The links are there, and shy of the Line Dev and every freelancer deciding to completely sever them, and no future Freelancer or Dev deciding to pick them back up>, they will always be around.
Hell, I've been having great fun slipping things into Missions and AU. I wouldn;t want it to overwhelm Shadowrun, but it's fun to have easter eggs and linttle things to make old players go "Hey, cool!"
It's a balancing act, to be sure, but so long as I'm involved with SR, the links will be around. Not used very often, to be sure, but they are there. It just doesn't control Shadowrun (and SR doesn't control it) anymore. So if Red Brick kills off the dragon that is supposed to become Lofwyr, no big deal. And if we decide to introduce something that's supposed to be from teh 4th age, we don't have to go looking at Earthdawn and RedBrick to see if it would have been possible. We're seperate realities now. So Shadowrun's past is "Earthdawn-3", with Red Brck being "Earthdawn 1" and Living Room Games being "Earthdawn 2" (Since they diverged a bit, and at one point were both developing a version of the game, LRG with 2nd edition, and RB with a revised 1st edition). Same source, but different worlds.
Bull
