When I started this series, I stated that updates would be very irregular. It hasn’t turned out that way, but the time has now come when my schedule requires me to take a break and concluding with a serial that feels like a season finale (even if it isn’t one) is as good a place as any. I have every intention of returning in the new year and moving on to season three, but the dates are uncertain.
Where & When
The closing segment of the story is set on the planet Mechanus, close to, or just beyond, the edge of human-inhabited space. There is no indication of the date in the story, and the tie-in media have come up with various interpretations ranging from the 22nd to the 36th century. The more popular assumption, however, seems to be that it’s in the mid-third millennium, somewhere between the settings of The Dalek Invasion of Earth and The Rescue. This is the sort of question that would have to be answered in a game (since we do interact with people from Earth) but here, I’ll just note that various options exist.
Setting
The fourth episode however, takes place before the arrival on Mechanus, and is instead set on Earth in the “near-future” year of 1996. Although none of the time travellers realise this, it takes place in what turns out to be a Halloween-style attraction at an international exhibition. The location is a two-story building made up to look like an old mansion, but filled with fake bats on wires, dangling skeletons, and at least three robots imitating the monsters – there may also be a holographic image of a ghost, although nobody reacts to it.
We only see three rooms, counting the entrance hallway, but there are evidently many others, and a set of secret passages that Vicki and Barbara explore off-screen. Nobody tries the front door at any point, or attempts to look out a window although, since the attraction is closed, they’d probably be locked and boarded up anyway. In what’s probably a nod to futuristic-seeming geopolitics, the exhibition is taking place in Ghana and has been closed down by orders from Beijing. Why that would make sense is an exercise for the GM, as is why a Festival of Ghana would prominently display something based on European, rather than West African, culture.
Moving on to Mechanus, the landing site is a marshy area in a dense jungle. While it’s true that the whole world isn’t necessarily like this, in this particular instance we have the added fact that the same site was selected by the authorities on Earth as the location of their first colony on the planet. This implies that it was one of the best areas they could find, which could be significant, given what we see.
A possible reason we could come up with is to decide that the planet has a relatively small land surface, with a chain of moderately sized islands in a vast world-spanning ocean. Perhaps there are no islands in the temperate zone, with all the others either similar to this, or less hospitable for some reason – baking deserts, ice caps, active volcanoes, or the like. They don’t even need to be that horrible; perhaps there are more habitable islands but they happen to be subject to earthquakes or regular hurricanes (the latter seems especially likely on a world with few land masses to weaken tropical storms). Sure, many people in the real world live in such areas, but if you’re going to pick one place on an entire planet to build your first colony, that probably wouldn’t be it.
Even if this is the case – and there’s obviously nothing directly in the serial to support it – the island that the city is on could be substantial, perhaps the size of Great Britain or Madagascar. Most of this, of course, would be nothing but untamed wilderness, but that’s going to be the case regardless.
Mechanus has the Earth-like gravity and atmosphere that we would expect, but there’s no indication of a moon and we’re specifically told it’s very dark at night. It might also be noteworthy that Ian comments at one point that it has been dark for a long time, implying it’s more than he would expect on Earth. This could mean that the day-night cycle is longer than 24 hours... but, then again, he might just have lost track of time in all the drama up to that point and think it’s later than it is.
The jungle is densely vegetated and dotted with swampy pools, although the restrictions of 1960s studio filming mean that we don’t see the characters hacking their way through the undergrowth with machetes. There is no sign of any animal life, although the fungoids appear carnivorous and so must be eating something. But perhaps they are eating smaller mobile plants, and simply haven’t evolved to recognise some moving creatures as non-edible. So far as we can tell, the fungoids are the most advanced life on the planet – the spin-off media claim that they are intelligent interlopers from off-world, but there is nothing to suggest any level of sentience in the serial.
The final episode takes place primarily inside the Mechanoid ‘city’. This was built 50 years ago when the autonomous self-repairing Mechanoid robots were sent to the planet by the Earth government to clear the land and make way for future colonists. The fact that the planet is called ‘Mechanus’ despite not being where the Mechanoids are actually from may imply that this was a pilot study for a wider colonisation effort across the galaxy, and Earth simply named the world after the robots it had designed to establish their base.
