Semerkhet wrote:
I've been busy in the "Renegotiation of the Treaty of Denver" topic over in the official forums denouncing the Ghostwalker plot. I excised GW from my own version of the setting but I wonder what Frank, AH, et al thought about the plausibility of Ghostwalker hanging on to Denver for any length of time. My own position, obviously, is that it's bullshit.
It is, as you say, bullshit. Great Dragons are
powerful, but for fuck's sake they are just a flying tank. The idea of any dragon, even a
great dragon, taking over a major city that is divided between two or three security council seats is fucking absurd. Dragons are a tactical asset, but if they want to be a major international player they have to use their wanted intellect and magical power to
become rich and powerful, and then influence proceedings in the normal way. The idea of one of them going Godzilla on Aztlan in full view of the international news is completely ricockulous. Elissa Carey's writeup in Dragons of the Sixth World remains one of the stupidest pieces of crap ever written for Shadowrun. Both because of the comical absurdity of the event, and because it took a giant dump on one of the most popular settings in the game and replaced it with
nothing that could be plausibly used in a campaign. There is a giant untouchable NPC who doesn't follow the rules and can't lose and decides what goes down, who lives, and who dies. That's not a Shadowrun character, that's the Lady of Pain!
Technically the Treaty of Denver put a stop to the threat of the various North American powers nuking each other - both with the real thing and with various magical knockoffs. It being unconditionally abrogated by a big penis NPC who doesn't follow the rules is
very stupid, and puts incredible strain on the believability of the entire setting. You know Aztlan is contractually obligated to nuke Atlanta, right? And has been
ever since that nonsense went down.
Really, the only way to rectify the situation is to kill Ghostwalker and post hoc invent a reason why Aztlan wanted that shit to play out the way it did the whole time. Anything less requires Aztlan to have been holding their penises staring at actual weapons of mass destruction and a specific mandate to use them while being unable to take their grips off their johnsons long enough to press the fucking Go button.
But yeah, spy games to wrangle about whether to send non-binding resolutions
condemning Godzilla is a waste of an entire book. If
anything is to be done with Denver, it has to be done in a book called "Ghosthunters". Anything less is not going to solve the problem that is the permanent blemish on the setting that is the Ghostwalker storyline. And if you don't solve
that, then you can't really advance the plot with regards to the area
at all.
-Username17