Proof that the CS is Evil

[Shark_Force]

first-hand means personally. not through someone else. even the later sentence separates losing a loved one from suffering due to magic in other ways.

[Killer Cyborg]

first-hand means personally. not through someone else. even the later sentence separates losing a loved one from suffering due to magic in other ways.

Depending on how literally it was mean, as I said earlier.
In the context of the paragraphs, it's clear that it was not meant that literally, as I have shown.
"Scorch," taken entirely literally, means "burn the surface of, with flame or heat."
That word wasn't meant entirely literally either.

You can choose to take them that literally, but it's a deliberate choice to interpret the text in a way that makes less sense than the more obvious choices, and to then complain about the results of your own chose interpretation.

[Shark_Force]

first-hand means personally. not through someone else. even the later sentence separates losing a loved one from suffering due to magic in other ways.

Depending on how literally it was mean, as I said earlier.
In the context of the paragraphs, it's clear that it was not meant that literally, as I have shown.
"Scorch," taken entirely literally, means "burn the surface of, with flame or heat."
That word wasn't meant entirely literally either.

You can choose to take them that literally, but it's a deliberate choice to interpret the text in a way that makes less sense than the more obvious choices, and to then complain about the results of your own chose interpretation.

right. i forgot. only the meanings you want to count get to apply. "first-hand" isn't meant literally, because that would mean it doesn't say what you want it to say. odd, though, i can't seem to recall the reference for *that* rule. mind helping me out with finding the place that makes you the final arbiter of when the text is meant literally and when it isn't? because, as i recall, *last* time we had this discussion about words being used multiple ways, you pulled this same kind of crap, insisting that only the definition you liked was valid. it's getting pretty old.

it says first-hand. there is no non-literal definition of first-hand that means second-hand just because you want it to mean that. if i tell you i have decades of first-hand experience with plumbing problems of all kinds and you pay me 60 bucks an hour to do it, you're going to be pretty mad to find out that i actually meant my uncle is a plumber and i haven't ever done anything more complicated than plunging a clogged toilet, because that isn't what first-hand means.

[Killer Cyborg]

first-hand means personally. not through someone else. even the later sentence separates losing a loved one from suffering due to magic in other ways.

Depending on how literally it was mean, as I said earlier.
In the context of the paragraphs, it's clear that it was not meant that literally, as I have shown.
"Scorch," taken entirely literally, means "burn the surface of, with flame or heat."
That word wasn't meant entirely literally either.

You can choose to take them that literally, but it's a deliberate choice to interpret the text in a way that makes less sense than the more obvious choices, and to then complain about the results of your own chose interpretation.

right. i forgot. only the meanings you want to count get to apply. "first-hand" isn't meant literally, because that would mean it doesn't say what you want it to say.

I don't have a preference either way, other than this:
When a piece of text can be interpreted in more than one way, I interpret it in the way that is in accordance with as much of the rest of the canon as possible.
Failing that, I interpret it in the way that makes the most sense to me personally.

odd, though, i can't seem to recall the reference for *that* rule. mind helping me out with finding the place that makes you the final arbiter of when the text is meant literally and when it isn't?

There are two ways to interpret this piece of text.

In the first way, your way, the text is not part of any coherent thought or pattern. It doesn't fit with the setting as a whole, and it is immediately contradicted in the same paragraph by competing text.

In the second way, my way, which fits with common English word usage and writing structure, the text is part of a coherent thought and pattern that fits not only into the paragraph in which the text is written, but also into the book, the series, and the setting as a whole.

You're free to deliberately choose to interpret the text in such a way that the text makes no sense, and to then consequently complain loudly about the results of your own chosen interpretation.
It's quite the common hobby here on the forums.

But I don't think that it makes much sense.

it says first-hand. there is no non-literal definition of first-hand that means second-hand just because you want it to mean that.

Fair enough. Let's look at the definition:
First-Hand: (of information or experience) from the original source or personal experience; direct.

Now let's look at the sentence-fragment in question:
the vast majority of Coalition citizens have felt the painful scorch of magic first-hand.

Now let's look at what this is saying:
the vast majority of Coalition citizens have felt the painful scorch of magic from personal experience.

Now, if you had a brother, and a mage killed your brother, would you say that you are feeling the pain of magic as a personal experience?
Perhaps not, but many would, because they are personally experiencing pain and suffering as a result of the magic.
It's within common usage.
The pain is first-hand, because they are the ones experiencing it.

if i tell you i have decades of first-hand experience with plumbing problems of all kinds and you pay me 60 bucks an hour to do it, you're going to be pretty mad to find out that i actually meant my uncle is a plumber and i haven't ever done anything more complicated than plunging a clogged toilet, because that isn't what first-hand means.

Yet if you said that you understood the pains of war firsthand, and it's because your brother died in a war, that would be in perfect accordance with the definition of the term--the pain is yours, not somebody else's.

The metaphorical use is with the word "scorch," unless you want to argue that the word was meant literally...?

[Axelmania]

We could take scorch literally if we import that TTGD spell which turns fire temporarily into crystals. Perhaps mages grind that up and sneak tiny amounts into the food supply and nearly every human has been burned in the mouth/throat/stomach/bowels as the result of Scarlet Pepper.

The wards version of Fire Bolt inflicts SDC so people could survive that. I expect mage terrorists put those up all over the burbs so people will think the megacities are dangerous.

[Shark_Force]

if the military is not suffering *massive* losses specifically only due to magic (something along the lines of what was seen in the american civil war, for example, which was not in any way sustainable, and really would need to be explicitly noted to be a basic assumption of the setting), the vast majority of people having siblings or other close relatives die is still stupid. if, more realistically, the military is suffering only minor losses, which is the kind of thing the setting supports in the way almost no focus is given to CS losses before tolkeen at all, then that would require that each soldier who dies is a very close relation to anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand people. exclusive people, that is; any overlap would not be impacting new people.

the claim is laughably absurd, and if i am to evaluate it on the rest of the information available, i have to reconcile it with the fact that there are no references massive battlefields where there are so many CS corpses that you could walk from one end of the battlefield to the other and not touch the ground. given an absence of such things, combined with the fact that any analysis of rifts is going to come up with inconsistencies all over the place no matter what i do, i am forced to look at this as simply being another absurd inconsistency that simply reflects the poor ability of the author to grasp properly the implications of very large numbers, and ignore it.

furthermore, if you have to tell me to rewrite the books to make it say what you want, then that means it doesn't say what you want it to say in the first place.

(also, your brother dying due to magic is not really significantly different from your brother dying to any other violent death, so again: bull crap. you haven't suffered from magic, you've suffered from violence, which your own damn country is perpetrating, so we're right back to people choosing to use the consequences of their own evil actions by blaming others to justify further evil actions. which is, again, super common and not out of character for a human nation at all, but doesn't make murder, slavery, or hatred any less evil).

[Axelmania]

Shark you are shifting the goalposts. The statements are about pain and suffering. Neither requires death. You are also focusing on the military as the recipient of harm. You need to also take into account citizens not in the military who lack the environmental MDC armor. Not all of them inhabit the super city fortresses. Citizens can also have loved ones who are non citizens still waiting in the burbs and pain/suffering from their victimization.

If we take into account to video footage, the propaganda machine could also have something to do with it because every time a Boogie Man or Boschala eats a Burbs child, the CS will put together a biography of their lives from surveilanfe vids and get 90% of the populace hooked on the reality show only to reveal the grisly end and galvanize everyone to draft themselves.

[Killer Cyborg]

if the military is not suffering *massive* losses specifically only due to magic (something along the lines of what was seen in the american civil war, for example, which was not in any way sustainable, and really would need to be explicitly noted to be a basic assumption of the setting), the vast majority of people having siblings or other close relatives die is still stupid.

What about anybody else that the person in question knows and loves?
Grandparents? Aunts/uncles? Friends? Parents of friends? Children?

(also, your brother dying due to magic is not really significantly different from your brother dying to any other violent death, so again: bull crap. you haven't suffered from magic, you've suffered from violence, which your own damn country is perpetrating, so we're right back to people choosing to use the consequences of their own evil actions by blaming others to justify further evil actions. which is, again, super common and not out of character for a human nation at all, but doesn't make murder, slavery, or hatred any less evil).

If it was legal today for people to play with plutonium,
And somebody close to you had been killed by somebody playing with plutonium,
And people close to the majority of the population of the country had been killed by people playing with plutonium,
Where would you stand on the legality and/or morality of people playing with plutonium?

[Shark_Force]

if the military is not suffering *massive* losses specifically only due to magic (something along the lines of what was seen in the american civil war, for example, which was not in any way sustainable, and really would need to be explicitly noted to be a basic assumption of the setting), the vast majority of people having siblings or other close relatives die is still stupid.

What about anybody else that the person in question knows and loves?
Grandparents? Aunts/uncles? Friends? Parents of friends? Children?

(also, your brother dying due to magic is not really significantly different from your brother dying to any other violent death, so again: bull crap. you haven't suffered from magic, you've suffered from violence, which your own damn country is perpetrating, so we're right back to people choosing to use the consequences of their own evil actions by blaming others to justify further evil actions. which is, again, super common and not out of character for a human nation at all, but doesn't make murder, slavery, or hatred any less evil).

