Where & When
The story is set on an unnamed and uninhabited planet in the eponymous galaxy. Since there is no connection with humanity’s history, there is no way to date the story in any known calendar. If, as seems to be the case, it’s set before humans have reached the galaxy in question, it’s probably (judging from later stories) earlier than the mid-fourth millennium, but that’s all we can say, and all that we need to.
Setting
While it makes little real difference, we might wonder which galaxy “Galaxy 4” is. Here, there’s no definitive answer, not least because the writers won’t have had anywhere specific in mind. Assuming that the numbering system is the human one, it’s a safe bet that “Galaxy 1” is the Milky Way, but beyond that, it depends on how the system works. It could be that Galaxy 4 is the fourth largest galaxy in the Local Group, the Large Magellanic Cloud. That’s barely more than a third the diameter of our galaxy, but it still contains billions of star systems, so it is a possibility.
On the other hand, we could be going by distance from Earth, in which case we’d have to ignore the many ‘dwarf galaxies’ now known to exist (but which were largely unknown in 1965, when this was written). In this case, the LMC could be “Galaxy 2”, and, coming after Andromeda, Galaxy 4 is the Triangulum Galaxy.
However, despite its size, the LMC is sometimes considered a dwarf galaxy itself, especially since it’s a satellite of the Milky Way. It’s possible, therefore, that the numbering system ignores it and considers only the largest galaxies. If we go with that scheme, it makes the most sense that Galaxy 2 is Andromeda, 3 is Triangulum (perhaps the “Isop Galaxy” of The Web Planet), and 4 is probably M81.
The first three may not be numbered in everyday 41st-century speech, in much the same way that nobody today refers to ‘The Second World’ even though they often mention the Third. But, while M81 is sometimes known as “Bode’s Galaxy”, that’s not common, and one could easily imagine it being forgotten in 2000 years. It is about 10% larger than our own galaxy and the largest in its own Group, which is the closest to the Local Group.
The planet is never named, which is unsurprising as it is uninhabited, and the Drahvins have only just discovered it. We are told that it has an Earth-normal atmosphere and that the temperature wherever they are is comfortable. What we see is best described as “semi-desert” with thorny bushes and flowering shrubs in a sandy bed. It’s possible, however, that it’s less arid than this might make it appear, if grass has never evolved here – certainly, it’s not completely waterless, given the vegetation.
We are told that there is no animal life, at least within range of the landing site. This seems superficially unlikely, given the existence of the flowers, which don’t make sense unless they evolved to attract pollinators. Perhaps it’s more accurate, then, to say that there are no animals larger than insects.
As usual, we also can’t be confident that the whole planet is like this. There may be small seas or lakes, perhaps with larger aquatic life forms. The implication, however, is that large animal life (if it exists) has yet to get a foothold on land; it’s hardly a perfect analogue of our own Devonian period, but there may be at least some points of similarity.
One of the distinctive features of the planet, however, is that it has three suns. Trinary star systems are not especially rare, and it is certainly possible for them to host habitable planets, but there are some restrictions on this. The laws of orbital mechanics mean that you can’t just have three stars close together for any length of time, and the fact that this planet has (as a minimum) advanced plant life means that it’s probably been there for billions of years.
Instead, the way that the system would most likely work is that two of the stars orbit each other close by, while the third one is much further out, orbiting the first two together as if they were one object. The planet orbits that third one which, since it’s much closer, would appear the brightest from the surface even though that won’t be intrinsically true. The upshot of this is that the two less bright suns will always be close together in the sky and will occasionally even pass in front of one another. That they still appear bright and sunlike from the planet’s surface means that they are exceptionally large and hot – red giants are a possibility here, although not the only one.
Even though the three stars aren’t spread out evenly in the sky, the third one can be quite some angle away from the other two, depending on where the planet is in its orbit. If the central pair are bright enough to create some daylight even when the star the planet orbits is below the horizon, then we have a situation where the ‘day’ is much longer than the night – which is exactly what we’re told.
