Character Template: Former Time Agent

Some of the characters I include as pre-gens for convention games are historical or contemporary, which makes it easy to envisage the sorts of roles they'd fall into from other genres, and fits with many of the companions in the TV series. But this is science fiction, and many players will be more keen on playing a character that fits in that mould. One of the pre-gens I have that fills that niche is a former Time Agent, something that also ties us into the modern show. Not, I have to say, that anyone has yet played him like Jack Harkness or Captain John... although that could be the limitations of one-off convention play.

The general theme of this character is to have a mix of action-oriented skills with advanced technical skills; not, perhaps, a real specialist in anything, but an all-round concept that would still work in many SF games. There's also the key advantage that the character has some familiarity with time travel. Their vortex manipulator is of limited use in the sort of stories I'm running as one-offs, but they act as a useful backup if there isn't a Time Lord in the group. And that happens more often than you might think...

DW Monsters: Usurians

The next story is The Sun Makers, where the primary villain belongs to an unusual alien race called the Usurians. Even compared with the Ood, which can at least go mad or be possessed by evil psychic entities, the Usurians are physically harmless and one could therefore argue that providing stats for them is not necessary, since they basically can’t fight back. But that makes for something different, and, in any event, it’s at least possible to match wits with one, or attack it psychically, so I’m going to do it anyway.

Other than their original appearance, the Usurians have only featured in one story, an audio where they are manipulating events from behind the scenes.

Character Templates: Torchwood Scientist

At conventions, I have so far found that players tend to go for the obvious adventurer archetypes when picking from the list of pre-gen PCs for my Doctor Who games. That makes sense given the one-off nature of the game session; it's easier to work what a character is supposed to be doing if they fall into an obvious niche. So, although I originally included a pre-gen that fell into the support role (a military nurse from the 1940s) that was never popular, and I no longer include it. But this is Doctor Who, so it would feel odd if all the character options were traditional fighter or rogue types; we also need characters with scientific or knowledge skills. It's not quite the "wizard" niche of fantasy games since you aren't getting to zap people with fireballs or transform into animals or whatever, but it does fit the genre. 

So I include a scientist, somebody with the technical skills to solve problems in a more in-genre way. To keep them grounded in our world, rather than alien, and to fit them in with the setting, they are specifically a Torchwood scientist, something that also allows them a little bit of the "magic" role through their familiarity with alien technology (they'd have "boffin" in the 1st edition of DWAITAS, but that doesn't apply in the 2nd).