Shadowrun
Shadowrun General => The Secret History => Topic started by: Aria on <05-01-12/1231:06>
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Other than the information in Black Madonna is there anything else in canon on the immortal elf Leonardo? I know he was responsible for the sudden burst in Renraku’s advances (and if I’m getting my timeline right) which led onto them creating Deus. He had an 'optical' cyberdeck that could easily beat corp IC of the time.
Any info welcome…I’m sure there’s another mention of him somewhere but I can’t think where I’ve seen it. Does he go by another name too??? Anyone recall what his servant was called?
I might be misremembering but did Lofwyr chastise him at some point for interfering in the status quo? That could have been someone else entirely of course…!
Thanks
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Leonardo also appears in the last chapter of Technobabel, where he encounters Lofwyr (retconning the elve as only a Leonardo da Vinci admirer and poser). Blood in the Boardroom, in "Neck and Neck", also what he does in the period between the end of Black Madonna and the end of Technobabel.
"Leonardo"'s Matrix alias is Brightlight. And the servant's name is Salai (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sala%C3%AC).
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He is mentioned by the people Dunkie brought together to read Aztlan several times.
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He's also mentioned in one of the Arcology adventure notes somewhere-or-another; the Arcology room mentioned in Dunkelzahn's will is actually a virtual one, a monitoring station for the SCIRE matrix to watch for a developing AI. Renraku itself is/was unaware of its existence, because their pet IE (Leonardo the twit) built it for himself.
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I have a couple pet theories about Leo, the big one is that he was supposed to be Quicksilver from Project Imago but some wires got crossed somewhere and he either wasn't supposed to be dead in the adventure or the author of the novel didn't realize Quicksilver was dead.
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Or it wouldn't be the first time that someone who was thought to be dead turned out not to be. Remember, there are different levels of 'dead'.
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Or it wouldn't be the first time that someone who was thought to be dead turned out not to be. Remember, there are different levels of 'dead'.
I'm trying to remember how many levels of "Dead" my old group had...
I mean, hell, they completely nuked (literally!) one guy who came back.
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I have a couple pet theories about Leo, the big one is that he was supposed to be Quicksilver from Project Imago but some wires got crossed somewhere and he either wasn't supposed to be dead in the adventure or the author of the novel didn't realize Quicksilver was dead.
You mean the adventure "Imago", the absolute worst 'players-don't-matter' piece of crap railroading adventure it has ever been my distasteful task to read through. Sargent should never have been allowed to put pen to paper for Shadowrun -- same with Marc Gascoigne, and putting them together on products was kind of like saying "Oh, sorry, we thought we had a product we WANTED to sell."
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I'd apologize, but I'm really, really not sorry. The worst crap that has ever been published for Shadowrun, bar none, was written by one, the other, or both of them.
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There's an adventure worse than Burn (http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/99649/Shadowrun%3A-Mission%3A-04-07%3A-Burn)?
I don't feel so bad now. ;D
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Not just one.
And sourcebooks. "Oh, the players can't understand it. You can let them try if you want, but nobody can, 'cause he wuz a JENYUS!!!!11lolz!!oneone!!!"
I've read Gascoigne's stuff otherwhere, and it's okay, so I guess I have to place the blame on Sargent for the rampaging juggernaut of disastermonster that are their products ...
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Not just one.
Now I'm blanking. What else did he.they do?
(Imago being the single adventure I couldn't enjoy, mind you.)
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They wrote some novels, the Serrin ones iirc. Can't remember off the top of my head what else they did.
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i think they did the london sb iirc
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Together:
Novels: Streets of Blood, Nosferatu, and Black Madonna.
Sourcebooks: London, Tir na nOg, Prime Runners
Adventures: Celtic Double Cross
Alone:
Sargent: Imago
IIRC, Black Madonna is the first introduction of Leonardo; I may be wrong. I suspect that Sargent is to blame for most of the crap, but that's just me.
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Streets of Blood was good. Nosferatu was a bit harder to swallow, especially a bunch of high-end 'runners taking on an African feral child of sorts.
But I guess Serrin needed to have a reason to go batdrek insane after Crash 2.0, eh? ;D
Black Madonna... Yeah, not so much.
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For me, Prime Runners was my first real exposure to a sourcebook that at one glance-through was for years the prime example of how NOT to put a game book together.
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Does it mean London and Tir NaNog are also "That" reliable? Since both those books seem to be quite important for European runners...
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The lack of quality re: London, Germany, and TNO are, as I recall, significant reasons as to why Shadows of Europe became a product.
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The London Sourcebook still makes me want to punch myself in the face repeatedly whenever I notice it on my shelf. Its treatment of London, and the UK in general, is...not good.
