| From: | Max Rible slothman@*********.org |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Second World (was Re: IE) |
| Date: | Wed, 18 Aug 1999 15:04:56 -0700 |
>This talk of dragons, IEs, and other things that have been around for
>quite a long time is something of an interesting coincidence since I've
>been playing with the idea of running a game set in the second world. Any
>thoughts of how the overall setting should feel? I don't want it to get
>too primitive with a bunch of trolls running around with big clubs. I also
>want to avoid any high tech X-Files "we are all descended from aliens"
>crap.
My personal deranged notion is that a previous mana-using race on the
planet existed 65 million years ago-- a breed of sentient dinosaur.
They decided that being able to fly would be really cool, and turned
themselves from more conventional dinosaurs into the dragons we know
and love.
One of the more intriguing properties of magic in the Shadowrun world
is that sufficiently strong Patterns will re-instantiate themselves,
given time. This is how I believe a number of extinct species with
no discernable low-mana variant have been reappearing as the mana turns
itself back on.
Dragons, naturally, gave themselves a very strong Pattern as a species...
and then at some point, they overdid it in some of their experiments,
or perhaps even a war, and smacked a large asteroid into the planet.
It might even have been an attempt to wipe out the Horrors once and
for all...
The disruption to the biosphere killed off all the dragons and wrecked
Earth's mana field for millions of years. At a time about 25,000
years before the starting date of the Sixth World (since one mana
cycle is about 5125 years), the magic finally pulled itself together
enough to start popping some very confused dragons out of nowhere.
(Alternatively, it happened about 35,250 years before the Shadowrun
epoch, and the dragons spent the Zeroth World figuring things out
and getting their collective acts together...)
After taking a while to get used to these new mammalian critters,
I'm sure the dragons couldn't resist the temptation to start meddling
with their genes. (Vasdenjas was seriously overdoing it in his denials of
Great Dragons doing genetic tampering.) Hence humans were molded into
elves (by Alamaise), dwarfs, orks, and trolls, and probably windlings
as well (though going that far would probably keep them from
metamorphosing or giving birth to UGE'd offspring).
So the Second World would be the age when all the humanoid races were
servitors to dragons or neolithic tribes clustering around their
shamans for protection against the various threats out in the world...
--
%% Max Rible %%% max@********.com %%% http://www.amurgsval.org/~slothman/ %%
%% "No boom *today*. Boom tomorrow. There's *always* a boom tomorrow. %%
%% What? Look, somebody's got to have some damn perspective around here. %%
%% Boom. Sooner or later. BOOM!" -- Susan Ivanova, _Babylon 5_ %%
