Hard Light

6/14/2021

Hard Light

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The Basic Crawl
00:00:21 - Overview
00:03:00 - How have we used this in our games?
00:03:21 - Things we liked about this adventure
00:14:00 - Questions we had about this adventure
00:17:11 - Chain Lightning Round

The Expert Delve
00:19:35 - Sci-fi dungeons

Companion Adventures
00:38:00 - Films
00:39:56 - Video Game
00:40:52 - Music

3 Comments

Steve Dempsey

7/8/2021 08:20:41 am

It's interesting that you brought up Prometheus. Sumptuous design and cinematography for one of quite the worst SF movies out there. It also highlights some of the differences between SF and Fantasy.

In Fantasy we have a band of misfits thrown together by chance who just about rub along together as they each have a separate role. In SF, these people were often as not hired for their skillsets and have multiple redundancy. They have protocols and rules of engagement (except in Prometheus). It's a job, not a lifestyle.

In Fantasy, each situation is dealt with as it arises, and the goal is often a thing to get or a person to rescue. In SF, the goal is more often knowledge, of a new thing or race.

Both take place in a range of different locales but they have a different impact. In SF, there's often the contrast between the mode of travel which is cramped and the vastness of the outside and the alienness of it, and how antithetical it is to human life. In Fantasy there's wonderment and the crashing ocean, the living magma, the glimmering enchanted glades, but you don't that they will uncaringly go about killing you.

And Prometheus is all the more sucky in that it put paid to Guillermo del Toro's At the Mountains of Madness.

Tom link

7/16/2021 04:00:32 am

Good thoughts, Steve - thanks.

Ralph Lovegrove link

7/17/2021 03:32:51 am

This is spot on -- I said similar things about skills redundancy in The Sparrow. But the one thing that makes Prometheus even worse is the criminal negligence and incompetence.

Compare this with Alien, when the crew bring Kane into the ship after being infected there's a logical stand-off between the humanity of the crew wanting to rescue him and the logic wanting to protect the crew's integrity, and this goes on to underpin the rest of the movie with curiosity tempered with caution

None of that in Prometheus. Their stupidity is breathtaking.

Can't remember who said it, but Ridley Scott set out to make a slasher movie in Alien and ended up making a critically acclaimed and influential classic; the exact opposite happened with Prometheus

Fear of a Black Dragon

Hard Light

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