TW 1890: Setup

Last weekend, we held the first session of my Torchwood 1890 game. Having discussed the broad concept and rule system last time, I think it's time to talk a little more about the setting itself.

The year, as indicated in the title, is 1890. According to the TV series, the Torchwood Institute was established on the 1st January 1880, a few months after the events of the Doctor Who episode Tooth and Claw. As of 1890, therefore, the organisation has been going for ten years, and is very much in its early days. It's around this time that Torchwood Two (in Glasgow) and Torchwood India (in what was then Bombay) are established, which gave me an excuse to say that most of the pre-existing members of the organisation had de-camped to these new locations. At the beginning of the campaign Torchwood London consists of just two agents and a handful of staff. Both agents were, of course, PCs, with the remainder being new recruits.

One of the first questions I had to answer therefore, is where exactly Torchwood's headquarters are. In the TV series, the London branch is based in One Canada Square... which, as of 1890, won't open for over a hundred years. Where were they before that? I'd say that one of London's many abandoned underground train stations is a likely bet, and fits well with the Hub from the TV series. But, in 1890, there are very few of those around, and, besides, it wasn't the mood I was looking for.

Torchwood 1890

As anyone who has been reading the last two-and-a-bit years of posts on this blog knows, I've long considered the possibility of running a Doctor Who game. For various reasons, it's never happened, and it turns out that not all of my current group are particularly keen on the idea, either. But it turns out that I can get kind of close, and I will soon start GMing a game based on Torchwood. I have no idea whether I'll be able to post "actual play" summaries here on any sort of regular basis (although we only get to meet up about once a month, so it's not a ridiculous schedule, or anything). But I thought I'd at least outline some of the ideas behind the campaign here today.

The first issue with running a Torchwood game turned out to be the nature of the last two campaigns the group has run - with me as a player, rather than GM. Most recently, we've done Primeval, and before that, Supernatural. There is, let's be honest, a certain theme here, although it wasn't one that was particularly intentional (we'd done Call of Cthulhu and HeroQuest before that). The fact that they're all based on TV shows isn't really an issue, but I felt that the fact that they were all investigators running around the modern world might be if I made it three-in-a-row.

Doctor Who wouldn't have had this problem - alien planets, space stations, trips into history, it's all rather different. But Torchwood ran the risk of, in particular, being Primeval with aliens instead of dinosaurs. It's set in modern Britain, you're agents of at least some sort of vaguely official agency, and so on. Yes, we could have the characters be entirely unofficial remnants of the disbanded organisation, but that makes it more like Supernatural (only set in Britain), so it still didn't feel different enough to me.

DWAITAS: 9th Doctor Sourcebook

And, then, in 2005, the series came back.

But it had, of course, regenerated into a form notably changed from its former self. This was "Nu Who", and, fandom being what it is, there are still some who haven't got over that fact. Nonetheless, we are now in an era of the show more familiar to younger viewers, and, indeed, to many Americans. Having said which, while the series was an instant hit in the UK, it was another season or so before it really took off in the US, which means that the Ninth Doctor Sourcebook could well be less popular than the two volumes that will follow it.

Popularity aside, this book does have a couple of more immediate problems to cope with. The first, which has already been faced by volumes Six and Seven, is the small number of stories there are in this era. Indeed, there are only ten, less than that of any previous incarnation save the Eighth, and most of them are only about half the length of what had been the standard for much of the classic show. The second problem is the relatively tight story arc of the season, at least in terms of character development (rather than the superficially more obvious Bad Wolf thing). This makes it somewhat difficult to fit new stories into the era without it feeling more of a squeeze, something reflected in the content of this book.

But what do we have? Well, we start, as always, with an examination of the Doctor and his companions. Rose, and arguably Captain Jack, are the only real companions here, of course, and the book acknowledges that. However, Jackie and Mickey are included as important supporting characters, and there's a discussion later on in the book (in the Aliens of London entry) on how these sorts of characters can be used in campaigns - something that hadn't really been seen at all in the classic show, even during the UNIT era. Adam also gets a write-up, with the obvious caveat that he's exactly the sort of character you shouldn't be playing, just as his function in the series is to be the "failed companion" that helps to highlight the significance of the real ones.

The Companions That Sort Of Were

Sam Jones

After the dismal failure of the 1996 TV movie (decent audience figures, but pretty much everyone hated it), Doctor Who returned to existing solely in the spin-off media. If a true "Eighth Doctor era" exists at all, which one can certainly debate, then the vast bulk of it surely exists outside of TV. And it's there we have to look for his companions, whether they be those canonically named in The Night of the Doctor, or those of more doubtful status vis a vis the new series.

