NEWS

What was Dunklezhan doing for 30 years?

  • 6 Replies
  • 6101 Views

Fredo

  • *
  • Newb
  • *
  • Posts: 4
« on: <01-25-18/1334:10> »
Dunklezhan pops up in 2012 at Cherry Creek Lake, Denver, CO.  Either he came up there or he came up somewhere else and decided to take a nap there - I've seen both suggested.

Wyrm Talk starts in 2042.

Anyone know what he was doing for those 30 years?



He moved to Lake Louise in 2014(?) and created a lair.  I don't know if he had one there previously and just built the outside complex or not.

He started trading a fruitcake with Alamais in 2020.

John Timmons, his first Interpreter, gets killed in 2022.

He chooses Terri Ann Riberio as his interpreter in 2028.

He helped Damien Knight on the Nanosecond Buyout in 2033.

He meets Nadja Daviar in 2039 at an art show.

What else do we know about his actions during that time period?


Quote
To Art Dankwalther, I leave the sum of 34,586,224,739.58 in UCAS dollars. According to my calculations and accounting for conversion of the original currency, inflation, and 1 percent interest per annum, this settles my debt to your ancestor for the gold piece he kindly lent me for the last meal we shared.
Has anyone attempted to calculate when this occurred?

lokii

  • *
  • Chummer
  • **
  • Posts: 189
« Reply #1 on: <01-25-18/1527:41> »
Well, basically what a great dragon does. Think of him as a billionaire with wings.

Do you know this article originally published in the Dragon Magazine: http://web.archive.org/web/20040405120258/http://shadowrunrpg.com/fiction/fiction3.shtml

The Lake Louise lair was built from 2023-2028.

Quote
To Art Dankwalther, I leave the sum of 34,586,224,739.58 in UCAS dollars. According to my calculations and accounting for conversion of the original currency, inflation, and 1 percent interest per annum, this settles my debt to your ancestor for the gold piece he kindly lent me for the last meal we shared.

Has anyone attempted to calculate when this occurred?

Hm, it could be an easter egg but "accounting for conversion of the original currency" and "inflation" (based on what?) makes the result very flexible.

Osentalka

  • *
  • Newb
  • *
  • Posts: 12
« Reply #2 on: <01-25-18/1621:29> »
Quote
To Art Dankwalther, I leave the sum of 34,586,224,739.58 in UCAS dollars. According to my calculations and accounting for conversion of the original currency, inflation, and 1 percent interest per annum, this settles my debt to your ancestor for the gold piece he kindly lent me for the last meal we shared.
Has anyone attempted to calculate when this occurred?

Isn't sometime back in the 4th World? I guess I assume it was during the last time Dunk walked the other earth.

The Wyrm Ouroboros

  • *
  • Prime Runner
  • *****
  • Posts: 4470
  • I Have Taken All Shadowrun To Be My Province
« Reply #3 on: <01-26-18/1929:29> »
Quote
To Art Dankwalther, I leave the sum of 34,586,224,739.58 in UCAS dollars. According to my calculations and accounting for conversion of the original currency, inflation, and 1 percent interest per annum, this settles my debt to your ancestor for the gold piece he kindly lent me for the last meal we shared.
Has anyone attempted to calculate when this occurred?
Isn't sometime back in the 4th World? I guess I assume it was during the last time Dunk walked the other earth.

Essentially that's what it should be.  However, while the interest might seem to be the key figure (going by just 1% interest compounded annually, a penny ($0.01) will reach the above sum ($34,586,224,739.58) in 'only' 2900 years), it's the inflation that's the screwball.

While prices can change, value tends to remain roughly the same, unless something major occurs to increase or decrease the availability of the item*.  Inflation, on the other hand, seems to occur because the value of an item (e.g. a weight of gold) is disconnected entirely from the money used to purchase it (in this example, a dollar).  Conversion of the original currency (1gp --> ?? dollars) is, likely, a simple 'purchase price' -- how much gold did 'a gold piece' contain, and working from there.  After that, though, the inflation of a currency uncoupled to any sort of solid commodity (such as gold, silver, plutonium, whatever) kicks in -- hard.

The ]dollar price of an ounce of gold in 1792 (when the US dollar was first minted) was $19.39, and remained the same until 1833, when it increased to $20.67 -- where it essentially remained (with variation before, during, and after the US Civil war) until FDR moved the US off the gold standard in 1933, and the price started to slowly rise.  Even then it didn't see a radical rise (from $44.60) until after 1971, when Nixon took the US off the silver standard as well, essentially unpegging US$ from any physical item, and instead to the reliability of the US economy.  As of the writing of this comment, the price of gold is $1360.80 per ounce, which functionally makes for average inflation (compounded yearly) from 1971 to 2018 of roughly 7.713678%.

