Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8432467" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 75: September 1992part 4/5The Living Galaxy: Roger gives another reference-heavy article that reminds us that not only does he have a huge amount of general RPG knowledge, he's been responsible for writing a fair few books of his own over the past decade. This time, it's a list of published adventures for sci-fi rpg's, with a particular eye on things that can be easily converted to any system of your choice. After all, there's probably fewer prefab adventures for all the sci-fi RPG's put together than D&D alone, so you need to get used to adapting them or creating your own. Traveller is probably the system that has the most published adventures that are usable straight out the box, while GURPS has easily the most different but intercompatible sci-fi setting books. (which usually also contain plenty of adventure ideas) Despite being technically a modern day setting, Top Secret:SI also pushes the tech envelope just enough to have lots of inspiration for the more grounded sci-fi settings. Shadowrun is also pretty well equipped, even moreso now than then, although many of it's adventures fall into the railroady metaplot trap so they might need a little more adaption to work in other systems. The kind of list that would have been decent enough at the time, but is now 30 years out of date, with most of the specific examples out of print. (although the ratio of D&D adventures to all the sci-fi ones put together remains just as lopsided) No way you're going to be able to get hold of many of these without resorting to piracy. So this one isn't hugely useful to me, even though I can respect the time and effort that's gone into it. Mainly interesting on a statistical level then. Into the Dark: James decides not to go for an obvious theme this time, but instead review movies who's only connection is that they were all released in 1975. I have no idea if that was a good year for cinema or not, so I'm very interested in seeing what he picks from the rental store this time. (and if they're available on streaming sites so I can see if I agree with his conclusions)Beyond the Door (not the green door, which takes you somewhere completely different <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> ) is a particularly poorly made bit of satanic possession schlock. A mix of The Exorcist & Rosemary's Baby without the charm or coherent editing, James finds absolutely no value in it whatsoever.The Love Butcher is the kind of non-supernatural slasher movie that's long since gone out of fashion in the face of indestructible supervillains who make better franchise-headers. A guy pretends to be a mentally handicapped gardener, and then gruesomely murders the women who look down on the hired help as his suave alter-ego. The police are incompetent enough that he racks up a substantial body count before being stopped, along with quite a few terrible one-liners relating to the way he kills them. With terrible production values and a premise that definitely wouldn't pass the political correctness test these days, this can probably be left safely in the past where it belongs.Death Race 2000 is basically a big-budget wacky races cartoon with real gore and consequences for crashing. It's pretty much the perfect inspiration for the Car Wars rpg. Watch David Carradine & Sylvester Stallone duke it out for the big prize, along with plenty of other quirky characters and their highly customised cars. Not particularly deep, but a fun way to spend an evening. Jaws gets a 5-star review from James, reminding us that while the sequels might have sucked and run the idea of a scary shark into the ground, the original is a well-paced story where there's more emphasis on the stupidity of humanity and their desire to protect profits than showing the monster, ironically resulting in more deaths and loss of money than taking the threat seriously straight away would have resulted in. (Another thing that shows how little things have changed decades later with the USA's reaction to the pandemic.) All good horror stories are ultimately about humanity, and unless we genetically engineer ourselves to remove our flaws (something which has it's own fair share of horror stories involving all the many ways it could go wrong) the core of what horrifies us and how we deal with it isn't going to change that much no matter how many years pass. Trilogy of Terror is unsurprisingly one of those collections of shorter horror stories that wouldn't make sense as a theatrical release otherwise, as still parodied in The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror episodes long after most of the watchers have forgotten or grown up too young to ever know what the reference was. Like those, it reuses the same actors in completely different continuities to tell it's stories. The third of them is by far the scariest and best. Another of those reminders how ideas can be traced back through history, with true originality being surprisingly rare.</blockquote>

Verification