Settings: The Space Museum on Xeros

With the next story, we are off to an alien planet again, albeit one inhabited by a race virtually indistinguishable from humans – if, indeed, they’re supposed to be distinct at all. The opening episode, which plays with the concept of time, is reasonably popular, but what follows drags the whole down for most fans. But, as usual, that isn’t a universal opinion. Unlike, say, The Sensorites, very few people seem to really like this, but a significant minority regard it as middling rather than weak. The problem, as so often in this era, is usually cited as being the slow pacing, with some claiming that Vicki only starts the revolution because she’s bored by the plot up to that point. The setting is also, perhaps, less memorable than the likes of Marinus or Vortis… but let’s see what we can do with it.

Where & When

The story is set on the planet Xeros, within the interstellar Morok Empire. No date is given for the story, but it clearly takes place later than The Dalek Invasion of Earth because of the design of the Dalek seen in the museum. Although it’s not obvious that the Moroks are also specifically aware of humans, we can at least say that the story is not set so far ahead that the exhibit has obviously degraded. This probably places it a few centuries into our future and, fitting with this, the tie-in media have tended to select dates towards the end of the third millennium. 

Setting

The Moroks speak of their empire as if it's grandiose, but they are probably biased, and we never hear of it again, at least in the TV series. While there could be other reasons for that, it’s most likely that it’s relatively small as interstellar empires go, perhaps controlling a dozen or so star systems. If we take the late third millennium date as accurate, it would be contemporaneous with the (much larger) Earth Empire. It’s possibly closer to Skaro than Earth, depending on where they picked up the Dalek shell, but it’s unlikely to be in some more distant galaxy.

Xeros is stated to be three light years from the Morok homeworld. Unless we’re in a particularly dense area of space such as a star cluster or near the galactic core, this probably makes it the closest inhabited system and therefore likely the first one that the Moroks conquered. Since the Moroks need Xerons as servants on the other planets of their empire, most, or even all, of these are likely colony worlds without native intelligent life.

The area of Xeros that we see is an arid, dusty, desert, lacking any visible vegetation or sign of natural water. As always, this doesn’t necessarily indicate that the whole planet is like that, although a couple of signs point to the planet being relatively arid. Firstly, xeros is the Greek word for “dry”, which means that it was probably the intent of the writers. On the other hand, in-universe, it’s the actual native name of the planet, not one applied to it by human explorers so, unless the TARDIS translation circuits are tweaking things, we could argue that it’s merely a coincidence.

Another argument for a dry world is that a desert doesn’t seem the best place to put a museum if you have a whole planet to choose from. Set against this is the fact that the Xerons are very nearly human, not only implying an Earth-like habitat, including oceans, but also requiring that they must have somewhere to grow crops and provide drinking water. The place we see is clearly not that, but there must logically be more fertile places somewhere or they would have been dead long before the Moroks reached them. 

A way to square these two assumptions is to argue that the planet has extensive deserts, and less water than on Earth, but that the original settled areas were in the relatively small fertile patches along the coasts or near the poles. In this case, we can say that the Moroks didn’t want visitors to their museum to see the devastated ruins of Xeron civilisation and the newly built slave camps in the agricultural areas. Picking one of the great deserts as a site then makes a lot more sense.

While it is dry, there is no indication that the site of the museum is especially hot, and it may be in the planet’s temperate zone, barren but without the heat of the Sahara or the American southwest. There is no indication of a moon, and, while there’s nothing to say that there isn’t one either, it may be simpler to say that it doesn’t exist. 

The only clue as to the length of the Xeron day is that there are a thousand of them to the Morok “mimmian”. However, without knowing how long a mimmian is supposed to be, that isn’t much help. The obvious interpretation is that it’s a year on their home planet, indicating that either that’s quite a long way from their star, or the Xeron day is really short – or both. However, it could be that a ‘mimmian’ is a culturally significant unit of time that consists of multiple years, rather as we might use the term ‘Olympiad’.

If the Xeron day is roughly the same length as ours, a mimmian is about 33 Earth months long and the museum – stated to be 300 mimmians old – has been around for over 800 Earth years. This seems rather excessive, so it could be that the Xeron day is shorter than that; it’s certainly not the same length as a Morok day or they wouldn’t bother to distinguish the two. Most of the story takes place inside a windowless building, so while all of the exterior scenes take place in sunlight, it’s quite possible that an entire day-night cycle has taken place while the protagonists explored the building. 

