[farothel]

If humanity in Shadowrun doesn't destroy itself, it could stand a good chance of not just surviving the horrors, but matching them and preserving a lot of the race/culture/tech/ect. Constantly advancing tech can make it so individual soldiers could go toe-to-toe with minor horrors, and squads to take on larger ones. Magic is also advancing and I'd imagine that by then, the Awakened will wield power that makes the big spells of today seem like sparklers. It'll also be interesting to thing about what will happen in other areas outside of Earth. Will the horrors only come through there, or will colonies on the moon, Mars, or others see them as well? Hell, will humanity have some sort of FTL that far in and have colonies in other systems.

Maybe, but if for each of those human (or troll, or ork) supersoldiers there are 10000 horrors, you still have a problem.  In fact, leaving this solar system (or at least colonizing it's many planets and moons) is I think the best option.  If they only pop up on earth, maybe even abandon earth altogether and wait for them to disappear again and then come back and recolonize.

[Rosa]

As i said earlier leaving Earth doesn't solve the problem. Aetherology establishes that you can travel to other Worlds via the Astral Sea, so it would be no problem for them going there, the question ofc. would be if those other Worlds had enough ambient mana to sustain them though.

And btw. the main problem of the Imperium in WH40K is not that they don't understand their own tech, though that certainly doesn't help, but rather that they have been fighting constantly on a thousand fronts for a thousand years, that kind of pressure would degrade any civilisations ability to continue fighting.

[Lighthouse]

OOh giant robots would be cool but maybe not for PC's. Shadowrun warhammer 40k style would be cool but that is another game altogether. I want more world war Z/mad max shadowrun. What world events leading up to 4500 would create such a world?

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

Uh ... your standard apocalypse?

In any case.  The part about WH40K was huge massive ships leaping (per se) into and through the Void / Chaos, built to withstand the problems there.  But of course, they'd be fighting back, and by the point the IEs and the GDs start talking (because humanity is ready to believe them about what's coming), humanity is also ready to buckle up and bring the war to the enemy.  So at least in my mind, the years 4500-5000 spell the end of the Horror threat, with strict lessons of Why It Is No Longer Wise To Fuck With Metahumanity.

But hey, that's me and my opinion.  I have a better view of humanity than most people, I guess.

[Moonshine Fox]

OOh giant robots would be cool but maybe not for PC's. Shadowrun warhammer 40k style would be cool but that is another game altogether. I want more world war Z/mad max shadowrun. What world events leading up to 4500 would create such a world?

That type of world is pretty easy to get to. People don't know about/don't believe in/just don't care about the threat, and massive war breaks out on Earth. Metahumanity is more then capable to fragging itself back to the stone age at this point, and tensions in some areas are ripe for it. Simple is usually best and World War 3 (or 4 or 5) is a good reason for post apocolyptia ripe for the reciving end of a Horror beatdown.

I'm personally with Ouroboros though, and think metahumanity may at least get over itself and become better.

[Lighthouse]

So what places do you think would survive and which places would get wiped off the map?

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

Depends on the causal events.  Presuming a true societal collapse, every city over 100,000, most over 10,000, and many over 1,000.  Because everything these days is moved, and if people aren't willing to move stuff - food and fuel being the key items - then, well, see 'Dies the Fire'.

[Lighthouse]

I'm not sure if I understand your comment. Cities over a 100,000 won't survive? Because they won't be willing to move?

[farothel]

No, because they can't survive without a constant transport of food and other necessities.  If that stops, the city collapses.  And if people start dying in large numbers, you get epidemics.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

Uh ... no?

Look, where do you get your food from?  The local grocery store.  Where do they get the food from?  For some (not a lot) of it, local farms; most of them come from companies that move the food from where it's grown to either where it's going to be consumed (for fresh food) or to where it'll be processed (canned, packaged, slaughtered, whatever), thence to transshipment locations, typically ports or trainyards, thence to warehouses and distribution centers, thence to the stores.  Most food isn't grown five miles away from where it'll be eaten any more.  Food needs to be moved, and so that requires fuel.  No surprise, fuel needs to be moved, from where it's acquired (mined for coal or uranium, pumped for oil), to where it'll be processed/refined, thence to where it'll be used - whether that's a power plant or a gas station.