The city itself has no name, but given that it’s the only one, that seems entirely plausible.
Some time after the Mechanoids arrived, Earth scrapped the colonisation program and just left them to it. We’re told that this is because humanity became embroiled in wars with other planets and had to redirect its resources, although no further information is given as to who the enemy might have been. This, even if the PCs only happen to ask, is where the date of the story becomes relevant.
The novelisation sticks quite clearly to a date in the late third millennium, stating that the wars in question are against (at least) the Draconians and the Daleks. If we stick solely with the TV serial, however, a much wider range of options present themselves, with the only restriction being that we can’t be any earlier than The Dalek Invasion of Earth or later than the mid-fourth millennium (since this takes place “centuries” before The Dalek Master Plan). The enemies could, therefore, be almost anything, including breakaway human factions. Arguably, a time period other than that of the Earth Empire, in the second half of the third millennium, makes more sense as one where the homeworld might be forced to abandon off-world colonisation efforts, but whether it’s before or after is very much a matter of taste.
The way the ‘city’ is described in the dialogue makes it evident that it is much larger than the visuals of the model-work make it appear. To get some idea of its intended scale we’re probably best off keeping its proportions much the same as they are shown to be and fitting them to the one dimension we’re specifically given: the height of the roof. That’s about 1,500 feet (460 metres) up, roughly the height of the tip of the Empire State Building’s aerial.
About two-thirds of that is the height of the stilts on which the habitable section is constructed, making the latter something like 40 stories high. Assuming an average apartment in the city has a floor area of about 600 square feet (55 m²), and allowing for open spaces, infrastructure, administrative buildings, walkways and so on, this could perhaps accommodate as many as 2,000 colonists. Clearly, this goes down if we allow for a floor area more typical of a suburban house than an inner city flat, so it’s probably something of an upper limit, and it’s possible that the ‘city’ is more accurately described as a large village.
Of course, in a game, we could change the proportions to make the place even bigger. Regardless of the size, however, there must be several places within the ‘city’ other than mere accommodation, since it needs to be self-sufficient. Much of this will be empty, other than the facilities needed by the Mechanoids themselves and the services required for electricity generation, a water supply, and so on. Nonetheless, we see only three locations, one of which is an outdoor plaza where the Daleks face their showdown.
The other one inside the city proper is Steven’s quarters, which may well have been originally designed as a holding cell rather than standard residential quarters. The only original furniture seems to be a bed, although the fact that even that exists suggests that the rest of the city was provided with furnishings when it was constructed. What he made the DIY structure from is unclear – either the Mechanoids provided him with material such as local wood to keep him occupied, or he has cannibalised other furniture originally in the room.
The other area we see is the ‘cave’ at the foot of one of the support pillars. This seems to be the only ground level access to the city, connecting to it via a concealed lift shaft that runs up to a lengthy promenade/walkway running across to the main structure. This seems very limited as an entrance, so either there are more elsewhere, or the original design intention was that people would normally enter and leave the city via flying vehicles – in which case, there’s probably a fleet of them somewhere in the structure.
Although it’s described as a ‘cave’, the room looks artificial, with stepped platforms and so on. It’s possible that this isn’t the intent and is simply a reflection of the TV show’s budget but, equally, it’s not obvious why the original design specs would include a disguised entrance. There are, after all, not supposed to be other sentients on the planet, and during daylight, it’s going to be hard to miss the 1,000-foot tall metal pillar rising directly out of the cave roof.
A long path leads through the jungle to the cave, kept brightly illuminated at night to keep away the photophobic fungoids. The method of illumination is unclear; there may be lamp pillars hidden by the vegetation, or else the path itself is glowing but either way, we know it requires an electricity supply since the cable is in the cave. The interesting question, however, is where the path is heading to – what’s at the end away from the cave?