The rule I am going to adopt in listing them here is similar to that I've used for the individual posts on actual companions. In order to count, they have to be contemporary with the series at the time, rather than being added in new stories featuring old Doctors after the fact. In this case, since we're considering companions of the 8th Doctor, that means that they have to have appeared between 1996, when the TV movie aired, and 2005, when the new series did. It's arbitrary, but I have to draw the line somewhere, and that's where I've drawn it so far, so let's keep it that way.

Leaving the comics to one side for the moment, the novels re-launched in 1997, now under the auspices of BBC Worldwide. Unable to use Grace Holloway for legal reasons, they had to invent a new companion. Apparently deciding that since the people who watched Doctor Who in the '70s and '80s had largely been teenagers, and they surely weren't likely to have aged since (right?), they settled on Generic Teenage Girl as their model for the companion. So, first appearing in the universally derided 1997 novel The Eight Doctors, we have Samantha Jones, better known as "Sam".

DWAITAS: 8th Doctor Sourcebook

The Eighth Doctor Sourcebook was always going to be the hardest of the series to write, and the one that was going to be least like all the others. The problem is obvious: at the time it was commissioned, the 8th Doctor only had one televised story, namely the 1996 TV movie. Since then, we have also had the seven minute webcast The Night of the Doctor, but that leaves a grand total of one-and-a-half stories to cover, neither of which give us much to extrapolate from.

One of the first things you note about the sourcebook is that the cover image, and most of the larger stills inside, come from The Night of the Doctor, not from the much longer TV movie. This is, it has to be said, reflected in a lot of the content, too, where the author shows far more interest in those seven minutes than in anything that happened in the other 85. He may not be alone among fans in that respect, mind you, and  it's not as if the TV movie fits terribly well into the overall picture of Doctor Who...

In fact, the book spends just 30 pages on the the actual subject of the 8th Doctor and his adventures. And, frankly, it needs a bit of padding to get that far. The book opens with a chapter on the Doctor and his companions, and here we see the first problem that the authors had to contend with: the 8th Doctor doesn't really have any televised companions. True, Grace fills that role in the TV movie, but she doesn't travel with him at the end of it, so she's really no more a companion than Ray in Delta and the Bannermen or Christina de Souza in Planet of the Dead. Still, for lack of anybody else, the book treats her as if she is a companion, and throws in Chang Lee and Cass (from The Night of the Doctor) for good measure. It makes an effort to explain how the latter could become a companion in an alternate timeline (for legal reasons, it can't do the same for Grace), but in the end, it has to concede that none of them really count.

DW Companions as PCs: Bernice Summerfield

The series is cancelled at the end of the twenty sixth season. Some time after, a new player joins the group. Deciding that everyone is getting a bit too old to still be playing teenage girls, she decides...

Sorry, what? You were expecting Grace Holloway, or Rose, or somebody? You're wondering who the heck I'm on about? Ah, right. Well, in that case, I suppose I'd better explain. (And if you weren't wondering anything of the sort - and many of you probably weren't - you can skip the next four paragraphs).

The classic series of Doctor Who was cancelled in December, 1989. For the first time in over a quarter of a century, there were no new DW stories coming out, and no prospect of any more soon, if ever. On television, at least. Because, of course, this left the door open to what I've been referring to in these posts as the "spin-off media", as the only venue for new material. Well, there's Dimensions in Time, too, if you're not trying to block that from your memory, but why wouldn't you?

The Companions That Weren't: the '80s

The year 1980 saw a major change in the production of Doctor Who, as John Nathan-Turner took over as producer. Although this was the top job on the show, it's probably fair to say that the actual nature of the stories was more affected by his script editors than by he himself - the modern "showrunner" job description being shared between the two roles in those days. Nonetheless, 1980 was a break-point in the show's history that was more than simply a change in decade, and since the next truly major change came in December 1989, with the cancellation, "'80s Doctor Who" is very clearly a distinct thing.

So, having reached the last companion of the classic era, now it's time to look back over that decade, as I did with the '60s and '70s, and look at some characters from the show that weren't companions, but could be in our own RPGs. One of the rules I'm using here is that the character in question should have survived whatever story they appeared in, so that it's possible for some PC group to turn up and collect them afterwards. This, unfortunately, rules out the only decent candidate I could find from the Sixth Doctor's era, namely Orcini from Revelation of the Daleks. Indeed, three of my four main examples are going to turn out to be from the Seventh Doctor's run. (Which, probably not coincidentally, lines up nicely with Andrew Cartmel's run as script editor, rather than Eric Saward's).

