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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Abstruse" data-source="post: 6157650" data-attributes="member: 6669048">What he said. The manacycle is on the same 6000ish year cycle that the Mayan Long Count calendar uses. Every 6000 years, magic returns to the world. The Second World was the Age of Dragons, while the Fourth World was Earthdawn. Earthdawn takes place at the end of that cycle, while Shadowrun takes place at the start of the Sixth. Between downcycles (the Third and Fifth worlds), magic is dormant and very difficult to work. Dragons don't have enough mana to sustain them so they go into a sort of hibernation (they can still telepathically learn about the world through osmosis or something...it's never explained that well in-universe because the dragons are notoriously closed-lipped about themselves). There's also Immortal Elves who survived through the Fourth World and lived through all the Fifth World, giving them a HUGE advantage when the mana levels started to rise again because they knew what was coming.At the peak of every manacycle, it becomes possible for metaplanar beings that feed on fear and pain to come through to this world. In Earthdawn, they were called Horrors. Shadowrun used them a bit in the mid-90s, but the plotline was closed out between the Harlequin's Back adventure and the Dragonheart Trilogy of novels. When FASA closed, the BattleTech and Shadowrun licenses when to a company called FanPro, while the Earthdawn license went...somewhere else I can't remember because the company closed down. While the two were careful not to step on each other's toes so the worlds could remain linked, there haven't been any other crossovers between the two game lines since then with the exception of a few shared dragon and immortal elf characters.As far as other planets, again, nail on the head. There used to be three Mars colonies, but I believe two of them were evacuated during Storm Front (the eventbook that bridged SR4 to SR5). There's about half a dozen lunar bases and about two dozen space stations. The Corporate Court (the self-regulatory group that keeps the various megacorporations in line) is actually housed on one of the space stations called Zurich Orbital (this was originally a heavily-modified MIR in the fiction, but when MIR was decommissioned and deorbited, they either retconned it to be the International Space Station or they just stopped mentioning the connection altogether). There's been work on a space elevator in South Africa for...crap, since at least 2062 I think (current game year is 2075) and it just keeps getting plagued with problems. There's a lot of information about space in a couple of the download-only sourcebooks for SR4 if you're really interested.</blockquote>

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