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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8497238" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 84: June 1993part 4/5The Everwinking Eye: Having spent two issues on the history of Zhentil Keep & it's rulers, Ed talks about what they're up to in the present. While they'd like to dominate the world, they've accumulated enough enemies that they're far too busy just holding onto what they've got to seriously expand. However they're quietly increasing the number of organisations they've infiltrated, and working at establishing new trade routes through hostile terrain that would make them very rich indeed by being able to deliver goods much faster than any competitors. Some of the monsters they'll negotiate with to accomplish this, while other are less willing to listen to humans regardless of alignment, in which case they have no qualms about killing them, or better yet, petrifying them and setting them in locations they want to guard with automated dispels triggered by anyone who doesn't use the correct procedures. Or in other words, another excuse to have dungeons full of monsters placed in rooms with no food and no thought about how they interact just waiting to fight the PCs and have it make sense in universe. Gotta love all that lampshade hanging. As usual, he's putting far more work in than he needs to to make the Realms both a good place to adventure in and still somewhat coherent, with even the most diabolical of villains still having to spend much of their time worrying about economics and logistics. It's an fascinating read yet again. I just wish any of the other developers were half as invested in their worlds, so there was some kind of competition. When first place is so far ahead of everyone else in the field, it can be a little bit discouraging.The Living Galaxy: Roger decides to go full Harry Turtledove this time, giving us an alternate history themed column. A single change a few centuries ago, followed up logically, and you can wind up with a completely different geopolitical setup. Whether you stick strictly to real world laws of physics, or introduce a few fantastical macguffins to push the divergence along, you can have endless amounts of fun by picking different places and times to make that little push and set the ball rolling. What happens if the weather was a little nicer and the Spanish Armada wasn't devastated? What happens if China colonised the Americas from the west first? What happens if the Nazis won WWII? What does the existence of superheroes do to the world if you don't keep on pressing the reset button? As usual, he references a wide variety of sources, including some of TSR's own books, but has to admit that the best all-round game for this kind of scenario is GURPS, due to the sheer number of historical & genre sourcebooks combined with a solid system. (God I wish they'd do some Living GURPS material in here, but it doesn't seem to be particularly popular as a tournament system, probably because using pregens doesn't suit the strengths of the system, and creating your own point-buy character without GM supervision is packed with railroad-breaking exploits. ) As this topic works particularly well when you do lots of research and break things down into smaller chunks rather than trying to come up with the entirety of new history at once, this is a topic that synergizes well with Roger's writing style, resulting in an above average column for him. This is a well you could go too quite a few times with quite different results and still keep your players entertained. Into the Dark: James can't think of a theme, so it's time to review another round of reader recommendations. These definitely skew towards the recent end, which reminds us that most of the readers are somewhat younger than the TSR writers. Will James enjoy any of these, or wish he'd stuck to his own selections?The Blood of Heroes is basically a gritty postapocalyptic version of Quidditch starring Rutger Hauer. There's nothing new in the world, and even less originality in Rowling's writing. The usual sports tropes involving plucky underdogs, forming bonds with your team and careers ruined by behind the scenes politics make their appearance. James finds it decent enough, but runs out of steam at the end. Not one to put any great effort into hunting down, but might watch if it happened to be on. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves annoys James with virtually everything it does.  Formulaic, bloated and cheesy, embracing regressive classism and cartoon villainy. Consistent geography or accents, no thank you! So much money and talent thrown at the screen in a fundamentally misguided way. Which means the lowest common denominator viewers loved it, and it was the second biggest selling film & biggest soundtrack album that year. It richly deserves the many parodies it got in the next few years. The Guyver is the 1991 american adaption of the manga & anime. The whole thing turned out more power rangers than serious body horror, limited by the rubber suit tech of the day. There's plenty of amusing cameos, but if you want something a little less saturday morning, stick to the japanese adaptions. The Flight of Dragons is a bit of derivative Rankin-Bass animation, on about the same technical level as their adaption of The Hobbit, but adapted from a distinctly less famous author. Younger viewers might be entertained, but anyone who's already consumed a large quantity of books will see the frequent obvious cliches and yawn. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is by far the oldest of these, and the only one James actually gives a positive result too. The 50's stop-motion might look a little dated now, but the human characters are better handled than most giant monster movies and the writing in general is tight. There's a good reason why it's been imitated so frequently.</blockquote>

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