Sunday 31 July 2011

Doctor Who And The Adventure You Have Lying Around

One key advantage of Doctor Who that makes it so game-friendly (as well as so flexible generally) is how many settings and genres you can drop the TARDIS into.

I more-or-less managed to combine GURPS Aztecs, Espionage and Horseclans when I got them to run an adventure off-the-cuff, but it would have been easier to pick one or two and run with it. I've used a Traveller adventure (albeit one about uncontrolled time travel) with no trouble at all. Plenty of WEG's Star Wars adventures feel like they emulate a 45-minute TV series in the setting more than the movies. When I discussed pre-Communist Russia here, Siskoid considered an all-historical-ish season based on GURPS historical books.

But it would be easy enough to go further with this idea. Very few RPGs are off-limits.

Several dozen examples.

Call Of Cthulhu has a special place for one of FASA's Doctor Who adventures being a reject from it slightly rewritten, but hey, too easy...

So I'm off to grab a random D&D adventure from the official site... paging back through the subscriber-only ones... The Haunting Of Kincep Mansion would be too easy...



Sleeper In The Tomb Of Dreams

Two superhuman evils seeking to steal some great power killed each other over it. A century later, cults have grown up around both the dead leaders, and now the tomb of one has been looted... the trail leading to where the other was interred, and with a plan to resurrect him, to ravage across the world unopposed.

Well, that's easy enough to do. Aliens, psychic entities, a bit of old-fashioned "Books of Saxon" style blatant alchemy. You could set it in the Middle Ages, mixing up the strange trade in "relics" of saints. You could even do it now, with the secret cults operating in the Home Counties and pretending to be neighbourhood landowners...

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