If it was legal today for people to play with plutonium,
And somebody close to you had been killed by somebody playing with plutonium,
And people close to the majority of the population of the country had been killed by people playing with plutonium,
Where would you stand on the legality and/or morality of people playing with plutonium?

yes, i get that. but when we're talking about losses that are tenths of a percent, including a number of people who are not yet citizens and have no ties to existing citizens (remember, vast majority of CITIZENS, not just random people), and some of those are from sources other than magic, it's quite ridiculous to make that claim. it would have to mean that anywhere from hundreds to thousands would need to be majorly impacted by each individual death. which is just absurd. the great majority of people won't have anywhere near that number close to them. knowing someone who has? that's a lot more plausible, at least. especially if you define "know" fairly losely. someone who works at the same place, or is a friend of a friend that you happen to hang out with occasionally, or lives on the same block and you have block activities of some sort, or plays on the same recreational sports team, or whatever equivalents there are to those things on rifts earth, you "know" a fairly large number of people. but you're not seriously impacted by most of them if something happens to them. but we're not talking about your coworker that you say hello to every morning, we're talking about people close enough to you that when something happens to them, it hurts a lot to lose them, and that's even assuming that the military has regular interaction with most other people who aren't family members... i mean, is a soldier even likely to be on a recreational sports team with civilians? they probably don't usually work at the same place on a regular basis, in any event. so again: unless the CS military is consistently suffering massive unsustainable losses (the fact that they would need to have sustained unsustainable losses certainly strongly implies that they haven't), the idea that the vast majority have personally experienced suffering is just stupid.

your plutonium is a nice straw man, though. it really doesn't compare, though. this isn't everyone having plutonium. magic is not inherently unsafe, for one thing. this is people going into someone else's house, murdering them, getting shot by their victims occasionally before they die, and then blaming the victim for fighting back, because the victim happens to (maybe, they don't necessarily bother to check) use something similar to what a bad person did once or possibly comes from somewhere else. with no evidence, no attempts to gather evidence, no questioning if whether what they're doing is right, and no regrets.

if it offends you to say that's evil, well, i'd say i'm sorry but i'm not in the slightest. that's evil. murdering people is evil. enslaving others is evil. hate crimes are evil. it is evil whether the person who is doing it thinks it is evil or not. it is evil whether lots of people do it or not, regardless of the time period in which they did it. it is evil whether i can understand why someone might do it or not. even if i can look at their situation and not be certain that if i were placed in the same situation that i would be any different, that still doesn't change that it is evil.

it is, again, a very human sort of evil. it's not like a demon, where i don't really understand why a demon takes pleasure in torturing people to death. i can't relate to that. i can relate very much to why the people in the CS do what they do. they're afraid. they're ignorant. doing the right thing is hard. honestly looking at yourself and asking yourself if what you're doing is right or not, and then trying to change, is hard. and even if you try, you don't necessarily succeed every time. and whether it's right or not, what the CS does certainly seems to have been keeping their people alive so far, for the most part. the world they live in is dangerous and scary, and it sure as heck isn't easy to put "doing what is right" ahead of "doing anything it takes to survive".

but it is still evil. just like it is evil for the mechanoids to murder billions of creatures, just like it is evil for the splugorth to enslave and sell billions of creatures, just like it is evil for a demon or devil to torture someone to death for fun. to all of those creatures, what they're doing makes sense. what they're doing sounds rational and like it's the correct thing to do, from their own perspective. that doesn't make it somehow not evil.

[Killer Cyborg]

if the military is not suffering *massive* losses specifically only due to magic (something along the lines of what was seen in the american civil war, for example, which was not in any way sustainable, and really would need to be explicitly noted to be a basic assumption of the setting), the vast majority of people having siblings or other close relatives die is still stupid.

What about anybody else that the person in question knows and loves?
Grandparents? Aunts/uncles? Friends? Parents of friends? Children?

(also, your brother dying due to magic is not really significantly different from your brother dying to any other violent death, so again: bull crap. you haven't suffered from magic, you've suffered from violence, which your own damn country is perpetrating, so we're right back to people choosing to use the consequences of their own evil actions by blaming others to justify further evil actions. which is, again, super common and not out of character for a human nation at all, but doesn't make murder, slavery, or hatred any less evil).

If it was legal today for people to play with plutonium,
And somebody close to you had been killed by somebody playing with plutonium,
And people close to the majority of the population of the country had been killed by people playing with plutonium,
Where would you stand on the legality and/or morality of people playing with plutonium?

yes, i get that. but when we're talking about losses that are tenths of a percent,

Got a source for that number?

including a number of people who are not yet citizens and have no ties to existing citizens (remember, vast majority of CITIZENS, not just random people), and some of those are from sources other than magic, it's quite ridiculous to make that claim. it would have to mean that anywhere from hundreds to thousands would need to be majorly impacted by each individual death. which is just absurd. the great majority of people won't have anywhere near that number close to them.

That would depend on what the population of the CS is, what the ration of citizens to non-citizens is, how many people die (or are significantly harmed) per year by magical sources, how many years this has been happening, and quite a few other factors.

knowing someone who has? that's a lot more plausible, at least.

Well, there you go. Since that's part of what is meant, the combination should be fairly plausible.

your plutonium is a nice straw man, though.

Man, I wish people would either learn what that term means, or they'd just quit trying to use it.

it really doesn't compare, though. this isn't everyone having plutonium.

Remember the quote I shared earlier where the CS believe using magic to be the equivalent of juggling nukes?

magic is not inherently unsafe

Sure.
Except for the apocalypse thing, and the hundreds of years of demons coming to Earth through Rifts, and mind control, and teleportation, and so on, and so forth.

, for one thing. this is people going into someone else's house, murdering them, getting shot by their victims occasionally before they die, and then blaming the victim for fighting back, because the victim happens to (maybe, they don't necessarily bother to check) use something similar to what a bad person did once or possibly comes from somewhere else. with no evidence, no attempts to gather evidence, no questioning if whether what they're doing is right, and no regrets.

You don't think that magical forces ever attack the CS except for in self-defense...?

if it offends you to say that's evil, well, i'd say i'm sorry but i'm not in the slightest. that's evil.

It's not offensive, just a bad comparison, and an incorrect conclusion.

i can relate very much to why the people in the CS do what they do. they're afraid. they're ignorant. doing the right thing is hard. honestly looking at yourself and asking yourself if what you're doing is right or not, and then trying to change, is hard. and even if you try, you don't necessarily succeed every time. and whether it's right or not, what the CS does certainly seems to have been keeping their people alive so far, for the most part. the world they live in is dangerous and scary, and it sure as heck isn't easy to put "doing what is right" ahead of "doing anything it takes to survive".

You also assume that people have available enough facts to make an informed conclusion.

but it is still evil.

Not according to canon.

[dreicunan]

One aspect that I think some on the "Kevin S can't possibly be correct about his own game world" side are ignoring is life spans of CS citizens. CS citizens live to between 100-130 years of age. That is a long time during which one only has to feel the painful scorch of magic firsthand once to count as a member of the vast majority who have felt it.

[Axelmania]

Why does Shark think there is a citizen / non-citizen disconnect? Only 1 family member getting citizenship then working to help others get it ke probably very common. Makes for motivated workers.

We don't even know if CS has birthright citizens ship. For all we know, citizens' kids are born non-citizens and have to apply for it.

[guardiandashi]

Why does Shark think there is a citizen / non-citizen disconnect? Only 1 family member getting citizenship then working to help others get it ke probably very common. Makes for motivated workers.

We don't even know if CS has birthright citizens ship. For all we know, citizens' kids are born non-citizens and have to apply for it.

umm no just no

the CS mega/fortress cities (arcologies by another name) are actually pretty clear, if your parents are citizens then you are a citizen automatically. now the burbites that is similar to modern us immigration and naturalization, rules but without the "anchor baby" rules, IE a lady comes to chi-town ~8 months pregnant (is not a citizen) and gets a pass (to use hospital facilities) and has the child inside the city in the hospital, they would not grant automatic citizenship to that child (well they might, but I doubt it especially given the other checks for entry)

I know there was a blurb where burbites were given contracts such as: you sign up for 3 years of service in the CS military, and you get your citizen papers at the end of your tour, you want additional members of your family? another 2 years each, and they get moved to the top of the list for citizenship. (I just don't remember the exact time periods if they were actually listed)

I don't totally agree with shark about the scorch of magic statements being utterly ridiculous, but I also think he is closer to right than a lot of the nay sayers about it being a stretch.

with that said, the closest analogy I could see is trying to make the claim that the vast majority of people have first hand suffered from the ravages of slavery, or the world wars (I and II ) while it may be true, that many of us especially in Europe could look at our family trees and find people who served, and or relatives that were killed in the wars, once a generation or two has passed, its not first hand anymore its second or third hand, and that's where the statement starts breaking down and falling apart. UNLESS the people of the coalition are so past obsessed that they ignore their lives and present, to focus on the past and do the equivalent of walking past the Vietnam memorial wall every day on the way to and from work. then I guess I could partially see it but I still believe it has the same issue that the writers have been criticized about IE they just don't get what the numbers really mean, they just write down something that sounds "good" without really thinking about it and ignoring what has been previously written and /or previously published.

[Shark_Force]

the CS can claim magic is like plutonium all they want. that doesn't make it not murder when they murder someone. it is no different than the mechanoids believing that their crusade to slaughter all the humanoids in the universe is just.

and no, knowing people who have suffered is NOT part of the same number. it is a clearly stated DIFFERENT metric that incorporates more people than the one for those who've suffered first-hand, and since they are not equal in number, they CANNOT be the same thing.

if my coworker who i say hi to in the elevator dies, that is not even remotely equivalent to if my brother dies. even if we buy that you've felt the scorch of magic specifically rather than the scorch of living a violent lifestyle counts someone you care about dying partially as a result of a fire ball instead of exclusively due to laser rifles.

and i've already pointed out how people *can* obtain evidence. the fact that they don't care enough to ask themselves questions that lead to the desire to obtain said evidence, or follow up on those desires if or when they experience them, is not somehow invalidated because they don't want to. i don't particularly want to be poorer than someone who earns 7 figures a year, but that doesn't mean i'm justified in stealing from them, even if i'm just making a blanket assumption that anyone with that much money *must* have come by it dishonestly so i'm really just taking money from a thief. no matter how much i might believe it, that justification does not make it right for me to steal. people in the CS have all the resources they need to get their own answers to questions like "is it really necessary to kill *every* d-bee" or "are psychics really so dangerous that they *all* need to be persecuted"? just like the resources needed for a person in america leading up to the civil war to find out if a african americans were really a completely inferior race in every way and in need of someone to own them to direct their lives were available back then, and lots of people chose not to use them (but some did, and that's why there was an underground railroad).


and again, the CS would need to be suffering massive unsustainable losses to their citizens (ie not people in the 'burbs) in order for nearly everyone to have personally experienced suffering at the hands of magic. a fact which would need to be stated far more prominently and regularly to be at all believable. to leave it out would be like a post-WWI europe encyclpedia describing the area without bothering to mention that large portions have been shelled to oblivion, or that entire towns have lost most of the men because their unit suffered 90% casualties in an assault somewhere, except in one sentence of some random paragraph in one of the books somewhere. if someone was to tell you that those books do a good job of covering the subject, and you read that one sentence, which would be reasonable to assume that the sentence is in error, or that the rest of the 30+ book series just neglected to mention one of the most absolutely critically important pieces of information for understanding post-WWI europe?

again, to get the "vast majority" to have *personally* felt the scorch of magic would require things that are not stated anywhere in the books. things like huge battlefields where at *least* tens of thousands of CS soldiers died, if not more, and the CS does not have enemies that are both capable and willing to do that (it certainly has enemies that are capable, and enemies that are willing, but none that are both of those things), at least, not prior to the tolkeen war (and since those claims are referring to the time before the tolkeen war, we know that it isn't referring to those losses, which were mostly among 'burbites anyways rather than citizens of the CS).

heck, the fact that soldiers were completely shocked by the tolkeen war's brutality tells us that the CS wasn't suffering massive losses prior to that.

now, i'm not saying that it must be *super* uncommon for someone to have suffered due to magic. certainly, there will be some. but the vast majority of the people who are literally living in gigantic fortresses protected by the largest military in north america including a large number of specialists capable of tracking down just about any magic that comes into the city? yeah, that isn't plausible.

