The Shadowrun Situation

[Fuchs]

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

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.

[Ganbare Gincun]

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

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.

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.

[Ancient History]

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.

[Crissa]

Magic guys can't defeat Horrors in Earthdawn.

-Crissa

[Ganbare Gincun]

Magic guys can't defeat Horrors in Earthdawn.

Can't they? Isn't everyone in Earthdawn pretty much a Luminary, running around and beating up Horrors and Therans and whomever else decides to be an asshat in the Fourth World?

[Crissa]

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

[Fuchs]

Fuck Earthdawn. Fuck whoever had the shitty idea to load that stupidity onto SR.

[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

[Ancient History]

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.

[Juton]

It'll be OK as long as technology increases as fast as magic does.

[Fuchs]

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.

[Fuchs]

So, fuck ED. Fuck "powerful magical artefacts that can ruin/rule/affect this world". Fuck IEs, fuck "Great Dragons are gods!".

[Ancient History]

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.

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!

[Crissa]

But Earthdawn says nothing about technology. For all we know, there's ways to build cities and weapons ala Spirits Within.

Blaming Earthdawn for the dragon porn is stupid. There aren't even super-powerful dragons and elves in Earthdawn.

-Crissa

[Ancient History]

*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.

[Crissa]

See, obviously the dragon porn comes from somewhere, and infects settings with it.

-Crissa

[Fuchs]

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.

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!

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.

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]

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.

[kzt]

IIRC, the mana level isn't high enough for the earthdawn magic crap to work.

[TheFlatline]

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.

Okay, maybe not *worse* than technology, but different, alien, incompatible.

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]

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!

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?

*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.

So the Theran Empire is secretly run by dragons, then?

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.

But... they didn't have the Internet! Or 4chan!

[Stahlseele]

Technically, 4chan did not happen in Shadowrun either . .
Closest you're going to get is the new emergent lolcats. .

[Lago PARANOIA]

Technically, 4chan did not happen in Shadowrun either . .

Anyone mind telling me why the real world is more of a dystopia than a fictional one?

[Stahlseele]

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 . .

[Lago PARANOIA]

And now we're off worse actually . .

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.

Awwwww yeah. Life can be pretty sweet in a dystopia if you hae the Internet.