Science Fiction Trivia

[Malacandra]

Okay, I'm thinking of a book where the protagonists are, in a manner of speaking, on an island where the primitive natives might make wooden aeroplanes, and where said protagonists do end up finding a wooden aeroplane - a very large one which actually does fly. Title and authors, please?

[ffutures]

Too easy - Larry Niven and Stephen Barnes, Dream Park

[Malacandra]

Too easy - Larry Niven and Stephen Barnes, Dream Park

Much too easy. Take it away!

[ffutures]

OK - A role playing game in which antigravity material literally grows on trees. Name the game, publisher, and antigravity material.

[Malacandra]

Too easy.

Space: 1889, Games Designers Workshop, liftwood.

[ffutures]

Yup, thought someone would get it. Exactly right. Over to you!

[Malacandra]

While we're on a science-fiction RPG theme, then, here's one...

After defeating many opponents ranging from goblins to dragons and all points between, the "good" ending sees the protagonists encounter an android who looks surprisingly like Data, though not connected with him in any way, and gaining access to a system of teleport gates allowing transit to a large number of worlds. What happens in the "bad" ending?

(One of a series. This was released in about 1999, the series did not last much longer.)

[ffutures]

It sounds a bit like the "choose your own adventure" game book Starship Traveller from Games Workshop, but that was a lot earlier since I reviewed it for White Dwarf and stopped writing for them in the early nineties. In that one of the bad endings was getting lost in an endless series of portals.

[Malacandra]

No, it's computer-based. As with a number of such games there are non-interactive cut-scenes at various places during the action and the meeting with the android was one of these. More hints later if necessary.

[Malacandra]

Hint: The entire series was fond of giving you a sword-and-sorcery set-up only to turn science-fictiony at the end of the adventure.

[Malacandra]

... it was a PC game, first-person perspective...

[spud42]

my google fu has sadly departed.
no idea and every search i try comes up nada.......

[Malacandra]

Ah well, it's been a week and more, and there's been next to no nibbles at the bait, so probably time to put this one out of its misery.

The game was Might & Magic VII, in which the protagonists do indeed spend most of their time chasing after goblins, ghouls, griffins and the like, before the final mission which is to enter the crashed spaceship Lincoln, fight their way past the security droids, and recover the Oscillation Overthruster -- a glowing green crystal, which can then be used to repair one of two key pieces of equipment.

In the "good" ending -- and the party will have chosen this path much earlier in the story -- the NPC they recovered the Overthruster for will use it to repair the teleport gate system, which will give them access to a transit station where they meet the android Corak ("I am a Corak, not the Corak") who welcomes them and announces that they now have access to many other worlds formerly colonised by The Ancients.

In the "bad" ending, the NPC instead repairs one of the "Heavenly Forges" (replicators) and uses it to mass-produce copies of the blasters that he and his gang brought from off-world, which they then pass out to the Necromancers they have allied with, and hordes of blaster-wielding zombies controlled by the Necromancers proceed to conquer the world.

The series continues on the presumption that MMVII ended the "good" way, when it all turns out to have been for nothing: an Ancient security system responds to an earlier invasion of the world by the enemy Kreegan by activating a planetary sterilisation sequence, and despite all the labours in MMVI and MMVII, MMVIII ends with the world blowing up after all, although the population is able to escape to other worlds.

Over to... well, anyone, really.

[ffutures]

OK - obvious question suggested by the previous answer - name a film whose titular character makes use of an Oscillation Overthruster.

[spud42]

Buckaroo Banzai