It’s evidently intended to be traversed on foot, rather than by large vehicles that might carry, say, ore from a nearby mine. Similarly, while there must be a landing port for spacecraft somewhere, that’s probably on the other side of the city since you’d hardly want the only access to it to be via a narrow footpath. A possibility is that there some small outpost facility that would normally be reached by aircraft but that has the footpath as a backup – although keeping it illuminated at night when nobody is going to be using it seems a bit wasteful.
The facility might, for example, be a research station since you’d probably want to know about the local fauna and flora once you build your self-sufficient colony, and that’s the sort of thing you’ll need to be on the jungle floor for. Since it’s likely never been used, the amount of equipment at the station would be minimal, however.
Scenario
The haunted house section of the story is unlikely to work well as written in a game. PCs will probably not be frightened by creaking floorboards, dangling skeletons, and fake bats. They’re likely also armed, which lends a different tone to things. The robots may be pretty much indestructible, but they also don’t really attempt to harm people unless they are attacked first. To keep this, a GM would probably want to make significant alterations, perhaps making heavier use of holograms to have it all appear surreal. Or perhaps borrow from the likes of Westworld and have the robots out-of-control so that they are genuinely dangerous. You might also want to make the setting larger, with more monsters – a wolfman is obvious, but masked serial killers, zombies, and mummies could all work. Or add more vampires; Ghanian myth does have something very vampire-like in the adze, so they don’t even have to be European.
In the serial, both this and the concluding section take place in the context of a chase, the basic concept of which I looked at in the last post. Once the time travellers reach Mechanus, they decide to use it as the location on which to make their final stand. In the case of a game, players are unlikely to want to run for long (if at all) so we can either cut out the two episodes in the middle, and assume that they only realise they are being pursued once they arrive at the planet or else make it clear that there’s something here that will allow them to even the odds against a foe that previously outgunned them.
That could be as simple as identifying the high local technology, or there could be some specific device or power source that the Mechanoids use that the PCs can detect from a distance, perhaps through its energy signature. The story then becomes about convincing the Mechanoids to help and/or finding the special item, giving the players more influence over the ending of the story than the protagonists have in the TV serial.
Once they arrive on the planet, the characters in the story begin exploring their environment but are interrupted by the android duplicate, which tries to sow discord among them so that it can kill them. This is essentially the same idea as a doppelganger in D&D and can be used in much the same way. Imitating a PC isn’t likely to get very far in a game, since the players know that their characters are the PCs, but an NPC could be a different matter. One already travelling with the party would be ideal but may not be an option. Instead, it could pretend to be somebody else lost on the planet and either in need of help or able to offer (fake) assistance that the party needs.
In the story, the protagonists are alerted to the issue because Vicki has been forced to stow away on the Dalek time machine and has seen what they are up to. That’s unlikely to happen in a game without a lot of railroading, so there has to be some other means of identifying it as a fake, or at least not instant death if the party fails to do so.
Once the android is defeated, the story moves to the Mechanoid city. This is the sort of sequence that could plausibly play out in a game in much the same way it does in the serial, although that obviously isn’t guaranteed. It may make sense, for example, to allow the PCs to explore more of the city, rather than confining them to a single room and expecting them to run away as soon as they figure out how to.
In the original, the Daleks are defeated, not because of anything the protagonists do, but just because the Mechanoids see them as a threat and attack them. In a game, we would want more player agency. We could make the Mechanoids less effective in combat, so that the PCs have to set up an ambush or figure out some other way of overcoming their pursuers. However, it’s also possible to have the Mechanoids not identify the pursuers as a threat and require reprogramming or persuading to ally themselves with the PCs – so that, while the NPC robots are a key element in the defeat, it’s only because of something the players have done. Again, this might require access to some part of the city that’s difficult to reach and/or well-guarded.
In the story, the Mechanoids are programmed to defend the city from intruders, which they identify by their inability to give the password that genuine colonists would have been provided with. Even so, they aren’t overtly hostile to non-violent strangers, locking them up in a cell but then providing them with food and water to keep them alive and reasonably healthy until the ‘real’ colonists can turn up and tell them what to do.
