NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8314203" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 59: May 1991part 5/5With Great Power: It's this column's turn to do a competition. They give four sets of stats, and ask the readers to come up with backstories for them. The magical cowboy Desperado, able to generate horse, six-shooter and lasso out of thin air. Kaleidoscope, a rainbow-generating flashy teleporter. Mongrel, your basic beast-person powerset of undefined gender. And Sidestep, who's basically a human Displacer Beast, always appearing to be a few feet from her real location. Will people go for the obvious stereotypes for their personalities and history, or manage to throw some interesting curveballs that intrigue the editors better. Tune in several months later to find out!Into The Dark: This column goes even further back than last time in it's pursuit of decent fantasy films, with two of them originally released in 1962. Without CGI and green screening being common things yet, making a fantasy film is expensive compared to more grounded genres, as you have to actually make all the sets, or at least, elaborate matte paintings. Finding ones that have both decent budget and writing was not an easy task. Let's see what he's dug up, and if I've heard of any of them before. Carnival of Souls is that increasingly rare concoction, a horror movie where the supernatural details genuinely seem to be all in the protagonist's head. A flop on initial release, it's gradually built a cult fanbase since then, and James is quite pleased to see it appear on home video. Yes, the production values might not match up to modern stuff, but the low-fi special effects work well with the black and white film to make it all seem more detached from reality. There's a reason people still use black and white to make things nostalgic and/or creepy today. The Navigator gets a fairly positive review for it's interesting reverse wizard of oz story, where a group of people from the 14th century go on a quest to modern day earth to save their village from the plague. The challenges are a bit easier and the resolution neater than James would prefer, but I guess that's a general problem with it being a movie rather than a series. There's only so much challenge you can fit into a single sitting. Tower of London sees Roger Corman try his hand at the Richard III story. Vincent Price hams it up impressively as usual, but the low budget does limit what they can do somewhat. Still, like all his films, there's enough energy there that it remains an interesting watch, and also like all of his films, it managed to make a profit. There are many far bigger directors with far worse records on that count. Deathstalker gets thoroughly and viciously panned. Terrible writing, terrible continuity, terrible pacing and huge amounts of sexism. They can't even make the violence and nudity convincing. File pretty near the bottom of boringly bad. Another issue that makes it clear just how hard TSR is working to come up with new ideas and add them to it's repertoire at this point. Some of it is formulaic, some of it is silly, and much of it won't stand the test of time, but if they'd only stuck with one idea, chances are, nothing'd be remembered at all.</blockquote>

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