I'd say that while the interest may not have been compounded, since inflation is pegged to the economy, that was what really kicked in, so let's figure it out from there, using that perfectly reasonable yearly inflationary increase.  We need to divide the amount ($34,586,224,739.58) by 1 + our 'overall' yearly inflation rate (7.713678%, so 107.713678%), for every year from the year Dunkelzahn died (9 August 2057) backwards to the year the UCAS dollar was minted (15 October 2030).

Because I'm an American, I'm going to be arrogant and decide that the (reduced) US economy in 2030 was somewhat stronger than the (reduced) Canadian economy, and since the two currencies have always been relatively near each other (within 25% of the USD value), let's just say that when the UCASD was minted, they said, '$1 USD = $1UCASD'.  This allows us to roll our inflation rate all the way back to 1971, where we have solid 'generally un-Shadowruned' (yes, I used Shadowrun as a verb) financial history.  This results in a 1971 conversion of X ounces of gold into USD: $58,024,255.62 worth.  Since we know the price of gold at the end of the year then ($44.60), we convert this into 1,300,992.28 ounces of gold - over 40 US tons!!

At this point we need to decide the weight of the original 'gold piece'.  For these, we need to use grams; 28.3495 grams per ounce.  Having done some research on this for a campaign/book idea, at the $44.60 cost, a 2.67-gram 'mite' (roughly 1/10 oz., smaller than a dime) gp will cost $4.20, a 6.68-gram 'dime' (roughly 1/4 ounce) will cost $10.50, and a 13.34-gram 'nickel' (roughly 1/2 ounce) will cost $20.99.  We're really only interested in the gram-weight, though, and we'll divide our total gram-weight (ounces *  28.3495 = grams) by those numbers to find out how many gp we have: 97,523.56 nickels, 194,870.63 dimes, or 487,320.22 mites.

Compounded interest gives us times on these of the years 815, 746, and 654, respectively; incremental interest (+1 = 100 years) gives us ... very unlikely times, at 9,752,365 years for the 'nickel'.  Increasing the weight reduces the time to compound the value, but even having a huge coin (half again the size of a silver dollar) at non-compounded 1%-of-original-weight interest still keeps the timespan in the millions of years.

In short, the writer picked a ludicrous number, and made up some complicated-sounding BS to say 'what the heck' and left it at that.


* - A good example of this is aluminum, which was once a fabulously expensive thing; Napoleon and Josephine were immensely wealthy for having an entire set of   aluminum tableware.  When the techniques were developed for cheap extraction of the metal, well -- recycleable aluminum cans.  If you're going back far enough in time, take an aluminum snow shovel with you.  Wealthy!!!!
Pananagutan & End/Line

Old As McBean, Twice As Mean
"Oh, gee - it's Go-Frag-Yourself-O'Clock."
New Wyrm!! Now with Twice the Bastard!!

Laés is ... I forget. -PiXeL01
Play the game. Don't try to win it.

Marcus

  • *
  • Prime Runner
  • *****
  • Posts: 2802
  • Success always demands a greater effort.
« Reply #4 on: <02-04-18/2137:44> »
What ever the heck he wanted, he's was a dragon!!  :'(
*Play-by-Post color guide*
Thinking
com
speaking

Mirikon

  • *
  • Prime Runner
  • *****
  • Posts: 8986
  • "Everybody lies." --House
« Reply #5 on: <02-05-18/0342:29> »
Big D was a planner and a manipulator of the highest order. You don't get to that level without doing your research and prep work. You got to get the lay of the land, convert treasure from your hoard into something less distinctive to make investments with so you can hide your actions behind a shell corporation or a hundred, and so on. Sure, having the hoard makes the set up work easier, but you still have to do the work so that you can be the one manipulating things from behind the scenes, and you have to know who to manipulate and how.
Greataxe - Apply directly to source of problem, repeat as needed.

My Characters

The Wyrm Ouroboros

  • *
  • Prime Runner
  • *****
  • Posts: 4470
  • I Have Taken All Shadowrun To Be My Province
« Reply #6 on: <02-05-18/1959:18> »
Yeah -- don't judge the Big D by some arbitrary number used by the writer.
Pananagutan & End/Line

Old As McBean, Twice As Mean
"Oh, gee - it's Go-Frag-Yourself-O'Clock."
New Wyrm!! Now with Twice the Bastard!!

Laés is ... I forget. -PiXeL01
Play the game. Don't try to win it.