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What exactly was the problem with the Dragonrise?


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This might make me seem like a kinda heartless bastard but I've never really understood the issue with the Dragonrise. A single strike that wipes out the high command of an oppressive imperial power as well as much of their military power in the region. Sounds good! (At least from the Sartarite perspective).

I see a lot of times in sourcebooks and well of daliath posts however that the reaction to this was more often than not Horror. Not fear which would obviously make sense, but Horror. Apparently even Kallyr who set the whole thing off got kinda spooked by it. I would understand surprise, this probably wasn't the plan, but if I were a commander hoping to put a stop to the consecration of the new temple, surely this is a pretty good outcome isn't it?

I suppose the main trouble I have is figuring out the rebel Sartarite point of view that doesn't see this as a good thing. If you're a sympathiser with the Lunars, I get it, but Kallyr? I don't quite remember where but I recall reading that Leika was also horrified. And those two are some of the most hard core Lunar haters in Dragon Pass.

The new Reaching Moon temple was, in my opinion at least, a very valid military target. If it was a civilian population I would understand the reaction a lot better but when I read the section on the Dragonrise in the Glorantha Sourcebook it seems like four bites the Brown dragon took were mostly Lunar soldiers and buildings aswell as "a smaller part of the panicked mob".

Is it the loss of life? Sure this was bad but surely the Lunar college of magic wasting large swathes of soldiers on the battlefield would be a little comparable and these are Lunar lives aren't they? They enslaved the Dundealos and murdered the Royal Family! They killed Orlanth! The Great winter wasn't that long ago, in the corebook there is a 55% chance that one of your parents died as a result, if they were in Sartar! I can't imagine most people felt very supportive of the Lunar regime at the time.

Is it the fact that it was done by a single monstrously powerful creature? Kallyr was at Whitewall when the Crimson Bat came calling wasn't she? You'd think she'd be hardened to the idea of what is essentially a kaiju eating a bunch of people.

Is it the fear of reprisal?

Is it the fact that the Brown Dragon now just lives in Sartar and no one knows if it's going to wake up again? if you live nearby you can probably hear the thing snoring and that would keep anyone awake at night.

Obviously, absolute dread makes sense from a Lunar perspective, this is probably equivalent to a US military base getting nuked but if you're a Sartarite shouldn't you be out in the street dancing?

Why aren't they?

Edited by That_Old-Hammer
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16 minutes ago, That_Old-Hammer said:

This might make me seem like a kinda heartless bastard but I've never really understood the issue with the Dragonrise.

500 years before the dragons rose and wiped out all humans in Dragon Pass. Didn't matter who they were, they were eaten, incinerated, and destroyed. 
It took 200 years before humans ventured again into the pass with a very strong hope that the dragons had gone to sleep and would not destroy them again.
All seemed good. And then the Dragonrise occurs. The dragon devours everything in the place where it rises (Lunar temple, Lunar army, and anyone else who was in the area - including Sartarite slaves of the Lunars). Then it flies off north (5 miles long) for a great circuit until it returns to its resting place. But it is clearly awake and NO ONE knows what it may do next. (Is it angry at being awakened? Thinking of food?...)

It's not like a nuclear bomb that goes off and is done. It can rise again, and next time it may eat Boldhome or Clearwine.

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7 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

500 years before the dragons rose and wiped out all humans in Dragon Pass. Didn't matter who they were, they were eaten, incinerated, and destroyed. 
It took 200 years before humans ventured again into the pass with a very strong hope that the dragons had gone to sleep and would not destroy them again.
All seemed good. And then the Dragonrise occurs. The dragon devours everything in the place where it rises (Lunar temple, Lunar army, and anyone else who was in the area - including Sartarite slaves of the Lunars). Then it flies off north (5 miles long) for a great circuit until it returns to its resting place. But it is clearly awake and NO ONE knows what it may do next. (Is it angry at being awakened? Thinking of food?...)

It's not like a nuclear bomb that goes off and is done. It can rise again, and next time it may eat Boldhome or Clearwine.

Wow. You're totally right, can't believe I blanked on the Dragonkill. Thanks for the quick response!

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1 minute ago, That_Old-Hammer said:

Wow. You're totally right, can't believe I blanked on the Dragonkill. Thanks for the quick response!

Everyone knows that the dragonewts are totally bizarre and unpredictable - but they are very minor versions of the True Dragons. 

