Drop bears. Their hideous origins now revealed.

I would agree with you if it wasn't for the magical regrowth in Ireland. A lot of that seems to have converted energy into matter, and very specific matter at that. In any case, the laws of physics were ignored. I wouldn't be surprised if my little scenario there was included with the laws of physics being ignored anyway.

As for Einstein: His Theory of Relativity is wrong. It's been corrected since then, which led to the discovery of antimatter. He was a genius, but that doesn't mean he's always right.

Edit: Look up Paul A. M. Dirac. He's the one that revised it. His version is (E=+ or - mc^2)

Magic can create matter from nothing. There's a whole group of spells that already reflects that. However, magic cannot AFAIK nullify matte. The closest it's ever come is, like I said, with Dunk shunting a nuclear blast into astral space. A Great Dragon can't nullify energy or matter, and I cannot accept the idea that anything else has the knowledge or just the sheer power to do so with, like Ellery said, an amount of energy that can vaporize the planet.

And it if goes into the Astral, I'd bet the Astral would be just a tad annoyed.

Why must the magical regrowth be matter-creation of entire forests instead of acceleration of growth? Also, SR matter "creation" spells can just as easily be explained as matter rearrangement (e.g. creating food is just like move earth, except it moves atoms that could be in food, and assembles them as food).

This doesn't work so well when you're dealing with the volume of material that is the above sea-level land mass of southern California.

Unfortunately, I suspect we'll start seeing signs it can. Magic is the only way they have a snowball's chance in Hell of us accepting it, and whatever they do it pretty much requires a DnD wizard to build a giant Wand of Disintegration in orbit and decide California needs more islands.

We all know why they nuked southern cali. More islands = more piratey goodness. Who cares why? (please note sarcasm).

Well, no matter what, we all know they're going to rape physics. I'm just trying to guess how.

Say what you want about this not coming as a surprise, but the sheer scope of their raping of physics and logic is just... It's wrong.

I wonder if they found ghost rock on those islands...

I wonder if whatever happened there destroyed any of Dunk's posessions. I could've sworn he owned something in that area.


Heh... My personal bet on the Calif. situation?

The ring of fire didn't settle down much after YotC, still causing quite a bit of upheaval.. perhaps even as far as shifting the Pacific plate from being a slip fault to one pulling away from the American plate... This might explain things, as I'm sure the rock falling down could accomplish the devistation we see there, as well as the general lowering of the overall ground height needed for the ocean to invade in without noticably affecting any other coastlines (yay for a lack of global warming, no? =P )...

More likely? Wuxung used whatever the hell they were using those dragon lines for to blow the drek out of Saito. Don't ask me why.. I just like Wuxung, and hated Saito. =P

Well, then they missed Saito by about 200 miles.

Besides, that's a ton of collateral damage. If this was a sudden event, I'd guess 8-10 million dead, MINIMUM.

But the fault line changing is a pretty significant stretch. If a couple million years of geological events hasn't done it, I doubt the Ring of Fire could have.

And it uses a deck of cards.

was bellingham always the capital of Salish? I have had so many games in seattle and have crossed the border SO many times. But never did a run against/for the next door government, and from the looks of it. The capital is about a 30 minute drive from Seattle. Did my GM and I just miss it, or is this new?

It's in Shadows of North America.

Why didn't the entire L.A. basin disappear, then?

Why did the water go around downtown? It's all pretty much flat until you get north of the 101 (Try driving up La Cienega on a Friday night to Sunset and you can see how steep the hills suddenly get in your rearview, because you'll be looking at it for a while).

hmm. instead of hitting them with all the pain at once, dish it out piecemeal over time, so they live in constant fear of the next dose. very evil, i like it. you will serve your Sith masters well.

Fastjack's in. Rob said so at Origins.

Yay!

It doesn't reflect the actual topography of the basin. If it was just sinking, the beach cities and southern Santa Monica would for sure be gone.

Okay, a last attempt at a plausible (in-character plausible) explanation:

Winternight, having read "hammer of god", buries thier awesome nuke weapon focus deep below LA and ignites it, opening the San Andreas Rift and setting off the worst quake in Californian history. Death toll is abysmal, Winternight is happy.

Then, their magical nuke has an effect noone really expected: it generates an astral vortex, diffusing the borders between astral, metaplanes and physical plane. While hordes of spirits suddenly materialise (against their will) and go on a rampage, lots of the physical plane in turn is sucked into the astral, including a lot of magma below California.

We know stuff can be transported off the physical plane (and backwards), those islands that reappeared out of nowhere (the one in the Canal and the one Dunk left fto some corp in YotC, the Island chock-full of Orichalcum, also, Ghostwalker and dragons in general count as 'stuff' too and have am phase where they become purely astral in their life - at least one, as dragon -> Great Dragon transformation remains a mystery). Now, this just happens in an uncontrolles way.