Vicki does have a meal, but the earliest opportunity anybody has to sleep would be when they are all locked up in the final episode. This suggests that the entire story can’t be longer than 24 hours and it is probably rather less. But, even so, we could make the case for a Xeron day being as short as 12 hours, leaving the museum a more reasonable – but still lengthy – four centuries old.

One oddity worth mentioning is that the Doctor states that the planet has an “advanced state of erosion”. It’s unclear what this would mean, since any rocky desert is going to be subject to erosion and billions of years of planetary history allows for quite a lot of that anyway. It may just be an indication of the local aridity, with windblown dust not being countered by water-based sedimentation or the formation of new rocks by volcanism. We do see some large rocky outcrops in the distance, and some smaller ones nearby, so whatever it’s intended to imply, it seems to make little practical difference.

The majority of the story takes inside the eponymous museum. From the outside, this is a large windowless building flanked by five spaceships that, according to the Doctor, show a ‘natural progression’ in technological sophistication. Four of these are presumably a part of the museum, suitable for guided tours and with enough power for internal lighting and so on, but not fuelled; in any event, the earliest ones may be centuries old and so wouldn’t be going anywhere anyway. We’re told in the final episode that the museum has its own transport ship prepped and ready for launch; this is likely the ship standing away from the other four on the opposite side of the main building. Logically, there must also be room to land additional ships carrying tourists, even if they rarely see much use by the time the story is set.

The main building is apparently even larger than it appears from the angle at which we see it. Ian claims at one point that they have walked ‘miles’ through the structure, and that it’s larger than any museum he has previously visited… and, as a teacher living in London, he’s surely been to the British Museum at least once. That has over 700,000 square feet (65,000 m²) of display space and about two miles of public corridors, so if the Space Museum is noticeably bigger, that’s impressive. 

And probably more than a GM would want to map out in any detail.

In fact, it’s worth noting that we’re explicitly told that the museum has no maps or exit signs – although it must have exits other than the main entrance, or the Xeron rebels wouldn’t be able to get inside and move about, as they clearly do. Taking what we see on screen literally, there are also virtually no signs indicating what the exhibits are, but we can put this down to the limitations of the props department and ignore it unless it suits our needs.

Three other locations are mentioned in the story, although only two are seen from outside. The barracks for the Morok guards are a focal point for the revolution, but entirely off-screen – they are, however, clearly separate from the museum building. The armoury is likely close to the barracks but, in this case, we only see the interior. Finally, there is the rebel base, which gives the impression of being in a basement; it may just be a temporary holdout inside the vast museum complex, unless there are more buildings around in the desert than we know of.

The operators of the museum are, of course, the Moroks. In the story, apart from Lobos, the only Moroks we see are the guards, soldiers stationed there as part of their tour of duty. Given the low visitor numbers, it’s possible that tour guides travel across with the few tourists that still actually visit, and aren’t permanently employed (they’d be very bored if they were) but it’s surprising that there aren’t any conservators or even maintenance crew. In any event, the fact that we only see guards gives us a necessarily limited view of Morok society. 

The guards are members of the military, and since they’re not especially young, they’re probably not conscripts. On the other hand, they aren’t exactly competent, either. This may be partly due to low morale, but the posting may also be a punishment for the sort of soldiers you’d want to put somewhere that they can’t do much harm. We only see one officer, and, like the regular guards, he isn’t there by choice. However, we hear the voices of two others over the comms, so there are clearly more off-screen. In fact, there are at least twelve squads of at least five soldiers and one officer each; even allowing for differing shifts, that’s quite a lot for an unimportant museum. 

Apart from a questionable taste in hairstyles, Moroks appear indistinguishable from humans and all the ones we see are white males. An absence of female soldiers may imply less gender equality than on modern-day Earth, but we can’t say how much that extends into civilian life. In Star Trek, we can be confident that they’d have bumps on their foreheads or other cosmetic differences; certainly, they instantly identify the TARDIS crew as ‘aliens’. In other settings, however, they might not look much different, or might even be descendants of Earth humans – a Minor Race of Humaniti in Traveller, for instance.

Given what we know of their history, it’s possible that Morok civilisation is largely moribund, with many of the civilians on the homeworld living decadent, directionless lives. This impression is strengthened by the fact that, despite being technologically advanced, they keep slaves.

