If that amount of land fell into the sea,I would want to hear about damage in New York. We are talking about something in the mid teen range on the reqitor scale here. We are talking about something that would be felt in the rockies here. We are walking about a quake that would not leave on bring top of another for large parts of pasfic cost.

A quake that big should cause damge to every costal city in the world. Ot just about all of them.

To quote the USGS, about the possibility of a 10.5 earthquake:
"Based on our existing knowledge of plate tectonics -- where the Earth's crust is broken into many solid "plates" that typically collide and push under (subduct) or scrape by each other to create the largest earthquakes -- there is not a large enough single crustal plate boundary to create a magnitude 10.5 earthquake... Based on information gathered from the world's largest earthquakes, it would take a rupture 6,000 miles long along a subduction boundary to produce a magnitude 10.5 earthquake. That would be a rupture from the North Pole to the Equator, and that type and size boundary doesn't exist."

Remember that the Richter scale is logarhythmic. Each increase of a whole number in the scale means that the quake of that number has release about 32 times as much energy as a quake with a smaller whole number value. I.E. 5.2 is 32 times more powerful than a 4.2. That means that in comparison to the Ft. Tejon quake of the 1850s, if we assume a richter scale mark of '15' (being the absolute of 'mid-teens'), the quake would release 1,073,741,824 times as much energy as a 9.6 earthquake. I don't think there's any force indigenous to this planet that could release that much energy in one go.

You know, fuck that answer. This makes the NAN books look reasonable. Hell this makes Quicksilver look like a reasonable character. This more of the fuck California with a stick shit, and it is way past old now. I mean, just when you think they are done fucking over California, they do it again. i say get it over with it and nuke it. Just flat out get rid of it. if you are really going to treat it so badly, just kill it.

But they weren't from Canada. At all.

The Great Ghost Dance War started in freakin Abilene, Kansas, if I recall.

*palm slap* You know the System Failure cover? We've been making the incorrect assumption that is a picture from inside the Matrix. In fact it is LA in the meat world. Deus' managed to set up his happy-fun lab again, this time using it to develop a paranatural silver tree that eats a better part of the SoCal coastal region.

Not to be too much of a dick but FanPro Germany pronounced a campaign that bridges the 5-year-gap a while ago (together with the SR encyclopedia).

Maybe there could be a fan translation? The official German forum is doing that with Bug City right now, so I guess it's not too much against company polic. Well, maybe they will at least consider selling the finished product as a PDF. It's not like it'd ciost them anything to do that. *shrugs*

Or you could just go away.....mad.

Maybe I want to play in a canon world? Maybe because it is an uneeded kick in the balls to add to the whole list of kicks in the balls that California has gotten? Maybe because it that happened the whole PaC Rim would be in chaos for years to come? Maybe because it would never happen? Maybe because it makes less sence than any other thing that shadowrun has done. It is less based on facts than say the awakening? Yes, the magic coming back to the world is more likely to happen than that. At least if any major city in the pac rim aren't still half leveled in 70.

re-read, this time paying attention to what he actually said. there are lots of reasons why Critias is losing interest in SR. the destruction of California is one of those reasons, and it's one that (handily!) can be used to kill his characters and make a clean break.

I'm not sure I trust Mario Puzo and Richard Donner as much as DC's smartest man in the world.

You have a strange usage of the word "could".

Apparently it does, but that doesn't make it a good idea. Whoever is the author of that section had better have gotten as much milage out of those geological changes as the setting got out of the Awakening in order to justify it. The Awakening provided the basis for the entire unique theme of the game--near future cyberpunk with magic--it's a defining characteristic, and one that can be developed to craft an interesting, internally mostly self-consistent world that looks, acts, and feels a lot like ours but with twists that make it fun to play in.

If they've managed to do something equally profound with the geological changes in CA, then the author(s) will instantly become my very own personal literary hero(es).

If, instead, they've blithely wiped out massive amounts of geography because it seemed cool at the time, then I think the action was exceedingly stupid, and a tremendous waste of an event that was more spectacular than anything that has happened on the entire planet since the KT event (that wiped out the dinosaurs).

