The Whoniverse

We’re really calling it that now. It has a logo. And short reunion stories highlighting some classics. And nearly everything available on iPlayer.

K9 And Company!

Regeneration surprises

For obvious reasons I was thinking about regeneration episodes, and how the last time one surprised me was Four to Five, when I was six. These days they’re hyped up immensely. Or spoiled by newspapers, like Nine leaving so early.

The closest we got was Ten not quite regenerating a year early. For a week, we were wondering if they’d actually done it - I guessed not as I’d seen press coverage of filming The Next Doctor, but it was fun to speculate.

The Power Of The Doctor

The Power Of The Doctor

Bits of it worked great for me. Other bits didn’t.

Siberia, early 20th century. Are we doing Tunguska? Oh, apparently not. That was 1908.

So the Master with a Rasputin look is actually doing Rasputin...

Has Doctor Who never done a Rasputin episode? Apparently not. Nearly during the Capaldi run. And apparently the Boney M joke was in that script.

Sacha Dhawan playing the adviser to another Russian monarch is an odd but of typecasting.

The Eleven Doctors' Episodes

Someone on RPGnet spotted that Clara will have featured in ten episodes when this series ends, which is one per Doctor before the Eleventh for the anniversary special...

With the alien mummy and the Vigil who look rather like the guys from Underworld, this week would be the Tom Baker episode? In terms of some style choices sure, but not really in content. Last week’s episode was definitely rather Pertwee, however - modern Earth, mundane things turned fearful, riding a bike, UNIT at the end. The Snowmen would then be the Troughton - it rather fits with a Troughton villain returning from an episode of a related title. And presumably Asylum Of The Daleks would be the Hartnell? Can’t say I noticed in that case, barring the fact it was about Daleks.

The theory gets a bit wonky next week as it all sounds very Troughton, Base Under Siege and returning Troughton monster last seen in the Pertwee era and all...

It could a great basis for a season-sized run, however, particularly in a celebratory year - throw the TARDIS travellers into an homage to a different era of the show every week, emphasise the stylistic differences between Doctors and their stories. As a multi-Doctor story does, emphasising the distinctions between Doctors rather than the constant core.

Follow the stylistic advice from each Doctor’s sourcebook to get the right feel, bring back era-specific characters and monsters... So a Historical for the First Doctor, a Base Under Siege for the Second, a UNIT story for the Third, a horror pastiche for the Fourth...

Revisiting The Visitation

Mentioning to Siskoid that his pilgrimage through Doctor Who was getting to the point I was around for, it occurred to me that the first TV story I really remember (as opposed to the comics or toys, of which I have spoken before) is Logopolis, mostly the end, probably as repeated before the start of the Fifth Doctor’s initial run in The Five Faces Of Doctor Who.

But the first TV story I could really tell you about from experience was The Visitation, the one with the Terileptils, sneaking about London in 1666, altering the Plague, and accidentally causing the Great Fire of London.

I knew that, unlike the Master from a few stories earlier (or the Daleks and Cybermen from the toys) the Terileptils were new, but I remember being impressed by the robot Death and their brightly coloured fishy look, clearly from a more exotic part of the space aquarium than the Sea Devils. I soon realised they weren’t going to become a big deal, but I still have fond memories of them.

(Oddly enough, real aliens using a fake ghost to scare people off is a bit Scooby Doo, isn’t it?)

I suspect it lodged in my mind most of all for the setting. Aliens in the future, or on a spaceship? Normal. Aliens in the present? Common enough. Aliens in Pudding Lane? Here was something I knew about from history at school (which now seems odd as I was seven, which seems a bit young for the Black Death) and no other show had something like that happening. Pseudohistoricals remain Doctor Who’s “killer app” to me, something it does better than anything else. You get schooling brought to life - and a monster to keep you interested if there aren’t enough swordfights anyway. Fantastic!

Trope, Cliché, Classic and Tradition

Ten Episodes That Every Sci-Fi Show Must Have (if they last long enough) naturally includes quite a few that the Doctor has faced.

Christmas every year since 2005 (and that one time back in the day), alternate universes, important characters dying, flashbacks (which the characters can visit), time loops, betrayals and Blink.

Always room for more, though.

And what would you want in a Doctor Who Hallowe’en special? Hmm...

