This weekend, I ran a Doctor Who game at the annual Continuum convention in Leicester. I've had relatively little to run the game before, despite having written about related topics here, although this was the third in a loose series where I have previously run the other two (including one at last year's Continuum). The game was run using the Doctor Who Adventures in Time and Space system (2nd ed.) - one that I haven't used in my "monster" posts since, of course, the relevant information already exists in print. For those who haven't previously encountered it, it's available here.
Unfortunately, I'm not terribly good at coming up with ideas for adventures. I can tweak stuff that already exists, and throw in ideas but writing the adventure itself, not so much. (My recent fantasy sourcebooks, which are available here and here, consist of settings, NPCs, and plot hooks, but cannot reasonably be described as "scenarios"). Fortunately, there is a readily available source of plot ideas for Doctor Who: the expanded universe.
This term refers to all of the licensed material that exists outside of the TV show itself and its associated webisodes, etc. It's a common enough concept in fandom, perhaps first being used to refer to Star Wars, and also being prominent for Star Trek, among other franchises. In the case of Doctor Who, aside from the RPG itself (which clearly does count) there are three main types of media involved.
While the comics have been going in some form or another since late 1964, I've only read a very small number since high school. The novels are, perhaps, taken more seriously. While they began with the Target series that novelised the broadcast TV stories, original ones began appearing in 1991, along with numerous licensed short stories... and an indeterminate volume of fanfic. I haven't read the novels for a few years now, and, in any event, they are usually too long and complex to easily adapt to a game - certainly not to a one-off con game.
Which leaves us with the audio plays, produced since 1999 by Big Finish. Perhaps the biggest advantage here is that I happen to have listened to a lot of them, but it's also the case that (with a few exceptions) the details of their plots aren't all that well-known and they're about the right length. Most are two hours of audio, and that converts pretty well to three or four hours of gaming, if you do it well enough. So, that's what I do: cannibalise concepts from Big Finish audio plays and turn them into scenarios.
The first thing I do is, of course, identify a suitable idea. A high proportion of audio plays - probably the majority - won't work as scenarios for one reason or another. They're part of a longer plot arc, or they rely on a protagonist doing a particular thing, or there's only one, not-very-obvious, way of defeating the bad guy. Or, if they're particularly good audios, they'll be instantly recognisable and/or beautifully tailored to the protagonists featured, making use of their quirks and backstories. For that matter, many won't work with more than one or two main characters.
To be clear, what I'm not trying to do here is copy the original work - even though I'm not publishing it, just using it for a game between friends. Instead, I'm just taking the basic idea, and building a new scenario out of it. In the case of the con game I ran last year, I ended up mutating things so much that there was essentially no trace of the original left, beyond having the same monster in approximately the same place. This time, anyone who had a good memory of the original would have realised it was much the same idea but I figured that that wasn't a big risk, and it wouldn't help them much if they did.
So: the source material was Industrial Evolution by Eddie Robson, which came out in 2011. It's a decent story, but one multi-user online ranking site currently puts it in 171st place out of 215, and it came out over ten years ago, so, hopefully, it's not memorable enough for the homage to be obvious! The core idea here is that an out-of-control alien device is boosting local technology, and not doing a very good job of it. I kept the idea of how it had got to Earth, and why it was being used there in the first place, but key elements of the original went out the window.
All of the parts about Thomas Brewster, and that relate directly to the Doctor and Evelyn go out, because we don't want to replicate the plot, just use the central idea. I moved the setting from a fictional town in Lancashire to the real town of Huddersfield (in Yorkshire), the MP became a vicar, the alien has a different motive, things were structured so that the segment of the story set in Liverpool (Leeds, here) couldn't be directly investigated, cutting down on run-time. And I threw in the idea that the alien tech would be networked using a 3G signal, which would strengthen and upgrade itself to 4G, 5G, and beyond, as the scenario progressed.
My write-up of the scenario plot ran to less than half a page of A4. And not all of that ended up being used in play. I did do a few pages of stats and NPC character notes, padding the total out to 4½ pages. Other than that, the main prep work was researching the setting and getting as much detail right as possible.
The date of the original story is never specified, although, in the previous audio, the Doctor says he is heading for "about 1870". I needed something more precise, since I was going to have the TARDIS land at the train station, and I figured (correctly) that one of the first things the PCs would do was look for a newspaper. So, 29th June 1870 was the date I picked, and I then looked to see what could plausibly have been in the headlines around that date, and threw them in as background detail.
I checked the fashion of the day, found some pictures that would do for some of the key NPCs, and of some of the buildings that would feature. The mill that forms the centrepiece was a bit tricky, but there are real 19th-century mills still around, so I took one, cropped out a few bits of modern street furniture. decolourised it and degraded it a little in photoshop to make it look older. Probably not convincing if you looked closely, but it was good enough. I found genuine photographs of Huddersfield train station in Edwardian/late Victorian times, (the modern ones all show a water feature, cars, and a prominent statue of Harold Wilson) - not literally 1870, but that hardly matters. And I found an image of an old postcard featuring the actual church that the vicar NPC worked at.
If I'd prepped this recently, I'd have used Midjourney to generate pictures of the steampunk robots that form the main antagonists, but I already had some from existing artwork that gave the right look, so I used those. Handily, there are maps of 19th-century towns online, including Huddersfield, so I was able to present the players with a real-world map of the area that would prove useful in explaining how the technology was spreading and allow them to follow or triangulate the 3G signal if they thought of doing so (which they did; I had contingencies in place in case they didn't).
I was, as I usually am, uncertain about how things would go when I actually ran the adventure. In particular, I had only a vague idea for how things would play out once the PCs cottoned on to the basic idea of what was going on. How long, for instance, would it take for them to track down the source signal? Nor did I know how long it would take to play, and just hoped it would fit in the relevant slot. But it all worked out very well, coming in slightly under the maximum available time. Of course, a lot of the fun was down to the players - absolutely kudos to them for an enjoyable time, bringing it all to life!
All in all, it was successful enough that I'll be running a similar game at the next con. I already know what my starting point is going to be, but it's one where I'll have to completely change the monster, so the chances are that it won't resemble the original inspiration very much. Even so, I'm obviously not going to say here which one it is...
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