No, Earthdawn should leave SR alone. Shadowrun needs a balance between tech and magic, not more shitty fantasy. And Shadowrun needs to focus on modern fantasy, not the stupid "old magic is always better" Tolkien propaganda.Crissa wrote:Well, eventually some Earthdawn should be creeping into Shadowrun... But this seems a bit... Much. Why aren't you blowing up, I dunno, Machu Pichu?
-Crissa
The Shadowrun Situation
Moderator: Moderators
- Ganbare Gincun
- Duke
- Posts: 1022
- Joined: Wed Mar 11, 2009 4:42 am
I concur. I believe that Earthdawn/Shadowrun crossovers would be a lot more palatable if tech-based characters actually had some tools at their disposal to defeat opponents and overcome obstacles that can only currently be addressed by magical characters. I'm down with cyborgs and guys with power armor and running around in mechs gunning down Horrors. But I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for that to happen.Fuchs wrote:No, Earthdawn should leave SR alone. Shadowrun needs a balance between tech and magic, not more shitty fantasy. And Shadowrun needs to focus on modern fantasy, not the stupid "old magic is always better" Tolkien propaganda.Crissa wrote:Well, eventually some Earthdawn should be creeping into Shadowrun... But this seems a bit... Much. Why aren't you blowing up, I dunno, Machu Pichu?
-Crissa
- Ancient History
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 12708
- Joined: Wed Aug 18, 2010 12:57 pm
That sort of thing is essentially what bughunts were for. In the few IE adventures, the PCs rarely confront IEs, GD, or Elder Evils directly - notable difference being Harlequin's Back. The big problem with Harlequin, Survival of the Fittest, and Dawn of the Artifacts was sidelining the PCs too damn much and letting the god-NPCs be so bad-ass.
It comes to the point where you ask yourself "why doesn't badass X do this shit themselves? Why hire shadowrunners at all?" Nobody wants to be an audience or a bunch of sidekicks. You can have bad-asses in a party without sacrificing the utility of the players, but damn few PCs want to be the hobbits in the Fellowship of the Ring when the GM is handling Gandalf and Aragorn.
That's part of the reason why in HG I wanted to really emphasize the necessity of the players. In the first Harlequin, the PCs are literally chess pieces, because that's how the game is played - Harlequin isn't allowed to do this shit himself, even though he can. His hands are tied. In Harlequin's Back, the PCs are basically picked by Fate - H isn't even fucking sure why they were picked, but he's got his hands full holding back the tide and he needs the PCs to go do what he cannot. So he's off-screen for 95% of the adventure. In DotA and Harlequin's Gambit, the real IEs are almost all behind the scenes except for a couple places - the real interaction is supposed to be between the PCs and Frosty, and that's where the first real mistake happened, because Frosty is supposed to make an impression and survive. Mandated NPC survival is a bad thing in most adventures. In HG at least we were working it back closer to the original Harlequin, where the PCs have to be the active part and Frosty has to take a passive role - and more than that, the PCs have skills, experience, and abilities that Frosty does not have, and she has to rely on their planning, resources, and judgment at least as much as her own.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, as you like it) the campaign as presented in that doc will never see the light of day. Jason won't allow it.
It comes to the point where you ask yourself "why doesn't badass X do this shit themselves? Why hire shadowrunners at all?" Nobody wants to be an audience or a bunch of sidekicks. You can have bad-asses in a party without sacrificing the utility of the players, but damn few PCs want to be the hobbits in the Fellowship of the Ring when the GM is handling Gandalf and Aragorn.
That's part of the reason why in HG I wanted to really emphasize the necessity of the players. In the first Harlequin, the PCs are literally chess pieces, because that's how the game is played - Harlequin isn't allowed to do this shit himself, even though he can. His hands are tied. In Harlequin's Back, the PCs are basically picked by Fate - H isn't even fucking sure why they were picked, but he's got his hands full holding back the tide and he needs the PCs to go do what he cannot. So he's off-screen for 95% of the adventure. In DotA and Harlequin's Gambit, the real IEs are almost all behind the scenes except for a couple places - the real interaction is supposed to be between the PCs and Frosty, and that's where the first real mistake happened, because Frosty is supposed to make an impression and survive. Mandated NPC survival is a bad thing in most adventures. In HG at least we were working it back closer to the original Harlequin, where the PCs have to be the active part and Frosty has to take a passive role - and more than that, the PCs have skills, experience, and abilities that Frosty does not have, and she has to rely on their planning, resources, and judgment at least as much as her own.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, as you like it) the campaign as presented in that doc will never see the light of day. Jason won't allow it.