There’s no way from the story to determine how long the total day is, although it’s probably intended to be around 24 hours. The Doctor initially estimates that the night will last only two hours but eventually revises that upwards (probably after observing the speed at which the angle of the suns in the sky changes) and, in the final episode, we learn that it’s a little over four hours. The planet does not appear to have a moon.
However, the planet, being uninhabited and devoid of dangerous lifeforms, is no more than the backdrop to the story proper. This is set primarily in two crashed spaceships belonging to rival enemy races. Judging from events in the final episode, the two ships are about two hours’ walk apart. So, maybe six miles, given the even terrain and the Drahvins’ physical fitness.
The Drahvin vessel is a scout ship sent to locate habitable worlds for colonisation due to the overpopulation of the homeworld. It is armed with a ship-mounted laser cannon, although, following the crash, this has insufficient power to significantly harm a small robot. The ship has a crew of five but may be largely automated since nobody onboard appears to be a skilled engineer.
Aside from the airlock, we only see one room inside the ship, although there is at least one more beyond since Maaga walks through an internal door in the first episode. This main room jointly functions as a bridge, common room, and resting place for the soldiers, which, taken together with the external size of the vessel, implies that there isn’t much else to the ship – an engine compartment, perhaps, or, for all we know, just the toilet. It has a single bed, presumably for Maaga, so even she doesn’t get a cabin.
In addition to the airlock, the room also has a hatch in the floor that leads to an additional exit from the ship. It’s not explained why this should be, but perhaps it’s a small cargo hold underneath the main room with an access ramp that the chumblies haven’t spotted.
The Drahvins are a humanoid race with a very hierarchical society. Maaga, as the commanding officer, is the only ‘typical’ member of the race we see, biologically conceived in the usual manner. Only women hold positions of power in Drahvin culture, with most males being culled to conserve resources on the overpopulated world. The males kept alive, who are probably the fittest and most physically attractive ones, are used for breeding stock and seen as useless for anything other than sex and reproduction. (Given that they aren’t human, it’s even conceivable that this belief is true, although it seems unlikely.)
The remainder of the crew consists of soldiers ‘cultivated in a test tube’ rather than being birthed biologically. They are genetically engineered to be obedient, lacking the intelligence to question orders or to think much for themselves. They tend to speak in a monotone, although it is clear they do have emotions; they are likely trained to conceal them from an early age.
They are also physically fit, their lack of genetic flaws also making them highly attractive (at least judging by Steven’s initial reaction to them, as well as their description in the novelisation). They’re probably sterile but, from the point of view of any PC trying to seduce them, it doesn’t follow that they have no sex drive – the genetic engineers who created them wouldn’t see any need for one, but it’s probably harder to eliminate than mere fertility, so they might not have managed it.
The soldiers rest by sitting in chairs and attaching electrodes from some system within the ship to their scalps. On the other hand, we see that they are capable of normal sleep, so it could be that this is a device to provide them with the equivalent of a full night’s sleep in just a few hours. They are provided with bland and unappetising food pellets while Maaga is allowed to eat some kind of leafy vegetable.
They have no rights in their society and aren’t even considered ‘real’ people, just property. This slave status extends to them not having names, being referred to only by a reference number. It’s plausible that, on the Drahvin homeworld, there are similarly engineered women serving as labourers or in service roles that the natural-born Drahvins don’t want to perform but of course, we only see the soldiers.
As depicted in the story, the Drahvins are xenophobic and misandrist. While Maaga at least tries to hide the latter once she realises that the Doctor is potentially valuable, the soldiers lack the initiative for that. Instead, they treat Steven as if he is of the same low status as themselves, only allowing him to eat slave rations; Vicki has no such restriction.
The Rill spaceship is much larger, designed for a crew of twelve, and likely with accommodations far more comfortable than the tiny spaces in the Drahvin ship. While we only visit two rooms in the interior, there are multiple corridors leading off from the main hatch/airlock, so there is evidently far more that we cannot see. The ship is designed as a peaceful exploratory vessel but has at least some form of armament for self-defence. It is said to use solar power, which the Rills have difficulty recharging from the planet’s surface – possibly, it requires a lot of UV, which is blocked by the ozone layer.