DW Companions as PCs: Ace

Mel leaves at the end of the twenty-fourth season. (Yes: twenty-fourth... suck on that, Supernatural). It didn't take long for the player to tire of her prissy and irritating former character, and she has already decided that her next one will be a teenager, yet one quite different from those in the early days of the game. This one will be aggressive and tough, injecting a bit of life into a campaign that's getting a bit long in the tooth.

After vacillating between two characters that broadly fit this concept, she settles on Dorothy McShane, almost universally known by her nickname of 'Ace'.

Ace is an immediate change from her predecessors, and is, along with Leela, one of only two female Action Hero companions. (Well, okay, one of three, if you count Sara Kingdom). On the character sheet, this is reflected with some decent skills in brawling and the use of simple hand weapons. Ace is clearly physically fit, and probably reasonably strong with it, if likely not in quite the same league as Leela. Most memorably, of course, she demonstrates this by attacking a dalek with a super-charged baseball bat, but there are a number of other scenes in which she comes off best in a fight. Her athletic ability also extends to swimming, as we see in Battlefield.

DW Companions as PCs: Melanie Bush

Peri leaves part way through the twenty-third season. Her player is getting a bit tired of the GM having NPCs drool over her character, and decides to create a new PC that does just as much screaming, but doesn't have the Attractive advantage.

After a rather weird dream in which she turns up to the next game session only for the GM to hand her a character sheet with a talking penguin on it, she instead creates uptight scream queen Melanie Bush, better known simply as 'Mel'. The character's surname is, incidentally, never mentioned on screen, but it's been confirmed pretty conclusively by her real-world creator, so, as with Polly in the '60s, I'll stick with it.

Along with Adric, Mel is, unfortunately, one of the two prime contenders for "least popular companion ever." Not everyone agrees, of course, and even less agree as to which one should actually come bottom, but that's the broad fan consensus. As with Adric, though, her character sheet isn't actually all that bad. In her case, however, we do have to rather work at it for that to be the case. The problem being that, like Peri before her, Mel's only real function on screen is to scream at the monsters and get into trouble.

DWAITAS: 7th Doctor Sourcebook

And so, with this sourcebook, we reach the end of the classic era of Doctor Who. The broad fan consensus on this era is that, at least in its last two seasons, it marked a significant improvement over the era that preceded it. While, for some, that might be merely damning with faint praise, there are many who regard it as a true return to form, albeit one that came far too late to stave off the threat of cancellation. Because, frankly, by this point, most of the audience had already left.

But with a sourcebook like this, published so long after the fact, that's no longer an issue. A more significant problem, perhaps, is one that this volume shares with the Sixth Doctor Sourcebook, and, looking ahead, with that for the Ninth: the Seventh Doctor only has twelve stories, just one more than his immediate predecessor. Which makes it tougher to find enough to say to fill the book out.

And, yes, as we might expect, the entries on the individual stories are considerably longer than they were in volumes prior to #6 - about twice as long, on average, as those in the first three volumes. However, on the positive side, it also means that this book has room for quite a lot of discussion on the general themes of the era, and for the background to what's going on in these last dozen stories.

The book begins, as usual, with descriptions of the Doctor and his companions. Somewhat oddly, Sabalom Glitz is in this chapter alongside the genuine companions. It's true enough that he fills a somewhat companion-like role in his one adventure with the Seventh Doctor, but, still, it is only one, and he was in two with the Sixth Doctor. Anyway, players should note that this is a proper PC version of the character, not the NPC one from the previous book - a difference marked largely by a full set of Story Points, although there are some other improvements, too.

DW Companions as PCs: Peri Brown

Tegan leaves part way through the twenty-first season. Her player hasn't quite given up on the idea of playing a colonial, instead of yet another Brit, but evidently feels that her next character should do a lot more screaming and a lot less of anything useful, bringing back some of the flavour of the campaign's early days.

The result, on the basis of what someone has assured her is an entirely typical name in the US, is American college student Perpugilliam "Peri" Brown.

In the actual show, Peri's primary functions are to look pretty and scream at the monsters. Neither, it has to be said, is a really sound basis for a player character. Indeed, with the recent departure of Turlough, we're back once again to the "Doctor plus one female companion" model, which also doesn't fit wel with the metaphor of an RPG. It's a model that the show will stick with, more or less, from here on in, but for our purposes, we're going to brush that aside and try to look at Peri as she might fit into a more typical group.

This isn't easy, not least because if the writers had any clear concept of her personality traits beyond "she's American", they made a poor job of fleshing them out. Granted, this is more of a concept than they had with Dodo, but that's damning with faint praise.

