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A Series Of Skywatch Variant: The Big X-Parter

Okay, last one.

Since Skywatch is partially “what would I do in place of Torchwood” I decided to add a final entry discussing its later format as a series of miniseries, multi-part serials about world-changing developments in Children Of Earth and Miracle Day. (And a number of the spinoff audios and novels are about this big as well, such as the time-hopping comic story Rift War.)

They hark back to the Quatermass model co-opted at the start of the Third Doctor era - among other things, as DWM noted when discussing that development and pointing out that Monty Python’s Flying Circus had effectively managed to parody it a month before it started.

They set the team against a “what if?” SF or science-fantasy idea so large and/or strange that it will take five or even ten episodes to deal with it. And during that time the government will panic, the characters will go on the run, people we like will die, Captain Jack will have a relevant flashback, there will possibly be a filler episode and the world as we know it will be threatened by forces beyond our comprehension which the Doctor could probably send packing in five minutes...

I’ve looked at parallel Miracle Day ideas before, but more generally, what would sustain multiple sessions?

A Series Of Skywatch 13: The Season Finale, Finale

We’re gonna need a bigger boat.

Building from last week as well as the through line of the entire series, a series finale can go crazy big. (Although a surprisingly small and personal conclusion works too.)

Now is the time for brave and possibly foolhardy plans, dramatic moves, sudden but inevitable betrayal, equally sudden displays of heroics, snogging at the edge of the abyss, special guest monsters, ideas you have floating about spare...

A Series Of Skywatch 12: The Season Finale Begins

The Season Finale is upon us.

Building plots rear up, character connections reach crisis points, and the world (or the universe, or at least the city centre) is threatened. Can the team rise to the challenge?

Torchwood has them (indeed, the latter series are all build-up and finale) as does Primeval. Not The Sarah Jane Adventures, but it had its could-be-a-finale two-parters featuring the Trickster.

Much of the advice from the Doctor Who version (and its sequel) and the Buffy season equivalents apply here, as do general Big Two-Parter ideas, and a Secret Invasion wouldn’t feel inappropriate either.

So what about specifically Earthbound and low-key ones? Well, they can threaten everything, or just threaten everything the characters hold dear. And it would seem proper to really hit the idea of victory at a high price. Keep the tone about the level of the rest of the series, but if it’s been grim so far, may as well go that bit grimmer.

And tap existing connections of the more grounded show, too. Have friends and enemies turn up again - and enemies ready to help if the situation’s bad enough are often welcome. Call in the troops for the agency you’re sort of working for. Bring out some of that Illicit Alien Technology to go off like Chekhov’s Gun - ideally, the players should think of this themselves while spitballing possible solutions.

And the threat can be fairly quiet too. Keeping a lid on things might be part of the group’s brief, and equally, keeping the setting recognisably like modern Earth is important for a game set somewhere like modern Earth - unless you want to run a season set in a planet occupied by Daleks, they should clear off by the end of part two.

But it’s still enough to lead up to a big “oh no...” cliffhanger.

A Series Of Skywatch. 11: Time Travel

Skywatch specifically doesn’t put the cast in a time machine, but the Whoniverse being what it is and genre telly being what it is, a time travel episode here and there is bound to happen. After all, Star Trek has plenty of them, including more than a quarter of the films.

(You can do all The Staples Of SF TV with illicit alien tech, as well, but let’s stick with the most Whovian oddity. I’ve left it this late so I’m not tempted to reel off the whole lot.)

Most genre shows do a one-off time travel episode at some point, including the Who spinoffs. Torchwood had these going in both directions due to the Rift on their doorstep, and a sinister time-aware cultist in town as well. The Sarah Jane Adventures had the Shopkeeper and the Captain, possibly a reference to Mr. Benn, sending the gang on vital-according-to-them missions through history. See also Blink, a mystery working backwards, where unintended time travel by the Doctor puts some normal modern people’s lives in great danger.

Like a Doctor Who story about time travel (rather than framed by it) a time travel episode of a normally-in-one-era show will generally focus on the mystery, strangeness and danger of time travel, play up paradoxes and predestination. Even restricting ourselves to Earth’s history, or the history of the place the group starts, there are plenty of ways to get in trouble.

