So, what exactly Yama Kings are?

[Cypris Melaenis]

Are they Horrors? I imagine Kowloon is place where mana bleeds really badly (forgot the name of the mana measuring index from DF DC), a perfect place for Horrors to manifest themselves.

[Watchman]

Yama Kings have jack all to do with the Horrors, which have been kind of Put On A Bus in the PnP metastory anyway as IIRC the relevant IP isn't owned by the same company as the SR one these days.

In PnP canon the buggers are "just" particularly powerful Shadow Free Spirits preying on the hapless inhabitants of the Walled City - though on the plus side they're territorial enough that the Bugs haven't been able to get a foothold there unlike in most hellhole slums, as the Kings basically *eat* them when they try. (Although it's suspected in-universe, to the point of attracting Ares bughunter squads, that one of the Kings - Lam Vy the Ebon Queen - may be an aberrant Roach.) Estimates on their numbers range from ten to sixteen but reliable accounts are predictably scarce.

The HBS version is obviously different and more along the lines of classic FRPG demon lord types, but still a very far cry from the Horrors.

[Winter]

Maybe if the game took in another country/culture the Horror that appears may be based on that culture's mytha that said horror feels attracted to.

Yes the SR makers first tried to rationalize this as either humanity remembers magical things correctly in mythology because they are based on something we might have seen, or that some spirits appear the way they do because the summoner calls them with expectations that affect his formula/summoning. But that goes for spirits, not necessarily for horrors.

since they are so like metahumanity, i don't really like to accept them as serious horrors. maybe you are correct, perhaps they increase their empathic draining powers when they are attuned to their prey, so they adapt to culture, but i think i like Watchmans explanation better. But as i read, there is actually a distinction between "Free Spirit: Shadow" and uncategorized Shadowspirits, the latter were seen coming through the Bridges, and were asssumed to be helpers/agents of the horrors (i think they came through at the hawaii bridge, crater lake, the ghost dance bridge and the watergate rift).

[Watchman]

Note that "vanguard" spirits (one notes that the 5th ed Street Grimoire has arbitrarily changed this term to mean free spirits on a vigilante gig against perceived abusers of spirits) from the Deep Metaplanes like Insect Spirits and Shedim are wholly independent of metahuman cultural paradigms, unlike spirits summoned by magicians. (Autochtonous "wild" spirits are debatable as it can be argued they're the *source* of many such paradigms.) There would seem to be preciously little reason to think the even more fundamentally alien Horrors would cared a jot more of human belief patterns, except inasmuch the cannier examples could exploit them.

Also "Shadow" is just a classification category for the kinds of Free Spirits that actively prey on metahumanity in some fashion (much of it has to do with the peculiar relationship Free Spirits have with Karma in PnP). Also note that Qian Ya's servitor critters are purely a HBS creation already at the conceptual level - "minion spirits" wouldn't even make much sense under the PnP Karma dynamics.

İlk olarak Winter tarafından gönderildi:

But as i read, there is actually a distinction between "Free Spirit: Shadow" and uncategorized Shadowspirits, the latter were seen coming through the Bridges, and were asssumed to be helpers/agents of the horrors (i think they came through at the hawaii bridge, crater lake, the ghost dance bridge and the watergate rift).

[citation needed] as I don't recall reading of such. Unless you mean the Shedim, which are certainly bad news all around and indubitably hostile to metahumanity but AFAIK have never even been hinted to have any connection to the Horrors.

[Jorjor Wel 1984]

İlk olarak Watchman tarafından gönderildi:

Yama Kings have jack all to do with the Horrors, which have been kind of Put On A Bus in the PnP metastory anyway as IIRC the relevant IP isn't owned by the same company as the SR one these days.

Horrors are still, in everything but name, mentioned in SRR:DF Directors Cut.
Especially the bad ending in which you help spread the virus that makes all the dragons die and another scourge occurs, because the dragons are the only thing keeping them at bay. Absinthe even references the previous scourge, alebeit indirectly, and how it occurs when mana peaks

So just because they can't be called "horrors" anymore due to IP shennanigans doesn't disqualify Yama Kings from being said horrors.

[Winter]

True Medicine Peddler. I think as long as they sacrifice human life to corrupt and feast, they can be called (minor) horrors. But for IE and Great Dragons, they needed to be a great enough threat to be taken seriously. i think that was most clearly uttered in the atzlan sourcebook on the part of state religion, where they tried to hurry the arrival of the tzizimine.

Thank you Watchman, very interesting. Yes, i doubt they'd care for beliefs unless they could exploit those, which they need to do as long as their influence and power is as limited as it is right now. Anyway, the term vanguard is already quite suggestive, isn't it?