To be honest, Peri isn't a very proactive character, and she's often getting lost (she certainly doesn't have Sense of Direction), getting captured, failing to run away from things, and so on. Presumably, she's gaining Story Points from this, retreading the 'Peril Monkey' role of '60s companions like Victoria. To make her more than that we have to, as we did with some of those characters, look at what she's supposed to be good at, rather than what skills she effectively demonstrates on screen.

DWAITAS 6th Doctor Sourcebook

Okay, it's confession time: the Sixth Doctor's era is my least favourite in all of Doctor Who.

Nor am I alone in this. While the Sixth Doctor does have his fans, they aren't terribly numerous. His run of stories are generally reckoned to be amongst the weakest in the show's history, rising to the level of mediocrity once or twice, but more often falling short of such a target. Indeed, while I am sure there are those who will disagree, I'd argue that they're the only two seasons in the entire run that haven't included even one story I could honestly call 'good'. For that matter, by popular acclaim, the single worst Doctor Who story ever broadcast is the Sixth Doctor's debut, The Twin Dilemma.

I am, of course, compelled by the Sacred and Unwritten Rules of Fandom, on pain of being banished to the Planet of the Ming-Mongs, or some such, to follow that up with "...but he's a lot better in the audios." That caveat is, it seems, as mandatory as it is true, but, sadly it's not relevant here. Since, of course, Cubicle 7's license doesn't extend beyond the TV series itself, and the best they can do is make oblique references to the spin-off material. (Which they do, for example, on p.22)

At any rate, I wasn't exactly bursting with excitement to read this particular instalment of the DWAITAS Sourcebooks. Yet, when you think about it, this book does have two advantages that it's predecessors didn't. Perhaps the more obvious of these is that the Sixth Doctor only has eleven televised stories. With Cubicle 7 insisting that every book in the series has to have at least 160 pages, you should at least have space for a pretty detailed discussion of every one of them. The downside of this, though, is that you're in danger of resorting to spurious padding to try and fill the page count up.

DW Companions as PCs: Vislor Turlough

A new player joins the group in the twentieth season, briefly bringing the number of players up to four again. His initial character concept is, in many respects, similar to that of Adric: a high-tech rogue from an alien planet. But this player is older, and the character more complex, and less annoying.

Turlough is the last in the line of alien companions, and also the last male companion of the classic era. When we first meet him, he is a sixth form student at an expensive boarding school somewhere in the south of England, and so is presumably about eighteen years old. He is desperate to escape from Earth, but, while he admits to the other players that his character is alien, Turlough's player gives out no information at all about his background, or how he got to Earth in the first place. It's entirely possible that he's left this blank, with the intention of filling in a backstory later; it would explain why he sometimes mentions his homeworld, but never actually says what it's called.

Then again, it's possible that he's just being cagey. The "rogue" aspect of the character is only partly built on the obvious skills of lockpicking, devising traps, and so on, and is far more based in deception and similarly subtle methods. Turlough seems to be a master of Fast Talk, Bluff, or whatever else your system might call it. Right from his first story, we see him getting another student into trouble to divert attention from himself, and successfully tricking the headmaster into falling for the ruse. There are other instances in later stories where he uses the same skill again, albeit usually with less base motives.

DW Companions as PCs: Tegan Jovanka

Romana leaves towards the end of the eighteenth season. After so long playing her, albeit in two different forms, her player wants to try something different. Her last character was an intellectual aristocrat from a sophisticated and highly advanced civilisation, so the player comes up with the exact opposite of that.

She's going to play an Australian.

Joking aside, though, what is the character concept for Tegan Jovanka? When we look back through the previous companions on the series, most of them have actually turned out to be fairly identifiable character concepts that would fit in this sort of RPG. They haven't always been executed well, but the concept itself has usually been clear and perfectly viable. We have had a heroic space pilot, a number of soldiers and scientists, a secret agent, an investigative journalist, a barbarian warrior, and so on. With Tegan Jovanka, we have an air hostess.

DW Companions as PCs: Nyssa

Romana leaves towards the end of the eighteenth season. Her player is unable to attend the next session, but that's okay, because a new player is considering joining the group - bringing it back to its original size of GM plus four players. But the new player isn't quite sure she wants to become an ongoing member of the group, so she offers to play a one-off character for the next adventure, and see how it goes.

Probably she's heard of Romana (perhaps she's a friend of that player), and knows that she's left, so she sees an available niche, and designs a character that fills much the same function. Which brings us to Nyssa of Traken, who does, of course, become a regular PC from Logopolis onwards.

