Where & When
The story is set somewhere in Britain several centuries into the future, as a new Ice Age is starting. No date is given on screen; we’re told that “five thousand years” of history are at risk from the ice, but it’s unclear what this is counting from. Pre-publicity for the story suggested it took place around 3,000 AD, but more recent fan theories go for 5,000.
Setting
The Earth has been going in and out of Ice Ages for over two million years, each separated by a warmer “interglacial” period. On average, the more recent of these have lasted about 15,000 years each, and the last Ice Age ended around 10,000 BC. Therefore, so far as anyone knew in the 1960s, when the episode was made, 5,000 AD would have been a pretty good guess for when the next Ice Age would start.
Studies since then have indicated that our current interglacial is, for reasons of orbital mechanics, likely to resemble the earlier, much longer ones than those that the 15,000-year figure is based on. And this ignores any effect from human-created global warming, which could make thousands of years' difference. Therefore, if it were set during a regular ice age, the date of The Ice Warriors ought to be much later than fan theories would suggest or than the writers likely intended.
However, it isn’t supposed to be a regular ice age but rather a man-made one; the result of anthropogenic global cooling. The way this is explained is that, having developed ‘artificial food’, mankind got rid of all of its agricultural land and built vast cities over both that and most of the remaining wilderness, killing off a high proportion of the world’s plant life. Without the carbon dioxide that plantlife emits, CO2 levels around the globe plummeted, and the world cooled, passing a tipping point that brought back the Ice Ages.
There is a rather obvious flaw with this as an explanation: vegetation is a carbon sink, not a carbon emitter. Get rid of it, and CO2 levels go up, not down, and the world warms.
Thus, if we’re going to go with an anthropogenic explanation and also stick with anything resembling real-world science, we’ll need a different one from that in the serial. It is true that reduced CO2 levels would cool the world. Indeed, this has happened naturally at least twice since the extinction of the dinosaurs, albeit due to plate tectonics and crustal weathering rather than anything artificial. We just need something that would soak up the CO2 from the atmosphere, such as a geoengineering effort designed to halt global warming that swung the pendulum too far in the opposite direction. This is roughly the explanation given in the novelisation; here, it’s the result of industrial recycling processes to reduce pollution rather than a specific counter to global warming (the book having been published in 1976).
We could also go with a natural explanation, although most plausible ones won’t be as rapid as that depicted in the serial. After all, it took tens of thousands of years for the Last Ice Age to reach its peak, which rather blunts the immediacy of the threat. We could perhaps have the solar system be passing through a dense interstellar cloud that cuts down on sunlight; nothing like this seems to have actually happened within the last few hundred million years (at least) but it might work in the right sort of SF game.
Fortunately, we’re on safer ground if we move the story away from Earth. And, if we’re adapting it to an existing SFRPG, that’s probably what we’re going to be doing anyway, since we’d be cutting out the time travel element. In this instance, another possibility is that the world orbits a variable star that has suddenly (and perhaps unexpectedly) started dimming. It doesn’t even have to dim by much to trigger an Ice Age, especially as we aren’t trying to be so extreme as to render the planet uninhabitable.
Returning to the setting in the serial, however, the focus is on Brittanicus Base and its immediate surroundings. The name, and the apparent nationality of all of the staff, make it clear that this is located somewhere in what is currently the UK. The terrain around the Base is shown as being mountainous, with the main glacier advancing down a valley and patches of pine woodland amid the snow.
Britain obviously doesn’t have mountains on the scale of the Rockies or even the Alps, but it’s far from being flat. The most likely location for the Base is therefore in the Grampian Mountains of central Scotland, which fits with the fact that the only local we see in the story is, in fact, Scottish. This puts the glacier front about 700 km (450 miles) north of the maximum extent of the real one during the Last Ice Age, but it’s supposed to be advancing rapidly, so that might not be as good news as it sounds. And it’s certainly far enough south to be a threat, as it would have already destroyed Inverness, and possibly Aberdeen, too.
Significantly, the Base is one of six stationed across the world, with three on each hemisphere. Logically, we would expect these to be positioned equidistantly around their respective ice caps, although the triangle doesn’t have to be super-precise. Given that Brittanicus Base is roughly on the prime meridian, this places its Northern Hemisphere counterparts at +120 and -120 degrees, which, as it turns out, equates to British Columbia/Washington and central Siberia, both of which are entirely plausible.
