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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8344520" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 62: August 1991part 4/5The Living Galaxy: Roger continues to talk about the opportunities and obstacles to adventures involving sentient spaceships. Is there any systematic legal discrimination or informal prejudice against free-willed machines in the various jurisdictions of your galaxy? Are they employed? If so, can they quit if they want without having enforcers sent after them, or are they trapped by a punitive contract or hardwired behavioural limitations? Are they in debt, and so need to keep earning or risk repossession? Does the ship have a human scale avatar? What cool stuff can they do beyond space travel? (cloaking, scanning, weaponry, etc) Once again this demonstrates why a fairly crunchy but flexible system like GURPS is probably the best choice for defining what they can and can't do without getting into regular arguments with your players about unexpected situations. Once you know these things, figuring out the kind of plots they're likely to get involved in becomes much easier. There's definitely an extensive list of ideas to draw upon, some of which will get repetitive sooner than others. Given the length he's been expositing on this, it's definitely seeming increasingly achievable. Hopefully someone got some use out of it back in the day. Or you could now, as it's not as if it's system specific. Good luck if you do. Into the Dark: This time, James picks the somewhat quirky theme of fantastical movies with lots of music in. (though not full-on musicals) The kind of thing that's extra challenging because if even one of the aspects isn't good enough, the whole thing winds up subpar. Even Disney can't get it right every time, so what hope something independently produced with a low budget? Will he be able to recommend anything this issue, or will it be all warnings?Slumber Party Massacre II takes the whole having sex = death thing that's common in slasher movies, and elevates it to parodic levels, with the killer wielding a guitar with a drill on the end to kill a synth-pop based girl group. A metaphor for toxic masculinity that works on multiple levels! There's definitely things here to amuse a watcher, but the characters and dialogue are unrealistic to the point of being ludicrous. If you can't write horror without making the characters complete idiots, you probably shouldn't be working in that genre. Trick or Treat fails in the other direction. It's apparently supposed to be a parody, but comes off as a sincere tract for moral majority nonsense about how rock n' roll is corrupting are youth! Skarka's law strikes again! Of course, if the music isn't good, it's not going to be convincingly corruptive in any case, and it fails in that area as well. No amount of backmasked subliminal messages can get people to buy things if it's not tempting in the first place, they merely tip the scales a little further. Hard Rock Zombies is the kind of b-movie that sounds interesting on paper, with a rock band summoning zombies to fight nazis, but the basic technical ineptitude of the filmmaking makes it a much duller watch than it should be. The kind of thing that's immensely improved by having the MST3K guys at the bottom of the screen taking the piss.Labyrinth gets a decent but not exceptional rating, which still puts it above everything else here. The muppets steal the show from the human actors, with even Bowie much stiffer than in many of his other roles. He's not too keen on the music for this one either, to which I say BLASPHEMY!!1!!!, as it's easily my favourite of Bowie's 80's output. (which admittedly is praising with faint damnation. ) One of the few here that has actually aged well, with better critical reception now than at the time. Two Thousand Maniacs takes us way back to the mid-60's, for one of the ancestors of modern shock horror. This time with extra banjo music to fit the hillbilly theme, which is more horrific than the gore. The plot is once again not much to shout about, but as long as you go in with the right expectations, it's entertaining enough.</blockquote>

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