Characters beyond the Whoniverse

And we are back! I know I tend to ignore this blog quite a bit, but I have still been playing about with stuff for the Doctor Who RPG lately.

For the longest time I have been tinkering with this idea of building a collection of character write ups. The theme would be various robots from movies and TV.  I'm formatting these write-ups similarly to the Doctor Who Expanded Universe Sourcebooks since that is a fairly useful template. 

For an example, here's A-X-L. This is from a 2018 sci-fi movie of the same name about a robot dog built for a top secret government project that escapes from it's creators and befriends a teenage outcast.

Classic Battlestar Galactica

One of the notable classic sci-fi series that sprang up in the wake of the popularity of Star Wars. The original Battlestar Galactica was quite an achievement for sci-fi TV. It created a popular franchise that remained popular within fandom, and it eventually got reimagined in 2003 as an equally popular series that spawned a number of TV movies and a prequel series of it's own.

The original series still holds fond memories for a lot of the people who grew up watching it. The spaceship battles were exciting, the Cylons menacing, and Starbuck was the slickest space cowboy around.

The Battlestar Galactica Universe

The series follows the struggles of the last survivors of the twelve colonies as they travel across the galaxy looking for Earth, the fabled 13th colony. The Colonials logtime enemy, the Cylons, staged a massive attack on the Colony worlds. They engaged in wholesale destruction of the people, leaving only a handful of survivors aboard a scattering of small ships. The Colonies only surviving battleship, the Galactica, under the leadership of Commander Adama, gathers the survivors together and leads them on a quest to find Earth, hoping it will be a sanctuary against the Cylons, who continue to pursue the survivors.

Leading the Cylon pursuit is Baltar. A former member of the Colonial Council who betrayed his people. He though his world would be spared in exchange for their service to the Cylons, but he was murdered along with the rest. Despite this, Baltar continued to serve the Cylons and their hunt for the last Colonials.

Along their journey, the Galactica fleet found other groups of humans living on other worlds. Most of them long lost settlers from the Twelve Colonies. Most of them were small pockets of people, little more than a few towns on a whole planet. Many of them were under the thumb of Cylon rule which made them no safe haven for the fleet.

Many Years Later: Galactica 1980

Finally, they reached Earth, only to discover the planet was not as advanced as they had hoped. The fleet remained in close proximity to Earth, and tried to use their advanced technology to help uplift the people of Earth so they could help them stand against the Cylons. The first attempt at this was orchestrated by Commander Xaviar without the approval of the Colonial leadership. He used an experimental time machine to go back into Earth's history to try and push forward it's technological development. He arrived during World War II and decided Nazi Germany, with it's advanced rocketry program, was the logical candidate. His effort at altering time were thwarted by Colonial warriors that followed him to the past, and all of them ended up back in the unaltered present.

The Colonials instead focused on changing the Earth in more subtle ways. They tried to introduce technology and ideas through trusted intermediaries, assisting people in need on Earth, and generally small things to make life better for people, as part of a plan leading up to their eventual reveal to the general populace.

Galactica as RPG Setting

Battlestar Galactica can work as a setting for a crossover adventure with the Doctor Who Roleplaying game, or it can be used as a setting for a full campaign. In fact The Battlestar Galactica revival series got converted into an RPG in 2007.

As a crossover with Doctor Who, the obvious choice would be for a TARDIS crew or other time travel team to wind up on a ship in the Colonial fleet during their journey to Earth. If you are playing a UNIT or other Earth bound group, it might be the fleet has arrived, and is doing their part towards preparing the Earth for the Cylons. Considering the willingness of some Colonials to interfere in  human history, it might be the role of the players to stop them.

As a setting for a standalone campaign, it might serve better to use the Rocket Age rules with it's more action oriented nature. It would be very easy to focus on life within the Fleet and the possible adventures as the Colonials explore unknown regions.

Not dead yet.

Despite not posting anything new in several years, I am still an active member of the Doctor Who RPG forum and contributing material there on a semi-regular basis. If nothing else I might collect a bunch of my write-ups from the forum here for convienence sake and maybe put them together into a PDF at some point.

The Six (B) Doctors

I had developed this theory to explain the previously unknown John Hurt Doctor. Of course, with the release of the Night of the Doctor my idea completely falls apart. So instead I present it as a possible scenario for the game.

My idea was that John Hurt was definitely the Ninth Doctor, but the product of the Season 6B timeline.

Season 6B is that bit of continuity wiggle room in between the Second Doctor's last appearance in War Games, and the Third Doctor's first appearance in Spearhead from Space. Instead of exile on Earth as the Time Lords had decreed, the Doctor became their agent dealing with secret missions for the Time Lords. That apparently lasts quite a long time for the Second Doctor, who is visibly aged when he's seen in The Two Doctors alongside a much older Jamie McCrimmon.  Though eventually the Second Doctor either died in action, or failed the Time Lords in some manner. Either way they follow through with their decreed fate for him and he becomes the Third Doctor we see in Spearhead.