The Southern Hemisphere is geographically less convenient. There’s no reason to suppose that the bases there have to be on the same lines of longitude as their northern equivalents, but they probably should be at least roughly evenly spaced. This allows us to say that one is in Patagonia – the only southern area other than Antarctica that was under a polar ice sheet during the Last Ice Age. (It’s worth noting, however, that there might also be isolated ice caps in Tibet and the high Andes, which could be relevant if we’re keeping the setting on Earth and want a global perspective.)
Patagonia is fine, but the issue comes with the other two, stated in the serial to be located in ‘South Africa’ and ‘Australasia’. South Africa is on roughly the right line of longitude, but it’s much too far north to be anywhere near a glacier. New Zealand might not be, but it’s too far east, so really we’d need something in the middle of the Indian Ocean, several hundred miles southwest of Australia.
We can conclude, therefore, that these two bases are stationed far out at sea, perhaps with control centres on land (in Cape Town and Perth, most likely), with some kind of remote setup.
While a world map is visible in a few scenes and described as showing the current extent of the ice sheets (presumably from satellite imagery), what we see on screen is too vague to make any sense of. If the ice sheets have expanded in the same way that they did during the Last Ice Age and have just reached central Scotland, however, we can assume that some southern parts of Scandinavia are still ice-free, but that’s all. In North America, most of Canada will already have been destroyed, but the glaciers won’t have reached what is now the US border (except for Alaska, obviously), leaving something still worth protecting.
Moving specifically to the area around Brittanicus Base, this is shown as snow-covered wilderness with stands of pine trees. From The Sensorites and some later stories, we know that much of the UK was covered by a mega-city in the late third millennium, and we’re likely later than that. However, this part of Scotland has apparently been set aside as a nature reserve and still has some of the vegetation we are told has been wiped out across much of the rest of the world. It also has both wolves and bears, neither of which are found in Scotland today, and so must have been reintroduced to the reserve at some point.
Two locations outside of the Base are relevant in the story. One is a “plant museum”, presumably originally a visitor attraction from the time when the park was still in operation. There would be little point in it featuring only local plants when the outside would have been green anyway, so it may have included facilities for growing tropical plants, although most of these would have broken down or at least would no longer be powered by the time of the story. It is, however, likely one of the few buildings still standing, with most others in the area perhaps having been cleared when the area was set aside as a reserve.
The second is the glacier front within which the Ice Warriors’ spaceship is entombed. At the beginning of the story, we see scientists from the Base using drills to plant seismographs into it, monitoring its advance and perhaps providing information about weak points to serve as optimum targets for the ioniser. Their communicators have poor reception out here, although those of the Ice Warriors work much better, perhaps using a different frequency… or else the weather has improved by then, which there is some evidence for.
We are told that the glacier is moving forward at 100 metres a day. This is extraordinarily fast; the fastest glacier in the world today moves only 40 metres in that time, although, to be fair, we’re not in an artificially induced Ice Age. But if we take that as accurate, we can extrapolate that the front will advance by around 36 km (23 miles) in a year. This means it will take over 20 years to reach London… although, admittedly, this may be little consolation if you live in Edinburgh.
Brittanicus Base is located at an old mansion house, sealed inside a geodesic dome. The entrance way to the dome leads to an open space in front of the building, although we can’t see enough to tell quite how wide this might be or what else is in it. Clearly, the house isn’t circular, so the existence of the gap is unsurprising, but whether it’s concreted over, grassy, or still has remnants of an ancient garden is a mystery. There don’t appear to be any guards regularly stationed at either the dome entrance or the front door to the building, implying that the occupants don’t feel under any threat from potential visitors.
A key feature of the story is how much the society of the day relies on computers, and specifically on AI. Almost everyone working at the Base defers to the computer installed there, which guides all of their operations in coordination with its counterparts at the other five bases. Moreover, we are told that the whole of civilisation is controlled by the “Great World Computer” to which world leaders have apparently delegated their authority.