The True Dragons are obviously immense - the Brown Dragon at 5 miles(!) long and can devour an entire temple in a single bite is terrifying. And it didn't even use its fire breath (or equivalent) to do what it did. It opened up a vast crevasse where it rose and later resettled. But if you project unpredictably from the lesser dragonewts to the True Dragons (and remember the tales of everything they destroyed), then you don't want anything to do with them (and hope they go back to sleep.

In my Imther game, the True Dragon flew overhead on its way to the Lunar Empire (before being turned back). It looked like a great storm line approaching with a massive thundercloud above and around its head from which lightnings constantly spewed. Its thunderous rage was loud enough to shake buildings and knock people down in the cities over which it passed. 

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I mean, the Dragon had just devoured the Red Bat. And THAT thing actually projected horror! It's like if the cultists summon Cthulhu and then the "good guys" summon SOMETHING THAT ARRIVES AND EATS CTHULHU...

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ROLAND VOLZ

Running: 1870s Mashup Hero System | Playing: nothing | Planning: D&D 5E/OSE/Fantasy Hero Home Game

D&D is an elf from Tolkien, a barbarian from Howard, and a mage from Vance fighting monsters from Lovecraft in a room that looks like it might have been designed by Wells and Giger. - TiaNadiezja

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1 hour ago, AlHazred said:

I mean, the Dragon had just devoured the Red Bat. And THAT thing actually projected horror! It's like if the cultists summon Cthulhu and then the "good guys" summon SOMETHING THAT ARRIVES AND EATS CTHULHU...

Where did you get that from?

The interaction between the Crimson Bat lifting off Runegate towards Boldhome being intercepted by a dragon happened in 1602, during the conquest of Sartar by the Lunars, directly led by their Red Emperor. Subsequently, dragonewts "hired at inhuman cost" aided the Lunars to overcome the defenders of Boldhome.

The Bat re-appeared in Sartar in late 1619 on its way to Whitewall, where no draconic intervention was observed. It has not returned to the region since it was repelled and lost to the Empire then.

This wasn't exactly a game of Summon Bigger Fish. The plan was to make the Lunars fumble their rite, possibly imploding the temple site or whatever. Awakening a dragon might have been a secret agenda of Orlaront and maybe Minaryth Purple.

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Telling how it is excessive verbis

 

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57 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Where did you get that from?

The interaction between the Crimson Bat lifting off Runegate towards Boldhome being intercepted by a dragon happened in 1602, during the conquest of Sartar by the Lunars, directly led by their Red Emperor. Subsequently, dragonewts "hired at inhuman cost" aided the Lunars to overcome the defenders of Boldhome.

The Bat re-appeared in Sartar in late 1619 on its way to Whitewall, where no draconic intervention was observed. It has not returned to the region since it was repelled and lost to the Empire then.

This wasn't exactly a game of Summon Bigger Fish. The plan was to make the Lunars fumble their rite, possibly imploding the temple site or whatever. Awakening a dragon might have been a secret agenda of Orlaront and maybe Minaryth Purple.

Yeah, my memory is shot. I'd conflated the events, but you're absolutely right, they're unrelated. 

ROLAND VOLZ

Running: 1870s Mashup Hero System | Playing: nothing | Planning: D&D 5E/OSE/Fantasy Hero Home Game

D&D is an elf from Tolkien, a barbarian from Howard, and a mage from Vance fighting monsters from Lovecraft in a room that looks like it might have been designed by Wells and Giger. - TiaNadiezja

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1 hour ago, AlHazred said:

... I'd conflated the events, but you're absolutely right, they're unrelated. 

Except:  Dragons.
We really don't know if they were related at all; maybe from the Draconic POV they were very tightly linked indeed.

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C'es ne pas un .sig

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1 hour ago, g33k said:

Except:  Dragons.
We really don't know if they were related at all; maybe from the Draconic POV they were very tightly linked indeed.

Quite likely, but we were discussing the panicked reaction of humanity (including the Sartarites who benefitted from the erasure of the Lunar temple).

Telling how it is excessive verbis

 

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17 hours ago, Joerg said:

This wasn't exactly a game of Summon Bigger Fish. The plan was to make the Lunars fumble their rite, possibly imploding the temple site or whatever. Awakening a dragon might have been a secret agenda of Orlaront and maybe Minaryth Purple.

I personally prefer it the way it’s depicted in Sartar Rising, in the Boatraising quest. At the barest minimum, Kallyr knows the Draconic forces she’s playing a dangerous game with. She went to talk to a cosmic dragon about it, after all!

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6 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

I personally prefer it the way it’s depicted in Sartar Rising, in the Boatraising quest. At the barest minimum, Kallyr knows the Draconic forces she’s playing a dangerous game with. She went to talk to a cosmic dragon about it, after all!

