Thursday 31 March 2011

Fury Of The Cybermen

At some point I'll feel strong enough to talk about the Aztec Horseclans Espionage game. In the meantime...

The people back away from the gleaming metal figures. The first steps forwards, flanked by the other two.

"Who are you? What do you want?"
"We are the Cybermen. We want... we-w-we... want... are the Cy-y-y-ber-men... We are... want." The figure twitches, sparks flickering around its casing, hands clenching and unclenching, and stumbles forwards. The other two looking at it warily. "We are. We are. Cyber. We are... men. We are. We! Are! We... Ar-rr-rr-rrRRRRRRRRGH!"

Saturday 26 March 2011

And the Horseclans you rode in on!

Right, so, IR'N GM. I got the following three GURPS soucebooks to run an adventure from.

Espionage. Not difficult.
Aztecs. Again, works for Who, or for a historical.
Horseclans. A series of pulp novels about post-apocalypse "Merihka" and the heroic psychic horse-riders lead by an immortal from the 1930s.

Good grief.

But I can grab an element or two. Weird people on horses... would be the Conquistadors. Or maybe I can use the villains, body-stealing immortal scientists.

Not the bloody psychic sabretooth tigers.

Saturday 19 March 2011

Space and Time

A new episode... well, more of a new skit really, but for a good cause.

Very much a reminder than before he became famous for terrifying and romantic Doctor Who episodes, Steven Moffat was best known for Coupling.

Tuesday 15 March 2011

Here's three elements, go make a game

Last year at Conpulsion I ran The Hammer Of Time and fun was had, I reckon. This year, I am not running Doctor Who... but I probably am.

How is this possible? I AM IRN GM!

The game is to grab three GURPS books sight-unseen from a shelf, and come back a day later with an adventure. It doesn't have to be for GURPS. So I think, based on what kinds of books come out for GURPS, there's a good chance of getting a historical era and some kind of monster book, the sort of disparate elements that can make a Doctor Who adventure.

(I'm also running a Buffy adventure based on a popular vote for what Buffy should fight.)

Testing this theory, I went to the GURPS shelf at my friendly local games store and tapped it at random three times, and this got:

Traveller (a space opera setting), Low Tech, and Magic.

Well, Traveller's no problem. Low Tech and Magic aren't really either. All three together... Well...

But I thought of the original FASA Doctor Who adventure "The Lords Of Destiny"...

A generation colony ship flies through the depths of space, home to tens of thousands... but when the computer dedicated to educating the descendants of the original crew went mad, all but the most basic knowledge of the ship's systems was lost. So now the ship thunders through space, out of control, with its passengers unaware of the universe outside and believing the ship's systems work by the will of unknown gods... as it nears the world it was sent to colonise with no way of stopping!

Obviously if I get three books that strongly suggest a different game I'll consider that... but I think Doctor Who is a pretty safe basis.

Resistance is futile... wait, that's the Borg these days... damn Borg...

Siskoid Blogs ... Of The Cybermen.

Wednesday 9 March 2011

April 23rd

Oh, BBC America. So much more helpful than that bit of the BBC that gets its country in the Broadcasting Corporation's name.

Saturday 5 March 2011

A series-ful of plots, deleted scene: Oddity Of The Daleks

I figure they had a fair shake already so I didn't include this one originally, but bringing in a classic Big Bad from the source always pulls in the punters. But what do we do different from last time we had Daleks?

One good trick is to have them acting significantly out of character...

I SAID EXTERMINATE!

Tuesday 1 March 2011

Doctor Who: Through Time And Space

This is a collection of six one-shot Tenth Doctor comic stories from IDW, who got the American Who comics licence concurrent with three different British magazines. Anyway, I got it because, hey, six stories by different writers in one book, and I'd only read one when it came out separately and missed a couple others I would have liked.

Two pseudohistoricals and four space-set stories, only one of which features human characters. Which is interesting, in a no-budget-issues way, but not very accurate to the show’s vision of the future at the time.

So was it worth it? Well... kinda...