The main room that we see is the control room. In the animated version, this is a spartan, open space, lacking any furniture and with discreet control panels set into the walls. Alcoves for the chumblies line the walls, and the whole structure feels airy and spacious – as well it might, given the large size of the Rills.
The original set design, as seen in the one episode with complete surviving footage, looks quite different. Here, rather than being solid, the entire structure of the spaceship is composed of translucent plastic sheeting hung on loose scaffolding with wide gaps between the sheets. This is even true of the hull, so that most of the ship looks as if it should be open to vacuum when in flight. Aside from the flooring and the scaffolds, the only visible solid structure is a boxy control unit in the middle of the floor.
From a modern perspective, the design in the animated version makes far more sense and still manages to look alien, with its heavy use of triangular doorways and corridors and lack of furniture.
The little we learn of Rill culture implies a peaceful and egalitarian society, albeit one aware that the rest of the universe can be hostile and willing to take appropriate precautions. They communicate soundlessly, perhaps using some form of telepathy that works only on their own species. The most significant fact about them, however, is that they need ammonia to survive and die if exposed to terrestrial atmospheres.
The implication is that they are breathing the ammonia as we breathe oxygen, but this isn’t something that makes sense chemically. If we want to keep the ammonia, therefore, it must be doing something else. Fortunately, the molecule has a key role in many real-world biochemical pathways (albeit not as a free gas), so this is not inherently implausible. We’re unlikely to need to go into the details, but, for example, it might be that they cannot extract energy from oxygen without ammonia being present. It’s a little difficult to see how this might evolve, especially as the mix might be flammable, but not necessarily impossible.
An alternative is to have them use ammonia as we use water; there are reasons this would have limitations, but again, it’s not strictly impossible and appears in some other science fiction stories. This would require them to live at very low temperatures and/or high atmospheric pressures, but since we know they have to stay isolated from humans, that may not be a problem. Finally, we could replace the ammonia with some other toxic chemical; sulphuric acid vapour might work here, surprisingly, since there are known metabolic pathways to get energy out of sulphates.
If we do stick with ammonia, we might wish to note that (for humans) it is irritating to the eyes and nose, with a potent and unpleasant smell. In high enough concentrations, it causes seizures, collapse, and eventual death.
Regardless of the specifics, however, the atmosphere required by Rills is toxic to humans. In the story, they have retreated to a safe chamber inside the spaceship just off the control room. When the protagonists are allowed inside, the ammonia is strong enough to affect them and limit their time there, and even then, the Rills have sealed themselves and their preferred atmosphere inside smaller capsules within the larger room. Once again, the room is devoid of any furniture, at least in the animation, but the shape of the Rills makes it look as if they wouldn’t need chairs, which may partly explain that.
We can also look briefly at the chumblies, the remote drones that the Rills use to explore the planet with a (for them) hostile atmosphere. They are sufficiently armoured to be resistant to the Drahvins’ beam weapons and have, for no obvious reason, a magnetised coating that sticks metal objects to their surface. They have no visual sensors, navigating by directional microphones and IR sensors that can only detect what is in front of them. They also have some limited degree of autonomy with which to carry out whatever general instructions they have been programmed with. They are armed with a laser weapon with a stun setting – essentially indistinguishable from a Star Trek phaser. In the later episodes, they use speakers to transmit verbal communication from the Rills; that they don’t use these earlier on when they would be useful suggests that it’s an upgrade added by their creators during the course of the serial once they realise it might be needed.
Scenario
The main driver for the story is the imminent destruction of the planet, which spontaneously explodes into a ball of expanding hydrogen at the end of the final episode. Needless to say, planets don’t actually do this, and no explanation is given in the story; it’s just what’s going to happen. Players might not question ammonia-breathing aliens, but there can’t be many groups where at least some won’t ask why the planet they’re standing on is going to explode.