[Axelmania]

the CS mega/fortress cities (arcologies by another name) are actually pretty clear, if your parents are citizens then you are a citizen automatically.

Neat. What book/page is the earliest mention of this you are aware of?

What about if just one parent is a citizen?

[boring7]

It's just another one of those things that doesn't make sense. A majority of citizens have personally been victimized by the constant FoM terror attacks despite the FoM attacks not making sense, the "personal burn" being almost universally "instantly fatal", and the number of citizens being the poorly-defined variable "$enoughforplot".

Presumably when trying to defend the idea it includes people who had to fail a horror check, people who lost family, and even people who only lost property to magic.

Even then, that's not how real world math works, but it's how real world perceptions work and I suppose that's close enough.

[Killer Cyborg]

the CS can claim magic is like plutonium all they want. that doesn't make it not murder when they murder someone.

Depends on how you define "murder," how you define "someone," and how you define "they."

it is no different than the mechanoids believing that their crusade to slaughter all the humanoids in the universe is just.

It's quite different, actually. The Mechanoids are actually insane, and they actively delight in the torture of humanoids in their mad quest for revenge.

and no, knowing people who have suffered is NOT part of the same number. it is a clearly stated DIFFERENT metric that incorporates more people than the one for those who've suffered first-hand, and since they are not equal in number, they CANNOT be the same thing.

That's not how paragraphs and the English language work, as I've already explained.

if my coworker who i say hi to in the elevator dies, that is not even remotely equivalent to if my brother dies.

Sure, but there are generally quite a few people who range closer to the brother level than to the barely-known co-worker.

even if we buy that you've felt the scorch of magic specifically rather than the scorch of living a violent lifestyle counts someone you care about dying partially as a result of a fire ball instead of exclusively due to laser rifles.

Not sure why you're focusing on fireballs instead of all the magically summoned demons and monsters and such.

and i've already pointed out how people *can* obtain evidence.

Right. All they have to do is to go against everything they've been taught and seen, to go to an enemy that they've been told is corrupting, subversive, evil, and has mind-controlling abilities, and to trust what that enemy says.
Piece of cake.
Any logical person would do it.

and again, the CS would need to be suffering massive unsustainable losses to their citizens (ie not people in the 'burbs) in order for nearly everyone to have personally experienced suffering at the hands of magic.

Again, I don't know why you're talking exclusively losses instead of suffering.

again, to get the "vast majority" to have *personally* felt the scorch of magic would require things that are not stated anywhere in the books. things like huge battlefields where at *least* tens of thousands of CS soldiers died,

Really?
Why not simply hundreds of years of regular border skirmishes, monster attacks, magical terrorism, magic and psychic criminals, and so forth...?

now, i'm not saying that it must be *super* uncommon for someone to have suffered due to magic. certainly, there will be some. but the vast majority of the people who are literally living in gigantic fortresses protected by the largest military in north america including a large number of specialists capable of tracking down just about any magic that comes into the city? yeah, that isn't plausible.

You're acting like magical attacks on Chi-Town are an impossibility, and as if no monsters ever get into the city fortress.

[dreicunan]

@Shark_Force: Not a single person has to die for the vast majority of CS citizens to have felt the painful scorch of magic firsthand. The second statement deals with people.who have either suffered in some way or lost a loved one, or know someone who has. That statement also does not necessitate massive amounts of losses to be true. Thus, the CS does NOT need to be suffering losses beyond those shown in the books for these statements to be true (let alone plausible).

[Nightmartree]

I don't totally agree with shark about the scorch of magic statements being utterly ridiculous, but I also think he is closer to right than a lot of the nay sayers about it being a stretch.

with that said, the closest analogy I could see is trying to make the claim that the vast majority of people have first hand suffered from the ravages of slavery, or the world wars (I and II ) while it may be true, that many of us especially in Europe could look at our family trees and find people who served, and or relatives that were killed in the wars, once a generation or two has passed, its not first hand anymore its second or third hand, and that's where the statement starts breaking down and falling apart. UNLESS the people of the coalition are so past obsessed that they ignore their lives and present, to focus on the past and do the equivalent of walking past the Vietnam memorial wall every day on the way to and from work. then I guess I could partially see it but I still believe it has the same issue that the writers have been criticized about IE they just don't get what the numbers really mean, they just write down something that sounds "good" without really thinking about it and ignoring what has been previously written and /or previously published.

The thing is, what if the World Wars never ended? they just faded out into a mix of large and small scale skirmishes, terrorist acts and flare ups into smaller wars...and then that lasted for over a hundred years into our modern day.

that's what the coalition is dealing with, now could the numbers be wonky?yes, but the intent behind the number and the amount listed basically says that pretty much everyone in the CS has been impacted negatively by magic, and arguing that its not possible...is blatantly wrong, its possible if only because the designers of the game say it is, and amazingly we have the exact elements needed for it to be true, namely an near infinite supply of a power source that can have a random everyday man wielding the power of a tank on the streets. The presence of an anomaly that generate endless monsters, aliens, supernatural beings and more, by...wait for it...magic! so in short, it's not like walking by the Vietnam memorial, its like walking by that open recruiters office and the gutted building were a burster resisted arrest and cause 32 deaths of unarmed civilians, and the street corner a monster appeared on last week and started eating people, must have teleported, is anywhere safe?

[Axelmania]

the FoM attacks not making sense

What about them doesn't make sense?

the "personal burn" being almost universally "instantly fatal", and the number of citizens being the poorly-defined variable "$enoughforplot".

Source?' Plenty of harmful non fatal magic. Life drain? Surviving an SDC skeleton or mummy attack? Someone controlling canines or rodents who sends them to bite you? Circle of fire? Firebolt Wards.

Presumably when trying to defend the idea it includes people who had to fail a horror check, people who lost family, and even people who only lost property to magic.

Even then, that's not how real world math works, but it's how real world perceptions work and I suppose that's close enough.[/quote]

[Blue_Lion]

Blue Lion proof that human kids were killed when psi hounds or stalkers were present to vet them?

Do not agree it is evil to kill when you do not know. The CS would lose if they did that. Heck, watch The Last Ship's new season. You don't even need to use magic. Fusion Block in a backpack.

CS were ambushed in ground they already took. Using child suicide bombers could be part of how Tolkeen accomplished this.

Unless you have overwhelming numbers and cover and control of an area it would be too difficult to secure these random wandering kids every anti-CS person seems to think exist.

At some point you gotta accept that the fault of the death of children is on KOT parents who keep them there instead of going somewhere safer.

SoT CS over kill-rising evil page 17-18

"Mass "purges" (the Second Wavers try to avoid words like "slaughter," "massacre," "genocide" and "mass extermination") is the only way to eliminate Tolkeen's most precious resource, its people. As for the sentiment that women and children should be spared, the Second Wavers claim the Coalition Army can't afford to be that merciful. Every man, woman and child in Tolkeen has the potential
to be a "living weapon" of magical might or a demon in disguise. In the least, they are supporters, sympathizers, and sorcerers in training or pawns of demonic fiends from alien worlds. Better to "eliminate" them now, than risk more human lives and the success of the war laters. And in the long run, the Coalition States can not afford to lose this war. Something must be done."

Odd that you saying that the CS did not target children while spouting the excuse that they used for intentional genocide. Good does not need an excuse for its actions but evil in denial does. (Now their is a factions in the CS that oppose such actions, but they as people pointed out could be subject to punishment for not killing a child while none was giving for mass purges/massacre. So that is a SoP that supports a evil reign of the CS.)

SoT 6 pg 10-11

"This time the CS Invasion Force presses ever forward hi a "scorched earth" campaign, destroying everything in their path - all military strongholds and civilian communities, bunkers, farms, hunting lodges, tool sheds, everything! A scorched earth campaign chops away at the enemy, diminishing its overall industrial and natural resources, eliminates manpower, scatters resistence, and leaves nothing of value for the enemy to retake or salvage. It also helps to prevent the enemy from counterattacking, engaging in sabotage or launching any surprises from behind. No prisoners are taken in this campaign either, as they are a liability, drain the resources of the army and slow it down. Consequently, civilians are gunned down as "hostiles" (especially D-Bees) or allowed to flee. If Tolkeen civilians run from the invading CS Army, away to Tolkeen or to the west, it is an acceptable consequence as they represent a minimal risk. Recognized guerillas and enemy soldiers are pursued and terminated whenever possible, but here again, a retreat to Tolkeen or the west is generally acceptable, especially if it is believed they are too demoralized to regroup and fight again. As long as the Coalition Annies manage to destroy every place they encounter and massacre the majority of Tolkeen's defenders and civilian population, all is going as planned. And so far, the outer perimeter defenses have folded like a house of cards."

That is the book saying that the CS during the war gunned down every one that did not out run their final invasion force. (others have pointed out that sparing any children was punishable.)

No the CS would not loose if they did not kill a kid they did not know was a not a threat.

This is really not any different than suicide bombers, you can protect yourself from unknown threat levels by practicing good security measures such as maintain a security distance from civilians.

Also over looks the fact that most shape shifters that pose a threat can have access to invisibly to use instead.