We know even less about Xeron civilisation, given that it hasn’t really existed for centuries. The Xerons in the story believe that their planet used to be a ‘place of peace and wisdom’ but, for all we know, that has been filtered through hundreds of years of myth-building with an understandable anti-Morok bias. What is unarguable though, is that the Xerons are currently, as they describe themselves, a slave race.

We’re told that only young Xerons still live on their homeworld, and that older individuals are transported elsewhere in the Morok Empire to serve as slaves. How old this is isn’t stated, although it must be after they have had the chance to have children, or the system wouldn’t work. The actors playing the Xerons were aged between eighteen and twenty at the time, which suggests that (assuming they age at the same rate as humans) the slaves are shipped out in their mid-twenties at the very latest. So, all but the youngest children will be being raised by people other than their parents, and then have to grow up without them – a fairly brutal system that exemplifies the Moroks’ strong xenophobia.

What the Xeron slaves are used for on the planets they are sent to is not explicitly stated. It’s most likely menial or hazardous work that the Moroks can’t be bothered to build machines for.

As noted above, we can assume that most Xerons live away from the desert, somewhere they can at least grow crops to feed themselves and have ready access to water. A GM could take different views here about how the majority live. Taking a relatively bright view, they might be in scattered villages, left to themselves except when the troops come to take away the older residents. Or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, they might live in organised slave camps unable to even see much of their own planet – although, in fairness, the rebels we see do seem to be in a better condition than this might imply. 

A more plausible middle path may be to decide that they are in shanty towns among the ruins of their past. Their communities are regularly scoured by Morok patrols, and they live in relative poverty but not absolute destitution. A lack of real elders would weaken any connection they had to their genuine history.

Moving Xeros to a different sci-fi setting merely requires that one planet be subjugated by another. The closest fit is to have the Moroks, or their stand-ins, have some small interstellar polity beyond the bounds of the Federation, Imperium, or other cultural base of the setting. Traveller, for example, has numerous small ‘pocket empires’ lying between and beyond the territory of the dominant powers and it’s not too hard to justify in something like Star Trek, either, if we make the Moroks alien-looking.

But, equally, the setting doesn’t change significantly if there are only two planets involved, one with high technology and/or high population, and the other without. It may also be possible to find specific instances within the established setting that are close enough to use more or less directly. For example, in Star Trek, there’s no reason to assume that Bajor is the only planet the Cardassians have ever conquered; perhaps there’s one with a smaller population, deeper inside the Union, or on the far side of it from the Federation. Especially after the Cardassians get kicked by the Dominion, the time may be ripe for a rebellion on this other world too, and the occupying troops no longer at peak performance.

And one wouldn’t put it past the Cardassians to build a pointless museum on a subjugated planet just to show off the glory of their past conquests.

Scenario

The plot of the TV serial is relatively simple, largely consisting of the TARDIS crew trying, with varying levels of success, to hide from the Moroks. This isn’t, perhaps, too much of a story from a game perspective and it's further weakened by the ending in which some NPCs turn up to rescue them and do all the heroic stuff. Which, for various reasons, makes sense within the context of the serial but isn’t the sort of thing people play RPGs for.

In game, therefore, we could introduce the Xerons earlier on, and make the rebellion more actively the focus of the story. Perhaps the PCs need to break into the museum to rescue someone else (rather than one of their own, as happens in the serial) or to recover some specific artefact from the collection. They may have been sent by some outside agency specifically to obtain the artefact, whether because it’s inherently valuable, or because it would be dangerous if the Moroks ever work out what it is.

Here, it’s notable that simply trying to negotiate for the item or (if it’s a ticking time bomb) reason with them probably won’t work. This is because they are deeply xenophobic and inherently distrustful of aliens – in the serial, they basically sentence all the protagonists to death for having turned up to the museum without a ticket. Plus, they’re pretty stupid.

Perhaps the most notable part of the serial, however, is the first episode. Here, the TARDIS ‘jumps a time track’ so that the characters aren’t fully able to interact with the world around them, and are invisible and inaudible to the locals. This may be difficult to justify in most sci-fi settings, although a wormhole-type transportation, such as a stargate, could go wrong in a similar manner. But, if we do employ it, it allows us to use the device of the PCs seeing their future selves obviously defeated, and see how they try and avoid that. 

A focus here, perhaps, would be getting them to approach things in a way that they normally would not, the better to ensure that whatever happened to them the first time doesn’t come to pass. Apart from some interesting RPing opportunities based around that, it’s also, as future visions go, easy for a GM to construct – it’s not actually going to happen (unless the players screw up) so we don’t have to second-guess the end result.

