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Quite. It sort of redeems the entire concept of "subverted your expectations", shows it can be done right, and is absolutely thrilling when it is!

Yeah, and you can do the opposite of hedging your bets, which is betting on something that seems very likely to fail, and fail expensively, and that's where Ravenloft sits. Sure, an amazing writer + director team + the right budget (not necessarily the most insanely huge) might somehow unlock a...

That's a non-sequitur and also seems to not remember how long ago the 1990s were, nor how many bestselling novels there are every month. Bestselling is, I'm sorry, an incredibly low bar. You may think it means something, but let me assure you, it does not - and never really has (though it means...

I mean, probably not one designed for tabletop RPGs, I'd say. TTRPGs don't want the same things from a setting that a linear narrative like a film or a book does, I'd suggest. It's much easier to try and adapt from a film or a book to a TTRPG (which usually involves a huge amount of...

I feel like the original article is just wrong because, even just totally ignoring politics and anything a politician from anywhere did or said, the last 5 years are so insanely stupid, that time travel kind of has to exist, and has to being used to mess with us by jerks from the future. Like, I...

They're deeply interrelated factors, that are basically impossible to separate without the OP specifying more parameters. Movies that aren't really "feasible" tend to get very low budgets, usually a lower than what they "need" to do what they want to do. @Morrus is spot-on in saying "Why...

Yeah I don't get why beyond that it's very "topical", very pandemic/post-pandemic, and maybe they've never read one of his books that asks the same questions but better? It's genuinely accidentally hilarious at the end because it's downright "The Scary Door"-esque.

I'd blame the pandemic but it was released in 2024, and Ogres, which was released in 2022, much closer to the pandemic, is also much better. Maybe he has a long tail of books he's working on? He is very prolific. And yeah it's striking because it's common themes for him, but just really not...

If only! System Shock is, as fiction, quite superior to this. And System Shock is not exactly amazing, story-wise. Re: SHODAN, The whole thing was wild to me because he told a story with similar themes ("What is humanity, which humanity deserves to exist?") with Ogres (which was also short...

Oh god the yachting crews. That was so implausible I'd mentally put it as being in another book. Yes I found that out later and it did make me ask questions. Technologically most of what's going on seems to be like 1700s at latest, but then luxury-wise, it seems like there's a lot of stuff...

I feel like this is an un-usefully overbroad definition of "use a platform", I think you should have to have at least actively used it in say, the last six months. Like, I have a Facebook account, have I posted on Facebook in the last five years? No. Have even looked at Facebook in the last six...

I must sadly kinda disrecommend Adrian Tchaikovsky's Saturation Point. It's the only book of his I've read that I would say was actually "not good". Not like "average" or "mediocre", but like, not worth your time. And it's not even long! It's sad because the fundamental concept of the book is...

That won't work - it's going to be an ignore thing. A few months ago something broke with two-way ignore and threads. It used to be that everyone could see and post in a thread regardless of who started it (they'd always see the initial post), which served to prevent duplicate threads and keep...

It's unclear. There's no "arc plot" per se - there's significant character development, there are central mysteries of the setting which get somewhat uncovered in the second book, and the world is changing (for the better and worse) - but the books are standalone mystery novels in a very wild...

Indoctrination theory doesn't really enhance ME3 or the ME series for me, but some significant level of indoctrination is the only possible Watsonian (i.e. in-setting) explanation for a lot of strange things that happen in ME3, particularly those relating to Shepard's behaviour. Unfortunately...

My brother has been trying to get us to play this for ages, hoping we can in January maybe. Reading-wise I've recently read finished two extremely good books, and am most of the way through a pretty interesting one. So I read The Tainted Cup and A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett...

Wild that first edition has like, by far the strongest of those covers, visually and that isn't just nostalgia talking because I'd forgotten that was what it looked like, and had to go check it really was! (Unusually modern-looking for the era) I do appreciate 4th's visual nods to 1st though...

I was skeptical re: the title but in 1985? Yeah I have no doubt whatsoever that that was true. Pendragon was still one of the coolest-looking RPGs when I started buying RPGs in 1989/1990 (though soon beaten out in pure aesthetics by WoD, particularly 2E WoD).

Yeah I was like "But but but...". They were 100% right if they said that! D&D was within inches of at least belonging to a bankrupt company and probably ceasing production for at least a while. WotC buying it and doing what they did was, and I really hate to say this, almost an act of charity...

Not only that, but it was a fluke the studio decided not to follow up on with a sequel. The reasons for that can be discussed separately, but it's almost irrelevant - it just points to how IP licencing has become increasingly unpopular over the last 20 years, and how much difficulty WotC...