This lack of magma below the SA rift, of course, makes for a very large hole with a vacuum in it. And this hoe does what is expected: it fills. Magma from around flows into it (and rock from above crashes into it), making the entire coast line of California sink by several dozen meters. In the end, only the coastal massif (those islands) remain above in SoCal, the rest is the newly created Winternight Bay. Note: as the magma has different density and fluidity, the sinking doesn't happen homogenously. Hence some cities remain above ocean level (Santa Barbara, SanFran). Also, the main collapse is directly along the SA fault line.

The three cities that are still on the map despite being sunk - San Diego, LA and Tijuana - likely are arcology cities made by Proteus. They make them by the dozen. And how did they get them there so fast? Simple. In Shockwaves, they already made an arcology prototyle that *moves*. They just build a couple of those and send them over.

Because I look at maps of the L.A. basin all of the time. It just comes naturally.

You can't just cause the largest geological change in 65 million years and maintain an aura of mystery about it. That's almost as nonsensical as the change taking place in the first place!

To see plate boundaries, check out this image. The jaggy thing at the bottom of the Pacific plate is an oceanic rift (site of seafloor spreading). You can see that it 's pushing upwards on the Pacific plate, which is why the Pacific plate slides against the N. American plate.

no, not really. replacing mountain with ocean is pretty high up on the list.

HAHAHAHAHA

The OC is toast. It somehow went around Long Beach and gobbled up Orange County and the Inland Empire while sparing Santa Monica all the way down to PV and around to Long Beach.

HAHAHAHA

That's hilarious.

That island farthest to the west is Catalina. It follows around the mountains, but it looks like the Inland Empire bought it the most.

hermit--nice try, except that it takes hundreds or thousands of years for the earth to sink into place (a lot will happen initially to fill a void, but after that it's a very slow process, often with many earthquakes). There are places where the land is still rebounding after the weight from the last ice age was lifted off (!). But that's okay--the astral can just eat away more stuff, and eat from the top down.

The astral gobbling was the one explanation that barely sort of worked--kind of a swap of physical California with a replacement astral California. When the mana comes back down in a few thousand years, we'll get regular physical California back again. I don't really buy mana vortices sweeping away hundreds of cubic miles of rock because if they did so during the peak of the last mana cycle--when presumably such vortices were much more readily formed--and the process wasn't reversed, there'd be a fair few utterly incomprehensible geological formations lying around. Since there's not, you kind of have to store the existing one away and bring it back later.

It's pretty weird and raises all kinds of consistentcy problems (what happens to the people who are there at the time of the change?), but it's the best way I've thought of to put in some backstory to maybe partially justify something that, on the face of it, looks insane.

Added in edit: Also, Google Earth gives elevation values. One can use it to notice where 5000 foot mountains are underwater, while near-sea-level areas within 20 miles or so are still above water. This makes subsidance/earthquake/etc. explanations a lot harder to swallow.

Google doesn't give elevations. You can only try infer elevation from it. What it gives best is local terrain elevation changes (by both a derth of development, and the shadows). But following that i'm not seeing a lot in the way of that roughness being underwater. The coastline is generally following up what appear on the satelite photos to be the valleys inland.

There is one possibility that wasn't offered yet: there was much more land underwater after the quakes/planarshift/whatever. But the current shoreline include reclamation works (dikes and stuff). This would explain why some lands that should be underwater (like LA basin) are shown as islands. They would actually be reclaimed land protected by a ring of dikes.

if i remember correctly didnt they build a sizable wall around south central aka Inferno, wouldnt that make a good or at least decent excuse as to why there is still a section called LA, or perhaps they were just marking it for reference

In Dragons of the sixth world the two asian dragons are fighting over control of the lay lines around the ring of fire. Under the description of the asian dragon in china (forget his name) they mention that the dragon in japans ill use of the lay lines was leading up to a major magical upheaval that the eathquakes that hit japan were just the lead up for. This was of course if things were not fixed. From the map I am making a guess that they are going to say the magical inbalance continued and that California's new look is a further result. Could be way off and don't have DOTSW with me so specifics are out till I get home. AAny one else remember this more clearly?

Also whats with the gray area over Hetzeby's domain?

Still disputed land betwen the TT and CFS I'd imagine.

The more I'm thinking about it, the more I'm interested in what happened with the sentient mer-people in the region (I referred to them as Marrow earlier, but I know that is wrong). I know that between the piracy and toxicity, they weren't exactly happy... But they were also actively working to improve the area.

It would be intruiging, then, if they had something to do with these developments, positively or negatively.

Sort of off-topic, Google Earth (earth.google.com) is a great addition for people who like to scout out the geography of an area before setting a run there--it's got the same maps as on maps.google.com (which are themselves very cool), but is zoomable and slightly 3D (topographic information for mountains but not buildings). And it lists coordinates in degree-minutes-seconds style, so you can do things like tell people to check out the ~6000 foot peak at 32deg 51' 44" N , 116deg 23' 22" W that is underwater in 2070.

Unfortunately, it requires a Windows-only program (your regular web browser is not applicable), but I don't imagine that's a problem for most of you. High speed internet is a must.

Is it me or does the map indicate that Atzlan pushed north sometime in the last six years? Also it shows San Deigo on the map but it looks like it is underwater?

You make it sound like special things don't always happen in Tijuana.