Remember this-
SoT CS overkill -pg 17

To that end, the words of pre-Rifts philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (a favorite among more intellectual Coalition brass) comes to mind: "When fighting monsters, one must take care not to become a monster. For when you look into the mirror the mirror stares right back."

-You can not rid the world of inhuman monsters if you throw away your humanity to do it.

Regardless of how or why the war started the CS turned it into a war of genocide targeting civilians with the intent to wiep out a intelligent people. That is an evil act. (note the plan to wipe out the xits can also be seen as evil in the same sense as can the use of egg bombs by Triax. Lazlo may be considering it but by the books they have not done it yet.)

[Shark_Force]

I don't totally agree with shark about the scorch of magic statements being utterly ridiculous, but I also think he is closer to right than a lot of the nay sayers about it being a stretch.

with that said, the closest analogy I could see is trying to make the claim that the vast majority of people have first hand suffered from the ravages of slavery, or the world wars (I and II ) while it may be true, that many of us especially in Europe could look at our family trees and find people who served, and or relatives that were killed in the wars, once a generation or two has passed, its not first hand anymore its second or third hand, and that's where the statement starts breaking down and falling apart. UNLESS the people of the coalition are so past obsessed that they ignore their lives and present, to focus on the past and do the equivalent of walking past the Vietnam memorial wall every day on the way to and from work. then I guess I could partially see it but I still believe it has the same issue that the writers have been criticized about IE they just don't get what the numbers really mean, they just write down something that sounds "good" without really thinking about it and ignoring what has been previously written and /or previously published.

The thing is, what if the World Wars never ended? they just faded out into a mix of large and small scale skirmishes, terrorist acts and flare ups into smaller wars...and then that lasted for over a hundred years into our modern day.

that's what the coalition is dealing with, now could the numbers be wonky?yes, but the intent behind the number and the amount listed basically says that pretty much everyone in the CS has been impacted negatively by magic, and arguing that its not possible...is blatantly wrong, its possible if only because the designers of the game say it is, and amazingly we have the exact elements needed for it to be true, namely an near infinite supply of a power source that can have a random everyday man wielding the power of a tank on the streets. The presence of an anomaly that generate endless monsters, aliens, supernatural beings and more, by...wait for it...magic! so in short, it's not like walking by the Vietnam memorial, its like walking by that open recruiters office and the gutted building were a burster resisted arrest and cause 32 deaths of unarmed civilians, and the street corner a monster appeared on last week and started eating people, must have teleported, is anywhere safe?

well, then the great majority of the deaths would have been a hundred years ago, there'd be a small number of people still alive who even remember any of the big war to have been scorched by it, and the border skirmishes would not come even remotely close to being enough for the citizens (again, the people who live inside the heavily defended fortress cities where everyone else wants to go specifically because it's safe not a super-dangerous constant war zone, with the exception of those that are in the military... who, therefore, have the equipment to not be significantly harmed by most magic except in ways that involve death, and many of which are not related to very many actual citizens).

@KC: a paragraph does not have to deal only with the idea you want it to. it can deal with the concept of general suffering, and can deal with two different cases of those. considering the sentences explicitly tell us they're dealing with two different cases (those who have personally experienced suffering due to magic, and then that group plus other people who know them), *that* is the only rational conclusion of what the paragraph is dealing with. if you need to rewrite the book so that the book makes sense, then it is a valid complaint that the book never made sense in the first place, because you don't need to change something that already made sense for it to make sense.

[Killer Cyborg]

@KC: a paragraph does not have to deal only with the idea you want it to.

I don't WANT it to do any particular thing.
I'm simply telling you how paragraphs work:
"a distinct section of a piece of writing, usually dealing with a single theme and indicated by a new line, indentation, or numbering."

When paragraphs switch from one theme to another, there is typically some kind of note in the change of tone, because it's a departure from the usual.
That's not the case in the paragraph we're dealing with.
It--as paragraphs usually do--introduces an idea, then it expands and elaborates on that idea.

There is no reason to believe that this paragraph is doing anything otherwise, that it's departing from the norm.
The paragraph makes less sense if you interpret it that way.
So... why are you insisting that it must be interpreted in an unusual way that ultimately makes less sense....?

[Axelmania]

Blue Lion, I did not say the CS did not target children. I am asking where they explicitly target HUMAN ones. Also what def are we using? 17 year olds? The CS might for example spare pre-adescent kids while killing adolescent kids.

As for the scorched earth purges. Where? Just the City of Tolkeen would be relatively small compared to all of Minnesota. Where did this explicitly begin happening? How many miles from city center?

[Shark_Force]

@KC: a paragraph does not have to deal only with the idea you want it to.

I don't WANT it to do any particular thing.
I'm simply telling you how paragraphs work:
"a distinct section of a piece of writing, usually dealing with a single theme and indicated by a new line, indentation, or numbering."

When paragraphs switch from one theme to another, there is typically some kind of note in the change of tone, because it's a departure from the usual.
That's not the case in the paragraph we're dealing with.
It--as paragraphs usually do--introduces an idea, then it expands and elaborates on that idea.

There is no reason to believe that this paragraph is doing anything otherwise, that it's departing from the norm.
The paragraph makes less sense if you interpret it that way.
So... why are you insisting that it must be interpreted in an unusual way that ultimately makes less sense....?

it isn't doing anything different from the norm. the subject just isn't what you want it to be. a paragraph about people who have suffered due to magic does not have to deal with only one specific group. it's still dealing with one subject. first-hand is very clear. it doesn't mean second-hand, or anything else like it. it indicates personal experience, not knowing someone else who has personal experience. then we have a second sentence within that paragraph, still dealing with the subject of people who have suffered due to magic, and it is *equally* clear that it is talking about people who do not have first hand experience in addition to those who do. but the fact that the second sentence exists in no way means that the first sentence somehow *must* be talking about the same group, especially when it is completely explicit that it is not talking about the same group at all.

according to that quote, the vast majority have PERSONALLY suffered, and in addition to that almost everybody knows at least one of those people who have personally suffered, and the former of those two claims is ludicrous. if you want to rewrite the paragraph to mean something else, well then i guess you must agree that the claim of the vast majority personally suffered is ludicrous too.

[Axelmania]

It occurs to me that killing dragon hatchlings (smarter than human adults) is killing children, so species is important.

[Killer Cyborg]

@KC: a paragraph does not have to deal only with the idea you want it to.

I don't WANT it to do any particular thing.
I'm simply telling you how paragraphs work:
"a distinct section of a piece of writing, usually dealing with a single theme and indicated by a new line, indentation, or numbering."

When paragraphs switch from one theme to another, there is typically some kind of note in the change of tone, because it's a departure from the usual.
That's not the case in the paragraph we're dealing with.
It--as paragraphs usually do--introduces an idea, then it expands and elaborates on that idea.

There is no reason to believe that this paragraph is doing anything otherwise, that it's departing from the norm.
The paragraph makes less sense if you interpret it that way.
So... why are you insisting that it must be interpreted in an unusual way that ultimately makes less sense....?

it isn't doing anything different from the norm.

I agree.
It's following the usual pattern of introducing a thought, then expanding on the thought.
NOT--as you insist--introducing a thought, then contradicting that thought and talking about other issues.

the subject just isn't what you want it to be.

I've already addressed this: I don't want it to be anything in particular.
What you're doing, by projecting biases and desires onto me, is "addressing the poster, not the post."
This is against the forum rules, and I will start reporting you for breaking the forum rules if you continue to make up motives and project them onto me instead of addressing the content of my post.

a paragraph about people who have suffered due to magic does not have to deal with only one specific group.

Agreed, but--as I have shown--this one does. It's not a list. It's an introduction of a concept, then an expansion on the concept.

first-hand is very clear. it doesn't mean second-hand, or anything else like it.

Yes. And as I have pointed out, "first-hand" refers to "feeling the scorch" of magic, a phrase which is quite obviously NOT literal.
If magic has caused you suffering--say by killing, disabling, or otherwise harming a loved-one--then you feel that suffering first-hand.
It's not possible to feel your own suffering second-hand.

it indicates personal experience,

Yes, including experiences such as "I have personally lost loved ones to magical attacks."

the fact that the second sentence exists in no way means that the first sentence somehow *must* be talking about the same group, especially when it is completely explicit that it is not talking about the same group at all.

The fact that a bunch of words are strung together in a sentence in no way means that the words have anything to do with one another, BUT it's typically how sentences are composed, and if one wished to prove a deviation from the norm, then one must support that claim thoroughly.

[Nightmartree]

well, then the great majority of the deaths would have been a hundred years ago, there'd be a small number of people still alive who even remember any of the big war to have been scorched by it, and the border skirmishes would not come even remotely close to being enough for the citizens (again, the people who live inside the heavily defended fortress cities where everyone else wants to go specifically because it's safe not a super-dangerous constant war zone, with the exception of those that are in the military... who, therefore, have the equipment to not be significantly harmed by most magic except in ways that involve death, and many of which are not related to very many actual citizens).

the vast majority of deaths were centuries ago, when the rifts opened and BILLLIONS died in a mass wave of magical destruction triggered by a technological war. You seem to think that it stopped, I hate to break it to you but it didn't the rifts didn't close, the war never ended and every day new things step forward to kill. The fact that more people died centuries ago has no meaning on the people dying today at the hands of things that slip past the patrols of CS soldiers, or are slipped past. And war ALWAYS affects the citizens, you think they just plop CS soldiers onto a battlefield from a box labeled "disposable soldiers" and move on? No, every one of those men is a person, there to defend his family or earn their way into the "safest" location in the territories, not totally safe, but safe enough its a tragedy when something does break its way inside and kill people before the coalition troops can respond...which why would then have troops inside and patrolling if it was totally safe? We know mages and psychics can and do get inside, and the minute that happens all those safe people without the equipment are almost guaranteed to suffer, one burster resisting arrest can kill dozens even hundred of innocent people with ease, especially if he views the CS as "Human Demons" who all should die for what their nation does. Ever one of those people has a family, every family will suffer from the loss of its members.

You want to know why there are more deaths in the past than there are today In rifts? Its because there were more humans to die back then, more people who didn't live in a military state armed to the teeth with MD arms and armor and willing to kill anything that might be able to kill those weak civilians well before it gets near them.

