Ranking Star Trek: The Next Generation season five

A season of median familiarity, I feel like I've seen the big hits enough times already, while some may be less familiar for good reason. But what else am I going to do, watch new Star Trek? Engage!

Alrightreads: Further adventures in the futile Rhys Hughes completism odyssey

Rhys Hughes, The Postmodern Mariner

2008 / Ebook/audiobook / 160 pages

****

A thoughtful centrepiece adrift in a sea of daftness.

 

Rhys Hughes, Bone Idle in the Charnel House: A Collection of Weird Stories

2001–14 (collected 2014) / Ebook/audiobook / 245 pages

****

At this point, it's rare to find one of his collections that I haven't mostly read in other forms, but many of these were entombed in solitude and hit the sweet spot of absurd strangeness.

Rhys Hughes, Thirty Tributes to Calvino

1995-2015 (collected 2015) / Ebook / 202 pages

*****

Like a naive fool, I'd expected an expansion on the earlier Ten Tributes to the tune of 20 additional tales, but that would be too normal. There's minimal overlap for those who want to explore both, though admittedly I had read nearly all of them in other collections. It's a fine set.

Rhys Hughes, Cloud Farming in Wales

2017 / Ebook / 160 pages

****

A confidently insecure novel, or thematic pun scrapbook.

Rhys Hughes, Crepuscularks and Phantomimes: Gothic, Ghostly & Lovecraftian Tales in the Ironic Mode

2002–20 (collected 2020) / Ebook / 119 pages

****

Nearly all new tales, the Lovecraftian elements mainly amount to puns, which is sure to delight any die hard acolytes checking it out on that basis.

Alrightreads: TV XX

Nick Brown, The Red Dwarf Quiz Book: Written for Smegheads by Smegheads and Definitely No Aliens

2018 / Ebook / 49 pages

***

Straight-up trivia questions without the visual puzzles of its more official and dated namesake, I was doing respectably before it got on to the later series.

Keith Topping, The Complete Slayer: An Unofficial and Unauthorized Guide to Every Episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

2004 / Ebook / 702 pages

****

A comprehensive, no-chaff episode guide from a '90s British male perspective, for better and worse. My friend was watching the series for the first time and I didn't feel like another rewatch just yet, but this kept me up to speed for vicarious thrills and trivia.

Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman, Doctor Who: Vampire Science

1997 / Audiobook / 288 pages

***

Doctor Who's weirdly off-brand yet surprisingly significant vampire arch fiends should be a natural match for the new Byronic incarnation, but it's all too cynically 90s to fully embrace that.

Kevin J. Anderson, The X-Files: Antibodies

1997 / Audiobook / 276 pages

***

A smart sci-fiey episode, certainly better than some of those.

Joe Haldeman, Star Trek: Planet of Judgment

1977 / Audiobook / 151 pages

***

An early 'Trek book written by a bona fide sci-fi author seemed like a frontier worth exploring. It's as subtly off-brand as I'd hoped, subjecting Kirk and his redshirts to gory survival horror inside an impossible anomaly, unfortunately padded out by a tedious clip show to seemingly prove that the author has actually seen the show.

Junior Gamesmaster: Tails of Equestria – Run Away Danger (DIY)

My Little Pony: Tails of Equestria – Run Away Danger

DIY roleplaying game adventure

The longest meandering adventure in our relatively short roleplaying history, this epic Dantean trek through the multiverse spanned most of the school summer holiday, like the 90s Spider Man cartoon in cardboard standees, and about as coherent.

The young Game Master didn't waste any time on gradual escalation, plotting or other boring storytelling conventions, instead launching us straight into boss rush mode using all the biggest figures from the box to devastate the players (including herselves) and their supply of emergency tokens. After that onslaught, things got more cerebrally bleak as we travelled to the future and found it naught but a black void ("because it hasn't happened yet"), but still filled with more monsters down its multiple-choice paths that ate one of us.

I passed on the advice from the rulebook that GMs should be fans of the players who actually want them to enjoy themselves, and she reined it in to be about 20% less nihilistic after that.

Alrightgames: One Page Adventures – Coast, Pirate Ship, Underwater & Church

One Page Adventures: Coast, Pirate Ship, Underwater & Church

2022 / Roleplaying game adventures / 2+ players

****

Four pages of starting notes plus my own extensive improv to fit our theme, actually, but who's counting? There were enough ideas across these spreads to inspire a kid-friendly adventure above and below sea level while leaving out the nastier stuff. I thought I'd plotted a wide enough sandbox, but more improvisation was required when the player pursued an unexpectedly self-destructive path. She's keeping me on my toes.

Alrightgames: Tails of Equestria – Tabletop Weekly Playthrough

My Little Pony: Tails of Equestria – Tabletop Weekly Playthrough

2017 / Roleplaying game adventure / 2+ players

****

I dipped into this YouTube series last year to get an idea of how to start a roleplaying game in the first place, and used the example of the Bubblegum character to help my then-four-year-old understand the process of creating her own unique character. She liked it and decided she would just do that one.

More recently, we ran out of official adventures for the game and I decided we would just do this one. It got a bit creepy in the middle (I didn't have to play that haunted mansion backing music, to be fair), and more fighty at the end than we can be bothered with (I haven't really tracked stamina since 2024), but the writer's probably correct that it feels more like the show than the published adventures do. Their playthrough would have been a whole episode shorter if their team had decided to run straight upstairs like ours did.

Gamesmaster: Tails of Equestria – Castle Karaoke (DIY)

My Little Pony: Tails of Equestria – Castle Karaoke

DIY roleplaying adventure

The name and prompt came from kids' RPG No Thank You, Evil!, but I made up the rest, Taylored to her tastes and fun for me to plot out. It ended up being a whodunnit in a similar vein to a previous pony case that she wanted to play again, but can't, since she remembers the culprit. She seemed to dig it, since she immediately followed up with her customary "I can do that" improv remix.

Junior Gamesmaster: Tails of Equestria – The Glitter Fight (DIY)

My Little Pony: Tails of Equestria – The Glitter Fight

DIY roleplaying game adventure

After a thorough retreading of the official Ogres & Oubliettes adventure that saw the young player opting to exhaust all 10 random encounters, she still wasn't full on D&D Lite, so improvised her own sequel on the fly, and I got to experience being a clueless player under her tyranny again. I think I was doing okay until the final boss, when it stopped making any semblance of sense, but we were having foolish fun without screens, and that's what it's all about.

Alrightgames: Adventures on a Single Page – The Heist (Adapted)

Adventures on a Single Page: The Heist (Adapted)

2020 / Roleplaying game adventure / 2+ players

***

A bit lightweight on its own, this became one section of a larger story after more thematic meddling than usual to fit it into My Little Pony (changing the stolen painting to Rarity's gem; making the thieves' guild a dragon embassy because we have abundant dragon standees we've never used; losing the feral cats; challenging prejudices by making it all the doings of a troubled foal, after all). The framework was still standing after that adaptation inferno, even if we didn't trigger the creative alarm system in the end, or I just forgot.

We've probably run out of compatible modules from this set now, so I'll have to find flexible inspiration elsewhere to spare us from more of my own creations.

Alrightgames: Adventures on a Single Page – Magus Moreau's Island (Adapted)

Adventures on a Single Page: Magus Moreau's Island (Adapted)

2020 / Roleplaying game adventure / 2+ players

****

A nice little conversion of vintage sci-fi horror to junior RPG scenario that adapted smoothly to the My Little Pony setting with its pre-existing chimeras and Discord lore. A Fisher Price pirate ship and Catan board representing the island enhanced the thematic hodge-podge further.