What if that was not the case?

Instead, the Doctor regenerates into a completely different person. This Other Third Doctor is forced to remain in the service of the Time Lords as an agent of the Celestial Intervention Agency. The Doctor has proven himself far too valuable, and the Time Lords are getting rumblings of dangerous things happening through time. They have already foreseen the threat the Daleks pose to the universe, and the Doctor is the most logical agent to try and deal with this.

So we have a series of adventures with a Doctor working  (if not necessarily willingly) directly for the Time Lords through the Celestial Intervention Agency.

It could be the Time War may have already begun. It might be the adversaries in War Games may have been part of the larger machinations of various parties in the Time War to raise an army that could fight against the Daleks. The Doctor realizes what is at stake and remains part of the Time War, and in the process giving up a number of lives in the name of trying to stop the Daleks.

For a Time War themed campaign, this does give you the option of recruiting any of the classic Doctors into the War. Or you could create a new alternate Doctor tailored to your campaign, and still claim continuity.

Resourceful Pockets Table

So, your heroes have been captured by the bad guys and they tell them to empty out their pockets. Naturally the character with the Resourceful Pockets trait will have a wide variety of junk on hand. The GM has discretion about how many times rolling is needed.

Once again you roll two dice. Reading each one separately.

1-1   A vacuum tube
1-2   Pocket watch (normal)
1-3   a sandwich wrapped in paper (roll 1 die, on an even number it's still edible)
1-4   An 8 track tape of Polka music
1-5   Oolon Colluphid's Origins of the Universe
1-6   A piece of charcoal

2-1   A ball of rubber bands
2-2   5 meters of rope
2-3   A very old cell phone (circa 1992)
2-4   The last hand held gadget the players built in an adventure
2-5   quarter kilo of unobtainium-127
        (totally useless right now, but there's a materials engineer somewhere    
         who would sell his mother for this!)
2-6   That pen you nicked off President Taft's desk
       

3-1   shoe polish
3-2   a DVD of whatever movie is currently in theaters
3-3   a stationary pad from the Europa Hilton
3-4   A 3 1/4" floppy drive marked "Skynet 0.0176 DO NOT USE!!!"
3-5   A miniature theremin
3-6  A Mouse
       (roll 1 die; 1-2: USB Computer, 3: Living, 4: Dead, 5-6: Rubber,)

4-1   An Etheric Beam Locator
4-2   A Lighter
4-3   A Slide Whistle
4-4   A wad of lint
4-5   2d6 Coins from different planets (none of which are legal tender where you are right now)
4-6   A hip flask
       (roll 1 die; 1: Whiskey, 2- Vodka 3: Janx Spirit, 4: Holy Water, 5: Grape juice, 6: Vinegar)

5-1   A Cricket Ball
5-2   A pirate treasure map.
5-3   A rather dubious Hungarian to English Phrasebook
5-4   A glass bottle of soda
5-5   A rubber balloon
5-6   A tin cup

6-1   A string of fire crackers
6-2   An invitation to the time traveller's convention at MIT
6-3   A ball of twine
6-4   A Credit Card (roll 1 die; odds: still useful, evens: won't work)
6-5   A Swiss Army Knife
6-6   A bag of Jelly Babies

Rich Morris' Doctor Who comics

Webcomic artist Rich Morris has made quite a name for himself in Doctor Who fandom for the numerous fan comics he's done for the show. His magnum opus The Ten Doctors started in 2007 and ran for around three years and almost 250 pages. The fact it included all ten of the Doctors, most of their companions, all of the classic villains, and featured a story that tied all of these elements together  and in a truly epic manner is quite an accomplishment.


After Rich finished with the Ten Doctors, he really started playing around with the possibilities for crossovers.  His second comic Forever Janette, featured the Paul McGann Eight Doctor running into the cast of the vampire police show Forever Knight. It was much more of a straightforward murder mystery (though it did involve bodies getting miniaturized via the Master's Tissue Compression Eliminator.)

His next story The Stalker of Norfolk, was written in conjunction with his wife Hilary Doda.  It plays as a straightforward historical, dealing with mysterious events in Elizabethan England. Rich set the story in that interim between Jo Grant leaving in The Green Death and Sarah Jane Smith arrival in The Time Warrior. He used that indefinite period to introduce an original character: Corporal Beverly Powell, UNIT Historian. The story starts with Beverly having a debate about Lord Robert Dudley, Queen Elizabeth's Master of Horse. Naturally the Doctor takes her on a trip in the TARDIS just to prove he's right. Beverly is a great character, she stands up well as a companion in her own right.