Fortunately, there are several alternatives to what’s described in the serial. For one, it doesn’t need to be a planet-wide catastrophe, just something that will devastate the area where the ships happen to have landed. An impact with an asteroid similar to the one that killed off the dinosaurs (10+ km across) should certainly do the trick, creating unsurvivable earthquakes and a rain of red-hot ejecta around a crater the size of Maine.
Alternatively, if you really do want to take out the planet, one of the central stars could be a red giant about to go supernova. In this case, of course, the PCs will not only need to get off the world but do so in enough time to reach warp speed (or equivalent) before it hits.
Since the system is uninhabited, there will need to be a reason for the PCs to be there. It’s possible that there’s some useful resource there or that they are just looking for a habitable but unoccupied planet, as the Drahvins are. But two more obvious possibilities present themselves, depending on the nature of the campaign.
Firstly, the Drahvins could have sent out a distress signal, giving the PCs a logical reason to visit them first even after they discover that there are two crashed ships on the surface. Secondly, they could be there to investigate whatever the coming planetary catastrophe is, intending to monitor it from a distance until they spot the spacecraft. (Even a ship with the power of the Enterprise, it’s worth noting, probably can’t deflect a 10km asteroid once it’s just 48 hours from the planet, and it certainly can’t stop a supernova.)
Either way, we want the PCs to encounter the Drahvins first, although a meeting with an apparently hostile chumblie, as in the serial, also works. If they’ve sent the distress signal, that makes sense anyway, but otherwise, we can argue that the environmental protection in the Rill ship, combined with their alien biology, makes it harder to detect ‘life signs’ on board that vessel.
In the serial, the Drahvins try to persuade the protagonists of the Rills’ evil, pointing to the actions of the chumblie as evidence. They then take one of the time travellers hostage and force the others, firstly, to confirm the reality and timing of the catastrophe (probably unnecessary in a game where they have come down from orbit) and then to infiltrate and sabotage the Rill ship to soften it up for a Drahvin attack.
While a hostage taking would allow one PC to come up with an escape plan and perhaps face the situation with the airlock, it relies on them being captured in the first place. That’s perhaps less likely with a group of well-armed PCs than it is for the characters in the story and could lead to a premature conclusion of the scenario. Instead, persuasion is likely to be a better approach… and it’s worth noting that the soldiers, at least, believe everything they’re saying about the Rills being monstrous and wanting to kill them.
A further enticement could be if the Rills are accused of having taken Drahvin Four prisoner, rather than of killing her as in the story. Needless to say, if she really is on the Rill ship, it’s probably because she’s too injured to move rather than because she’s really a captive. If she recovers enough to speak, the PCs can get the truth out of her, but if Maaga thinks she’s dead, she may not be worried by that possibility. An apparent prisoner like this also gives the PCs reason not to just rescue the Drahvins and be done with it, sidestepping most of the story.
There’s also a question here of how the Drahvins will perceive the PCs. We can see from the serial that they automatically assume women are of a higher status than men and act towards them accordingly – although they can recognise skill when they see it. In many sci-fi games, however, there’s a good chance that one or more of the PCs are aliens. If they’re completely non-humanoid, the Drahvin would likely be as suspicious of them as they are of the Rills, but it’s hard to imagine that they wouldn’t treat, say, Bajorans the same as humans. Indeed, in that sort of setting, the Drahvins themselves can probably be distinguished from humans by an oddly shaped forehead, leopard-like spots on their face or whatever, instead of just by a few dots on their eyebrows.
The situation is less clear-cut with races that are generally humanoid but have some significant differences – Andorians, Twi’lek, or An Phar, for example. Here, the GM is best off setting the Drahvins’ xenophobia to whatever level works best for their particular group. For instance, if the only female PC in the group is an Aslan, it might be interesting if the Drahvins assume she’s the leader and the dumb human males are just tagging along. If there’s more of a mix, however, it may give more variety, and be more revealing of Drahvin culture, for them to treat an Aslan of either gender as something that disgusts them.
