[DeathStrobe]

In Never Deal With a Dragon and The Sixth World Almanac refer to Haesslich as a Great Dragon.

The American and German wikis say he's an adult. I know wikis are not exactly the most reliable. But an adult dragon seems feasible for a Shadowrun team to kill, while a Great Dragon...is not as believable.

So was he reconned into an adult dragon or did Twist and company get really lucky?

[Mirikon]

You assume, of course, that Hasslich is actually dead. Dragons, even adult dragons, are tricky creatures. In Never Deal With a Dragon, we saw him hurt, badly, and fall into a river. We didn't see a body, and we sure didn't see whether any spirits came by to pull him out of the drink off camera. Remember how Sirrurg was hauled off by spirits in front of the whole Aztlan army? A dragon on Lofwyr's level could easily do the same without alerting one team of runners. We did see him taking a metahuman form in the novel, though there are spells that can replicate that. So yes, chalk it up to 'the runners got lucky' and 'Lofwyr in the background'.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

DeathStrobe, you hit upon the crux of the matter: officialdom and fandom.

Officially, Haesslich is/was a Great Dragon.  Therefore, officially, he is (or was) a Great Dragon; period, full stop.

Fandom, on the other hand (and me amongst them) gets divided into two camps on this: Great or Not Great?  The wiki articles, I have no doubt, had edit wars over this very thing, and it boils down to one question that the fans try to answer:

Could a Vindicator Minigun LMG kill Haesslich?

There are issues with answering either way on this, of course.  "Yes, it could."  Then this makes Haesslich either a) the single most dumb-ass stupid Great Dragon out there, because you had better not think that when Aden came off Ararat and punked Tehran into the New Dark Ages, the Iranians just sat there and let him do it; see Ghostwalker's first arrival in Denver (Year of the Comet) for exactly what a Great Dragon on a city-wide rampage is going to be doing, and you can bet that Iranian fighter jets and tanks and jeeps with pintle mounts were all going to be trying to engage him, which really doesn't jive with what we know by three examples (Aden, Ghostwalker, and Sirrurg in Aztlan) a Great Dragon can do; or b) Haesslich simply didn't possess that level of competence and power, which means that he wasn't a Great Dragon, and the official statement of 'he was a Great Dragon' is wrong.

But officially, he was a Great Dragon.  That means he must have possessed somewhere around the same sort of level of competence and power as Aden, Ghostwalker, Sirrurg - hell, even the newest-of-newbie-Great-Dragons, Masaru, can take on several of the world's superpowers (i.e. Japanacorps) in essentially an extended war and win.  So then the answer has to be "No, it couldn't."  Which means that, well, Haesslich has been laying low for most of three decades - probably because all the other Great Dragons, and even a lot of adult dragons, are snickering up their sleeves when he shows up at dragon parties saying, "Hi guys!!  Guess what happened to me today!!"  So he's embarrassed, and pouting in his room.  Or hey, maybe he's just catching up on his reading and stock manipulation, y'know?

The real problem, of course, comes - came - down to the out-of-world situation: the early writers did not have a really solid grasp of the game, and Predator had just come out with its cool minigun 'look, I chop down JUNGLES for fun' scene, so they figured, 'hey, yeah, sure a minigun is going to punch through dragon armor.'  You know - if a single frickin' arrow can kill Smaug, imagine him facing heavy autofire!!  It might possibly be the single most glaring failure-of-concept issue in the early years of the game.  And because Shadowrun is essentially a persistently-developing world over the last going-on-three decades, it becomes a legacy point of irritation.

Or a point of plot.  Watch your back, shoot straight, conserve ammo, and ....

[Mirikon]

As Wyrm says, the, basic idea is that there were early 'issues' with authors not being fully up on the rules, so things that were cool and badass went through regardless of the rules. Which I say the best way to make it all make sense is that Hasslich is not dead. A minigun at close range could hurt a Great Dragon (if they were good), but not kill him. We never saw a body, so assume he's alive, and been laying low for all these years. Remember, it is a lot harder for any enemies (like Lofwyr) to hunt you when the world at large thinks you're dead.

[Wakshaani]

My personal take, which isn't official word mind you, is that he was a lesser dragon with delusions of grandeur. He might have *said* he was a Great Dragon, but when push came to shove, he didn't have that kind of power and fell prey to a simple Vindicator. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

Which would be one of the arguments - and a very good one - on the 'H was not a Great, and a Vindie could kill him, and so he's a dead dragon' side of the debate.

... it could be neat to go back through all the stuff, read up, and pick out bits and pieces of 'unassociated' stuff that you can build into a Great Dragon's master plan, write it up, and publish it with the 'Return of Haesslich'. 

[Mirikon]

With the Orange Queen acting as a the Johnson, or perhaps a 'specialist' brought in to help the runners?

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

Ewww.  No.  Just ... no.  Hestaby committed a major breach in draconic social structure; she took a private disagreement very, very public.  Even though it's not open season on her, damn near every Great Dragon in the world is gonna laugh in her face and tell her to sod off.

If anything, Haesslich might be the GD she's gone to for succor ...

[Mirikon]

I don't quite read Hestaby's exile the same way you do, Wyrm. While that is one possible (and indeed likely) scenario, It doesn't mean it is the only likely one. Dragons have, for some time now, understood the need for deniable assets, especially those with skills and ability. Hestaby's exile reads to me much like a good third of the runner origin stories out there. I would not be that surprised to see Hestaby entering the shadows as a go-between for the dragons and the young races, or entering the shadows to continue her agenda. Just because she's exiled and her main hoard was stripped from her doesn't mean she is powerless or without resources. And anything she does is removed from dragon society, since she's exiled... As I said, it is one of the basic runner origin stories, or like any corporate Johnson who doesn't exist on paper as anything but a series of bank accounts they use for their 'work'.

[Namikaze]

A dragon's hoard is far more than just material wealth.  We don't have mechanics on this process, but the dragon's power level seems to be somehow directly affected by the "size" of the dragon's hoard.  Having it stripped from her, along with her standing among the dragons, is tantamount to a full-blown exile.  Penniless, friendless, powerless.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

Mechanics, no - but we have a very, very good idea of what and how.

In the GD's little 'Trial of Position' it's implied strongly in several places (and no, I'm not going to go back, re-read, and give you page paragraph and line) that the items in a dragon's hoard are memory keys, if not outright memory storage 'devices'.  The Crystal (Gem?  whatever) of Memory that the Big D gave to Gold Snout, and which is the final target in 'Survival of the Fittest' appears to be exactly that, with thoughts, records, notes, etc. of Great Dragons and Loremasters past.  As I recall, this information is mentioned when the PCs are going after the Silver Songbird, infiltrating Rhonabwy's lair.  Considering a lifetime of several thousands of years awake, having a way to key or back up thoughts, ideas, and the like is a really good idea.

Raiding a lair in part would mean that you're actually taking away portions of their memory - or at least making it much harder for them to recall that information ...

[Wakshaani]

She's hitchhiking down the coast of Big Sur, playing Hackey Sack and practicing her fire-hooping.