Five rounds rapid!

Defending The Earth: The UNIT Sourcebook preorder

Now the DWAITAS line’s first sourcebook instead of a box set.

Think of the going out before you enter.

10 Best Doctor Who Companion Departures (And 5 Worst) from SFX.

Some great examples to follow, and some... less so.

DWAITAS discusses the end of a character’s run, giving it more thought than many RPGs, reflecting its importance (sometimes properly addressed, sometimes not) in the series.

The Bad Trait “Unadventurous” in its Major form is expressly designed to write characters out, which may be a bit much but certainly reflects some of these departures.

Otherwise, the general advice is to make a departing PC’s (and particularly a departing player’s) last adventure as big a deal as you can (depending on how much warning you get, of course) and that’s advice worth taking to other games.

A Series Of Skywatch. 7: The Sapphire & Steel Episode

The highlights of the first two series of Torchwood included an episode each year by Sapphire & Steel creator PJ Hammond, each of which had its occasionally nightmarish surrealism and sense of doom.

Now, one can overdo the sense of doom bit, but while Doctor Who generally shows that humans are fantastic it does at times suggest there are corners we should let the Doctor poke around rather than looking at ourselves. These would be some of those times.

Slightly distinct from regular horror stories, Hammond-style episodes dwell on the strange and hostile things hiding behind myths, or in gaps in the fabric of Time itself. The threats tend to be haunting or creepy rather than purely monstrous, although they present plenty of danger. Magritte-style off-kilter imagery would suit them. The Torchwood episodes also demonstrated that actually defeating the threat is beyond humanity, and the best we can do is figure out how they work and what rules they follow, stave off direct attacks and save those endangered.

The Sound Of Who

Today’s pretty epic Google Doodle celebrates Robert Moog. It would be a very silly Doodle based adventure that had our heroes relying on a sound synthesiser to save the world. But...

So instead, synthesised sound got me thinking about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Ron Grainer and Delia Derbyshire creating the theme and music for Doctor Who. Music continued to play an important role in the show to this day, from the eerie electronic soundtracks of early Doctors to the rollicking symphonic sound Murray Gold brings to the modern show.

I tend not to use music in session, partially because I usually GM in society spaces but also because I am, by default, pretty quiet. However, I’ll occasionally send a link to a suitable piece in a pre-adventure teaser email, or reference a specific song, or include “and now the creepy music starts” in my narration.

And an adventure about music, or sound in general, would certainly be possible. Consider the film Pontypool or the second issue of Global Frequency, where just hearing the wrong phrase can change someone...

A Series Of Skywatch. 6: This Is Personal!

Doctor Who spinoffs such as Torchwood naturally include their own takes on Classic Who Themes. Plenty of action and adventure, a fair amount of horror, bits of knockabout comedy, and Big Emotional Episodes for everyone. I’m addressing the latter here, because it’s the most changed by the Earthbound format.

When tragedy strikes, or a character falls head over heels in love, or something else happens to do with Big Emotional results, it’s more likely that the non-emotional consequences are still there next week. Going to see how your father died when you were a baby is very different from dealing with your father dying right now. The Big Emotional Episode isn’t isolated in the way it would be in Doctor Who itself. Something to consider when preparing to run one.

This isn’t 100% the case, of course, there’s at least one Big Emotional Episode in Torchwood S1 with no fallout at all. But let’s try...

The less episodic setup can make a Big Emotional Episode stick out like a sore thumb if it isn’t integrated well. There are still ways to isolate it, of course - set the triggering events away from the normal setting, for example. You could also set this up as a solo episode, so none of the other PCs knows what the character involved really went through.

Or, at a pinch, explain everybody’s erratic behaviour as the result of a broken alien mind probe or something and make a joke out of the reset button and the lack of further impact. Don’t do that too often, of course - when discussing the equivalent episode in my Buffy season in TWH, I called it The One Where Everybody Acts Out Of Character.

Doctor Who And The Shifting Format

10 Totally Different TV Shows that Doctor Who Has Been Over the Years. Almost all by Doctor, but Tom Baker gets two and the Eccleston and Tennant eras are covered in one.

Note that I don't entirely agree, but the show has certainly changed dramatically from Doctor to Doctor and showrunner to showrunner.

