrors away most of the time.

Of course, any enchantment can be damaged or broken, even one on the whole of the Earth. Earthdawn's unsusual cycle and Shadowrun's manaspikes are signs of the cycle itself weakening, eventualy it will collapse all together and the Horrors will be able to reclaim the Earth once again.

If this is the case, then hiding in Kaers will only for so long. Eventualy, all of metahumanity will have to stand and fight the Horrors. With any luck, the technology and magical theory will have advance to the point where that it possible when the horrors next break through.


Horrors are inferior to human and dragons in one way, they can't create and they can't name. They can only corrupt what other have created and named.

Of course, there are those corrupted Great Dragons that are probably still sround somewhere. They can name and re-name, transforming the every nature of everything they contact into something that Verjigorm would find pleasing.
They're also a good way to introduce Horrors into Shadowrun.

Just a comment I wanted to make about the converted horror (the wormskull). Please keep in mind that the statistics given in the game-book are the STEP levels of the attribute, not the attribute number itself.

Considering that Shadowrun has an average attribute (normal human) of 3 and Earthdawn has an average attribute (normal human) of 9 (STEP 4, Roll 1D6), I would think that you could translate the Earthdawn STEP into the Shadowrun DICE rather easily.

Example:
Verjigorm (Horrors, page 70)
Body 28, Quickness 31, Strength 33, Charisma 29, Intelligence 35, Willpower 40

Not sure how to translate the rest of his stats over, but here are the originals:

Except that the Earthdawn system and Shadowrun system are completely different with regard to probability curves and mechanics, which makes things much less straightforward than you are making them out to be. It's not a simple matter of just dividing by 3.

I forgot to mention it before, but another reason I thought Horrors originated beyond the manasphere was that the Aztlan sourcebook is the first place to mention fovae, which are mana voids like the space beyond the Manasphere. Since the Aztlaners were known to be dealing with Horrors (obvious from the original Threats and Harlequin's Back books), I assumed the mana voids were a consequence of that meddling.

Find the general attribute chart for ED. The increase in abilities (encumberance was what i was looking at) with each point of higher strength is not linear in the least. An ED strength of 30 is much closer to a SR strength of 131 based on the encumberance rules (you may be able to argue down to 65 or so, the encumberance rules are a bit different between the games, and it's at about 657 kg when a str 30 ED critter first faces a penalty).

gah. mispost.

Of course, when you start talking about really big critters, it doesn't matter what it's stats are. It can kill people with much less, it cannot destroy ships regardless, and staging down damage at a (modified) Power of 24 or higher can still never be relied upon.