All this 'movement' requires a truly exquisite amount of cooperation; merchants during the pre-Industrial era would be amazed, even stunned, at the amount of movement of goods undertaken and considered normal these days.  However, that cooperation relies on the people who cooperate feeling safe with those with whom they're cooperating.  If you have a justifiable fear of the guy who sells you, say, beets, then you're going to be reluctant to deal with him - whether that's because you're afraid he's going to bite you as he turns into a zombie, sneeze at you because of VITAS III, or rob and kill you because you have money and are buying two whole tons worth of beets from him.  Exchange 'beets' for anything else - sugar, clean water, medicine, gasoline, or whatever catches your fancy - and the problem remains the same.  The issue is essentially identical if the modes of transportation (whether that's a port, a railyard, the trains, the oil pipeline, or lots of ships) are destroyed, except instead of 'won't', you have 'can't'.

It gets worse.  Your needs stay the same while the supply - both the local and the shipped supply - dwindles.  When the 'what we got in the cupboards' runs out in 3 or 5 days, people risk going out into the street to get food from the market.  When that runs out in a week - because people aren't shipping it, because the guys in the Port of New Orleans no longer trust the guys on the ship from Bahrain or where-ever else - then you have people raiding each other, robbing houses for food, heading out to local farms to raid them, etc.  Some coastal people will turn to piracy; despite modern concerns about piracy, if you compare tonnage shipped to tonnage arrived, we have a truly miniscule level of it in today's world.  Change that up, add in the fact that there are going to be bandits too - people will turn bandit in a heartbeat in order to get their hands on a food shipment if they're starving and (worse) they're watching their kids starve - and it just keeps going downhill.  Soon enough, it reaches the tipping point where it becomes much, much harder to turn the situation around; problem is, that point is usually reached before those in charge realize it.

Going off the standard pre-mechanized-farming ruler, it required 7 farmers to feed themselves and 3 town-dwellers - 7 farmers per 10 people, typically within 10-20 miles of the town or city (because you still have to move things, but now it's by horse).  As the fuel stops flowing (because most people don't live within 10 miles of an oil field and cracking plant), you have to return to pre-mechanized farming methods.  Me, I live in Atlanta; there are something like 7 million people here.  There are not, trust me, (7 million / 3 = 2.667 million * 7 =) 16.33 million farmers within, oh, a 50 mile radius of the 50-mile radius that is Metro Atlanta.

So, within weeks, Atlanta dies, and dies horribly, because gas and diesel won't get here, so food can't get here.

Repeat across continents.

Edit: Or, y'know, what farothel says so succinctly.  And yeah, I didn't even include 'natural' diseases from the corpses stacking up ...

[psycho835]

Based on Earthdawn descriptions this is what would likely happen. First you would have endless swarms ( literally endless ) of minor horrors and yes those would be fightable, and in the beginning they could be managed, but as the mana levels rose they would only grow bigger and stronger. Then the big ones would come, the ones that eats Mountains and levels forests, and while humanity were busy trying to fight these ones, the truly powerful and smart ones would move in secret, first they would take over a major country or mega corp ( Aztechnology seems to be in their sights or were at least ) through their horromarking and corrupting powers, technology would not stop them, as i said above, they already had a major Tech-Horror in the 4th age, the one known as artificer. The horrors are not just suppose to be understood as just the NeXT in a long line of spirits that don't mean well, they are supposed to be understood as Chaos personified, at least thats whats suggested in the dragon creation story from the Earthdawn Dragons book. The scourge would be an endless 300-400 year long war with no let up, no breaks to rest and replace losses...etc., so no, i don' see humanity winning this fight in the traditional sense, you win this fight by surviving and preserving as much as you can.