I would imagine the educational side doesn't get much play at gaming tables - maybe a solid Celebrity Historical once a season? I hear of teachers using gaming as a stealth educational tool, so maybe it happens here and there.

And the Insane Pantomime probably only happens when the GM isn't paying enough attention - it's certainly an era I haven't delved into, except to pull ideas out of some bottom-of-the-polls stories, shake them off and give them a new lick of paint.

It would be possible to do all ten of these in a single season (these days thirteen episodes, tending to have three two-parters, so ten stories) but what would that look like?

1: An educational adventure show: A straight Historical or adventure based (roughly) on genuine science.
2: A claustrophobic show about monsters attacking: A Base Under Siege. Sorted.
3: An Avengers knock-off: Aliens of London with a particular focus on running around and UNIT appearing and things blowing up. Possibly set in the 80s as played by the 70s. May well involve the Master.
4: Gothic horror movies: This one is not difficult. Choose a monster, put it in an appropriate or deliberately juxtaposing setting, rack up the body count.
5: An absurdist slapstick comedy: Nor is this. Watch City Of Death and take notes.
6: Boys' own adventure stories: Hmm. This is pretty vague. What really makes it stand out is the Doctor's youthfulness. Which is a player option, really.
7: Insane pantomime: Crank up the monster ranting, set it in the 80s or somewhere redolent of the 80s like a tacky theme park or something similarly garish.
8: The Sorcerer's Apprentice: Look at how people, not least companions, view the Time Lord (or equivalent) in your game. Consider their backgrounds, mysteries they might include, issues they could resolve.
9: A postwar survivor's story: War Story.
10: A relationship comedy with universe-shattering consequences: Again, this is a concern for the players. All you can do as GM is complicate matters with varying times and timelines, and possibly NPCs who can stir up trouble as well.

The Mighty 200-Odd Adventure Hooks

Siskoid presents The Retread Campaign - remake classic adventures, possibly entire seasons in order.

After all, it was good enough for Peter Cushing...

(Idle notion, the Cushing "Doctor Who" in colour remakes of non-Dalek stories. Doctor Who And THE CYBERMEN complete with Arctic base, half a dozen actors familiar from the Hammer rep company, and Moonbase-style Cybermen...)

And since I've looked at numbers 1 and 200, to mark Post 222, what's number 101 like?

The introduction of Adric!

Okay, let's see what we can do. (100 was The Crusade, which I've totally done.)

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...

5 More Horror Films To Drop The TARDIS Into

Five more, eh, Siskoid? Challenge accepted!

The trick here is finding things that could make an interesting Who spin and which haven't been spun that way already. For example, that rules out pretty much the entire zombie apocalypse subgenre. And the Doctor adding the prefix "Space" to a monster's title is rather easy.


The Birds
(Or, if you prefer, The Long Weekend. Or Birdemic, but, well, no.)
Nature turns on humanity, animals attacking people with no apparent provocation. It probably has been done, but what the hey. The original film (and Daphne Du Maurier's story) offered no real explanations, but a Who version would have to. Aliens would be obvious. How about a human experiment, in a research facility nearby so the effect is currently local but as it moves into the final phase it's about to go global?
(And since we're in Britain, we just have to affect the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, as seen in one of the early-build-up-Earth-goes-mad scenes in The Core.)


Cat People
Most admired for its horror noir style, Val Lewton's film also has a great plot hook to snag someone with. A werewolf (well, werepanther) story where the trigger isn't the full moon, but anger, desire and especially their combination in envy. Someone cursed with a terrible power which she can control if she can keep her emotions in check... pushed into a situation where she can't. Becoming a monster for the most human of reasons.


Scanners
An experiment accidentally produces telepathic and more dangerously telekinetic subjects, some in control, some very much not so, and the most powerful deciding that non-psionic humanity can bow to its new master or go the way of the dinosaur. Add people involved with the experiment trying to take the psychics down, others wanting to use them as weapons, a beneficial conspiracy of telepaths, and more... although you probably can't get away with the exploding head at 7pm on BBC One.


Dead Of Night
This one could be an entry all by itself, being a portmanteau collection of shorts, but I'm here for just one. And not the ventriloquist's dummy, either. No, the one I'm thinking of is the evil mirror. An object that fascinates its victim, drawing him out of everyday reality, showing him another world... another time. The room the mirror first hung in, when its first owner went mad and killed his wife. Is its new owner going mad as well, or is the mirror really showing him something that should not be there?


