Bow ties are cool. Discuss.

So I went in to work yesterday, on our local "weird cool alternative stuff" street of small galleries, record shops, indie clothes stores, memorabilia outlets, goth shops and old pubs built of several knocked-together rooms, and I saw the local kid who has taken the Tenth Doctor as his style icon. He was holding hands with his girlfriend, who sadly wasn't cosplaying Rose, so I resisted the temptation to ask if he thought bow ties are cool.

But anyway, seeing a reasonable Ten lookalike walking around drawing only the occasional curious look on a street full of arts students and emo kids got me thinking, further to the LARP essay, about Cool.


The biggest setting for LARP in the world after "generic fantasy" is Vampire: The Masquerade, a modern game about pale, slender people with powerful and dangerous secrets prowling through the modern world and, on average, being rather Cool. The Doctor, of course, makes his own Cool. But Ten is a rare example of it being accepted into the wider definition of Cool by normal people rather than Charmingly Eccentric, Rather Quaint or of course Geeky. And even he looks a bit out of place when surrounded by sinister black-clad figures wearing sunglasses after dark.

So, inevitably, an adventure idea.

--

Children Of The Night

(I can't believe there isn't already a Doctor Who story called that.)

The travellers land in the gloomy autumn of the present year, give or take, drawn by a threat to existing history. Looking around the streets, the local companions notice a lot of young people wearing a lot of black, moral-panic redtops banging on about sinister youth cults related to the disappearances of similarly-attired people...

A hateful alien force is targeting alienated young people - the same force that scattered the Romantics two hundred years earlier. It feeds on contentment, and so seeks to destroy morbidity and gloom.

And in order to find it, the travellers have to meet and work with people who are far too cool to take them seriously to begin with.

This could of course be done with any demonised youth culture, but the idea of siding with the goths against a disapproving monster who acts jolly amuses.