In a different setting, they would likely react to Romulans, Jaffar, and the like much as they react to humans – they’re probably not sophisticated enough to tell the difference. In this case, or if the pursuers are, in fact, human pirates or the like, the trick is probably for the PCs to convince the Mechanoids that they are colonists, and the invaders aren’t.
This might be different if the villains are obviously non-human; if it’s helpful to the story the GM could argue that the Mechanoids ignore non-humanoids unless they are actively hostile, being programmed to regard them as local fauna. How alien they’d have to be for this to be the case is a matter of taste – Vargr? Kaa? Tholians? On the other hand, if the Mechanoids are automatically hostile to what they think are alien invaders, then that’s a problem if the party includes an Aslan or a Tellarite or whatever, which could produce some interesting tension.
Of course, in a different setting, the Mechanoids might not be human creations. We can be fairly confident, for example, that the Star Trek Federation doesn’t colonise planets in this way and wouldn’t abandon such settlements if it did. In this case, the city could be truly ancient, the product of some alien civilisation that suffered an ecological catastrophe, nuclear war, or other world-spanning disaster that explains why they never turned up at their new colony. Here, we don’t need the Mechanoids to be waiting for a code-word to identify colonists – they’re just looking for something that’s identifiably one of their makers.
This also allows us to use the concept of Mechanus more generally without involving a chase at all. The PCs may need to recover something from the city, whether it be a piece of information, a valuable artefact, or something that has become dangerous with age and needs to be shut down. The Mechanoids can be outright opponents here, with whatever degree of violent response to intruders most suits the story.
In other settings, the idea that some humans might have tried this approach to building colonies is more plausible. The disparate nature of civilisation in Traveller, for instance, makes it entirely believable that some planet has done it somewhere. Indeed, it doesn’t follow that the Mechanoid city has the planet to itself. If the population of the world is low enough, there are very probably uninhabited continents and some neighbouring star system might have decided to colonise one of those – perhaps illegally, if we’re in the Imperium rather than outside its borders. Here, the PCs might have been hired to deal with the illegal/unwanted colony if the locals don’t have the ability to do so themselves due to a low TL, etc.
We should also mention Steven at this point. In the serial, he’s here to join the TARDIS crew as a new regular character and proves to be fairly capable once he’s no longer locked up for years on end with nobody to talk to but a cuddly toy. In a game, if we want to keep him at all (and he can be useful for exposition if the PCs don’t go in knowing what they’re facing) we may not want him to compete with the PCs for attention. If we’re keeping the idea that he’s a crashed combat pilot, perhaps he’s crippled, or has been here so long that he’s elderly and infirm… or just crazy after his prolonged captivity.
Hopefully, the PCs won’t need persuading to help him despite his presence providing an additional obstacle. But it may be fitting for him to be a Star Fleet officer presumed dead, or a member of the IISS or other equivalent organisation that the PCs are sympathetic to.
Rules
The tech level of Mechanus is, perhaps, arguable. We know that it is sufficient to allow FTL travel and there must be an unmanned spaceport somewhere near the city to allow the colonists to disembark. It is also, of course, sufficient to build the Mechanoids themselves – self-repairing machines, although probably not truly sentient robots despite their autonomy. The rest, however, depends on whether the world is supposed to be an early attempt at off-world colonisation, or one from an established and expansionist interstellar polity. So it could be TL9 or 10 in GURPS, 6 or 7 in Doctors & Daleks, or anything from 10 to 12 in Traveller.
With modifications to allow for that, the Traveller UWP of Mechanus could be E-869000-A.
We also need, of course, stats for the Mechanoids and the fungoids. The former are effective in battle, if of limited intelligence and apparently lacking free will. They are resistant, but not immune, to blaster attacks due to their high armour rating, but a GM may well want to replace or supplement their flamethrowers with more futuristic weaponry.
The fungoids, as depicted in the serial, are non-sentient flesh-eating creatures, that are slow-moving and attack by smothering rather than lashing out – dangerous to an unarmed traveller, but probably less so to most PCs unless they can get the element of surprise. They are afraid of light, which means they must be able to sense it, but they don’t have any visible eyes, and so may not have sufficient visual sense to form images; they may, instead, hunt by detecting vibrations.
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