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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8349719" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 63: September 1991part 4/5Into The Dark: This column is shorter than usual due to a VCR malfunction at James's. As a result he also hasn't had time to think of a clever theme, and gone back to your basic swords & sorcery flicks. Has he managed to find any he can unreservedly recommend this time? The Princess Bride gets the full 5 stars for it's metatextual humor, excellent casting, writing and plot twists. Now there's one that's definitely stood the test of time, with many of it's best lines still being regularly used memes to this day. Let's keep on using those words, even if they do not mean what they thought they meant in the original context. Fire and Ice sees Ralph Bakshi and Frank Frazetta team up for another heavily rotoscoped bit of fantasy animation, full of overmuscled heroes, scantily clad women and grotesque monsters. It's all very formulaic and regressive, even at the time, and probably looks even worse to modern eyes. I'm not hugely tempted to hunt it down and test that theory. The Barbarians isn't particularly great, but James does give it credit for being the movie most like an actual D&D session he's seen, with monsters that show up for no reason other than to fight the main characters, and dialogue that's anachronistically pop cultural in exactly the way a bunch of nerds sitting around the table playing a pair of badass but dumb barbarians would be. There are even better depictions of gaming based media now, but it was the 80's, you had to take what you could get, and this is at least tolerable in a cliched kinda way. Chemcheaux: What would normally be the Living City column doesn't get the usual branding, and with good reason too, as while it mentions Raven's Bluff, it's not the primary focus. Slade, who if you remember your RPG history is responsible for cataloguing the entirety of TSR's magical item output in a few years time, foreshadows this with the complex system of magical item shops in his own campaign world. They do have a branch in Raven's Bluff, but as it's all rather higher magic than the default FR setting, and being able to buy any magical item you want upsets game and economic balance, they're nobbled by local regulations severely restricting who they can sell too and at what prices, so they don't undercut the locals with their ability to mass produce things. (with a full two pages devoted just to these laws and legal wranglings.) Another four are devoted to the ridiculously powerful founder, Prismal, (Wizard 35/Priest 35/Monk 14, evidently they never suffered from the 2e Monk & Assassin purges that swept Oerth & Toril) how he founded the franchise & rose to power, and some of the struggles he's faced in his multi-century lifespan. A story involving a fair bit of plane-hopping, some complex scheming, and the invention of multiple custom spells & magical items, it's all much more gonzo than the usual Raven's Bluff fare, as well as quite a bit longer than the average article. It's definitely an interesting read, but the kind that you incorporate into your own campaign with caution, because once you've opened the Pandora's box of easy plane-hopping and magic marts, it's very hard to close without hitting the reset button and starting a new game from scratch. It demonstrates the tensions between wanting to have Speljammer & Planescape stuff that crosses over with their other settings, but not have it advance the overall state of technology in those worlds and destroy the themes for regular fantasy dungeoncrawlers, so any otherworldly visitors remain rare or secretive, keeping things in a state of artificial stasis. All a bit frustrating really. That's the problem with running a shared world. You have to be extra careful about these sorts of things if you want to maintain consistency and playability.</blockquote>

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