Seems like those shadowy spirits that sometimes slipped through have been called Wraiths (among others), just like Miaos/Craftys mother called them in HK, and have been classified as shadow spirits in 2070 (i guess thats in street grimoire). Wraiths have been called harbingers of the horrors and sometimes even minor horrors (i think in the barsaive book).

citations for novels (triology of power, worlds without ends, house of the sun, perhaps just compensation and those about the bridge) may take long since i don't have them here:
- watergate rift (in 2061) see year of the comet p.58: "but they had some bone-numbing "I'm going to chew away your sanity" feel that made most folks just steer clear..." "In Ghostwalkers wake.. "right behind it came a big, boiling mass of more spirits. There were all kinds - at least half of which I'd also never encountered. " Two pages earlier, p.56, the first spirits that got through the rift are described as "nebulous and amoeboid, fainter than most apparitions" which +- = wraith, which fits the big hysteria theme in yotc.
- Harleqins warning against Wraiths in paranormal animals of europe, pl.shadowrun.wikia.com/wiki/Earthdawn states under the Wraith description, the netter -H- (an abbreviation that Harlequin has used in the past) says "Kill these Horrors whenever you encounter them. They are Evil, if anything is." -H- also says that the Wraiths will be just the fore- runners of something much worse if Earth cannot stem the tide now.
- In the Earthdawn rules, in the history of Barsaive section, descriptions given of the Signs of the Scourge describe mist-like wraith beings driving men to violence against one another, which matches exactly the description and powers of the Shadowrun Wraith.

About the Novels:

- In the Secrets of Power trilogy, book 3, in "Find your own truth", sam accidentally releases something that masquerades as a spider totem, but does not behave as a totem at all, but seems to share similarities with your Ebony Queen. The citadel was prison for evil things from before, along with that big one, other smaller things esquape, also that guy whose hand turns scary.

- In "Worlds without end" p.226: 'more recently, caimbeul told me about the encounter at mauii where the enemy actually managed to get through.'
At crater lake she looses controll. on p.246, six months after the event, she comes home and her telecom is overflowing with newscasts big D sent her. "..about unrelated events.. scattered around [many, many places of] the world.. Mostly they were about random occurances of mania. a woman goes crazy and kills her children. there is no explanation and she doesn't remember the event even happening. later, she takes her own life, scrawling images of obscene monsters in her own blood on the prison walls. .. A shaman loses controll of a spell. ten people are killed, including the shaman.a witness says it looked like the shaman had changed into something else before the spell went out of controll. there were more. each told a similiar tale." there is a note from dunkelzahn: "Aina. in light of our last conversation (about the plot of the book, that the horrors are coming back), i thought these might be of interest to you. by the way, i have been keeping track of these things, and on the night you told me about (where she used all her power and blood magic) there was a spike at crater lake." implying that on that night, wraith/shadow spirit might have slipped through causing all this.

As far as this goes, at least i take it that potent shadow spirits are a valid form for YK.

[Watchman]

İlk olarak The Medicine Peddler tarafından gönderildi:

Horrors are still, in everything but name, mentioned in SRR:DF Directors Cut.
Especially the bad ending in which you help spread the virus that makes all the dragons die and another scourge occurs, because the dragons are the only thing keeping them at bay. Absinthe even references the previous scourge, alebeit indirectly, and how it occurs when mana peaks

So just because they can't be called "horrors" anymore due to IP shennanigans doesn't disqualify Yama Kings from being said horrors.

DF is pretty unambiguous in the Bad End, and IIRC straight up calls them by name. And there's no particular shortage of details disqualifying even the HBS version of the Yama Kings from being the same thing, like now for starters the fact that Qian Ya is actively and specifically attempting to bar others of its kind from crossing over. The MO is also quite different; the Yamas are basically parasites and for all their unpleasantness specifically do NOT seek the death of their victims, as that rather stops them from being useful energy sources anymore. The Horrors conversely are pretty much out to wipe out all sentient life on the planet, and possibly just plain all complex life.

There's also a notable and telling lack of Great Dragon and Immortal interest in the Yamas - and this despite one of the former being a patron of one of HK's major Triads... and those guys sat up and took notice of already the quite unrelated Bugs just because the critters turned up far sooner than expected (thanks to Great Ghost Dance shenanigans having inadverdently helped narrow the dimensional gap).

[Watchman]

@ Winter: note that canonically in PnP Wraiths are just a particular form of parasitic spirit that derives sustenance and power from the violence and mayhem their victims cause. Could be retcon but them's the breaks. Also they were obviously around long before the major bad-news astral rifts formed since PNAoE predates those by quite a few years so eh...