Magic coming back to the world has profound implications on the geopolitical structure of SR. Fine. What do you suppose the geopolitical implications of massive geological change like that would be? Do you suppose anyone would want to live within a hundred miles of a fault? Who do you think would seek to use this kind of overwhelming power that dwarfs nuclear weapons to the same degree as a nuclear weapon dwarfs a grenade? In a terrorized, post-apocalyptic world, sure, this could be helpful. For SR? I don't think so.

Now, GMs and players (especially those who know anything about earthquakes, mountains, how big a mile is, how to read a map scale bar, and so on) can just look down there on the map, shake their heads, roll their eyes, and pretend it never happened. Or they can accept that in SR, anything is possible--and will eventually happen for no good reason, and take bets on how long it will be before someone destroys the moon.

No, it's not. It's just a way for me to bring some closure to the 13+ year recently-abusive relationship I might be getting out of soon. Do a forum search for "Critias" and maybe you'll notice a recent overwhelming sense of despair, anger, and cynicism in all my posts, ever, in the SR4 forum. Or, better yet, don't do the forum search and just take my fucking word for it.

Oh, and Blakkie? Do us all a favor and shut up. Then pretend I'm a line developer, and get back to work rooting around in my feces for yummy, yummy, peanuts (while paying me cash money for the priviledge and praising my genius all at the same time).

Because, well, that's what's being done to us, and you're one of the people that's just eager to get right down to it. One of the greatest RPGs ever is being turned into a steaming pile of Taco Bell bean burrito caused shit, and all the fans are being left to dig around in it to try and salvage something playable out of the mess with house rules, blinders, and love for the game. The system's getting fucked, the cover's getting fucked, the planet itself is getting fucked, our intelligence as fans is being repeatedly insulted, and they're not even doing it according to their own promised release schedule.

It's crap. And you're singing praises to it all the while, like some fawning fucking court jester. Keep licking, Blakkie. Maybe they'll give you a free copy for being a good little fanboy.

I direct you to the sentance right after that one, the one where I state my opinion of the odds against it happening. 'Could' is used in its absolute and correct sense.

Whether or not this stuff is a good idea is irrelevant in the extreme. General consensus is that SURGE was not a good idea. It exists in SR regardless.

The massive geological changes to a section of the California Free State are stunning and mind-boggling, but not really that important. People in New York'll hear about it (and quite possibly hear it happening several hours after it happens), but really, it's just some tragedy on the other end of the continent. People in Seattle will be holding on to things and screaming with fear every time someone breathes hard until the friendly Gov't people say that it was a one-time freak occurence, which will not happen again in anyone's lifetime, be they Ork, Elf or Dragon. People on the other side of the two big oceans will have even less of a connection to it. Life will go on, and it'll be in the history books and talked about on those science-trids that examine how disasters happen, but other than that it'll fade within a few years from earthshattering event to 'well, at least the earthquake monitoring stations have more funding now'. That's what happens. That's what keeping it realistic would be like. People respond to natural disasters, even on this scale, with short-term reactions before settling back in. Geopolitically, you'd see some massive sympathy outpouring, many politicians trying to hijack the tragedy for their own purposes, and then it'll fade into the background. The people living in California won't forget for hundreds of years, but the rest of the world really couldn't care less.

If this is the work of a magically-supercharged nuke, then yeah, you're going to see some national security crackdowns that make the US today look like Libertyville, where everybody's nice and no one gets oppressed at all. But, hey, that's actually par for the course in SR. If you're not going fascist, then you just don't have the money to keep it up for more than a year or two.

Now I don't like that they blew up California. I thought the place was fine as it was, horribly disfunctional and barely a country, but fine for SR purposes. Now it looks like Galactus took a big bite out of the place before Ryan Mercury could get there to scare him off. Stupid and annoying, but it's canon Shadowrun. Do with it as you will.

Why? Can you articulate why its "on the wrong side"? Or is it just personal bias?

And do you know what you just said? Pseudo scientific gibber gabber. Sure, AI is theoretically possible. Do you know whats not? A comet causing magical outbreaks of nonsense. Only apparently its acceptable because its part of the "cycle of magic" which just does away completely with the pseudo science and goes straight to the gibber gabber.

How do you know there's not an explanation that fits in with what's already been established? As far as I can tell no one has even bothered to explore any possibilities except "WHATEVER HAPPENS CAUSES THE WORLD TO BLOW UP!!!!!"

Okay, so you don't know much about science, and can't distinguish possible future developments from utter absurdity--we get the picture.