Sunday adventure hook: The Red Moon

No Doctor Who for the first Sunday this year. So, naturally, I feel I must provide...

The Red Moon

The Door opens on the Black Forest in the 16th century, as villagers bar their doors at sunset. A red moon rises overhead, greeted by the howls of hundreds of wolves.

“This is what fairytales were like before they cleaned them up...”

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy first broadcast beginning on this day in 1978. So it’s... 42.

Douglas Adams wrote the first serial and book while working as a script editor on Doctor Who, and the first series broadcast before his first Who story, The Pirate Planet. Sequels included things he couldn’t do in Who for various reasons like budget and later tone, but from the beginning it featured a confused modern British person stumbling around time and space with a human-looking alien and getting into a wide variety of trouble.

International Women’s Day

Have a good International Women’s Day!

The Timeless Children

“Don’t tell me what I can’t do!”
Not Terry O’Quinn

March

And on into March, and St. David’s Day. An animated Google Doodle just for the UK, apparently! (Meanwhile Australia has a squirrel in a hot air balloon for the start of autumn.)

Wales is of course important to the revived Doctor Who, based for years in Cardiff and Torchwood set there. Not many historical episodes though...

Leap Day

Leap Day! Today does not exist.

The distance of time

AV Club takes a look at Ranger In Time, a series of children’s books about a rescue dog travelling in time to help in disasters, which drew some controversy overnight with someone flagging up the new book about 9/11.

Author Kate Messner responded that it came from her audience asking - kids born after the event.

Those kids were born years after 9/11 and don’t have the memories we do as adults. To them, it’s an awful thing that happened in history, like Pearl Harbor is to many of us. They want to know more about it, but adults don’t like to talk about it. So kids are left wondering.

It will always be too soon for me, but it’s true. Where do we draw the line, and when does it move?

Ascension Of The Cybermen

“Mad? No, hopeful.”

Surprise!

Dropping one kind of enemy into a different kind of story works pretty well.

Maybe not three times in eight episodes though...

A--ac- Of The Cybermen

For a non-serious Cybermen adventure, their voices break up like Discord calls.

The Haunting Of Villa Diodati

“Definitely a hand!”

The Haunting Of Villa Diodati comes weighted with expectations. The Year Without A Summer is one of those stories that science fiction, horror and fantasy fans know very well, from the resulting Frankenstein and The Vampyre to Ken Russell’s Gothic and many more.

I did it in The Door In Time too, drawing ideas from Frankenstein’s Womb by Warren Ellis and Marek Oleksicki, and I suggested it as a historical setting for the Frankenstein-inspired Chronicles Of Darkness RPG Promethean: The Created.

This includes audio and comic Doctor Who. So the TV version is not the first, but as the one that gets on TV it will be the definitive Whovian take for many.

Help! (See what I did there?)

A new poster on RPGnet seeks adventure hooks based on Beatles and Bond titles. Far be it from me to refuse.

Can You Hear Me?

“I tried to warn you.”

Emily Cook at DWM reports that this is the first episode with a question mark in the title. Considering the title of the show and the accessorising of most Doctors in the 80s, this surprises me.

Praxeus

This is not a normal day...

Happy Palindrome Day by the way!

Mary Somerville

A Google Doodle celebrating Mary Somerville, mathematician, geographer and astronomer, who worked out that Neptune must be there.