The last story Rich has completed is Outrage, which features another unlikely crossover. This time with Colin Baker's Sixth Doctor and the 80's cartoon Jem and the Holograms. Jem did have the advantage of being one of the more dramatically themed cartoons of the 80's, with ongoing plots through several episodes. Rich also shows some skill in making the often disregarded Sixth Doctor and making him an interesting character yet still the crass blowhard the fans know.

Beyond these completed works, he also has two other Doctor Who comic he's working on.  A Time To Kill is a James Bond crossover, with an added wrinkle regarding Bond's true nature. The other one focuses on the Daleks and their run in with the Xenomorphs of Aliens fame. It's simply titled Daleks vs. Aliens.

I definitely recommend a read through his archive when you have the opportunity.  His breadth of ideas and imagination is quite inspiring, especially to the gamers looking for possibilities.

Thinking of possibilities, on Rich's forum, back in 2010, I started the "This would be an Awesome Crossover!" Thread which has stayed active up up to this year. Everybody who reads the comic chimed in on their dream crossovers, and lots of spitballing with ideas. It's definitely worth a look just for some possible inspiration.

Weekend Write Ups: ALF

Here's another one of my oddball character write-ups. This time it's ALF from the 80's sitcom of the same name. The series focused on typical American family that has it's life turned upside down when an alien crash lands his ship in their garage. Keeping him out of sight of the authorities and the neighbors focus of a lot of the show, which was made more difficult by Alf's exceedingly difficult personality.  The series ran from 1986-1990, and in 1996 there was a follow-up TV movie titled Project ALF.

ALF (aka Gordon Shumway of Melmac)

Awareness 3      Coordination 2   Ingenuity  5
Presence 2         Resolve  4          Strength 2

GOOD TRAITS
Alien
Alien Organs (5 stomachs)
Boffin
Charming
Immortal (major)
Keen Senses
Technically Adept

BAD TRAITS

Alien Appearance
Impulsive
Last of My Kind
Selfish
Tiny (minor)


SKILLS
Convince  3

Knowledge 3
Science 3
Subterfuge 3
Survival 2
Technology 4
Transport 4

Story Points: 12
Tech Level: 6

Gordon Shumway is an alien nicknamed ALF (an acronym for Alien Life Form) by the humans that took him in.  ALF's body is covered with fur and he has a rippled snout, facial moles and eight stomachs. His heart is apparently located in his head. He likes to burp and eat cats, and can whistle without opening his mouth. He was born on October 28, 1756 on the Lower East Side of the planet Melmac. Melmac was located six parsecs past the Hydra-Centaurus Supercluster, and had a green sky, blue grass and a purple sun.

ALF was gardener by profession back on his homeworld, but did serve as a reservist member of the Melmac Orbit Guard.  He was fortunate to be off planet at the time when nuclear disaster caused the destruction of his planet. Homeless with a damaged ship, he crash lands in the garage of the Tanner family when his ship locked in on HAM radio signal Willie Tanner was broadcasting. With nowhere to go the Tanner family took him in and helped him adjust to life of Earth and avoid the Air Force's Alien Task Force that was looking for him.

ALF lived with the Tanners for several years. When other survivors of his planet contacted him with information about their newly formed colony, he jumped at the chance to leave. But before he could escape the Alien Task Force caught up with him, and he found himself  a prisoner.

His captivity by the military was not kind to him, which did include various "experiments" on him that were little more than torture. While the senior officers and their pet scientists were downright xenophobic regarding ALF, his Airmen jailers were much more accommodating. They gave him many creature comforts and allowed to turn his cell into the center of a lot of illegal business on base. When one of the senior officers decided of his own accord to have ALF killed, two of the junior officers smuggled him off base.

ALF's fugitive status was relatively short lived, and when returned to the Air Force, the people responsible for his harsh captivity had been removed. He was further granted status of Ambassador to Earth, though after meeting ALF they  have reservations about how good an idea that really was.

 USES IN THE CAMPAIGN

In a UNIT campaign, the characters might be more inclined to run into ALF during his military captivity.  After the events in England with the Slitheen and Sycorax attacks, The US military might have to reveal ALF's existence as part of an information exchange. If he's been in their care since 1996 (the year the Project ALF movie was released) the US might end up foisting him upon UNIT just to be rid of him.

ALF's main role is obnoxious troublemaker, his impulsive nature makes him the one to push the big red button on the control panel, or to run off and try to do something on his own when he should be waiting on the rest of the group. His sarcastic nature sometimes gets the better of him, throwing out one of his quips at the most inopportune moments.

ALF does have his good side though, he is quite loyal to his friends and will try to make amends when he realizes he's gone too far. He is also quite the boffin, having created several gadgets over the years including converting Willie Tanner's HAM radio into a galactic communications system. Given the right motivation he could potentially be quite useful on the technical side.

Melmacians age so slowly they have for all practical purposes the Immortality trait. ALF is over two hundred years old, and likely to live for several more centuries. So it's likely the players could run into him on multiple occasions and points in history.