There is no way to keep the "Border" skirmishes away, you live in a world were everywhere has magic and ley lines, everywhere there is a rift is the front line, at any moment a monster could teleport in and start attacking. and you can never secure a border perfectly, especially not when something the size of your shoe has the power to slaughter entire villages of humans and walk away unharmed.

[Shark_Force]

well, then the great majority of the deaths would have been a hundred years ago, there'd be a small number of people still alive who even remember any of the big war to have been scorched by it, and the border skirmishes would not come even remotely close to being enough for the citizens (again, the people who live inside the heavily defended fortress cities where everyone else wants to go specifically because it's safe not a super-dangerous constant war zone, with the exception of those that are in the military... who, therefore, have the equipment to not be significantly harmed by most magic except in ways that involve death, and many of which are not related to very many actual citizens).

the vast majority of deaths were centuries ago, when the rifts opened and BILLLIONS died in a mass wave of magical destruction triggered by a technological war. You seem to think that it stopped, I hate to break it to you but it didn't the rifts didn't close, the war never ended and every day new things step forward to kill. The fact that more people died centuries ago has no meaning on the people dying today at the hands of things that slip past the patrols of CS soldiers, or are slipped past. And war ALWAYS affects the citizens, you think they just plop CS soldiers onto a battlefield from a box labeled "disposable soldiers" and move on? No, every one of those men is a person, there to defend his family or earn their way into the "safest" location in the territories, not totally safe, but safe enough its a tragedy when something does break its way inside and kill people before the coalition troops can respond...which why would then have troops inside and patrolling if it was totally safe? We know mages and psychics can and do get inside, and the minute that happens all those safe people without the equipment are almost guaranteed to suffer, one burster resisting arrest can kill dozens even hundred of innocent people with ease, especially if he views the CS as "Human Demons" who all should die for what their nation does. Ever one of those people has a family, every family will suffer from the loss of its members.

You want to know why there are more deaths in the past than there are today In rifts? Its because there were more humans to die back then, more people who didn't live in a military state armed to the teeth with MD arms and armor and willing to kill anything that might be able to kill those weak civilians well before it gets near them.

There is no way to keep the "Border" skirmishes away, you live in a world were everywhere has magic and ley lines, everywhere there is a rift is the front line, at any moment a monster could teleport in and start attacking. and you can never secure a border perfectly, especially not when something the size of your shoe has the power to slaughter entire villages of humans and walk away unharmed.

you clearly haven't read up on the chaos earth setting.

rifts, at least in north america, is not a post-apoclyptic setting any more. it is post-post-apocalyptic. the coalition states, in particular, have recovered wonderfully. new CS tech is pretty danged near the same as pre-rifts tech with only a few exceptions, their military is frankly most likely many times stronger, and the idea that they're continuing to suffer massive losses comparable rifts earth did right after the coming of the rifts is nonsense. in the CS, citizens live in fortress-cities, and are surrounded by tens of thousands of trained anti-magic warriors as well as hundreds of thousands of regular soldiers. furthermore, there was a massive surge of new rifts at the coming of the rifts, that simply is not remotely the case in the time of rifts earth.

there is diddly squat to support this moronic notion that ANYONE in north america is suffering the kinds of losses that occurred just after the coming of the rifts, not the massive nation of the CS, not the large cities like lazlo and arzno, and not the tiny villages in the wilderness. nobody, not even the people living in the magic zone, are getting eradicated by these threats you insist exist, so how in hell is the CS managing to lose a huge percentage of their army when nobody else is?

@ KC: nothing is contradictory in the paragraph. *if* the vast majority have suffered personal loss, there is nothing contradictory for those people plus all the people who know them to be a larger group. in fact, that part is expected. *if* well more than 50% (again, "vast majority" ==> over 50% by a large amount) have suffered personal loss, then we would expect a near 100% rate of people either being included in that number or knowing someone who is included in that number (in fact, if well over 50% had suffered personal loss, you'd expect the number of people in the CS who don't at least know someone who has suffered to be such a tiny amount that it would probably round to 100% of the population knowing someone who has suffered, and you could probably count the exceptions on one hand). we further know that the two groups are not the same (the second group explicitly includes people who have lost loved ones, and then *also* people who know people who have lost loved ones. so again, even if we attribute "being killed by someone trying to defend themselves from being murdered by a person" as that person's close friends and family suffering due to magic rather than suffering due to their loved one being a professional murderer, the second group very explicitly and clearly includes not just those who have lost loved ones, but those who know other people who have lost loved ones. so again, we need the vast majority to have suffered PERSONAL first-hand experience, and i don't give a rat's ass what metaphor the author used to describe suffering by magic, because it doesn't matter in the slightest to the question of how many people are included in that number.

the only contradictions are with the setting at large, and the fact that it claims substantially more than 50% of the population have suffered personal loss from magic, and yet the CS is not one gigantic graveyard/battlefield with people dying constantly and being left to rot because extracting corpses from a warzone is likely to get your own corpse added to the pile, neither of which are within that paragraph. but the paragraph is quite clear: the vast majority have personally suffered. again, this is not in the least bit contradictory to the claim that almost everyone knows someone has suffered, and your insistence that it does contradict is frankly baffling.

[Killer Cyborg]

@ KC: nothing is contradictory in the paragraph. *if* the vast majority have suffered personal loss, there is nothing contradictory for those people plus all the people who know them to be a larger group. in fact, that part is expected. *if* well more than 50% (again, "vast majority" ==> over 50% by a large amount) have suffered personal loss, then we would expect a near 100% rate of people either being included in that number or knowing someone who is included in that number (in fact, if well over 50% had suffered personal loss, you'd expect the number of people in the CS who don't at least know someone who has suffered to be such a tiny amount that it would probably round to 100% of the population knowing someone who has suffered, and you could probably count the exceptions on one hand).

Okay, I get where you're coming from there, although I still disagree.
Thanks for clarifying your view.

we further know that the two groups are not the same (the second group explicitly includes people who have lost loved ones, and then *also* people who know people who have lost loved ones.

I disagree--there is no indication that the two groups are not the same.
The first sentence introduces the basic thesis that "the vast majority of Coalition citizens have felt the painful scorch of magic first-hand."
The next two sentences support that thesis:
The Great Cataclysm was caused by the unwitting release of magic energy. Since that day forward, humans have suffered from magic-wielding monsters, gods, demons, dragons, and aliens as well as their fellow humans.

The next sentence still supports that same thesis:
Virtually every citizen of the Coalition States has lost a loved one or suffered in some way by magic, or knows someone who has. Ever since the Dark Ages, people have suffered at the hands of practitioners of magic--some inhuman monsters, others mortal men and women who dared to call upon elemental forces and supernatural beings they could not control or who used the power of magic to become conquerors, invaders, criminals, avengers, and madmen.

"Virtually every citizen of the CS" would in fact constitute "the vast majority of CS citizens."

the only contradictions are with the setting at large, and the fact that it claims substantially more than 50% of the population have suffered personal loss from magic, and yet the CS is not one gigantic graveyard/battlefield with people dying constantly

As has been repeatedly pointed out to you, suffering does not necessarily equal death.

[Nightmartree]

you clearly haven't read up on the chaos earth setting.

rifts, at least in north america, is not a post-apoclyptic setting any more. it is post-post-apocalyptic. the coalition states, in particular, have recovered wonderfully. new CS tech is pretty danged near the same as pre-rifts tech with only a few exceptions, their military is frankly most likely many times stronger, and the idea that they're continuing to suffer massive losses comparable rifts earth did right after the coming of the rifts is nonsense. in the CS, citizens live in fortress-cities, and are surrounded by tens of thousands of trained anti-magic warriors as well as hundreds of thousands of regular soldiers. furthermore, there was a massive surge of new rifts at the coming of the rifts, that simply is not remotely the case in the time of rifts earth.

there is diddly squat to support this moronic notion that ANYONE in north america is suffering the kinds of losses that occurred just after the coming of the rifts, not the massive nation of the CS, not the large cities like lazlo and arzno, and not the tiny villages in the wilderness. nobody, not even the people living in the magic zone, are getting eradicated by these threats you insist exist, so how in hell is the CS managing to lose a huge percentage of their army when nobody else is?

Every hour of daylight on a leyline has a 1-20% chance of opening a rift
Every hour of daylight on a nexus has 1-30% chance of opening a rift
During a leyline storm (no chance of one occurring given, merely that they appear whenever and wherever on a leyline without warning) there is a 20% chance of a rift ever 30 minutes on a line or 15 on a nexus, storms may last 30 minutes to 3 hours.

during solstices, equinoxes, eclipses, and at super nexus points where 3 or more ley lines cross these numbers increase greatly making it rarer for a rift to NOT open than for it too. Each rift usually remains open for a few minutes, however some last for hours. And they aren't suffering the kinds of losses that happened right after the coming of the rifts , THERE ARENT ENOUGH PEOPLE LEFT ALIVE TO BE LOSING THEM. The CS is a set target, with a large area to protect, and is suffering losses higher than everyone else because they hold more ground than anyone else, your comparing city states smaller than the county I live in to a power that's trying to hold down land across half of the right side of the united states. And I don't see their Mega Cities holding that land, I see outposts of grunts backed by samas and a few robots. I see farmers running to a CS outpost because "Something" is in the woods. I see a patrol set to run a ley line every day because there is a 1 in 5 chance that with every hour that goes by this will be the time a rift opens and something steps out. And if it does and they aren't there you better call in the dog boys to track it before it reaches civilians. I see a world that's not as bad as chaos earth but is far from the beautiful little rose field you seem to think it is. Just cause you didn't have your ass blown through your brains by a mine doesn't mean your not living in a minefield. It just means the people who lived there first were the ones to greet their backsides mentally. Every single hour of daylight there is a 1 in 5 chance a rift will open on a leyline and I slightly less than 1 in 3 chance at a nexus. That's every leyline and nexus with the sun shining on it in the world. EVEN if we assume that only a few of these open where a creature will enter through, and that only a small portion of those stay open for hours and allow mass migrations we still get things like the bug men up north, the gromeks, and other races. We still get enough supernatural predators and intelligences that the first rifts book had a random table to make them. Just because things got better, doesn't mean they aren't as **** as the books say they are, rifts is set to be the "rise" from the dark ages and fight for a world that is no longer ours and plagued by constant beings from elsewhere. Honestly I find that setting to often be far less kind than a mere post apocalyptic world. At least post apocalyptic is all about making it to the next day, not the hope that is torn from you when the monsters come.