Once we get past this, the serial as written largely consists of the Doctor repairing the damage to the Rill ship’s power systems so that they can take off, with the Drahvins only attacking at the last moment before the planet explodes. Here, we may wish to throw in other obstacles to make the various scenes with the protagonists walking back and forth between the ships more interesting. Hostile animal life on the planet might work, but it may be better to make use of its imminent destruction. Smaller chunks of rock may shower down before the main asteroid strikes, or the unstable red giant could send out flares that disrupt the atmosphere, causing fires. Or there are two asteroids, one striking on the far side of the planet and causing earthquakes and eruptions on this side before the second smashes into the ship landing site a day or so later.
The PCs might even have to take shelter in the Drahvin ship for a while at an early point in the scenario, giving them some opportunity to understand the alien culture.
The conclusion will likely see the PCs trying to flee as any surviving Drahvins pursue them to capture whatever shuttlecraft/scoutship/etc. they arrived in. In the serial, the reason they don’t try to do this straight away is at least partly because they don’t think they can operate the TARDIS. In a different setting, this might not make sense. Perhaps the Rill ship is obviously superior to that of the party, making it a more desirable first choice; a spacious high-tech ship may well be a better option than a battered Free Trader. Or perhaps it simply looks easier to capture… which is undoubtedly true in a Star Trek game where it’s going to be four people with minimal equipment against the entire crew of a Federation starship.
A stargate might be an easier thing to capture than a spaceship, but even assuming they can be confident of operating it without captive PCs, the Drahvins may not want to be whisked away to the far side of the galaxy with no way of getting back home. They may change their mind once there is no other option, but a spaceship they can fly off in is almost certainly a superior choice. (This assumes that they think the planetary disaster will destroy or at least close the Gate, but that’s hardly unreasonable.)
It is, of course, possible that the scenario could end with one or more of the Drahvins getting off the planet, especially if the PCs have stun weapons and don’t deliberately leave them behind. Indeed, this is probably what happens to Drahvin Three in the serial, since she’s seemingly still on board the Rill ship when it takes off. That naturally raises the question of what the PCs are going to do with anyone they have, perhaps reluctantly, rescued. Maaga is clearly culpable for whatever she happens to have done – and she’s going to be an attempted murderer at the very least – but the soldiers arguably aren’t.
Does “I was only following orders” have a different ring when you’ve been genetically bred to be obedient and have limited free will? Is it possible to break a Drahvin soldier’s indoctrination, and should you try when they initially just want to get back to their own people and become a slave again? If they can’t return to their homeworld, will they look to the PCs to give them the orders and purpose they crave, and if so, what should be done about it?
This brings up the wider question of what else we can do with the two alien races. The Drahvins are portrayed as militaristic, although we hardly see a broad cross-section of their society, so that may be misleading. Assuming it isn’t, we know that they are trying to find colony worlds after their home planet has become overpopulated, which suggests that they have little, if any, interstellar empire. Granted, it would be staggeringly bad luck if the only habitable planet they could find was a few days away from being destroyed, but other off-world colonies may be at an early stage of settlement.
The good news is that this all implies a pocket empire – at best – of the sort that should be easy to insert into any setting with sufficient empty/unexplored space. On the other hand, the Drahvins won’t be a great military power, although an army of obedient slave soldiers might make them more effective than their small size would suggest. They won’t be posing a major threat to the Klingon Empire or a sector-wide government, but independent worlds or small interstellar associations might be a different matter.
Using them as villains in this way, we would want to play up the unusual hyper-feminist nature of their society and how it differs from that of Romulans or Zhodani or whoever else it might be. However, we could also do this without having them as direct antagonists; just because Maaga is a bad person doesn’t mean that her entire race is. Here, there could be opportunities for diplomacy or figuring out how to open up trade routes with a race that, even if it isn’t automatically hostile, is at least paranoid about men and non-humanoids. And of how we deal with a culture at least partly built on slavery but that has genetically engineered the slaves in question to be happy that way.