And I bet she used Orlaront as her interpreter. Who might have received a different agenda than he communicated to Kallyr, or at least that's what she is fearing now the 5 mile dragon has risen.

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Telling how it is excessive verbis

 

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On 10/26/2024 at 3:57 PM, Akhôrahil said:

I personally prefer it the way it’s depicted in Sartar Rising, in the Boatraising quest. At the barest minimum, Kallyr knows the Draconic forces she’s playing a dangerous game with. She went to talk to a cosmic dragon about it, after all!

And dragons would never lie, would they...???

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On 10/26/2024 at 4:04 PM, Joerg said:

And I bet she used Orlaront as her interpreter. Who might have received a different agenda than he communicated to Kallyr, or at least that's what she is fearing now the 5 mile dragon has risen.

I don't know about you (well, your Glorantha), but in mine, dragons are never easy to understand at the best of times... layers upon layers upon layers of meaning, and subtext, and all that jazz. Besides which, the whole concept of Time to them would be very very different to ours/theirs (Kallyr et al.).

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On 10/25/2024 at 1:45 PM, That_Old-Hammer said:

This might make me seem like a kinda heartless bastard but I've never really understood the issue with the Dragonrise. A single strike that wipes out the high command of an oppressive imperial power as well as much of their military power in the region. Sounds good! (At least from the Sartarite perspective).

I see a lot of times in sourcebooks and well of daliath posts however that the reaction to this was more often than not Horror. Not fear which would obviously make sense, but Horror. Apparently even Kallyr who set the whole thing off got kinda spooked by it. I would understand surprise, this probably wasn't the plan, but if I were a commander hoping to put a stop to the consecration of the new temple, surely this is a pretty good outcome isn't it?

It is all to do with the Dragonkill.

After the Empire of the Wyrms Friends was brought down, humans tried to destroy the Dragonewt Eggs, and the Dragons rose up and destroyed them. This consisted of Dream and True Dragons awakening, or flying to the area and destroying whole armies in dragonfire, poison gas and acid. Hundreds of thousands were killed. Then the Dragon Pass region was closed off and humans were banned for a long time. 

This left a mythical wound in the area, resulting in a fear of Dragons. The Dragonrise awakened that dormant fear and re-energised it, giving it form as well as revitalising the mythic echoes.

 

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Simon Phipp - Caldmore Chameleon - Wallowing in my elitism since 1982. Many Systems, One Family. Just a fanboy. 

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Hi all,

I have had the same ideas.

This is the experience of my PC in Jonstown.
Sorry for the bad grammar.
 

"I anticipate that something big will happen during Harmony week. It is during Ulerias special festival week. We all guess wildly on when it will happen. I guess that it will happen on Full Moonday, or Wildday, when the Lunar Phase is strongest. I bet a full Wheel on it with Andrin Swenson at the Black Alynx Inn. Andrin bet on Cresent Come, or Windsday, because the Moon is growing the fastest then.

But already at Black Moon or Clayday, when Yelm is at his highest, celebrating the Lightbringers Quest, we hear a thundering sound all over. And many starts to throw up of all the magic energy in the Air. As my head start to spin and building a headache, I see what I cannot believe!

A Dragon, a True dragon, huger than a mountain, and more colorful than anything I have ever seen. Brown in all colors and shapes! It raises up into the Middle World and keep coming up and head right at the Red Moon.

A Dragon, a brown dragon! It engulfs the Red Moon and swirl around it. And the leaves it, covered in a dragon-shaped cloud, paler than I have ever seen. The dragon throws itself down and disappears from our view.

What has happened? Will Glorantha be devoured? Will the dragons devour all humankind again here in Dragon Pass, their hatching ground? That happened in the Dragon-kill-war. We are all living inside the Deathline.

And then I forget to breath as the dragon circling the sacred peak of Kero Fin even hides it completely. When it disappears out of our sight I remember to breath. As I look around there is people who is using their left hand and talks with tongues that is split.

The world has changed forever. A new godlike Dragon has been born, appeared here with us.

Everyone knows something big has happened. People talk of a major Lunar military disaster. Our priests are busy by all who wants to understand what these portents mean."

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47 minutes ago, soltakss said:

After the Empire of the Wyrms Friends was brought down, humans tried to destroy the Dragonewt Eggs, and the Dragons rose up and destroyed them. This consisted of Dream and True Dragons awakening, or flying to the area and destroying whole armies in dragonfire, poison gas and acid. Hundreds of thousands were killed. Then the Dragon Pass region was closed off and humans were banned for a long time. 