This, incidentally, indicates the existence of a single world government, but that’s hardly surprising in a story that, from other evidence, is set at least two thousand years after the time that the Earth Empire ruled a significant chunk of the galaxy – nation states are long gone by this time. This may be the ‘World Control’ mentioned as being in ultimate charge of the Base, but it’s also possible that that’s the specific government agency charged with the project, rather than the ruling authority itself.
While we only see two people outside the Base, the technicians there are not surprised to see the protagonists turn up, so they are aware of some population outside their gates. They refer to such people as “scavengers” and, depending on how they arrive and their general appearance, may well assume that the PCs fit this description.
They may, of course, be right…
Storr may represent an extreme example of the scavenger mentality, rejecting not just the computerisation of society, but pretty much any technology or science (he hunts with a bow and arrow). Penley is probably an unusual example too, if for the opposite reason, but it’s likely that most such people are at least generally opposed to the direction that their wider society is going. They cannot be numerous, given the nature of the reserve they are living in, and the general lack of a good food supply, but they may be more significant than is obvious from the elements of the story we see on screen.
In fact, the world government has a plan for them, evacuating those still living in this part of the world to Rehabilitation Centres in Africa. We can reasonably assume that similar programs exist elsewhere in the world, dealing with the inevitable migration as the ice sheets advance. South America and Australia seem obvious candidates, if we assume that the population is already very high in places like India. The personnel at the Base assume that at least some scavengers will be happy with this relocation, given that their own homes are being destroyed by the glacier, but that’s evidently a short-sighted view. Either way, part of the duties of staff at the Base is to collect and deport any scavengers they find to Africa.
We see fifteen members of staff at Brittanicus Base, not including Penley, who was part of the original complement. They use job titles as honorifics, with Leader Clent at the top and Garett being Senior Control Technician, but hoping to become an Organiser, 1st Class. All of this implies a strongly hierarchical society, which is probably something that the scavengers are also rejecting. At least some of the staff were ordered to serve on the Base by superiors elsewhere, and aren’t necessarily very happy about it.
They wear relatively light clothing, with shorts for the women, so the heating inside the Base is good. This is decorated in bold patterns and is similar in style, but not so much so as to appear to be a uniform. It may instead be the equivalent of business suits in the modern world. There is thicker clothing available for travelling outside, but the real protection is provided by a transparent outer garment that must consist of a strongly insulating material, perhaps (in a modern game) even laced with heat-generating nanotechnology.
In the story, we only ever see people travelling outside the Base on foot, extending the journey time and its potential hazards. This is because the Base’s only transport is destroyed in the opening section of the first episode. It is described as an "air-sled"; we never see it, but the name implies something very much like a Traveller air-raft or a Star Wars speeder. We know that it can carry at least three people and a fair-sized cargo of scientific equipment, but it probably isn’t much larger than this.
That the scavengers can be relocated to Africa without too much inconvenience implies regular visits by supply aircraft, although these are not so frequent that anyone is expecting one in the 36 hours or so that the story covers. By the same token, it can’t take much more than an hour or two to get between the Base and the glacier front, given the number of trips between them. However, the plant museum can’t be directly between them, requiring some sort of detour to reach it.
Due to the restrictions of studio filming, we only see two rooms and a corridor inside the Base. Clearly, there must be far more, including food stores and kitchens, living quarters with enough spare to accommodate locals being evacuated, technical workshops, and so on.
One of the rooms we do see is the Medi-Control Centre, which hosts a drugs supply cabinet and some basic medical equipment, including a vibro-chair for stress relief. There is no medic stationed at the Base, but if supply ships visit regularly, they probably need no more than a first aider. Certainly, the Medi-Control Centre doesn’t look like a surgical theatre.
On a similar note, we can mention that the Base is not equipped with any regular weapons, but it does have tranquiliser guns, possibly for dealing with the threat of wolves.
The main room at the Base, however, is the control room from which the equipment for pushing back the glacier is operated. This requires four control operators (all women in the serial), plus a couple of technicians. The way we are told it works is that it ionises the atmosphere, which then focuses the sun’s rays to create a beam of intense heat, capable of melting rock on its highest setting.