Of course, the setting also provides opportunities beyond that of the original, albeit some of them rather grim. The story takes the view that once the Governor has been killed and the guards at the museum dealt with, the Morok Empire will realise that they’re beaten and just leave the planet to it, writing off their regular supply of slaves. 

Well, possibly, since they are clearly in decline and obviously don’t care much about the museum itself. But, even if that is the case, there must be other guard units out on the planet, who could try to take retribution, or simply hole up somewhere and terrorise the locals. Dealing with the aftermath, or trying to recover culturally significant items, are options for a story set after the original one, and moving elsewhere on the planet.

Or one could move further afield. It’s likely that the Xerons will want their parents back and this could lead to PCs taking part in rescue missions in Morok space. Or even inspiring slave rebellions on Morok colony worlds.

Rules

The Moroks are capable of reasonably safe and efficient interstellar travel, sufficiently so to have forged an empire of some kind and transported enough troops to subjugate Xeros. We can therefore say that they have a standard ‘space opera’ tech level, albeit perhaps a little towards the lower end in systems that provide fine gradations within this. This is TL6 in Doctors & Daleks, 10 in GURPS, and 11 in Traveller. 

Left to their own devices, the Xerons seem to be less technologically advanced than their oppressors, and they certainly don’t have facilities to manufacture much in the way of sophisticated goods. They also don’t seem interested in advancing their technology with equipment looted from the museum at the end of the story. But, like it or not, they are not currently dominant on their own planet.

In terms of the planetary facilities, it’s plausible that there is a proper starport of some kind somewhere, rather than just the landing pad at the museum – although this will, of course be under military control. The planetary population is probably relatively low, what with so many of the inhabitants having been forcibly expatriated, and the remainder living under harsh rule that likely discourages high population growth.

In Traveller, this gives Xeros a UWP of something like D-86566B-B. It’s almost certainly Amber Zoned.

Notably, the Moroks are armed with “ray guns”, which are basically laser pistols/phasers or other standard weapons seen in many sci-fi RPGs. They don’t wear any kind of armour.

There are, however, some more specific pieces of technology that will require rules of some kind. The Zafra gas used to flush out Barbara is stated to have a paralysing effect, although what we see on screen is closer to tear gas. Either should be fairly easy to simulate in most game systems.

However, the one area in which the Moroks do seem to excel is in automated mind reading. We see two different devices that use this technology. One is the “electronic brain” protecting the armoury, which detects whether or not a person is lying when they state they have permission to go inside. Here, the story as aired implies that it’s essentially infallible, but a GM might wish to simply give it a superhumanly high Insight/Detect Lies/etc. skill and have any PCs roll against that with whatever deception skills they might have.

Perhaps more interesting is the mind-reading device that Lobos uses to interrogate the Doctor. Functionally, this is a Detect Thoughts spell (or psionic equivalent) that only works while the subject is sitting in the device’s chair. Here, it’s more obvious that there is going to be a willpower saving throw of some kind to resist it or an intelligence roll (against a higher difficulty) to feed it with false information.

Then there is the Preparation Room that turns people into static, but still living, museum exhibits. This is described as cryonic technology, perhaps freezing the body fluids solid, and it requires a skilled technician to operate. In most systems, a PC subjected to this would have to make regular saves against cold damage, being frozen instead of dying when they run out of hit points, endurance, wounds, or however else the system tracks damage. Judging from what we see on screen, there is some lingering cold damage even after the effect is reversed.

As a final point, there’s the technology of the exhibits themselves, some of which, as noted above, could be items that the PCs need to steal, giving a motivation for the scenario different than the random encounter in the original. They are evidently looted from several worlds, some of them acquired from well beyond the borders of the Morok Empire. Most are likely to be of lower technology than the Moroks, but some may be either items that have no interest in using or that they just don’t understand, thinking that they are more innocuous than they really are. 

So far as we can see, they don’t include any pre-electronic artefacts, although obviously a GM could change that if necessary. In GURPS, for example, the tech level would range from 6 to 10, with the occasional higher-tech item concealed among them. The spaceships exhibited outside the main building are said to be a technological progression although, since they would probably have to be starfaring to be placed here in the first place, that’s probably not a wide range of tech levels in most systems (6 only in Doctors & Daleks, 9 to 10 in GURPS, 9 to 11 in Traveller).