They should have just nuked them from space... It's the only way to be sure!

(yes, your post here did give me flashbacks - quite literally - to watching parts of that movie).

But - to be fair (when has that ever bothered an Orlanthi???) - what the dragons did was actually fairly understandable. Someone really should have said "hey, you know... this probably isn't a really good idea".

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39 minutes ago, soltakss said:

It is all to do with the Dragonkill.

After the Empire of the Wyrms Friends was brought down, humans tried to destroy the Dragonewt Eggs, and the Dragons rose up and destroyed them. This consisted of Dream and True Dragons awakening, or flying to the area and destroying whole armies in dragonfire, poison gas and acid. Hundreds of thousands were killed. Then the Dragon Pass region was closed off and humans were banned for a long time. 

This left a mythical wound in the area, resulting in a fear of Dragons. The Dragonrise awakened that dormant fear and re-energised it, giving it form as well as revitalising the mythic echoes.

At least that is how those who were not present (and thus survived) tell the story. The reports of "we all were killed by dragonfire" were from one of the few ghosts (!) that escaped the dragons' ire, a Yelmalian of Balazar's volunteer force.

At least IMG, the True Golden Horde did what all Pelorian invaders into Dragon Pass did, only on a more systematic base - they rounded up those Orlanthi who would surrender and send them off into slavery in the homelands of these invaders (Saird, Dara Happa and Carmania) alongside whichever loot they found in a region that was plundered dry and lost all their draconized lifestock 78 years earlier, leading to a mass exodus similar to the Irish potato famine, mostly into the south, swelling the ranks of the Hendriki kingdom and crewing the Adjustment Wars.

Following this depopulation, about a third of the previous population of Dragon Pass survived to take up traditional herd beasts and agricultural produce and rebuilt a somewhat sustainable society with subsistance farming and semi-abandoned cities. Three generations later, the True Golden Horde assembled for genocide, and not just on the dragons.

The humans of Dragon Pass had a good idea what was coming for them, and many picked up what mobile wealth they could carry in their flight to the south. Others remained to put up some resistance against the invaders.

The high hopes of bountiful plunder from the humans in Dragon Pass were thus thoroughly disappointed, quite likely leading to discharges of disappointment against those of the population they could round up. Then the invaders started to destroy dragon eggs, and draconic entities throughout the world awakened from their meditations and took wing to Dragon Pass to prevent that slaughter by annihilating the invaders. And yes, there was collateral damage.

Portions of the Golden Horde seem to have advanced almost to the Crossline, e.g. to the Sun Dome County temple (one of the few places still boasting some gold) or the (future) Grazelands when the dragons fell upon them, but the dragons seem to have recognized that the  main thrust came from the north when they applied the Scorch along what would become the Death Line. Weirdly enough, there was no equivalent to the Death Line on the Praxian border, even though there was a strong taboo even for Jaldon's followers against crossing into Dragon Pass afterwards.

All in all, I suppose at least as many humans fell to other humans in this conflict as were killed by dragons. The majority of indigenous casualties would have been to the northern or the Praxian invaders.

 

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Telling how it is excessive verbis

 

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Also I think part of it is the psychological impact of your problem being resolved by a deus-ex-machina, a fickle uncontrollable power that is in all sorts of ways just unfair. We understand battle, we understand war, their horrors we learn to live with. Right or wrong, we accept the consequences of our actions as part of the way the world works. The death toll in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was somewhere around 200,000, which is nothing (bad choice of words, sorry) compared to the 6 million combatants and around 19 million non-combatants that died in the pacific theatre, but as a single incident it carries much more weight psychologically speaking. The sheer enormity of a single event, particularly if you witness it or had a hand in triggering it, can overshadow much greater, more distributed circumstances.

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To the OP

There are several reasons.

- 500 years ago dragons killed every single human in Dragon Pass. Add to that the sheer randomness of interactions with dragonewts [who have several nest-cities in the Pass]. 'Fear Dragons' isn't an uncommon phobia in Sartar.

- The Brown Dragon from the Dragonrise ate an entire conclave of some of the most powerful magicians in Glorantha and several legions of troops without so much as a burp.

- Sartar itself is heavily divided regarding the Lunar Empire. Peace and Trade clans prospered fairly well. Many people converted to the Lunar Way during the Occupation. And when cities like Boldhome and Jonstown were liberated, a bloody purge took place. Even loyal Orlanthi are not eager to see a cousin they grew up with get executed by a mob because that cousin was swayed by Lunar promises.