[Blue_Lion]

Blue Lion, I did not say the CS did not target children. I am asking where they explicitly target HUMAN ones. Also what def are we using? 17 year olds? The CS might for example spare pre-adescent kids while killing adolescent kids.

As for the scorched earth purges. Where? Just the City of Tolkeen would be relatively small compared to all of Minnesota. Where did this explicitly begin happening? How many miles from city center?

By the book they did a mass purge killing every man woman and child. So they made no distinction by the book about age. The book made it clear the goal was to wipe out all the people of Tolkeen.

The amount of area that they did it is explained in the book(quite some dinstance from the city of tolkeen starting point was a crescent formation from the Sothern Iowa-chi town border swinging northeast into into the CS old Front line in Wisconsin pushing north and west into Minnesota), but in the end the amount of area it was done in does not matter as all that is needed to know is it was done by a large force of CS troops as a matter of SoP. (The book is quite clear it was not just the city of Tolkeen but the surrounding communities that where purged during the scorched earth.)

The post of yours I quoted is an attempt to skirt the real issue and introduce claims of possible diversions from what the text says to avoid the CS being held accountable for its actions.(I would recommend you do yourself a favor and read the books related to this as you are introducing claims that are direct conflict with them. Heck your claim that they might have let young children survive was in conflict with the paragraphs I quoted.)

[Blue_Lion]

It occurs to me that killing dragon hatchlings (smarter than human adults) is killing children, so species is important.

Well it comes down to what part of the alignment you are using. As I said the key is likely will not attack/kill an unarmed foe.
A dragon hatchling while a child to a dragon is still armed as it has natural weapons and has the ability to use them to kill in combat. An elf child would only be armed if it possessed a weapon.
(You can argue that the CS thinks they are not innocent but weather or target was armed is something we can determine as a fact. So will not attack an unarmed foe=only attacking a foe you know is armed. Mass purges/genocide is killing every one weather or not they are armed, and in this case regardless of race.)

[Axelmania]

Anything which can survive in Minnesota might be assumed to have MD capabilities even if this is occasionally wrong.

The distance from Tolkeen the purges began does matter. I would like to know where it says the CS killed every kid thy came across from Iowan border on. Also at what point in time. Since if they did it later on after already nonfatally pushing everyone out, these are folks who SNUCK BACK IN and can be reasonably assumed to be combatants.

[Nightmartree]

It occurs to me that killing dragon hatchlings (smarter than human adults) is killing children, so species is important.

Well it comes down to what part of the alignment you are using. As I said the key is likely will not attack/kill an unarmed foe.
A dragon hatchling while a child to a dragon is still armed as it has natural weapons and has the ability to use them to kill in combat. An elf child would only be armed if it possessed a weapon.
(You can argue that the CS thinks they are not innocent but weather or target was armed is something we can determine as a fact. So will not attack an unarmed foe=only attacking a foe you know is armed. Mass purges/genocide is killing every one weather or not they are armed, and in this case regardless of race.)

This is why I use the example of a bug race with little wimpy maggot things that MIGHT be able to nibble on you...about as hard a puppy

those aren't armed, but I bet you anyone on this forum in 90% of campaigns wouldn't think twice when their PC's said they wanted to light that egg chamber up to "stop the spread of the alien menace". None of them will think its evil or pause to have a philosophical debate on it...well maybe your biomancer will...but if you let them be a PC with a normal party something is already up.

[Axelmania]

Wolfen are basically Xiticix Lite.

[Shark_Force]

@nightmartree: sure. a rift opens, out pops something that *maybe* is even MDC (not too likely, but possible), probably melee threat if it is any sort of threat at all, probably slower than a decent vehicle, starting from whatever your preferred engagement range is because if you're not an idiot you've cleared out all the cover along those ley lines and otherwise prepared the ground, probably not expecting to step into a fight, and probably not even remotely close to being a match for a few dozen dog boys or dead boys, let alone those dog boys or dead boys with backup available including squads of SAMAS, heavy robots, long-range missile barrages, reinforcements, and so forth.

if you are suffering major losses to that consistently when you have the kinds of resources the CS has, you must have a special military trained to be less competent than ordinary civilians in every way, because i'm pretty sure if you gave a bunch of drunk rednecks with shotguns that kind of advantage, they'd be able to win with no losses almost every time, never mind a formally trained military with a variety of specialists trained to fight the supernatural using weapons that could vaporize a tank from 2,000 feet away.

and in any event, that wouldn't explain why the CS is suffering massive losses when there are small villages dotting the wilderness that haven't been whiped out by a massive ravening horde of demons pouring into their homes 3-4 times per day and nobody else seems to be suffering losses at the same rate. and i don't know why you've got this weird fixation on flat numbers, i've been expressing losses in percentages. news flash: whether you have a million or a hundred million, if the percentage of losses are the same, you should expect similar distributions.

@ KC: "Virtually every citizen of the Coalition States has lost a loved one or suffered in some way by magic, or knows someone who has"

let's look at that again: "Virtually every citizen has lost a loved one or suffered in some way..." (that would be the personal experience, going by your definition of what counts - again, not sold on magic being the cause of someone being killed if their job is professional murderer and they're killed because their victims defended themselves so much as being a professional murderer is the cause) "...or knows someone who has" (these people clearly do not have personal first-hand experience, because OR means that it is one thing or the other, so if they fall into that second group they have neither suffered nor have they lost a loved one).

then we go back to that first sentence, "the vast majority of Coalition citizens have felt the painful scorch of magic first-hand". notice that the vast majority have *personally* experienced this, "first-hand". not "know someone who has", which is much more plausible, they have first-hand experience. explicitly.

again, "vast majority" means "a lot more than half" (half being a majority, vast as an adjective meaning it's not a small majority). we don't know *exactly* how much "the vast majority" is, though i personally would probably say somewhere around 66% (if you were to display it visually, double the number is a very visible difference) to maybe 75% (three times as many is even more visible) or more, but in any event, it is going to be fairly substantial, such that if you were to somehow represent it visually it should be very obvious.

and that is simply absurd. it implies absolutely massive losses that i'm simply not convinced are reflected anywhere else in the book. that second sentence, where almost everyone has personal experience *or* knows someone who has, that's a heck of a lot more believable. even if the personal experience rate was something as low as, say, 5%, you could probably still get almost everyone knowing people who have suffered by personal experience. i mean, i'm not a super-social person, but i know *way* more than 20 people. probably a couple hundred at least if you go through various social groups. distant family members that you're not very close to, friends, friends-of-friends, people you work with, neighbours, people whose kids are in the same playgroup, friends of your family members, people who are your siblings' in-laws, and so forth. but when you're telling me that way more than half have personally suffered, that sounds like crazy talk, even if we're extending that to your definition where losing a family member is counted as personally suffering because of magic. and this doesn't even account for losses to non-magical threats, which you've gotta assume do happen as well.

so, we have what i would consider a conflict between this one little sentence in a throwaway paragraph, compared to the entire rest of the setting material i've ever seen, and i have to say... i am *far* more likely to chalk that up to "kevin wasn't thinking too hard on the implications of that one lone sentence" than i am to chalk it up to "they just neglected to mention that the CS is one gigantic perpetual warzone in every other rulebook". for example, it doesn't match up with the idea that the CS would be looking to lose even more people by declaring a largely pointless war, nor does it match up with the soldiers in that war being shocked by what a state of constant brutal warfare looks like.

[Axelmania]

First hand feeling of the scorch of magic doesn't necessarily mean "hit by an MD magic bolt" so high losses are not a requirement. It also doesn't mean you were attacked directly.

Scenario: a 20 year old city rat living in chi-town has never actually had to battle magic. When he was 5 years old in the burbs, his dad (a butcher & beef salesman) refuses to pay protection money to the local thug. This thug (a mind melter) managed to have connections to acquire an Animate and Control Dead talisman (in the form of a piece of jerky) which he gave to a street urchin with Hypnotic Suggestion instructions to use it against the butcher (but then mind wiped the kid so he wouldn't know specifics about who gave the orders, only that it was important to obey) 3x (animating all the beef carcasses to attack customers) and then eat the jerky, destroying the evidence of the talisman so it could not be traces or object read.

Nobody was killed. The beef skeletons were all on hooks so they could not pursue fleeing targets. A few people were hit for SDC damage. Including the dad. His business was ruined (nobody wants to buy necromantic meat) and he signed up to become a CS Grunt so he and his family could get away from this.

The boy was never hit by the meat. He did see a leg of beef extend out and smack his dad in the face though. He did see the family business ruined. He felt the scorch of magic.

[Nightmartree]

@nightmartree: sure. a rift opens, out pops something that *maybe* is even MDC (not too likely, but possible), probably melee threat if it is any sort of threat at all, probably slower than a decent vehicle, starting from whatever your preferred engagement range is because if you're not an idiot you've cleared out all the cover along those ley lines and otherwise prepared the ground, probably not expecting to step into a fight, and probably not even remotely close to being a match for a few dozen dog boys or dead boys, let alone those dog boys or dead boys with backup available including squads of SAMAS, heavy robots, long-range missile barrages, reinforcements, and so forth.

if you are suffering major losses to that consistently when you have the kinds of resources the CS has, you must have a special military trained to be less competent than ordinary civilians in every way, because i'm pretty sure if you gave a bunch of drunk rednecks with shotguns that kind of advantage, they'd be able to win with no losses almost every time, never mind a formally trained military with a variety of specialists trained to fight the supernatural using weapons that could vaporize a tank from 2,000 feet away.

and in any event, that wouldn't explain why the CS is suffering massive losses when there are small villages dotting the wilderness that haven't been whiped out by a massive ravening horde of demons pouring into their homes 3-4 times per day and nobody else seems to be suffering losses at the same rate. and i don't know why you've got this weird fixation on flat numbers, i've been expressing losses in percentages. news flash: whether you have a million or a hundred million, if the percentage of losses are the same, you should expect similar distributions.

