The occasional mana spike that makes Horrors an issue, every fifty to a hundred years maaaybeee, can be a nice bit of spice, but for dealing with the Horrors in-their-totality-of-terribleness, well, that's something the Shadowrun writers of somewhere between 3,000 AD - 4,000 AD (in real life) will have to deal with (so long as the Shadowrun timeline keeps progressing along at current time + ~60 years. Even though the Horrors can be fun to talk about, imo.
Yeah, I can get passionate about it. I didn't mean to be such a dick.
Better to be a passionate dick that's open and known about than one that's lurking all Spanish Inquisition style
It's just that, yes, it doesn't strike me as a really big deal. There should be little things here and there, but I especially don't get the whole "Oh my God! They're going to be here RIGHT NOW if we don't do something!" That's just ... anticlimactic, for one thing. It's not in the cards. At least as far as I have ever seen it. I can't imagine the idea of us blowing up the world. And that's exactly what that would do. So it's just about as likely as Evil winning in any of these big comic book events. The world keeps rolling along because you can't change things like that.
But the bugs ... They're here, they're patient, and they don't stop coming. Ever.
Totally agree.
Little things, tiny little things, that are here and there,
Only after years, fighting hives o' the Bug
And toxic spirits of water, earth, air
The runners may glimpse what's under the rug.
They may perceive an extra eye or nine
In the mirror in the dead of the night.
Or a walking nightmare, the secret sign,
While murdering friends in a firefight.
Yet these are but gold moments in the sun.
Trifle worries; whispers born on the wind
Not ev'n hinting the massacre to come.
B'yond the pale o' every mortal who's sinned.
This is the horror that is in store, though
Not for you, for your children's children's marrow.
I'm also obsessed with the idea that virtually no one who encounters any ED artifacts knows what they are, or can do.
Snopes is quoted as saying, "The leading theory of magic is that it has a cyclical nature. Magic was part of the world, then it was not, now it is, and someday it will leave again." (CT pg 67). So at least, amongst magical academia, it is widely thought (hypothesized) that these magical artifacts come from the 4th world (or mana spikes in the 5th). But what meaning, significance, and magical-use is lost until cultural records surface (if ever) or an immortal in-the-know steps forward and makes public.
And like how the street will figure out it's own uses for everything, so will metahumanity figure out its own uses for whatever it finds. So ... Let's see what happens when people who know more about string theory than Barsaive take a look at this stuff.
I like that too. What happens when magical theorists bring to bear the computational power of a 2070 era super computer to run statistical and probability analysis of mana flow in and around an artifact, how is the mass-energy changed, etc. Ahhh, science and magic together at last
And how will the bugs use all of this to build a better hive
