I guess that's just part of the business when you're a professional criminal, though. Like ooh, why are all our meetings so fraught with intimations of violence? I don't know, maybe because you're mostly meeting people in the planning, execution, or aftermath of an armed robbery (or kidnapping or industrial sabotage or what have you). The main difference when dealing with dragons is that you can't plausibly fight your way out of a bad situation.
It still feels kind of bad, though. Will not a single one of these motherfucking lizards at least try to put me at ease?
Well, to be fair, Hestaby tries. And I think the implication is that this effort is why she eventually wins in the emergency dragon battle-royale probate hearing. She cultivates the kind of relationships that lead to her employees canonically resisting Lofwyr when he offers history's biggest bribe.
It's a side of the job they never tell you about. You've been secretly manipulated by a dragon to commit a half-dozen highly dangerous international heists and she tells you it's all part of a scheme to embarrass her fellow dragons as part of a contest of cunning and influence, but there's only one task left to perform - travel to the deepest reaches of the astral plane to steal the spiritual essence of a magic memory gem from the sole shareholder in the world's largest corporation - and just as you think you've succeeded, he shows up and offers you an immense bribe ("Even a billion nuyen is chump change to a being of his wealth") to throw the contest to him at the last minute.
Maybe it's a tempting offer, but a shadowrunner has a code - never betray your employer, do the job you were hired to do. And that's why the comments section in Dragons of the Sixth World confirms that Hestaby won the contest. Because of honor. And the priceless value of a good reputation.
Or maybe it's just a plot hole. I think the encounter with Lofwyr was meant to be a morality test and in the context of a role-playing game, those are always a bit strange. Because, as a GM, all you can ever offer the players are words in a conversation. "Do this and I'll say your characters get rich." And good words for the characters aren't necessarily good words for the game. You say the characters have "fuck you money" and that's basically telling the players there's no reason to keep having adventures. Why would a newly-minted billionaire risk it all on a shadowrun?
And yet, these temptations do sometimes work. Players like to get into the head-space of their characters. Of course my desperate criminal guy is going to take the deal, never mind that it destroys the premise of the campaign, because my guy doesn't know they're part of a game. The trick for a conscientious GM is to give them an alternative that allows the players to pretend their characters would prefer the choice that lets them keep playing the game.
I think, in this case, the alternative is that Hestaby winning the contest means she has the credibility and political capital to work towards bridging the gap between dragons and the shorter-lived metahumans. Whereas a victory by Lofwyr means he will continue using the Jewel of Memory and the collected knowledge of all dragonkind for no cause other than the glory of Lofwyr. By turning him down, you're not just avoiding early retirement, you're taking a stand for a safer and more just world.
Unfortunately, these stakes are not explicitly spelled out anywhere in the adventure chain. Hestaby kind of alludes to them, near the end, when she tells the PCs that "she believes that dragons and other intelligent races should be able to work together toward mutual goals." But even to the extent that you meet her halfway and read that as her being a principled dragon reformer, it rings a bit hollow when you're coming off six consecutive death-defying jobs, most of which involved being menaced by one or more of her draconic rivals, and she's just now revealing that you've been working for her the whole time (and more importantly, that the rules of the contest mean that all those previous death threats were bluffs).
I think that's a very different conversation if you're having it at the beginning of the adventure. Then, as you're jet-setting all over the globe, stealing jobs from local criminal mercenaries, you're not just kidnapping the head of Ghostwalker's cult or rearranging the feng shui of the HQ of a corporation with ties to Lung, you've got a basic buy-in to the motive behind these acts - busting the glass ceiling of dragon society so that the inexplicably solitary female dragon can have a chance to be less of an asshole to the little people. Keeping the ruthless hoarder from the levers of political power is worth turning down a billion-dollar bribe. Preserving your reputation with potential customers after you quit your job is definitely not.
Thematic incoherence aside, I had no particularly strong feelings about this series of adventures. Most of them would be pretty typical shadowruns, were it not for the involvement of the great dragons and I guess that's all right. There's probably only so many ways you can present "commit crimes for money," particularly if your reader (i.e. me) is prone to engaging with the material from a high level of abstraction. I did enjoy the mission where you had to stealthily engage in unsanctioned interior decorating, even if my damnable abstraction couldn't help but notice its structural similarity to every other heist published for the line.
On the metaplot front, I'm moderately satisfied. We get a fairly protracted glimpse at the dragons' internal politics, and one or two juicy nuggets of gossip. In the closing fiction, Hestaby didn't seem entirely disinterested in the prospect of mating with Lofwyr and I'd kind of love to see the in-universe paparazzi get ahold of that story. Also, while visiting the metaplanes, the PCs interact with a (time-looped? magically reconstructed memory?) version of Dunkelzahn and, assuming the vision was accurately historical, it's revealed that he willingly sacrificed himself for the good of humanity.
I'm not sure I entirely approve of that last bit. I prefer a depiction of Dunkelzahn that's slightly more reminiscent of Mountainshadow (his more . . . pragmatic Earthdawn identity). But I can't deny that it's a tantalizing hint to secrets not yet revealed.
Two weeks ago, I was peeved that I read Dragons of the Sixth World before Survival of the Fittest because it was out of publication order. In retrospect, I don't think it made any difference. Despite its pitch, I never got the sense that this book was depicting the elaborate game of move-and-countermove that is the heart of draconic politics. Each of the adventures was part of Hestaby's plan, to be sure, but there didn't seem to be any particular reason for the same group of shadowrunners to do them all (and, in fact, one of the chapters potentially has the characters replaced halfway through), nor did I ever see any compelling evidence of a rival dragon's competing plans (the closest we get is when Celedyr hires the PCs to steal from Rhonabwy's horde, but even then Hestaby tricked him into doing it). It didn't turn me off the book or anything, but it was enough to cool my hype to mere enjoyment.
Ukss Contribution: At a certain point in the adventure, the PCs will have reason to interrogate a member of the Hong Kong triads. Naturally, the gangster is uncooperative. However, if the PCs use magic or coercion to get answers, he will spontaneously burst into flames.
Like, damn. Organized crime operates on a code of silence, sure, but using magic to ensure that your front-line soldiers can't even bargain their way out of torture . . . that's fucked up. Even a little bit of information compartmentalization would have made such measures completely unnecessary...
Which actually makes it a great bit of characterization for a terrifying criminal gang. Some of Ukss' gangsters will be similarly extreme.
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