Got it, sure, out of all they things we are shown in rifts its obviously the sdc things coming through the rifts we have to worry about. Not the things that as you say a formally trained military with a variety of specialists trained to fight the supernatural using weapons that could vaporize a tank from 2,000 feet away. Can't handle and are causing the losses that you seem to insist aren't happening. And I would love to meet the group of rednecks with guns who can go toe to toe with a balrog. Sure its rifts I can see them doing it, but It would be one hell of a group of redneck. As for the small villages which you seem to feel are so important, it's simple they aren't big enough to get hit all the time, mostly because they would be living away from the ley lines (as best they can) and almost all of them are supposed to have some form of "champion" to protect them from random roving baddies, and when their champion is killed they are either eaten, flee or just got a new ruler until the next time and they get to see if theyre eaten, fleeing or under another guy. As for the ones closer to the leylines the only people I can imagine doing that would be dominantly psychics or mages, and most of those communities will be either smaller than normal and so less noticeable, and likely have either enough forwarning to hide it out or enough power to be too much of a pain to eat, but those aren't NORMAL HUMAN BEINGS, like the CS. And you say your talking percentages, but what can you tell me is the percent of people in Lazlo who die to supernatural forces? Or the magic zone? how about rits Africa? You say that the CS citizens should be dying left and right for them to have "suffered" from magic. And that all these mass numbers of deaths should have happened in the past and don't now, yet you have yet to say a single thing as to why they couldn't have this number of people SUFFER NOT DIE from magic. And even now people are dying and being hurt constantly, in the CS not from the rift that opens and out flops a SDC alien that can't breath oxygen (but hey nobody mentioned his death generates a super plague! cause why not). But from the rift that opens and lets in a norse giant, or an alien swarm. Things that are just as likely to emerge as anything else in the multiverse.

You seem to have a totally different idea of what comes out of rifts than I do, cause somehow the fact that every magical being and most of the universe seems to have MD power levels doesn't factor into your world view, are there sdc things? sure, but from what I can tell few of them are messing around with forces that would get them zapped across leylines from the other side (and most of those come to rifts are realize HEY I'M MDC NOW!). Personally, I think if you were in charge the CS would run out of resources and die in a few months, after all, i'm sure long range missile bombardments, garrisons, miles long engineering projects in hostile conditions and full military deployment to surpress a continuous force of nature is a feasible way to handle it all, then we can build a massive wall around the entire CS too so the bad things outside don't bother us while we throw our entire population into holding down these locations 24/7.

i'll stick to a patrol of dog boys and flybys by samas until they need all that other stuff to keep things quiet. And then if all that fails i'll go find those rednecks of yours, they seem more competent than half the military forces on rifts earth. Can only say half because the other guys use magic to surpress rifts in their cities and feed on the leylines.

[Shark_Force]

clearing trees and brush isn't an engineering project, it's how you gather lumber for other engineering projects. the CS simply needs to do that along the ley lines in their territory, and now there's pretty much no cover... the entire line is now pretty easy to monitor, and hiding places are going to be pretty minimal. especially if you just set up some cheap sensors in the area to detect movement and such.

and the fact that the CS has access to reinforcements and missile bombardments and such doesn't mean they use them every single time there's a rift. if anything at all even comes through the rift (which isn't guaranteed to happen in the first place), you try to deal with it using regular troops. even a group of 10 soldiers are dishing out up to 4d6x10 damage per action collectively. there isn't much that lasts long against that. now give them a decent road (which you'll want anyways) and a couple of armoured hover vehicles, and that's going to be enough to deal with most things that come through a rift, even the big powerful MDC creatures (as opposed to the many, many SDC d-bees that we know also come through the rifts, because otherwise they wouldn't be on rifts earth).

does something big come through on occasion? sure. it's gonna be pretty rare though, simply because huge powerful creatures are much less common than smaller weaker creatures. that's how food chains work, really. and when that big thing comes through, well, that's when they use all those extra resources they have available. a couple of elves walk through wearing chain mail and armed with longbows? well, guess what, they probably get spotted, tracked down, and vaporized without putting up much of a fight in under a minute or two, without calling in any missile bombardments or air support or reinforcements.

[Killer Cyborg]

@ KC: "Virtually every citizen of the Coalition States has lost a loved one or suffered in some way by magic, or knows someone who has"

let's look at that again: "Virtually every citizen has lost a loved one or suffered in some way..." (that would be the personal experience, going by your definition of what counts - again, not sold on magic being the cause of someone being killed if their job is professional murderer and they're killed because their victims defended themselves so much as being a professional murderer is the cause) "...or knows someone who has" (these people clearly do not have personal first-hand experience, because OR means that it is one thing or the other, so if they fall into that second group they have neither suffered nor have they lost a loved one).

then we go back to that first sentence, "the vast majority of Coalition citizens have felt the painful scorch of magic first-hand". notice that the vast majority have *personally* experienced this, "first-hand". not "know someone who has", which is much more plausible, they have first-hand experience. explicitly.

I cede that the "virtually every citizen" includes "the vast majority of Coalition citizens" who have felt the scorch first-hand, because of the "or knows someone who has."
This puts the least-affected (but still affected) at the "knows someone who has suffered in some way" level.
This does not mean that "feeling the scorch of magic first-hand" does not include having a friend or loved one killed, because "suffered in some way" is so vague that it could include somebody inconvenienced by an irate mage spamming Magic Pigeons at them.

again, "vast majority" means "a lot more than half" (half being a majority, vast as an adjective meaning it's not a small majority). we don't know *exactly* how much "the vast majority" is, though i personally would probably say somewhere around 66% (if you were to display it visually, double the number is a very visible difference) to maybe 75% (three times as many is even more visible) or more, but in any event, it is going to be fairly substantial, such that if you were to somehow represent it visually it should be very obvious.

and that is simply absurd. it implies absolutely massive losses

Only if you for some reason believe that the only way that a person could feel suffering because of magic is via somebody dying.

[Nightmartree]

clearing trees and brush isn't an engineering project, it's how you gather lumber for other engineering projects. the CS simply needs to do that along the ley lines in their territory, and now there's pretty much no cover... the entire line is now pretty easy to monitor, and hiding places are going to be pretty minimal. especially if you just set up some cheap sensors in the area to detect movement and such.

and the fact that the CS has access to reinforcements and missile bombardments and such doesn't mean they use them every single time there's a rift. if anything at all even comes through the rift (which isn't guaranteed to happen in the first place), you try to deal with it using regular troops. even a group of 10 soldiers are dishing out up to 4d6x10 damage per action collectively. there isn't much that lasts long against that. now give them a decent road (which you'll want anyways) and a couple of armoured hover vehicles, and that's going to be enough to deal with most things that come through a rift, even the big powerful MDC creatures (as opposed to the many, many SDC d-bees that we know also come through the rifts, because otherwise they wouldn't be on rifts earth).

does something big come through on occasion? sure. it's gonna be pretty rare though, simply because huge powerful creatures are much less common than smaller weaker creatures. that's how food chains work, really. and when that big thing comes through, well, that's when they use all those extra resources they have available. a couple of elves walk through wearing chain mail and armed with longbows? well, guess what, they probably get spotted, tracked down, and vaporized without putting up much of a fight in under a minute or two, without calling in any missile bombardments or air support or reinforcements.

Your wanting them to clear trees and build in a location were there could be a random monster attack at any moment, assign a handful of troops to guard it, and then call for help when something too scary to handle comes through...which again, what have I said about dog boys? and how many troops escape uninjured when facing an unknown alien lifeform potentially daily.

I'm not gonna argue anymore because this all comes down to how many leylines we THINK are in the eastern half of the USA and in the apparently less leyline populated areas of texas and surrounding states. As well as whether what walks through your rift is a bunch of pointy eared guys wearing chainmail with longbows, or pointy eared guys wearing enchanted chainmail (now probably a few hundred MDC cause yay for magic) and arrows that explode like fireballs.

[Shark_Force]

clearing trees and brush isn't an engineering project, it's how you gather lumber for other engineering projects. the CS simply needs to do that along the ley lines in their territory, and now there's pretty much no cover... the entire line is now pretty easy to monitor, and hiding places are going to be pretty minimal. especially if you just set up some cheap sensors in the area to detect movement and such.

and the fact that the CS has access to reinforcements and missile bombardments and such doesn't mean they use them every single time there's a rift. if anything at all even comes through the rift (which isn't guaranteed to happen in the first place), you try to deal with it using regular troops. even a group of 10 soldiers are dishing out up to 4d6x10 damage per action collectively. there isn't much that lasts long against that. now give them a decent road (which you'll want anyways) and a couple of armoured hover vehicles, and that's going to be enough to deal with most things that come through a rift, even the big powerful MDC creatures (as opposed to the many, many SDC d-bees that we know also come through the rifts, because otherwise they wouldn't be on rifts earth).

does something big come through on occasion? sure. it's gonna be pretty rare though, simply because huge powerful creatures are much less common than smaller weaker creatures. that's how food chains work, really. and when that big thing comes through, well, that's when they use all those extra resources they have available. a couple of elves walk through wearing chain mail and armed with longbows? well, guess what, they probably get spotted, tracked down, and vaporized without putting up much of a fight in under a minute or two, without calling in any missile bombardments or air support or reinforcements.

Your wanting them to clear trees and build in a location were there could be a random monster attack at any moment, assign a handful of troops to guard it, and then call for help when something too scary to handle comes through...which again, what have I said about dog boys? and how many troops escape uninjured when facing an unknown alien lifeform potentially daily.

I'm not gonna argue anymore because this all comes down to how many leylines we THINK are in the eastern half of the USA and in the apparently less leyline populated areas of texas and surrounding states. As well as whether what walks through your rift is a bunch of pointy eared guys wearing chainmail with longbows, or pointy eared guys wearing enchanted chainmail (now probably a few hundred MDC cause yay for magic) and arrows that explode like fireballs.

dangerous to what?

ley lines are generally not really that dangerous. yes, something probably happens somewhere along the way. that something will most of the time amount to nothing, though. a rift opens and... nothing comes out. a rift opens and... a regular SDC d-bee comes out. a rift opens and... something that a sqad of CS soldiers can trivially deal with on their own comes out. on extremely rare situations, a rift opens and... wait for it... you have to wait a few seconds to a few minutes before something shows up that can deal with it, and in the meanwhile the equipment needed to avoid it is neither expensive nor uncommon.

when you have multiple millions of actual soldiers (in addition to "we swear they're not soldiers, they just have access to all of the exact same equipment", the "we don't count them as soldiers because they're not human", and the "they're not soldiers, they're just autonomous killing machines" numbers that are rarely acknowledged) you can heavily patrol ley lines. heck, you're gonna need outposts anyways, you may as well build them on ley lines. you're going to need roads between those outposts for maximum efficiency, so you may as well build them along those ley lines (and now you have a road to transport the lumber you're harvesting from those areas too).

if the CS had like 300,000 soldiers instead of 3 million soldiers in their expeditionary force alone (i'm just gonna presume that they didn't send 100% of their army away) plus probably a few million ISS troops (you don't need 1.6 million SAMAS if you don't have a lot of troops to potentially use them) and other paramilitary/"police" organizations, plus dog boys plus skelebots plus probably some militia or something if it comes down to it... well, then i could see the CS military suffering major losses. but you seem to be treating them like someone who doesn't have an obscene amount of resources. that's not who the CS are.