I don't disagree with your assessment - for the 4th World.  Move into the 5th, and thereby the 6th.  We went from developing gunpowder shells fired by cannon in the 1400s to bombs dropped by airplanes (themselves only first taking flight ten-twelve years earlier) in World War I to, only thirty years later, developing a single item capable of devastating a city.  That is, literally, 42 years worth of scientific development.  We're not talking another 42; we're not even talking 420.  We're talking scientific development in a span of time equivalent to that from the time of Christ until now, at the speed we're at now.

Do I feel there would be 'civilian bunkers'?  Sure.  I also think that there'd be no way in hell that any mass of humans at even this point in time would say 'all we can do is bunker up and hide out until they go away'.  In my Year 4000, there are strike craft built from steel refined from asteroidal iron, powered by nuclear furnaces fueled by hydrogen taken from Jupiter and Saturn, sealed by layered and coded Pattern Magic barriers, which launch themselves into the deep metaplanes and take the fight to the Horrors' homes, drop a solar-strength nuke right into Verjigorm's lap and sit there, fully protected, to ensure he's been permanently destroyed.

At their core, despite being 'chaos incarnate', Horrors don't change.  They can't change.  Oh, they alter their form, their psychology, but it is neither under their control nor an actual progression.  And at the time we're writing this, humanity has 'progression' figured out in a spade royal flush.  That is what Dunkelzahn realized; that's what many, many others, mostly mortal but some immortal, have come to understand, that humanity has gotten to the point where immortality and the long view is almost a handicap.  This is what Alamais died trying to counterprove.

Yes, FASA's core concept of the 6th World's peak was Earthdawn 2.0, and that at the 8th World Earth was a cinder, but I personally believe that to be a gross underestimation of the potential of a race that, less than seventy years after managing heavier-than-air flight, put two members of their race on their nearest extraplanetary body ...

*sheds manly tears* Chummer, that was beautiful.

Things that truly excell at turning people against each other and then sitting back and watching the show. But there's every chance that their agents will engineer a World war or two before we even get to the scourge event, just to tip Things more in their favor.

And that's when the runs change their aim to finding (and, occasionally, rooting out) Horror's mortal agents. Hell, a corrupted Johnson could be trying to get your team to sabotage metahumanity instead of just trying to screw you over.

As to seeking refuge on other planets, no such luck im afraid. Aetherology establishes that by travelling the Astral Sea you can actually travel to another World with no more problem than having to obtain the right directions as the Astral Sea touches every plane and every World all the time.

Damnit, I've missed that. Say, off the top of your head, does that include space stations?

So what places do you think would survive and which places would get wiped off the map?

Switzerland.

[Lighthouse]

My idea was that the places that would survive would do so in underground bunkers like the kaerns with underground food growing facilities, nuclear power, etc. Then when they reoppen after the mana drop they would expand to rudimentary traiding posts outsides (think like barter town)

[Sendaz]

Another place people might congregate at would be naturally occurring (or possibly artificially induced?) mana ebbs and foveae as these regions would be highly sought after because it would leave any Horror entering it pretty much like a fish out of water.

I admit I had always assumed Foveae were just a side effect of the warped magicks being done down in Aztlan, which shredded  the astral and leaving gaping astral holes.

But what if these had just been trial runs for a larger plan to create safe zones for the Aztech hi-ups and their lackeys to hole up in when the Big Bads came back?

Having a base to operate from that the enemy can't even enter without seriously hurting/destroying itself is never a bad thing.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

Well, since we were talking about what might bring a 'standard post-cataclysmic world' about, I answered your question in light of that discussion.  If you're talking post-Scourge, well - I think the Scourge would be in the opposite direction, myself.  The 'civilian bunkers', though, would certainly have some vague resemblance to kaers, though - internal power, food production, etc.

[Lighthouse]

I imainge they would be more corporate than civilian. Ooh I can see corporations coming up with ways to make fovae or mana ebbs surrounding there base but not centered in it so that the scourge would have to pass through it to get to them but they could use magic if they did.