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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8374342" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 66: December 1991part 4/5The Everwinking Eye: Ed once again reminds us that Mulmaster is an unpleasant place filled with untrustworthy folk from top to bottom. Neither the law nor the common folk are on your side as a wandering adventurer, and accepting missions from random patrons in taverns without any vetting will get you screwed over in multiple ways both long and short term. This is illustrated with two adventure outlines that like his Dungeon ones, you really do not want to follow as written, albeit this time that's intentional on his part. If you want to adventure here, keeping the majority of your cash hidden where the government can't get at it, being ready to skip town whenever the heat gets too high and come back with a new identity would be a very good idea. When the law is arbitrary and corrupt, following it is neither virtue or protection. Another reminder that the Realms isn't all nice, and there are plenty of challenges for even the highest level adventurers out there, including ones no amount of force will solve. If the majority of a country is evil, no amount of deposing the rulers will improve things much, but indiscriminate genocide is a quick path to your own alignment shifting to evil too. It'd take generations of subtle systematic changes to improve things. Do you have what it takes to go for immortality, then keep the ennui away long enough to accomplish something like that? Will you still wind up taking several missions from people in taverns along the way because you need some quick cash? Man, being a self-directed hero rather than some chosen one following a predestined path is hard work. It's no wonder most groups give up and go back to a new set of starting level characters even before the system breaks down from having too much XP.Into The Dark: A second column in a row devoted to fantasy westerns?! That really does illustrate just how badly the genre has collapsed in the past 30 years, if once you could assemble this many from a niche subset of the genre, while now, you're hard pressed to find more than one or two examples a year as a whole, despite special effects being considerably better and cheaper to do. Time for another look at the distant past to see if any of it is worth having nostalgia over. The Valley of Gwangi pits cowboys vs dinosaurs, which is a cool sounding pitch that instantly gets the attention. It has a lot in common with King Kong, including some of the production staff, although that includes the creatures being more interesting than the human elements. Overall, it gets a recommendation for the cool factor. I wonder if this one will ever get a remake like Kong has so many times. Westworld has recently got another TV adaption, so it's tales of virtual reality western obviously still have resonance for modern day audiences, if more for the VR part than the western part. James gives it a so-so result, as Michael Crichton is a better novelist than director, so the ideas might be good, but the pacing doesn't really work when adapting his own work to the screen. If it seemed slow to him, it'd probably seem even more so to modern audiences used to films edited digitally. You can probably skip this and go straight to the newer version without regrets.Outland also got reviewed by the ARES guys, who gave it a very positive review in issue 10. James also gives it a favourable result in terms of acting and special effects, but is not nearly so enamoured of the overall degree of bleakness and cynicism in the writing. Stories like this may be true to real life, where illegal drugs remain a hugely profitable business despite decades of fighting against them and plenty of casualties amongst both users & law enforcement, but do we really want to see that in our entertainment? The family friendly TSR upper management definitely do not.</blockquote>

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