- Ganbare Gincun
- Duke
- Posts: 1022
- Joined: Wed Mar 11, 2009 4:42 am
Horrors span from little guys to nth dimensional cores, though they're all outside of the physical. But it takes the physical guys to defeat them, because they eat magic.
Eventually you can defeat some of them, but it's like killing a fire with a flamethrower. It can be done, but it's not going to help the overall 'things are burning' problem.
Anyhow, Shadowrun is supposed to be an intermediate step between the physical laws being supreme and the Horrors prevail when physical laws become more lax. It's a step between us and Earthdawn, but in the future, when we have cybertech as well. Every year forward will slowly change the world to be more Earthdawn like.
-Crissa
Eventually you can defeat some of them, but it's like killing a fire with a flamethrower. It can be done, but it's not going to help the overall 'things are burning' problem.
Anyhow, Shadowrun is supposed to be an intermediate step between the physical laws being supreme and the Horrors prevail when physical laws become more lax. It's a step between us and Earthdawn, but in the future, when we have cybertech as well. Every year forward will slowly change the world to be more Earthdawn like.
-Crissa
That's a strange statement, since that was part of the whole mythology behind the world - magic comes and goes in waves, and Earthdawn is at one side of a peak and SR is on the other.
That stupidity came with the whole concept of having magic in Shadowrun.
I'm okay playing Cyberpunk 2030 with dice pools and no magic. But that's not Shadowrun.
-Crissa
That stupidity came with the whole concept of having magic in Shadowrun.
I'm okay playing Cyberpunk 2030 with dice pools and no magic. But that's not Shadowrun.
-Crissa
- Ancient History
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 12708
- Joined: Wed Aug 18, 2010 12:57 pm
Before Earthdawn was ever put to paper, one of the conceits of Shadowrun was that the magic came back. It implied a secret history or prehistory, and left open questions of strange survivals, hidden immortal puppeteers, and other things. It was a history referred to in hints and scraps of conversation by smug bastards that knew more than the reader did, and some players gobbled it up and others hated it.
Then came Earthdawn. Love or hate the later supplements, Earthdawn itself was a really nice piece of work. It took all the standard D&D tropes - characters with levels, spell levels, dungeons, memorizing spells - and turned them on their head, gave a setting-specific set-up for them. The art was fresh, the writing was rock-solid. It was a thing of beauty.
Then came Earthdawn. Love or hate the later supplements, Earthdawn itself was a really nice piece of work. It took all the standard D&D tropes - characters with levels, spell levels, dungeons, memorizing spells - and turned them on their head, gave a setting-specific set-up for them. The art was fresh, the writing was rock-solid. It was a thing of beauty.
- Ancient History
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 12708
- Joined: Wed Aug 18, 2010 12:57 pm
But...that doesn't exist, really. Point out to one instance where tech is nothing in SR. Hell, even dragons are threatened by nukes. And ED isn't better than SR, in any way, really. Hell, the elves managed to fuck over every nation they have in ED and SR. The orks manage to fuck themselves over on a regular basis. The Viking trolls kept slaves!Fuchs wrote:Oh, I like the idea of an earlier age of magic. I simply hate how they did it, and I loathe the stupid "and ED is so much better than SR, tech is nothing!" clichee.
- Ancient History
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 12708
- Joined: Wed Aug 18, 2010 12:57 pm
My point is: Old stuff should be worse, not better. ED spells, techniques, whatever, should not stand up to SR's. The "oh, ED knows more about magic than SR will for quite some time" is a crutch just to have Tolkien style nostalgia infect a SOTA setting.Ancient History wrote:But...that doesn't exist, really. Point out to one instance where tech is nothing in SR. Hell, even dragons are threatened by nukes. And ED isn't better than SR, in any way, really. Hell, the elves managed to fuck over every nation they have in ED and SR. The orks manage to fuck themselves over on a regular basis. The Viking trolls kept slaves!Fuchs wrote:Oh, I like the idea of an earlier age of magic. I simply hate how they did it, and I loathe the stupid "and ED is so much better than SR, tech is nothing!" clichee.