And with no friendly time-travelling PC in the group, if the group don’t solve the mystery they could end up trapped in another century...

Since this will probably be your only time travel episode, give or take (I’d keep it down to one a series at most), make it a doozy.

These are normally historicals or these days pseudohistoricals (with or without a celebrity) so pick an era that really interests you and/or your players, find suitable visual aids (like stills of any of the cast in suitable period dramas), play up connections like ancestry and links like a ruined building restored to its former glory, bring up changing attitudes more than Doctor Who itself usually does, see how well they deal with living in history.

Let them fight Nazis, run from dinosaurs, nearly Grandfather Paradox themselves, meet and fall in love with people who died centuries ago, accidentally lead to the foundation of Skywatch...

Visits to the future in not-normally-time-travelling series tend to focus on near-future nightmares with roots in the present, a la Marvel’s Days Of Future Past. And then get back to the present just in time to fix it.

Show how amazing (and frightening, and dangerous) time travel could really be if you aren’t bouncing around the centuries every episode.

A Series Of Skywatch. 10: Science Fiction That Is About Science!

With all the monsters invading, alien tech raining down and ghosts in the machine, the Whoniverse is a decidedly soft SF setting. But every now and then it looks at what’s going on in real-world science. The inventors of the Cybermen went on to create Doomwatch, and Torchwood Three’s first pre-watershed adventure (on the radio) was about something haunting CERN.

I run the odd “we just found or did X!” article here, when I come across a “we found or did X!” bit in the news and forums. Bringing things into the Whoniverse is generally a case of exaggerating a bit.

A Series Of Skywatch. 9: The Monsters Are Coming

... The human race.

Between the black market in alien tech, government jurisdiction territoriality, conspiracies and more, humanity gets a rather worse rap in Torchwood than it does in Doctor Who. Being an Earthbound show, more human nastiness is quite natural. There’s certainly room for an episode where the threat is entirely mundane.

Not much to say about this, of course, except that it can be tricky not to make it feel like a cheat or a letdown when the players are here to hunt monsters. Perhaps some hint of the uncanny can be included - like a serial killer being caught trying to escape because a door inexplicably won’t open for him, perhaps.

A Series Of Skywatch. 8: Red Tape

Judging by the first two series, it’s time for another Illicit Alien Technology episode, but you didn’t come here to read “see six weeks ago”, so let’s look at a different aspect of the semi-official alien hunting gig. Semi- being the important bit here.

When the Doctor swans into a crime scene, fast talks the guards and waves his psychic paper under their noses, it’s because questions of jurisdiction and other bureaucratic obstacles will tend to slow down an average episode. They can be fun when you get mired in a nightmarish dystopia of procedural excess, but less so when modern British procedures are concerned.

But a group that has to go through at least some of the proper channels may sometimes have to deal with such concerns. UNIT back in the day had to clear things with officials above, Torchwood had to get friendly-ish police on-side and avoid UNIT’s attention. And consider what the poor sods at The Laundry have to deal with.

A group like Skywatch would have an Oversight Committee, some of whom know what’s going on and some of whom have been sent from Parliament due to a cabinet reshuffle and would like to know why the programme is so expensive.

And for that matter, jurisdictional issues can get very messy if other departments start looking for aliens as well. In The Flood the Doctor is pressganged by MI6 (a clear influence on the attitude of Torchwood, among other things, in Army Of Ghosts) so what if another group formed by another branch of government turned up at the site of an alien incident? Or the police’s own paranormal experts? Or UNIT?

Something like this can really throw a spanner into a normal adventure.

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.

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.

A Series Of Skywatch. 5: Secrets Within Secrets

In a game about a covert-ish organisation, it’s quite natural to look at other covert-ish organisations and what they might be up to. Torchwood kept themselves hidden from UNIT, MI5, MI6 and the police, and were indirectly responsible for the Children Of Earth situation. The three families behind Miracle Day were even m ore secretive, and are still out there, working on Plan B.