This doesn’t really make a lot of sense, and it’s hard to see how it would force the glaciers into retreat over a third of the Northern Hemisphere even if it worked as described. We may therefore wish to come up with something else that fits with whatever our wider milieu is. For example, there might be solar mirrors or lasers in orbit that the Base must carefully coordinate from the ground to have maximum impact.
In addition to the ioniser equipment and the monitors necessary to determine its effects, the control room also hosts the AI system (called ECCO in the novelisation but not named in the TV serial) and a dispenser capable of synthesising simple chemicals, assuming it has the relevant elements on hand.
We can also briefly discuss the Ice Warrior’s ship. While it’s possible that some of the original crew didn’t make it to survive into the story, the five Warriors we do see are clearly enough to operate it, so it’s unlikely to be much larger than this. It is armed with a sonic cannon, which seems an odd choice for a spaceship, as it won’t work in a vacuum. Perhaps there are other weapons that were destroyed, or that they haven’t freed from the ice. Alternatively, we can replace it with something that fits the larger setting of our RPG, since it being sonic doesn’t make much difference beyond the Doctor being able to subvert it at one point.
A key point in the story concerns the Base personnel not knowing how the spaceship is powered, and therefore what effect their ioniser will have on it. In the end, it turns out to be powered by a radiothermal generator – a device that uses the heat from radioactive elements to provide a consistent supply of energy without the need for regular (and potentially explosive) fuel.
Well, okay, so they call it an ‘ion reactor’ in the serial, but it uses isotopes, so a radiothermal generator is the most plausible interpretation of what it would actually be.
We are told that the radiation source is an isotope of mercury. This would have to be mercury-194, since all the other possibilities would decay too rapidly to be useful. In fact, it can last for centuries before starting to run out, although there might be some loss of performance after a few decades. Unfortunately for the Ice Warriors, they have been buried since the Last Ice Age, and the mercury will continue to decay even if it isn’t being used, as indicated in the story. By the time they wake up, their fuel supply will have long since decayed into a chunk of inert platinum.
Which, in the right sort of game, could at least be worth a fair bit if the PCs can get it out of the remains of the ship after defeating the invaders.
Scenario
As with most base-under-siege stories, if we are running this as a one-off, the obvious solution is to have at least some of the PCs be the staff at the base. In the case of Brittanicus, this includes scientists and technicians in the serial itself and plausibly some support staff that we don’t see. We can also easily add a medic and some security staff due to the threat from scavengers, and scientists could include archaeologists or historians eager to preserve ruins from the advancing ice, as well as the more directly useful physicists and meteorologists.
We probably want to keep Clent as an NPC because he can make the PCs’ lives more difficult, but pretty much anyone else is fair game. We could also have at least some of the PCs be scavengers, either recently arrested or voluntarily leaving the dangerous area for a new life in Africa.
It’s worth noting that there’s no particular reason to stick to Brittanicus; the story would work just as well if it happened to be set in whatever the North American base is called – or, for that matter, the Asian or South American ones. On the other hand, if we’re using this concept for a standard science fiction game, then we’re probably not on Earth at all.
Turning up to save a threatened civilisation from an Ice Age apocalypse by offering scientific support is one of the most Star Trek: TNG things imaginable. Even if the Prime Directive gets in the way, it’s easy enough for a captain to argue that it stops applying (at least in full) once the Ice Warriors turn up. Similar logic can be used in any game based around a Space Patrol or the like.
It may be a little harder to fit the story into a classic “small trader” campaign. The operation is a big one-off government project that, as depicted, isn’t going to require the assistance of a random group of passing adventurers. Still, if the planet has few resources or a relatively low tech level, they might have to import spare equipment, perhaps in a hurry if something they already had has broken down.
Alternatively, a patron might have relatives who got stuck with the scavengers (as Penley is) and hires the PCs to find them and give them a lift off-world. In the latter case, at least some of them will turn out to be already being processed for rehabilitation, giving the PCs reason to visit the base and interact with the staff there and/or be captured by the Ice Warriors, forcing a rescue.
However they get on site, the scenario initially appears to be about the relatively technical challenge of saving civilisation from the climate threat. That changes when the Ice Warriors make their appearance.
