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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8402750" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 71: May 1992part 4/5The Living Galaxy: After several rather ambitious game ideas, Roger decides to scale things down and remind us that it's quite possible to run an entire campaign on a single planet. In fact, in any other genre, that would be the norm, and might be further restricted to a single country or even city. It could be a cyberpunk game rather than straight sci-fi, you could be pioneers going years at a time between new arrivals from the motherworld, you could be marooned and trying to survive until you can make repairs or someone answers your distress call, or you could be trying to hunt down the X golden macguffins that will give you ULTIMATE POWER!!! (which are conveniently all on one planet) As usual, he has plenty of examples of each from literature & movies to draw upon, so you'll never be short of options if you follow them up. There can be considerably more discreet locations to explore and creatures to interact with on a small moon than billions of miles of interstellar space. Basically, it isn't size that matters, it's what you do with it. As usual for this column, this is competent, but not particularly groundbreaking. You'll probably need to heed it at some point because no system supports things getting more epic indefinitely. (although some last many orders of magnitude longer than others) Let the playing field be small for a while, and it'll have more impact when big things happen again. Into the Dark: No theme this month. Instead, James is reviewing a motley collection of films recommended to him by the other TSR staff. Hopefully this means the quality will be slightly higher than average, although these things remain pretty subjective, so just because they liked it (or at least found it bad in an interesting way) doesn't mean he will.Legend sees Ridley Scott try his hand at fantasy, having recently been responsible for sci-fi classics Alien & Blade Runner. The result is not quite so successful or well remembered decades later. Tim Curry is perfectly cast as the Dark Lord, and the lighting, makeup & camera work is excellent, but the plot is just the same old "save the unicorns!" tripe filled with comic relief fairy characters, so many comic relief fairy characters, including an inexplicably horny ancestor of Navi. :shudders: He needs to pick his scriptwriters better. The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires sees Hammer studios try to mix their horror bread & butter with martial arts noodles, or some similarly tortured metaphor. This is precisely as uneven as it sounds, with lots of cool elements that don't blend together very well. It did nothing to prevent their eventual demise. Gor the movie lives down to it's source material quite effectively, with a "hero" who ignores most of the injustices and sexism of the world he winds up in, and is basically replacing one naughty word leader with another. Most of the people involved seem to know exactly what level of turkey they're dealing with, and the acting suffers accordingly. Not the kind of property I feel like supporting, even ironically.Outlaw of Gor is the even worse sequel, rushed out straight after the first one. You wouldn't think they'd suffer from diminishing returns when the bar was already that low, but I guess you can always scrape the bottom of the barrel a little more. I pity the executive who greenlighted this thinking they were getting the next Conan. A Chinese Ghost Story reminds us that asia produces plenty of home-grown horror that mixes stuff from their mythology with scares & gore more effectively than western bandwagon-jumpers. Just watch out for the subs vs dubs purists because those wars can be as terrifying as what's actually being portrayed on the screen. Fortunately, this one manages to be quite clear about what's going on without either.</blockquote>

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