(Probably not this Plan B, but you never know.)

A conspiracy, governmental or criminal, could be mixed up in world-spanning (or bigger) threats, as well as smaller plots closer to home. They might be working with alien technology, with aliens, or for aliens.

They could be aliens themselves, taking over the world or pursuing another aim, passing for human or going unnoticed and keeping Silent.

Or something else paranormal might be going on. Or even nothing directly paranormal - they just cross paths with the PCs another way entirely and don’t take kindly to them...

Whatever the case, conspiracies and covert-ish organisations can cause a lot of trouble. Even a small one can have scarily dedicated followers, and a large one could have spies, assassins, security forces, expert thieves and hackers on speed dial. Even without any super-tech or powers, a black ops team could be more than many groups can handle.

A Series Of Skywatch. 4: Mysterious World

An earthbound genre series will often look to supernatural and paranormal stories as a source of plot ideas. And there are plenty of options, from pop culture icons to obscure local legends.

Doctor Who and its spinoffs have provided alien or other pseudoscientific explanations for vampires, werewolves, witches, ghosts, faeries, changelings, demons, daemons, mummies, Frankenstein, UFOs, astral projections, mental telepathy, ESP, clairvoyance, spirit photography, telekinetic movement, full-trance mediums, the Loch Ness Monster and the theory of Atlantis. Three times, in the case of Atlantis.

Any character type from The World Of Darkness games can be explained by putting “Space” in front of it...

So choose a story, look at the basics, decide what’s right and wrong in the legends, figure out the being’s agenda or the source of the manifestation and work out how Skywatch cross paths with it and how (and if) they can stop it.

For one example, the Leanhaun Sidhe.

A Series Of Skywatch. 3: Illicit Alien Technology

A plot hook used in several episodes of Torchwood was the effect of various kinds of alien or otherwise super-advanced technology falling into human hands.

“This technology has been falling to Earth for centuries.” Henry Van Statten, Dalek

Torchwood One deliberately went out looking for technology to swipe, so it’s been part of the setup from the very beginning.

This allows a “how would this advance affect life?” SF story on a small scale, and with no aliens being directly involved it’s all about people and their motivations.

So look at any implausible bit of tech in isolation. Who might have, who would want it, what would they be willing to do for it? The more useful something is, the more various groups will want it (including the PCs and their superiors, and possibly other official groups).

If this is to be a recurring source of plots, I’d set up where all these things are coming from. The magic shop in Buffy provides a variety of phlebotinum even before Giles takes it over, and Friday The Thirteenth: The Series and Warehouse 13 are both series about artefacts causing trouble.

And Doctor Who has hinted at this before, with a Dalek passing from owner to owner until Henry Van Statten acquires it - this summer!

For such a setup, I’d create a consistent black market in such rare items. Perhaps run by a smuggler, a charming conman who doesn’t know quite as much about the things he finds and sells as he really ought to...

The last decision is what happens to the device at the end of the episode. Players will often want to keep it unless it’s really dangerous to the user or the world in general, and sometimes even then they’ll still be tempted by the power. So consider where or not to let them get their hands on anything too unbalancing. Maybe it takes time to learn to use a dangerous gadget safely, or it has a limited number of uses, or some other way to avoid it coming out every week. Players generally don’t mind missing out on a game-wrecking power, since it’s their game it would wreck.

A Series Of Skywatch. 2: Alien Something Else

Following Alien Attack:

A similar smallish number of aliens is in the area, doing something that isn’t immediately threatening or deliberately dangerous.

Exploring, taking resources to a non-cataclysmic degree, fighting a non-human enemy who happens to be in our solar system, fixing their engine after an asteroid strike, looking for an escaped convict, shopping for trinkets or the local delicacy known as beef, whatever they’re up to attracts Skywatch’s attention. It could be indirectly dangerous to humanity, temporarily or permanently, or could inadvertently lead to danger, perhaps due to the attention it draws from the RAF and the like.

This may lead to misunderstandings on both sides, escalating threats, teaming up against other human or alien presences, an alien PC joining the group...

