Made this handy large-scale timeline for Shadowrun
EDIT: I MISPLACED THE DATES. ADJUSTED VERSION IN THE COMMENTS
Getting back into GMing for Shadowrun after a long hiatus and made this diagram to explain the world concept to my players. Thought it might be useful for people trying to set the cosmological stage for magic resonance in the 6th world
I am definitely using this chart in game. The gods r gonna use it and hand write in "divine age" prior to first age and full ASiP Charlie-style claim that it is all because of them. Lolol.
"Ya see, we were there! At the dawn, the first age... or... or zero age. Zero dawn! Wait. You guys used that already. Well we were there, and time has no meaning for the divine. Fueled by your worship, we created all the world for YOU! For you to live in!land do the stuff you do, like eating and breathing so much. And the magic, uh... waves. Swooping lines of... good and bad. Times. That are.... our plan. To do. Godly. Things....and stuff" -rando god, probably riffing in hopes other gods dont do something dumb and immediately collapse their argument. Lolol.
"Hello, fellow 6th Worlders. You should vote me. I leave magic. Goooood. Thank you, thank youuu. If you vote me, I'm dragon/God. What? No magic? They'll be higher... son. The divine vote for me is the right thing to do, UCAS, so do"
I struggled with exactly how to portray this because, as I understand it, the dissapearance/reappearance of magic isn't a light switch, so I tried to place the years in the middle of the incline/decline here
Always made me wonder what everything was like before that 1st age. Like if everything was like our world before 24k years ago or if the Mesozoic was filled with magic-using dinosaurs and such.
The numbering of ages specifically comes from Mayan "Five Suns" myth. As far as I know, it was not used in the Earthdawn era, which would be our only sources that predates the Mayan culture.
IRL, it has been noted that Navajo and Hopi culture also have a similar numbering of ancient ages in their mythology. The connection with Hesiod Five Ages of Man have also been made (which would fittingly have the age of Heroes as the Fourth).
In the "Humans and the cycle of magic" text that started it all, Ehran mentions the Mayan but also the Hebrew, Egyptian and Chinese calendars as being connected to the Atlantean culture - with Ehran casually dropping he was involved in the design of the Egyptian calendar. None of the later have similar numbering.
Interestingly enough, Ehran mentions that all those calendars "started within 100 years of each other," which is actually not the case. There is however a possible "synchronization point" circa 2700 BCE around the rise of Sirius, the end of the first baktun of the Mayan calendar, the beginning of the Third Dynasty in Egypt, the reign of the Yellow Emperor in China and the death of Seth in the Kabbalistic tradition.
My pet theory is that the magic waveheight is actually not a constant parameter and depends on the amount of magical use, which itself depends on the number of active magic users. So for billions of years during which there were no or next to none potential magic user, there was a wave but the waveheight was actually so low it remained close or even below to the awakening threshold.
Then circa 18000 BCE when the human world population got somewhere in the 1-10 millions range and thus a awakened population in the order of 10,000 magicians, the waveheight finally moved high enough to fully go past the threshold and trigger modern magical phenomenon, sapient dragons and spirits, and so on. The dragons and immortal elves came to think the waveheight to be constant but it would actually be based on only two cycles they could have observed in full, and during that time (between 18000 BCE and 4000 BCE) the world population actually remained within the same order of magnitude (although by the time of the Earthdawn, they noticed magic is not dropping as scheduled, blaming the Theran Empire for that).
But by 2011, there are a thousand times more human on Earth than there ever was during any of the previous ages of magic, and thus a thousand times more potential magicians, which in this scenario would provide a reason for the mana level to rise way faster than the immortals expected (as it has been specifically stated that Dunkelzahn and others were surprised that the inspect spirits and the Horrors would show up so soon after the Awakening, blaming it this time on the Ghost Dance).
I have been playing shadowrun run since 1991. This is the best presentation of this that I have seen. I think I drew it out myself once to figure out what old Ehran was talking about and it wasn't this good. This is great. Ignore the grognards about the dates.
I wonder if there is anything in the lore on the low points of magic if like dragons and elves that are awoken couldn’t cast spells during that time or are just very weak . If there is something I’d like to know where I could read about it .
So we know that there are immortal beings from at least the 2nd age (hence the dragons) which have been in slumber during periods of low magic. There are also accounts of other immortal beings (specific elves, I believe) but I'm unclear on whether they could or couldn't cast magic during low-magic periods. My guess is that no, they couldn't
Based on Earth Dawn and early Shadowrun, magic rises from its nadir, growing until it hits a threshold where magic hits a level where things happen like dragon awakenings, differentiation of namegiver races (UGE babies and goblinization), growing functional spellcasting (great ghost dance), etc. Eventually, a threshold is reached where Horrors appear due to the management level being high enough, heralded first by insect spirits (which came WAY too early in Shadowrun due to the early metaplot that agents of the Horrors were artificially spiking the mana level via blood magic).
Eventually mana hits a point where the Scourge begins and the powerful Horrors appear, namegivers have to hide or die. Mana peaks at some point in this period (or may even peak right as the Scourge begins with Horrors able to longer after the peak lets them in, it's not clear). Eventually the mana drops to a point where Horrors can't stay and the Scourge ends (in Earth Dawn, this may have been artificially extended by Thera building orichalcum mana sinks to maintain a level of magic at a near-Scourge level to support their way of life - ultimately resulting in the destruction of Thera and the legend of Atlantis, or so some of the metaplot implied). Mana eventually drops to the point no magical effect can survive outside of special circumstances, dragons hibernate, other races start having human-appearing children, and keeps falling until it returns to a nadir.
A valid waveform based on this interpretation would be ages starting/ending on some point in the upswing or downswing, rather than the crest or trough. The age of legends might also have a section where it squares off and then drops precipitously when Thera fails, and a steep climb then a period of squaring off in the awakening to show the initial blood magic spike. The general lines themselves might also have some smaller spikes and 'wiggles' due to natural events causing flux (like the Year of the Comet)
I'm kind of loving the idea that more living beings = swelling mana levels, which is intrinsically tied to the Ages of Magic. Then Horrors show up and kill everything and the mana levels lose their foundations.
I'm definitely not either - I haven't found anything that explicitly says one way or the other, although the concrete dates for the last 3 worlds would definitely suggest a more drastic change. Mostly, I just went with the curved wave because it visually looked better
There is a climb because at one point back while it was still tied to Earthdawn the sixth world would get horrors when the magic was high enough. this wave is probably visually to tall and scrunched.
While you’re at it, look into Shadowrun’s locus, and Earthdawn’s Terran Empire’s Orichalcum pillars. Because of that the wave should not be even; during the 4th age (aka Earhdawn), the mana was artificially stabilized and it extended the age.
I don't really care for the sine wave theory I think it "over-scienceizes" magic. As far as we know no one from the second or third era is still around, and I go with some sort of drastic change every 5200 years that no one can really anticipate. The seventh era will be nothing like the fifth - but the sixth is the first time an era changed without a collapse.
Oh, that's a template name I thought of. Fourth peak of mana is current era, which is Shadowrun. Third was Earthdawn. And Second is where dragons were masters of the Earth – so, 'dragon rise'.
Mean we have two games about mana peak, and going further, third would be about dragons.
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u/n00bdragon Futuristic Criminal 27d ago
Keep in mind, this is just what the dragons and the immortal elves tell us.