In the case of the Rill, the distinguishing feature is that they can’t breathe terrestrial atmospheres. This is not uncommon in written science fiction but rarer on TV and in published RPG settings. This is probably because of the limited opportunities for interaction with human characters and, in the latter case, the difficulty of using them as PCs. These can be circumvented by having them wear breathing masks or the like – as is the case for the Benzites in Star Trek – but they would still need separate accommodations for sleeping and relaxing.
As NPCs, such features can be useful, keeping the race relatively mysterious. For instance, if they have a hermetically isolated section on a space station, humans probably won’t know what they get up to in there. Being ugly to human eyes won’t help, as is the case in the serial, and there are opportunities for stories based on smoothing over misunderstandings or outright prejudice in any setting in which they appear. Perhaps some of them are much less pleasant than those we see in the TV show. One could imagine a cell of fanatics determined to drive away oxygen-breathers and horrible-looking pink primates.
Rules
Being uninhabited and apparently even lacking in animal life, the unnamed planet that forms the backdrop to the story is not especially interesting beyond the fact that it’s about to be destroyed. For what it’s worth, though, in Traveller, it’s UWP would be something like X-866000-0.
The number of zeroes in that is only going to go up…
The Drahvin tech level appears to be that of a standard space opera setting. They have effective FTL drives that can fit on ships requiring a crew of only five, typical sci-fi beam weapons, and so on. This TL10 in GURPS, 7 in Doctors & Daleks, and 11 or 12 in Traveller. The Rills are supposed to be slightly more advanced, but this is probably not sufficient to warrant a full TL raise in most systems – just as, say, the 1950s and 1990s typically fall into the same bracket. Traveller is an exception here, where the Rills could plausibly have a TL of 12 or 13 without unbalancing anything.
When it comes to statistics, the Drahvin soldiers will probably all be identical, with high physical stamina, slightly above-average coordination and strength, and low intelligence scores (except insofar as the system requires them for operating military equipment and the like). We probably won't need stats for the Rills, since it's unlikely anyone will tangle with them physically, but that may depend on the group and, in some games, mental/social stats may well be worth drawing up.
The chumblies are a different matter, as they can be either antagonists or allies, depending on how the scenario plays out and how far through it the characters are. These are small remotely operated drones, armed with a weapon that can double as a laser and a stun gun and that have a basic manipulator arm. Significantly, their armour is very effective against lasers (it’s probably reflective) but less so against other forms of attack.
Deck plans of the two ships would also be useful, especially if there is going to be sneaking about. Since the story assumes that the two races are unknown to the PCs at the start, these wouldn’t be standard designs of the setting, even if the ships are superficially similar.
The standard Drahvin weapon is a rifle-sized beam weapon, although Maaga carries a smaller sidearm instead. Since there isn’t anything special about these, they are likely whatever the standard weapon would be in the system in question. That’s usually laser rifles, but, in Star Trek, it would be more in keeping with the aesthetic for even the soldiers to be armed with disruptor pistols.
Two pieces of Drahvin equipment are worthy of a slightly closer look. Firstly, there is the metallic net used to block radio signals and disable remotely operated devices/drones. This doesn’t require much in the way of special rules, just some idea of how easy it is to throw over something, but it’s not a standard piece of kit in most SF rulesets.
Secondly, when the Drahvins realise that their laser rifles, and even the (admittedly damaged) ship-mounted laser cannon, don’t work against the chumblies, they decide to hit one with a big stick. Which turns out to be far more effective. Since, at least in the animation, it doesn’t seem to make a big dent in the side or anything, it’s probably not the bludgeoning damage that’s doing the harm here. The stick looks to be made of metal, so it may well be delivering an electric shock that could stun a human just as much as it would damage a robot.
Many SF RPG systems may already have a weapon that fits this description. The stun baton in Savage Worlds could fit the bill, although maybe this version does Str+d6 damage. In GURPS, either an electroshock or neurolash baton would work, depending on how effective you want it to be. In Star Trek Adventures, such a weapon would have identical stats to a type-2 phaser set to stun - except that it’s a melee weapon.
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