SR should, after 6 to 7 decades of magic research, beat ED on all levels. SR got science, it got lots more people, and the information network to share progress.
"Ancient speshialll elven artifacts" being anything else than quaint but usueless relics of the past, like an old roman sword, ruins an important part of Shadowrun.
- Ancient History
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 12708
- Joined: Wed Aug 18, 2010 12:57 pm
-
- Prince
- Posts: 2606
- Joined: Fri Apr 30, 2010 11:43 pm
Okay, maybe not *worse* than technology, but different, alien, incompatible.Fuchs wrote: My point is: Old stuff should be worse, not better. ED spells, techniques, whatever, should not stand up to SR's. The "oh, ED knows more about magic than SR will for quite some time" is a crutch just to have Tolkien style nostalgia infect a SOTA setting.
Technology feels like it should be the wild card. The one thing the old timers don't know how to deal with per se or how it will impact the cycle. In fact, magic seems to develop/re-emerge along a fairly static path, kind of like a sine wave. It's technology that's expanding in wild, uncontrolled directions. An inversion of tech/magic might be an interesting theme to explore, where technology eventually becomes the new magic, with malleable limitations, and magic becomes the reliable "technology" that makes the cars run, the lights shine, and the trains run on time.
Otherwise, if magic is this glacier-esque wave of power, cycles, and inevitability, then anyone worth anyone is not going to go into the final showdown relying on tech, and at that point you have kind of screwed half of Shadowrun's themes over.
- Ganbare Gincun
- Duke
- Posts: 1022
- Joined: Wed Mar 11, 2009 4:42 am
As someone with only a passing interest in SR and ED... what have the Elves done to screw over all of their nations? I know how they created the Blood Wood, but what other nations have they run into the ground, and why? And how/why do the Orcs keep boning themselves over?Ancient History wrote:Hell, the elves managed to fuck over every nation they have in ED and SR. The orks manage to fuck themselves over on a regular basis. The Viking trolls kept slaves!
So the Theran Empire is secretly run by dragons, then?Ancient History wrote:*cough* Well, actually there are. Not "Lofwyr owns your house, your wife, and your soul." but...well, that gets into some of the more embarrassing books, like the Theran Empire sourcebook, and dragons got their own ED porn in the unpublished Dragons sourcebook.
But... they didn't have the Internet! Or 4chan!Ancient History wrote:Okay, so your theory is that a civilization that had a couple thousand years to get spellcasting down pat should be worse than one that's only had a couple decades practice? Granted, technology moves faster these days, but not that fast.
Last edited by Ganbare Gincun on Sun Aug 29, 2010 8:55 am, edited 1 time in total.
- Stahlseele
- King
- Posts: 5977
- Joined: Wed Apr 14, 2010 4:51 pm
- Location: Hamburg, Germany
Technically, 4chan did not happen in Shadowrun either . .
Closest you're going to get is the new emergent lolcats. .
Closest you're going to get is the new emergent lolcats. .
Last edited by Stahlseele on Sun Aug 29, 2010 9:33 am, edited 1 time in total.
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.
Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
-
- Invincible Overlord
- Posts: 10555
- Joined: Thu Sep 25, 2008 3:00 am
Anyone mind telling me why the real world is more of a dystopia than a fictional one?Stahlseele wrote:Technically, 4chan did not happen in Shadowrun either . .
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
- Stahlseele
- King
- Posts: 5977
- Joined: Wed Apr 14, 2010 4:51 pm
- Location: Hamburg, Germany
Because (science)fiction has to be somewhat believeable, wheras no such limitations apply to reality, seeing how we have to deal with that one anyway . .
See 1984. It was not meant as an instruction manual. And now we're off worse actually . .
See 1984. It was not meant as an instruction manual. And now we're off worse actually . .
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.
Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
-
- Invincible Overlord
- Posts: 10555
- Joined: Thu Sep 25, 2008 3:00 am
Disagree. The goal of the Party was to eliminate the orgasm. In the grimdarkness of the future reality, the pornography is exquisite. I mean these days we even have Julia x Faye porn.Stahlseele wrote:And now we're off worse actually . .
Awwwww yeah. Life can be pretty sweet in a dystopia if you hae the Internet.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.