Bolongo's page

My idea is to just homebrew some short scenarios and give the players a level each session. Because what I want to test is what the levelling experience is like: is it fun for the players to improve their characters?

I'm confused as to why the combat chapter spends so much time explaining reactions to movement, when there are so very few opportunity attacks in the game.

Agree completely.

Both downloads interactive maps are just the first page for me.

Same here. No maps, just a cover.

I read that they intended to kill barret in FF, I mean instead of tifa. Not only that but that to most of the people in the project it was a forgone conclusion. There were like "so how does barret die?" and the head creator was like "What? Barret doesn't die, tifa dies"
Rest of cast "HUH?"

Unless they did a George Lucas on FF7 since I played it, Tifa doesn't die either. Aeris does.

A number of reviewers have likened Northwest Smith to the likes of Indiana Jones or Han Solo.

I'm not seeing it.

I have to agree. Though I actually only see one person in this thread likening him to Han Solo, that's certainly the impression you would get from blurbs about Smith being an "intergalactic smuggler" and "daring spaceman". I've read the Indy comparison somewhere else, can't recall where, though. But the only similarity I see with Indiana Jones is the names...

The thing is that both Han and Indy are action heroes, and these are in no way action stories. They're all internal, there are few to none external events going on. And even though I like them, they're fine pieces of writing, reading them all so close together unfortunately highlights that they're all pretty much the same. They all deal with Smith getting possessed, hypnotized, enthralled or otherwise mind****ed, and how he struggles free from whatever's got him hooked this time around.

Now, to play the devil's advocate for a bit... The narration in the stories does make it clear that most of the time Smith actually is a physical, extroverted, take-charge kind of guy. Just not in the timeframes of these particular stories. It's as if someone wrote stories about Han Solo, but not when he's fighting stormtroopers or dodging imperial cruisers, instead focusing on the times he's sitting in a corner of a bar having a morose drink by himself. And to Smith's credit, the reason that he manages to break free of the various sirens where lesser men have failed, is that at the deepest, darkest core of his being he's just one mean bastard.

I hadn't thought about it much before, but I noticed in the latest email about a subscription shipment that at the bottom it says:

"You may download the PDF edition of The Samarkand Solution (Trade Paperback) at" and a link.

That might be useful at some point, so I checked it out. But there's no downloads available, and I can't find any way to add them - tried searching through my old orders and the product pages, but came up empty-handed.

So what am I missing? ;)