A Series Of Skywatch. 1: Alien Attack

While the basic Torchwood setup is fine, the main problem with it is how small it is compared to Doctor Who. Sure it was enough to run two years of it and two serials, and nine years of The X Files and four and counting of Fringe, but stuck in a single point in space and time, you need a decent reason for the PCs to face a new alien-related threat every week.

(Skywatch has "official sanction for events like this across the UK" and the Whoniverse's "this kind of thing happens three times a week". Torchwood adds the Rift, a spatiotemporal Hellmouth.)

They should generally be somewhat more low-key as well - alien incursions in ones and twos rather than hundreds and thousands. Torchwood Three work on a global scale at most. Even their Big Ten-Parter which changed the world dramatically for months could probably have been solved by the Doctor in a single episode.

So a lot of these will be ringing the changes on Aliens Of London. (Or Cardiff, or Glasgow, or MediaCity Salford...)

So to start with, there’s an alien on the loose, attacking and possibly killing people, for some nefarious or baffling purpose. It has to be stopped.

Ideally without (much) gunplay because chances are it’ll laugh off bullets like drizzle. The team might be able to combat it directly, but that will be tricky to set up and arrange, especially if they’re trying to keep quiet about things.

(If direct combat is likely to be a frequent thing, consider adopting the initiative system from Primeval which divides characters by speed rather than intent.)

Since this is the pilot, don't ring the changes too heavily. A single alien active near the team's base to some dangerous purpose, intentional or not.

A Series Of Skywatch. 0: Watch The Skies

“Semi-covert semi-official alien hunters in the Whoniverse.”

Right then, to start with (in the manner of the Angel RPG) what do the team and their backers have in terms of sanction and equipment?

Torchwood Three had a base, some files, some junked alien tech, a van (with Torchwood on the sides) and one Special Good Trait between them.

Torchwood One had troops on-site but was never seen to deploy them, and had some handy gadgets. Not nearly enough in the end, of course...

Sparrow and Nightingale have some video recorders and a camera. Still, I’d trust the world’s safety with them over Torchwood any day.

A UNIT team can swan in with official badges, APCs, big guns and redcaps. They can still be stymied, turned away, misdirected and massively outgunned, as demonstrated in the Pertwee era, but this could get the PCs through a lot of doors with no (or at least few) questions asked. Useful for PCs if you don’t want a lot of sneaking around and arguing for clearance.

As a point of comparison, the team from Primeval fall between TW1 and TW3, with shaky backing, occasional blackfatigues troops and whatever Connor could bodge together in the lab, but mostly rely on their skills and regular weapons and an ample supply of Story Points.

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Example: Skywatch

A branch of the RAF with jurisdiction for the skies above the UK, Skywatch is the government’s official response to the repeated threat of alien invasion. The PCs are a team from the investigative wing. And like any government department, they could do with a lot more resources than they actually have.

I’m going for the pseudo-official level of TW3 in the early years here. They have badges and access to some alien tech, but officialness means sometimes they have to get warrants and they have to send reports upstairs.

They could have some chaps with guns but couldn’t call massive armed backup. Actually flying around and blowing things up is technically UNIT’s role, although they have liaisons with them as well as the RAF.

Skywatch recruits are a mix of level-headed career military, brainy types recruited from our better universities, and people who have Seen Too Much. Probably no particularly weird characters, unless of course someone wants to play one and you’re okay with it.

A typical Skywatch minivan (silver, not black) has a good computer tracking system, mobile internet, maybe some ordinary guns and tasers in a lock box, some neat available-in-normal-cars-in-five-years doohickeys and not much else.

Making Our Own Whoness: The results are in!

From here and in time for Easter.

And is it "results" because Tyler and garethl responded.

And the winners are... something a bit Quatermass and something a bit Torchwood!

Which I think are close enough you could probably do them together...

Now, those who know me know that Torchwood is something I watched initially in car-crash fascination having wine with a friend, and in the later mini-series years largely willingly.

But (keeping in mind that this is a family-friendly G-rated blog) what would I do with such a setup?

Semi-covert semi-official alien hunters in the Whoniverse.

And so, here we go...