@ kC: being annoyed by magic pigeons is unlikely to qualify as having been metaphorically "scorched" by magic. i mean, it's not really defined clearly, but if we're justifying active murder of everything on the basis that some of them might be dangerous, it's gotta be fairly serious.

[Nightmartree]

ley lines are generally not really that dangerous. yes, something probably happens somewhere along the way. that something will most of the time amount to nothing, though.

@ kC: being annoyed by magic pigeons is unlikely to qualify as having been metaphorically "scorched" by magic. i mean, it's not really defined clearly, but if we're justifying active murder of everything on the basis that some of them might be dangerous, it's gotta be fairly serious.

prove it

There is nothing in the books that I'm aware of to say whether a rift opens and a soccer mom with a broken toaster steps through or whether it is the godking of a galactic empire and his 10,000 elite guard with a full range of support to ensure they can build a new land.

and honestly, fairly serious, lethal and a magic pigeon harassing you leaves a whole lot of range in between, especially if you don't have to be directly hit by a combat spell for it to count.

Friend or relative heavily injured or killed by magic
attacked by a monster from a rift (this covers harassment by faeries, entities, demons, supernatural predators, D-bee hordes ect.)
Maliciously targeted by a magic wielder (curses, property damage, sicked a demon on me)
Wide spread fallout (necromancer unleashes mass horde of dead on the living, shifter dies and his summons go wild, magic wipes out a dam and floods a city ect.)
Magic espionage (Theft, stolen secrets, espionage done by mages)
Indirect Harm (Magic revives Alistair Duncan from the grave, cures D-bees, teleports demon away from death, opens rifts, brings in competition or foes ect.)

[Killer Cyborg]

@ kC: being annoyed by magic pigeons is unlikely to qualify as having been metaphorically "scorched" by magic.

As I said.

[Killer Cyborg]

clearing trees and brush isn't an engineering project, it's how you gather lumber for other engineering projects. the CS simply needs to do that along the ley lines in their territory, and now there's pretty much no cover... the entire line is now pretty easy to monitor, and hiding places are going to be pretty minimal. especially if you just set up some cheap sensors in the area to detect movement and such.

and the fact that the CS has access to reinforcements and missile bombardments and such doesn't mean they use them every single time there's a rift. if anything at all even comes through the rift (which isn't guaranteed to happen in the first place), you try to deal with it using regular troops. even a group of 10 soldiers are dishing out up to 4d6x10 damage per action collectively. there isn't much that lasts long against that. now give them a decent road (which you'll want anyways) and a couple of armoured hover vehicles, and that's going to be enough to deal with most things that come through a rift, even the big powerful MDC creatures (as opposed to the many, many SDC d-bees that we know also come through the rifts, because otherwise they wouldn't be on rifts earth).

does something big come through on occasion? sure. it's gonna be pretty rare though, simply because huge powerful creatures are much less common than smaller weaker creatures. that's how food chains work, really. and when that big thing comes through, well, that's when they use all those extra resources they have available. a couple of elves walk through wearing chain mail and armed with longbows? well, guess what, they probably get spotted, tracked down, and vaporized without putting up much of a fight in under a minute or two, without calling in any missile bombardments or air support or reinforcements.

Your wanting them to clear trees and build in a location were there could be a random monster attack at any moment, assign a handful of troops to guard it, and then call for help when something too scary to handle comes through...which again, what have I said about dog boys? and how many troops escape uninjured when facing an unknown alien lifeform potentially daily.

I'm not gonna argue anymore because this all comes down to how many leylines we THINK are in the eastern half of the USA and in the apparently less leyline populated areas of texas and surrounding states. As well as whether what walks through your rift is a bunch of pointy eared guys wearing chainmail with longbows, or pointy eared guys wearing enchanted chainmail (now probably a few hundred MDC cause yay for magic) and arrows that explode like fireballs.

dangerous to what?

ley lines are generally not really that dangerous. yes, something probably happens somewhere along the way. that something will most of the time amount to nothing, though. a rift opens and... nothing comes out. a rift opens and... a regular SDC d-bee comes out. a rift opens and... something that a sqad of CS soldiers can trivially deal with on their own comes out. on extremely rare situations, a rift opens and... wait for it... you have to wait a few seconds to a few minutes before something shows up that can deal with it, and in the meanwhile the equipment needed to avoid it is neither expensive nor uncommon.

when you have multiple millions of actual soldiers (in addition to "we swear they're not soldiers, they just have access to all of the exact same equipment", the "we don't count them as soldiers because they're not human", and the "they're not soldiers, they're just autonomous killing machines" numbers that are rarely acknowledged) you can heavily patrol ley lines. heck, you're gonna need outposts anyways, you may as well build them on ley lines. you're going to need roads between those outposts for maximum efficiency, so you may as well build them along those ley lines (and now you have a road to transport the lumber you're harvesting from those areas too).

if the CS had like 300,000 soldiers instead of 3 million soldiers in their expeditionary force alone (i'm just gonna presume that they didn't send 100% of their army away) plus probably a few million ISS troops (you don't need 1.6 million SAMAS if you don't have a lot of troops to potentially use them) and other paramilitary/"police" organizations, plus dog boys plus skelebots plus probably some militia or something if it comes down to it... well, then i could see the CS military suffering major losses. but you seem to be treating them like someone who doesn't have an obscene amount of resources. that's not who the CS are.

I'd wager that the CS does patrol ley lines in their territory, along with protecting borders, cities, towns, farmlands, and so forth.
Not to mention exercises outside of their borders.
They do have a lot of resources, but they also have a lot of stuff to do with those resources. Against enemies that can melt into shadows, turn invisible, shapechange, teleport, mind control, and so forth, I don't see it as a stretch that they keep pretty busy.

[Shark_Force]

I'd wager that the CS does patrol ley lines in their territory, along with protecting borders, cities, towns, farmlands, and so forth.
Not to mention exercises outside of their borders.
They do have a lot of resources, but they also have a lot of stuff to do with those resources. Against enemies that can melt into shadows, turn invisible, shapechange, teleport, mind control, and so forth, I don't see it as a stretch that they keep pretty busy.

busy, sure.

suffering massive losses equivalent in percentage to what was happening at the coming of the rifts like nightmartree is claiming? no. not even remotely close. nobody has 3 million soldiers with brand new freshly-researched and upgraded equipment across the board to send off to a largely pointless war when their population is plummeting through the floor.

seriously, go back and read what he's arguing. apparently the only reason there aren't as many deaths in 10X PA as there were earlier in the apocalypse is that there are fewer total people in the world.

[Nightmartree]

I'd wager that the CS does patrol ley lines in their territory, along with protecting borders, cities, towns, farmlands, and so forth.
Not to mention exercises outside of their borders.
They do have a lot of resources, but they also have a lot of stuff to do with those resources. Against enemies that can melt into shadows, turn invisible, shapechange, teleport, mind control, and so forth, I don't see it as a stretch that they keep pretty busy.

busy, sure.

suffering massive losses equivalent in percentage to what was happening at the coming of the rifts like nightmartree is claiming? no. not even remotely close. nobody has 3 million soldiers with brand new freshly-researched and upgraded equipment across the board to send off to a largely pointless war when their population is plummeting through the floor.

seriously, go back and read what he's arguing. apparently the only reason there aren't as many deaths in 10X PA as there were earlier in the apocalypse is that there are fewer total people in the world.

I directly said they aren't suffering losses like the time of the coming of the rifts, I've said that two or three times.

you can't accept that there is middle ground between" OMG THE WORLD IS ENDING BLOOD DEATH MURDER BAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH" and "We are the mighty forces with technology! bow before us pitiful rift traveler so we may murder you and your puny might forever will be gone from this megaverse"

And that's not the only reason, that's what I said is the reason they can't be taking loses like back then, there aren't enough human beings on earth to be in the way of the things that will kill them. If you blanket the earth with a meteor shower of course it will kill more humans during the time when humans cover the planet compared to the time they have scattered villages and kingdoms with a handful of empires that struggle with equally or even more numerous kingdoms, villages and empires of D-bees.

[Axelmania]

KC funny you bring up magic pigeons. Was reading the Asher's Revenge scenario and it mentioned Karl Prosek got a magic pigeon from the dragon Aurelion. Cannot recall if that came up in thread about harassing him with pigeons.

There is also a spell in RMB for sending messages. So mages could send "come to me Karl" or "Karl I need you" from pretty far off and even if he saves he still hears it once and it is pretty cheap. Failing his save would mean he keels hearing it.

Maybe the reason Karl is Diabolic is people have been doing this his whole life?

[Nightmartree]

KC funny you bring up magic pigeons. Was reading the Asher's Revenge scenario and it mentioned Karl Prosek got a magic pigeon from the dragon Aurelion. Cannot recall if that came up in thread about harassing him with pigeons.

There is also a spell in RMB for sending messages. So mages could send "come to me Karl" or "Karl I need you" from pretty far off and even if he saves he still hears it once and it is pretty cheap. Failing his save would mean he keels hearing it.

Maybe the reason Karl is Diabolic is people have been doing this his whole life?

oh man...the evils of magic, sending whispered messages to the young children of the CS to corrupt their minds and convince them theyre crazy, or that the voices are real and they must obey!

the magic is evil part is an exaggeration but I could totally see a cult doing this to someone to take control over their power/influence, thanks for expanding my horizons axelmania