Darkness Falls
An obscurity which I only know because it stars Emma Caulfield and has a Stan Winston monster, but it contains two perfect Moffat-style episode hooks. Not only does she prefer to attack at night like the vast majority of horror monsters, she has to because, even more than a vampire with sunlight, any light harms her. And she only attacks people who have seen her, so if you know she's coming, can you keep your eyes shut?

5 Horror Films To Drop The TARDIS Into

Rather obviously inspired by Siskoid's 5 Sci-Fi Films To Drop The TARDIS Into...

Doctor Who has never been above a bit of creative recycling. Quoting Robert Holmes: "We only use original ideas in Doctor Who. Not necessarily our original ideas." This was the writer-producer who set a Frankenstein story on a distant planet and did a Mummy story with robots, so he knew what he was talking about.

So anyway, four supernatural or paranormal threats and one exaggerated natural one. Going full paranormal or SF-horror would have been too easy...


The Haunting
A parapsychological experiment to find "sensitives" and study their responses to a house regarded as haunted, cursed or "unclean". Nothing is directly seen, but is the overwhelming sense of foreboding only the atmosphere of the house, or...? (For a less ambiguous version, maybe Poltergeist, complete with solvable mystery and big implosion at the end. But not the Haunting remake.)


Jaws
A natural threat, but far stronger than normal, threatens a tourist attraction, and the town's rulers won't listen to reason and warn people off. Put that in space and imagine the Doctor dealing with a monster he can't argue with and a human authority who ignores his arguments.


Something Wicked This Way Comes
A circus comes to a small Depression-era town, arriving unannounced, bringing strange temptations and perhaps, just perhaps, relating to a string of disappearances in other towns... (Ray Bradbury could fuel a series of Doctor Who by himself. And as an added bonus, its Big Bad was the Master for one night only.)


The Ring
A psychic entity that demands to have its story told... or it will kill you. Can its threat of death within seven days pursue a target through time?


The Omen
A child marked as a future apocalyptic threat to the world, protected by strange "accidents" and fanatical servants. Is he human? Is he innocent in all this? What do you do?

A series-ful of plots series two: Series Two!

Time for a series rundown again!

And just to give added content, a bunch of different example adventures, with episode ideas listed to map out the shape of a second series.

The Complete Series N2

A series-ful of plots series two: Time Travel

You might think that a show about a time traveller would have a fair number of episodes about time travel, but this isn't really the case. Normally, the TARDIS is a magic door to a new adventure, and once you're there, you're there. Episodes where time travel is a major feature after the initial setup are much less common, although Steven Moffat is doing his best to change this...

The series has built up some (rather inconsistent) rules about time travel, from ontological paradoxes and how they apparently work even though they don't to the Blinovitch Limitation Effect saying that you can't meet yourself or you shouldn't meet yourself or you mustn't come into contact with yourself or that's okay as long as you're from a parallel universe or nothing else has happened or...

Generally, going back in time and having another go at fixing things is not on. Unless time itself has gone very wrong, in which case it is. I think. Anyway, there's a lot about this in a future supplement, but I'm not here to talk about how it works as that changes from story to story, I'm here to talk about the story in time travel itself.

11: Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey!

Classic Who Themes: Knockabout Action And Adventure

Knockabout Action And Adventure is the “default setting” for most Doctor Who adventures. And most roleplaying game sessions. So there isn’t that much that needs to be said here.

--

Example: The Maelstrom
(A Knockabout Action And Adventure Aliens Of London story)

The travellers, a UNIT fast response team and a group of civilians are caught between an alien marshal and an escaped carnivorous monster on a Dorset peninsula cut off by artificially bad weather. Can they find the monster before it kills again, and deal with the marshal before she calls in an orbital bombardment of the area to save the rest of the world?

Classic Who Themes: Game For A Laugh

Comedy stands alongside adventure, drama and horror as one of the things Doctor Who contains in many stories and gives pride of place to in a few. This is something that often happens around the gaming table anyway, but more out-of-character than in, and comedy in gaming can feel forced. (I’ve played some great games of Toon, but also some really flat ones.)