- The Lunar military has stomped the clans and warbands of Sartar into the mud for over a generation now. Every time Sartarites rose up, they got flattened by the overwhelming might of Lunar military organization. Even in the recent Battle of Dangerford the Lunars killed one of the greatest living Sartarite leaders, Kallyr Starbrow. And THAT was in a Lunar defeat! Success like that leaves a mental scar on a culture.

- Lastly, living Sartarites haven't read Argrath's Saga. They don't know the future history. What we as players think of as inevitable is still very much in doubt.

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On 10/25/2024 at 1:45 PM, That_Old-Hammer said:

I see a lot of times in sourcebooks and well of daliath posts however that the reaction to this was more often than not Horror. Not fear which would obviously make sense, but Horror.

But game-mechanically -- from the chargen event -- it is precisely Fear.  So lurid further descriptions of that are fundamentally just colourful busking.  So in that sense we've solved the problem already.  But as nerds gonna nerd, I shall nonetheless nerd s'more...

On 10/25/2024 at 1:45 PM, That_Old-Hammer said:

Apparently even Kallyr who set the whole thing off got kinda spooked by it. I would understand surprise, this probably wasn't the plan, but if I were a commander hoping to put a stop to the consecration of the new temple, surely this is a pretty good outcome isn't it?

Both things can be true at once.  If you think you're lobbing a hand-grenade and it turns out to be the Tsar Bomba, you're gonna be a tad shook.  Even if most of the people in the blast radius had it coming to them.  "I am become death, destroyer of worlds."  <Billy Bragg plays in the background to slomo montage>

On 10/25/2024 at 1:45 PM, That_Old-Hammer said:

Is it the fact that it was done by a single monstrously powerful creature? Kallyr was at Whitewall when the Crimson Bat came calling wasn't she? You'd think she'd be hardened to the idea of what is essentially a kaiju eating a bunch of people.

Fair comparison in some ways.  But Hate of/Fear of/Horror at Chaos is a verynormalstandardhuman reaction (and indeed Passion) -- and especially an Orlanthi one --, so not an especially reassuring one.  "Why, it was no worse than a simple, common-or-garden Crimson Bat attack!"  "... ... ..."

On 10/25/2024 at 1:45 PM, That_Old-Hammer said:

Is it the fact that the Brown Dragon now just lives in Sartar and no one knows if it's going to wake up again? if you live nearby you can probably hear the thing snoring and that would keep anyone awake at night.

That too.  And like a very old Ronnie Corbett joke, there's waiting for the second gotcha.  Or the next several, as IIRC the three other DP bg dragons are already known, but assumed to be long-term dormant.  So immediately you're wondering, a) when the BrD's next midnight snack? b) what about those other ones? and c) so if we didn't know about that one, how many others?  Bit nervous-making.  At least if you know the CB's eating Pentans right now it'll be a while before it's snacking on you in say Wilmskirk.  But if you're now starting a DP scenario where there's as far as you know 1D6 of the wee beggars, and they could destroy any hex-sized stack of units at any time...

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On 11/3/2024 at 9:27 PM, svensson said:

 500 years ago dragons killed every single human in Dragon Pass. Add to that the sheer randomness of interactions with dragonewts [who have several nest-cities in the Pass]. 'Fear Dragons' isn't an uncommon phobia in Sartar.

Indeed yes.  It might now be Wrong and Post-canonical, but the setup in HW/HQ (at least one of them, memory blurs) was that everyone gets that in chargen, and that overcoming that and ending up on the Dragonfriend side of things was itself part of the story arc and challenge.  RQ is to my mind just reframing the same idea to the more proximate cause, and adding what's either more randomness or more player agency in the decision to take the Passion.  Both approaches seem totally valid to me, mix and match to suit.

As well as the whole thing about them being a stack-destroying tacnuke -- maybe more like an opnuke really -- there's also the Orlanthi anxiety about 'mysticism' generaly to consider.  And both events certainly play into that, too.  "OK, we killed the sun and it got cold, so we did some solar resus.  That sort of mythology I understand!  But this draconic gubbins--!"

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And let's divide being frightened into two legit categories....

- Fear: Fear is a natural human reaction to danger. Sometimes that danger is trivial [spiders], sometimes that danger is all too real [standing on the edge of a cliff]. Most, but not all, the time fear can be mastered with discipline and a good POW [i.e. willpower] roll.

- Horror: Horror is mindless and debilitating. Horror can overwhelm even the fight or flight impulse and cause one to make irrational decisions that are clearly and obviously not in your best interests [freezing up] because your thought processes are subverted.

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