And the description of the weirdness coming out of the Watergate Rift largely matches the Shedim, and IIRC that's a major entry point for them - both the run-of the mill kind and the much more dangerous Master type. The rest could be any number of deep-metaplane weirdness of varying hostility to metahumanity. There's no shortage of inimical quasi-Lovecraftian or just predatory things out there after all.

Also do I remember wrong or isn't it kind of specifically noted that Horrors are *not* spirits at all but basically would turn up very much corporeal if the brown stuff hit the fan? Certainly the only beings positively identified to be of their kind in the actual game sourcebooks, Mr. Darke's freakish servant creatures (IIRC somewhere observed to be "Horror Constructs" whatever that now means), are that way.

[Watchman]

İlk olarak Winter tarafından gönderildi:

I think as long as they sacrifice human life to corrupt and feast, they can be called (minor) horrors, and SR:DF is a good source for that.

I hope you realise this covers literally every predatory type of spirit - and arguably a lot of the HMHVV I Infected AKA vampires, particularly Wendigos who tend to have a peculiar obsession with creating cannibal cults around themselves* - and as such is much too wide a definition to be of any taxonomic use. This is using the word "horror" in a purely figurative sense, not in the lore-specific Horror-with-capital-H meaning to which it is totally unrelated.


* though ironically every individual one that actually appears in the sourcebooks I've read is a recluse...

[Honzou]

Well not every predatory being in SR is a monstrosity from another dimension (actual dimension and not next door dimension). Also Wendigos may enjoy making cannibal cults, but comparing a Wendigo to a Yama King as a horror is like comparing a hotwheels' toy car to an Abraham tank.

[Watchman]

Yes that was kind of the point. Plus AFAIK Horrors aren't so much "predatory" as "omnicidal" so, yeah.

And the the difference between the cults many Wendigos compulsively try to set up and the "courts" of the Yamas is merely one of scale and specifics of methodology, not of fundamental purpose.

[Winter]

I realize that, you are right, the definition was too broad. i didn't include metahuman variants and the infected on purpose. as for shadow spirits, there will be many that are not horror pawns, but some that are, and that work incessantly to rush in their arrival. note that manifest wraiths sometimes appear as (grim) reapers, and QY has at least her scythe-like arms as a similarity. but true again, if QY was wraith and they come mainly in a smaller size, that wouldn't make sense. so maybe a kind of bigger shadow spirit, or the quasi-Lovecraftian type as you state, then.

Where did you find that they cannot be spirits? Afaik horrors are not necessarily always corporeal, many lurked in the astral in earthdawn, but i think more were often described as dual natured.

YK not seeking the death of their victims does not exclude them from being horrors. when true horrors were trapped inside parlainth, they even had to create more namegivers to stall their frustration and boredom (on missing out on the fun during the height of the scourge). Other horrors also had the YK MO. many of the big ones with their horror marks are also even bigger parasites, they were especially not trying to erase all life. omnicide was more the MO of the main part of the scourge. if you go way up the ladder, dragons and horrors both are said to claim right to creation myths (i think in legends of earthdawn sourcebook1)

Honzou, can you recommend good books to get into the WH - Tyranid Lore? Sounds interesting.

[Honzou]

Most of the Lord in WH 40k comes from the codexes which are the army books for the tabletop game and the novels.

My suggestion that you visit the Lexicanum website and/or WH40K wikis site. They are rich sources of lore.

[Jorjor Wel 1984]

We also need to bring up the fact that she apparently was unable to be killed, something that would put her above even the great dragons (who, as DFs bad ending shows, can in fact be killed).

Considering she was such a stickler for treaties, exact words, pacts, and such, I doubt she was lying about the "effectively immortal" part.

[Honzou]

Technically YK can lie according Crafty's mom notes. The notes imply that all YK will lie to anyone who doesn't know the rules, but should a person know the rules then the YK is bound to abide by the "rules" this is something similar to "words to have power" concept.

Basically it is an intricate system that the YK seem to abide on a "primal" level.

[Winter]

No, that wouldn't put her above a Dragon. We were able to harm her with Handguns, so that puts her (at this time) below Bug and other Spirits, because they have immunity to weapons. She showed regeneration which lowly vampires and others have. The runners were able to exhaust her after two regenerations. A Great Dragon, or magicians able to attune to the background count or filtering would have shredded her.

with the better endings, it just seems that she fled because she was scared of her siblings, no matter how whe haggled. you could mess up saving raymond by semantics, even when you know you have her cornered, so that is no proof of adherence to (arbitrary) rules. there is really no reason to believe that she doesn't lie all the time.

Thx for the WH sites, will have a look.