'Race for El Dorado - a Dream Park Role Playing Game adventure'. Two Shelves of Gaming Episode 13.

Greetings podsters! It has been a while since my last offering so I was feeling the slight pressure to get something recorded and edited before time stretched out any further. A combination of procrastination and not knowing what to pick off my book shelves next created a perfect storm of indecision - and talking of storms, Eunice was battering the Dutch coastline as I recorded this episode, you can hear it howling in the background.  The game I chose for this episode, or rather the adventure module, is 'Race for El Dorado', a rip roaring pulp adventure set in the 1920s/1930s that takes players from a ship sinking in the Pacific ocean to a Peruvian coffee plantation and finally into a lost valley full of dinosaurs. Or does it? Let me explain. The adventure is for the Dream Park role playing game, which is based on the books of Larry Niven and Steve Barnes. This game setting is slightly peculiar in that the players, and all the adventures they have, don't take part in a world or universe, but rather in an artificial virtual reality theme park set-up full of holograms, actors and special effects. Basically everything they encounters in the course of this adventure module is fake. With me so far? Essentially when you sit down to play this game, you the person (aka the player) has a PC who in turn plays a role in a themed adventure setting. The way I look at things is this; it's a game, within a game, within a game.  Admittedly I'm not familiar with either the source material or the details of the rules, but this creates a bit of head scratching on my part as I'm kind of thinking, "Why have such a set-up for a role playing game? Isn't this unnecessary?"  While the adventure itself is a roller coaster ride of thrills, spills and dangers, it's all fake - not just for you the player, but also for your PC. As I read through the module I kept having twin thoughts of it looking like immense fun to play, but at the end of the adventure what happens? Does one of the technicians mentioned early in the module switch on the lights, wheel away the backdrops and start sweeping the floor? What's the point is what I'm ultimately asking. Yeah, it's fun, but what happens after...? Anyhow, it's a curio of my gaming collection and one I randomly picked up 2nd hand in Manchester's Travelling Man game and comic store some time in the 00s.  To find out more here are a couple of links to the rules and source material: https://www.scribd.com/document/463166716/DreamPark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_Park