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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Flying Toaster" data-source="post: 9812995" data-attributes="member: 7052563">This adventure and the classic Expedition to the Barrier Peaks were some of my first exposures to fantasy / science fiction crossovers, and like many others I usually thought of them in terms of the iconic ad campaign for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups: two great tastes that did not taste great together, so keep your peanut butter out of my chocolate, etc etc.  However I did actually play both adventures back in the day.Now I realize that my Gen-X friends and I were living through the 1980’s boom in fantasy and SF media, including the ”divorce” that made genre crossovers increasingly rare.  My friends and I dabbled a bit in the sword & sorcery or cosmic horror recommended by Appendix N, but we really were a new generation influenced more by Tolkien and LeGuin than by Howard, Leiber, or Lovecraft.  Movies played a big role too: relatively serious fantasy films like Dragonslayer and Boorman’s Excalibur, but also cheese like Hawk the Slayer and Krull.  Schwarzenegger was our version of Conan, but our overall fantasy sensibility was really probably closer to light-hearted fare like Monty Python and the Holy Grail or The Princess Bride.  James Maliszweski of Grognardia would probably be appalled, but even CRPGs like the Bard’s Tale, Ultima, and Wizardry series definitely imformed our ideas of what a dungeon crawl was all about.</blockquote>