Settings: An Unearthly Child

I’m going to start a new series of posts here – and who knows whether it will prove any more popular than the previous ones. Not exactly a large audience here, although the D&D posts have done well enough, as did the “companions as PCs” posts back in the day. This is going to be similar to the other Doctor Who related things I’ve done looking at things from an RPG perspective, but with a focus on the episodes and, more specifically, on their settings. 

This has, of course, been done before. It’s pretty much the basis of the DWAITAS individual Doctor sourcebooks that I’ve reviewed elsewhere. But I don’t have a constraint on page count here, nor a publishing schedule to keep up with (these are likely to be very irregular) and, hopefully, I can come up with some different angles and try to avoid duplicating what they did too much.

For one thing, I’ll try to look at this from a wider viewpoint, not restricting myself to DWAITAS or even to games specifically in this genre – one question I’ll often be considering is can we use the setting or ideas from a given story in other sci-fi games? I’ll leave DWAITAS stats to the official books, and other fan projects, although I may occasionally consider how the rules of other systems would cope with particular issues.

Another point is that I don’t know how far I’m going to go through the run. That may partly depend on whether there’s any interest out there, but I suspect it’s also the case that the First Doctor is easier to do in this format than some of the later ones. Exploring settings was a feature of his era in a way that’s less true of others – the posts I’ve done on alien races may adequately cover some of those. So, quite possibly, Hartnell is all I'll do... or perhaps just the first season to see if it works.

Having said all that, this first post is not going to be one of the more in-depth ones. That’s because I’m going to start, not by looking at An Unearthly Child the serial, but 'An Unearthly Child' the episode, leaving the following three episodes for the next post. And this one, of course, isn’t a particularly exotic setting in the way that everything else will be for… oh, three seasons or so. But it’s an obvious place to start, so I will.

(I'll also add a note on the picture accompanying this post. Since the intent of this is to see whether things can be adapted for a different milieu, I'm picking pictures that fit with the theme, but are not from the actual TV show. So, here, a teenager that clearly isn't Susan.)

Where & When

The story is set at the time of its broadcast, November 1963, in the Shoreditch area of London. It involves just two locations: Coal Hill School and a junkyard in which the TARDIS has landed. There are no proper speaking parts other than the regulars, and no monsters, aliens, or other threats, just a mystery of who the Doctor and his granddaughter are – which is going to set up the entire premise of the show going forward.

Setting

Shoreditch lies in the East End of London, just north of the oldest parts of the city. It’s currently part of the Borough of Hackney but was a borough in its own right in 1963, when the story is set. At the time it was a relatively poor, working-class area although this has changed quite a bit since. 

Coal Hill is a secondary school, for pupils aged 11 and up. In 1963 it would have been either a grammar school for pupils who had passed an entry exam, or a secondary modern for those who had not – there’s no real way to tell which. Since Susan is supposed to be sixteen, she’s probably a Fifth Year student (the system of the time was similar to that of Hogwarts), and is likely to have been there for a couple of months, since the British school year starts at the beginning of September.

It's easy to adapt the story to a different setting if you’re going to use it in a different RPG. The only real requirement is that the area be sufficiently inhabited to have a secondary school and somewhere to hide the TARDIS. Setting it in a different British city or even in a large town would make no meaningful difference at all, and it would be trivial to move it to urban areas in just about any other first-world country (and possibly beyond). Using a more rural setting might require some minor changes – there may be better alternatives than a junkyard, for instance – but not many. 

Changing the date won’t make much difference, either, and would likely be preferable as the launching point for a modern RPG campaign. While 20th-century dates prior to 1963 wouldn’t require many tweaks either, a modern setting is the logical one here, and doesn’t really affect much from a gaming perspective. The differences between a 1960s British secondary modern and a 21st-century US high school are significant in some respects, but not in ways that are likely to be relevant here.

Scenario

Unlike many of those later on in the show, the setup of this first episode isn’t one that’s likely to work as the basis of an RPG adventure. The question of how to kick a campaign off, especially where ‘you meet in a tavern’ would be a bit of a stretch, is of course an important one. The show will tackle the equivalent question again in Rose, and to a lesser extent, at some other points in its run. Here, however, while the solution works well on TV, it doesn’t fit with RPGs. 

It’s written with Ian and Barbara as the protagonists/PCs, Susan as a mystery to be solved, and the Doctor as what initially appears to be an antagonist. The story relies on the ‘PCs’ taking a particular approach and, at some point, barging into the TARDIS where the Doctor essentially kidnaps them. Which is to say, from an RPG perspective, it’s heavily railroaded and requires some of the party members to be working against the others, with a predetermined side ‘winning’. As I say, it’s rightly a well-regarded episode on TV, but this isn’t the way to kick off a game.

So, what are we left with? To use the setting in a game, we need to add some outside threat that brings the characters together and gives them a reason to choose to travel. (Or, if it’s not the start of a campaign, at least gives them something to do). Indeed, this is the premise of the audiobook Hunters of Earth, set about a month before An Unearthy Child and showing some of the Coal Hill students and other locals being affected by a mind-control device that the Doctor has to stop.

A school as a setting, whether it be the 1960s or modern day, is obviously one with plenty of potential, as shown by most of Buffy or, more pertinently here, Class. But at this point, we’re straying from the basis of the original story into something quite different, so I’ll stop here to make way for the radically different setting of the remaining three episodes of the serial.