In the serial, a single Ice Warrior is discovered in one of the glaciers that the scientists happen to be surveying. The implication is that it was frozen somewhere further north and has been transported by the ice as it advanced south. This would actually make more sense if the ice were retreating and it were becoming revealed in the melt, but glaciers do flow, so it’s not entirely unreasonable, especially if we don’t have to worry about the 15,000-year timescale – as may well be the case on an alien planet.
In most games, it may be better to have the Warrior uncovered by NPCs off-screen and brought to the base before the PCs can stop them. Otherwise, they may limit the story before it can even begin, if they’re as suspicious as most PCs are likely to be.
Once he thaws out, the initial Warrior’s objective is to return to his ship to wake his fellow, preferably taking a hostage along the way. The involvement of Penley and Storr at this point is optional, although scavengers could be used more broadly, unwittingly interfering with the PCs’ plans. However, if the PCs do stop the first Warrior, we can assume that the others wake up anyway, perhaps as a result of some automated trigger set off by the survey or just by the first one waking up.
At this point, the focus of the original story turns to the base trying to work out whether they can safely use the ioniser to melt the glacier and incidentally kill the Warriors, or whether that will set off a nuclear explosion that’s even worse than doing nothing. This should require some first-hand investigation by the PCs, perhaps complicated by the need to rescue hostages or a desire to save the Warriors along with the humans.
In support of this, we can note that, in the original serial, the spaceship is specifically stated to have a screening device that prevents it from being scanned at a distance. Regular surges by the glacier triggering localised avalanches (we are told this happens about five times a day) pose an additional environmental hazard.
Whether or not the PCs decide to end the scenario by killing the Ice Warriors or try to find a better solution is up to them. If we can make one (or more) of the Warriors sympathetic, this may nudge things in that direction, creating more of a nuance to the scenario, but this does require the PCs to get at least some chance to talk to them.
Rules
As described in the story, the technology of the setting is advanced enough to enable impressive weather manipulation, and Clent casually mentions antigravity as a possible motive power for the spaceship, so they probably have that, too. (It may also be how the air-sled works, but we never see that). This means that, even if the story is set solely on Earth, it’s likely part of a mature ‘space opera’ setting. The AI system being used to run society is probably meant to indicate that, too, although it’s perhaps less futuristic today than it was in 1968.
This gives us a tech level of 7 in Doctors & Daleks, 10 in GURPS, and 12 in Traveller.
Other than the computer and the ioniser, the only really advanced technology we see the human characters using is the medical equipment. The vibro-chair seems basic enough, although in some games, we might say that it heals fatigue, psychic damage, or other non-physical sources of injury. There are also “tranquiliser pads” that deliver medicines to the body by touch alone; not much is required in the way of special rules for these, except maybe deciding what the drugs are.
The Ice Warriors do, however, have weapons. Their handguns are sonic, doing “thunder damage” in 5E terms, and can also partially paralyse those they don’t kill outright. Some saving throw, likely against CON or the equivalent, would be required here if the victim takes enough damage in a single shot.
Oddly, the ship’s mounted weapon is also sonic, which means it must be useless in outer space. Perhaps there were other weapons, but they are too damaged to repair in time, or the Warriors just can’t get them out of the ice. In many games, it may be too powerful to require stats, since it destroys buildings, not people. The Doctor’s modifications to it are a different matter, but aren’t an essential part of the plot, just something he happens to come up with.
We can also briefly note the use of ammonium sulphide in the story as a weapon against the Ice Warriors. This may not be required in a game, depending on how well-armed the PCs are to start with, but it is a possibility. It’s not clear why the Ice Warriors would be any more vulnerable to this chemical than anyone else, but apparently, they are.
The reason given in the story is that it’s because the atmosphere of Mars is mostly nitrogen. This explanation has two problems. Firstly, it’s hard to see why being used to a nitrogen atmosphere would make one vulnerable to ammonium sulphide. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the Martian atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide (only a recent discovery when the serial was written), and it’s Earth that has the high nitrogen levels.
In any event, if we want to keep this element of the story, we’ll need to come up with some other explanation, possibly hand-wavey, and allow a scientifically-minded PC to deduce it with a good roll on the relevant skill and some appropriate observations. So far as we can tell, it basically stuns and disorients the Warrior without doing much in the way of physical damage.
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