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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8547775" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 91: January 1994part 3/5The Living Galaxy: Roger continues his attempt at epicness, by ironically telling us how to stop things from getting too big and unwieldy, causing the campaign to collapse before you get to the conclusion. Draw up a flow chart of the obvious things the PC's could do, and come up with responses, but arrange things so no matter what they do, it'll always curve around back to the direction of the big story. Create the illusion that their choices are more significant than they actually are, but wherever they go they'll find clues leading to the same conclusion. Well, it's more subtle and considerate than most of the adventures they publish in here at least. <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" /> Another reminder that sandboxes are now thoroughly out of fashion in the TSR offices and railroads are in, and they're increasingly pushing for adventures to be more storylike, with defined beginnings, middles and ends that can span a whole campaign rather than PC's just wandering the world and gradually getting more powerful until they either get killed or retire. Even when they are just doing multiple small adventures, there's still more desire to plan ahead, as the large number of letters Dungeon has got about building chains of adventures recently shows. (which Roger has obviously been reading, as he references that here.) I guess it's all part of an even larger shift in society in general, as both TV shows and comics also become much less episodic and more serialised over the 90's. A fairly interesting read, but not in an entirely welcome way. Having a clever long-term arc that'll span years works a lot better when one person is doing the writing. In an interactive game like RPG's, finding out how little effect you actually have can seriously sap the motivation to continue playing. When not using a prefab adventure, it's better not to plan too far ahead and be willing to change the direction of the game on the prompting of your players. Into The Dark: James goes for a very specific subgenre this time, that of evil toys. Be they supernatural or merely elaborate machines, when they start moving they can be scary far in excess of their physical power, particularly when you're alone at night and the things in your bedroom are turned against you. Of course, if it's done wrong, it can turn to unintentional comedy just as easily. Child's Play has managed to be relatively straight horror, unintentional bad comedy and good, self aware intentional comedy over the course of the series. But of course much of that is yet to come. James likes the first one, but doesn't think much of the second & third. Looking at the reviews, this is not an uncommon opinion to hold. Toys is a tale of a toy factory being repurposed to create weapons of war by it's profiteering new owner, with soul-crushing results. It gets a medium result overall, good casting, visual design, soundtrack and special effects, but with an underlying weak script that's very heavyhanded with it's moralising about how war is bad. Quite decent to have on in the background, but doesn't bear up to close examination.Demonic Toys, on the other hand is just all round bad. Dreadful script, primitive special effects, the most obvious lowbrow humour. It and it's equally awful spin-offs can lurk in the back room of the video rental shop forever as far as James is concerned.</blockquote>

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