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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8545008" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 90: December 1993part 5/5Into the Dark: James must be busy, as it's just a small entry with no theme this time, returning to american films after our recent hong kong fest. Will any of them be good christmas fare, even if it's only by coincidence?Matinee is a return to the idea of film within a film James has done columns on before. A young B-movie fan in the early 60's grows up as the Cuban missile crisis hits, showing the contrast between the schlocky screen scares and the horrors of the real world. Your basic nostalgiafest for a more innocent time, but done with style and good research. And now we're doing nostalgia for the 90's in the same way. Time keeps rolling on, and there's always a little more innocence to lose. Who will be cleverly referencing the format quirks and viral hits of instagram or tiktok in 2050?Them! is one of the movies the previous film references. A classic 50's tale of giant radioactive ants attacking a small town, James finds it still holds up excellently and gives it the full 5 stars. Even if the ants are obviously models, the human cast plays things well enough that you believe the danger. House on Haunted Hill is a second 50's film referenced by the first one, showing that we do have a theme here after all. This is less impressive, and mainly notable for it's gimmick special effects such as having a skeleton behind the cinema screen set to fly out over the audience's heads at a crucial moment. Seems a bit finicky to time perfectly with the screen image, but if it works it'll work for the whole audience, unlike 3D glasses, which fail to do a proper stereo image if the user is sitting too far to the side or remotely visually impaired. One of the few reasons to actually go to the cinema these days, when home screens get pretty big and high resolution as well. Heart Of Evil: We finish the final part of the For Faerie, Queen & Country fiction and find out that the game title was a red herring - there's plenty of other weirdness in this world and no fae involvement in this particular mystery. It was an egyptian princess who swapped hearts with her brother to save him from the judgement of Maat. In return, she was barred from dying and became an immortal, indestructible mummy with a hunger for eating the hearts of others. Only by returning her true heart to her body could she be permanently laid to rest. Unsurprisingly, Holmes is the one to figure this out and have the presence of mind to do the right thing in the face of a seemingly indestructible monster with a penchant for maniacal monologuing. I guess when you're immortal it's easy to get complacent and start playing with your food. This definitely winds up on the cheesier end of the pulp spectrum, with the villain's own overconfidence being the main cause of their downfall, and a lot of exposition at every phase of the investigation. An entertaining read, but also a reminder that you need a fair bit of player buy-in for genre conventions like these to hold up in actual play. If they go into turtling paranoia or shoot the villain mid-monologue it won't be nearly as fun. Will you be able to drag your players away from the techniques they use to survive in deathtrap dungeons and get them to try something new like this out?The form for the membership drive is on the back page, as they said earlier. Feel free to photocopy it as many times as you like. The more the merrier.Another issue where I find myself saying another a lot, seeing everything as part of a series, or at least a long-term cycle of repeated events. The familiar fantasy worlds are looking increasingly filled up and the number of dungeons to explore has gone way down. Oh well, next year is the start of Planescape, which I've always loved. Let's see if there's any more little bits of lore hidden in these two magazines that makes the multiverse a little richer.</blockquote>

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