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Imago, Celtic DOuble Cross, London (With lots of Druid stuff), Prime Runners (More druid and Welsh stuff), Tir na Nog ... he loved him some celtic stuff, I do believe.
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So do I well that London s..t was really creepy even for Celtic lover...
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I didn't mind the Celtic stuff. I mean, you get down to it, the British Isles are rooted firmly in Celtic traditions -- Anglos and Saxons and Romans and Norse, etc. are all newcomers. Any pre-5th-World stuff would carry forward into Celtic traditions, so it isn't that I mind.
It's the problem of 'bigger and better', on top of the issues of 'okay, so if the players don't want to go this way, shoot them in the head and bury them on the heath'. Imago is the worst I've ever read through or played through; I haven't read Celtic Double-Cross through, so I don't know if it's actually worse. But in Imago, if you don't go along with the railroading, you get ***ked six ways from Sunday, and he does this to you at every turn.
For the sourcebooks (TNO and London), it's like they decided that everything there had to be better than anywhere else in the world. The mages were more powerful and more advanced. The disasters were bigger and deadlier and more destructive. There are (count 'em, at least 3) more Great Dragons per square mile. Never mind the fact that there are SO many places that are at least, if not more, historied than those comparatively small islands in the North Atlantic...
Just makes me want to shoot them both.
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I didn't mind the Celtic stuff. I mean, you get down to it, the British Isles are rooted firmly in Celtic traditions -- Anglos and Saxons and Romans and Norse, etc. are all newcomers. Any pre-5th-World stuff would carry forward into Celtic traditions, so it isn't that I mind.
It's the problem of 'bigger and better', on top of the issues of 'okay, so if the players don't want to go this way, shoot them in the head and bury them on the heath'. Imago is the worst I've ever read through or played through; I haven't read Celtic Double-Cross through, so I don't know if it's actually worse. But in Imago, if you don't go along with the railroading, you get ***ked six ways from Sunday, and he does this to you at every turn.
For the sourcebooks (TNO and London), it's like they decided that everything there had to be better than anywhere else in the world. The mages were more powerful and more advanced. The disasters were bigger and deadlier and more destructive. There are (count 'em, at least 3) more Great Dragons per square mile. Never mind the fact that there are SO many places that are at least, if not more, historied than those comparatively small islands in the North Atlantic...
Just makes me want to shoot them both.
Celtic Double-Cross almost made me quit rpgs. It was the most painful adventure I'd ever been involved in. There is no way (in my mind) that anybody could have figured out what to do in that adventure. The GM let me read it after I flipped out, I didn't believe he wasn't intentionally screwing us over until I had.
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The whole "my place has to be bigger and badder than yours" seems to have permeated all the various regional books. Hell, it may well be a RPG curse of sorts. Hell, i was tempted down that path while participating in the early fan work on the Norwegian part of what became Shadows of Europe (in the end it ended up as a variation on the online fanfiction/location book for SR, merging the nations into some kind of grand union).
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So... I should write a sourcebook on Winnipeg and actually have it be a nice place with only one Barrens?
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One very big one? ;)
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So... I should write a sourcebook on Winnipeg and actually have it be a nice place with only one Barrens?
That would be cool actually. Some place new, it would be a smuggling haven with polite police and road signs. ;D
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Polite police? Road signs?
Hell, we don't have that TODAY. Forget in Shadowrun!
... The winds are too hard for road signs.
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The whole "my place has to be bigger and badder than yours" seems to have permeated all the various regional books. Hell, it may well be a RPG curse of sorts. Hell, i was tempted down that path while participating in the early fan work on the Norwegian part of what became Shadows of Europe (in the end it ended up as a variation on the online fanfiction/location book for SR, merging the nations into some kind of grand union).
in fact, after reading my country entry in SOtE I thought, that it was written by some technohippie idiot with horizont set by the inside of pub window. Well, it was the only one who puts some efforts and aas able top get in touch with developers, so I cannot criticise that much. If you want it better, DIY, like old uncle Leary sayz.
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Which country is that?
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Czech republic
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Polite police? Road signs?
Hell, we don't have that TODAY. Forget in Shadowrun!
... The winds are too hard for road signs.
Could have sworn I saw one when I was up there :-\
Maybe it was blowing through, I do know it was polite though :D
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I wont be too hard on them about England and Ireland. But that is because thoses island are supposed to be such a strong Elven place in the 4th world and we just dont know how the IE-Dragon war ended in the 4th world.
More Great Dragon here could be simply that before going to sleep the Dragons put some of their younger and more actives brethren to stay i the area and keep a look on the stronger IE settlement since BloodWood demise and Theran diaspora...