Nyssa, like Romana, comes from a technologically advanced culture. Quite how advanced is hard to say, because Doctor Who doesn't, if we're honest, have a terribly consistent view of what RPGs call "tech levels". With a few exceptions here and there, there doesn't appear to be functionally much difference between any of the futuristic societies we see. They may emphasise different bits, sure, but so long as they've got starships, ray guns, and any specific gadgets needed to drive the plot (the miniscope from Carnival of Monsters, say) they mostly look pretty much the same. Even the Time Lords don't seem that different, apart from the fact they have time machines.

DW Companions as PCs: Adric

The campaign has, for some time now, had only two player characters: the Doctor and a single female companion. Which isn't really enough for an RPG. So, when, part way through the eighteenth season, the annoying kid brother of one of the other players demands to be allowed to join in... well, what are you going to do?

The new player, of course, creates alien boy genius Adric.

Now, we just have to face reality here. You're never going to get a group as large and diverse as Doctor Who fandom to agree on anything as controversial as the identity of the "worst companion ever"... but, the fact remains, if you look at just about any list ranking companions by popularity, Adric is going to be somewhere in the bottom three. He might not always come last, but he is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a popular character.

But let's take a step back from that for a minute, and just consider his character sheet. What, exactly, is the point of Adric, and how would he fit in an RPG campaign? On paper, at least, the answer is surprisingly well.

DWAITAS 5th Doctor Sourcebook

You're never going to get the whole of Doctor Who fandom to agree on when, or, for that matter, even if, classic Doctor Who "jumped the shark" and was irretrievably no-longer-as-good-as-it-used-to-be. But there seem to be at least three popular suggestions. Perhaps it was The Invisible Enemy, shortly after Philip Hinchcliffe was ditched as showrunner (or 'producer', as it was then). Or maybe The Leisure Hive, after Hinchcliffe's replacement left. Or perhaps The Twin Dilemma, a few more seasons down the line.

There are, of course, other possibilities, but the thing to notice about the three I've listed is that two of them doom the whole of Peter Davison's run to post-shark-jumping oblivion. A lot of people just aren't very keen on '80s Doctor Who, and how it sometimes seemed to be just treading water, and looking a bit naff.

But then again...

A lot of fans first came to Doctor Who in the '80s, and, numerically, there were more of them starting in Davison's era than in the two that followed. For many fans of the right age, Davison is "their Doctor", and fondly remembered. Astonishingly, on the fanfic site A Teaspoon and an Open Mind, there are actually more stories featuring the Fifth Doctor than any other of the classic era - even supposed fan favourite Tom Baker. (And most of them aren't pervy, in case you're wondering if that's the reason). Furthermore, the Fifth Doctor story The Caves of Androzani is frequently voted the single most popular story of the entire classic run, even managing to beat the likes of Genesis of the Daleks and The City of Death.

The Companions That Weren't: The '70s

Classic Doctor Who changed many times over the years of its run, but two particularly seismic shifts in its production stand out. The first, and most obvious to the casual viewer, was the move in 1970 from black-and-white to colour, which also involved many other major changes in the way the show was made. The second, which is perhaps easier to see with hindsight than it might have been at the time, was the arrival of John Nathan-Turner as producer (or, as we'd say now, "showrunner").

This involved a significant shift in the show's direction and style, with a lot of changes behind the scenes as well. For the purposes of this blog, though, what matters is that, coincidentally, it happened in 1980. And that means that there are three well-defined periods of the show's history, which just happen to line up with chronological decades. I previously looked at four characters from the '60s era of the show who never became companions in reality, but who perhaps could in our own RPG campaigns. Now it's time to do the same for the '70s.

We begin with Hal the Archer from the Pertwee story The Time Warrior. One reason he's a choice is that he came quite close to becoming a companion in real life. The producers dropped the idea before the role was even cast, so it never really got anywhere, but it's easy to see him in the same mould as Jamie, and he's certainly quite heroic in his one story.

DW Companions as PCs: Romana

Leela leaves at the end of the fifteenth season. The campaign has been a fairly odd one for some time now, with only two players for the last three seasons, and for some extended periods before that. Perhaps more significantly, there has been something of an imbalance between the two characters. Sarah Jane and Leela were certainly competent characters, but even they were clearly sidekicks to the Doctor, the character who has been there, in one form or another, for, well... fifteen seasons now.

So, perhaps inspired by an NPC in The Invasion of Time - the first time we'd ever seen an adult female member of the Doctor's species - the other player decides to create a character who can truly be the Doctor's equal. She creates the Time Lady Romanadvoratrelundar, better known as Romana.

Romana is a recent graduate of the Time Lord Academy, and there's some indication that she is even more intelligent than the Doctor. Certainly, she passed the Academy's final exams with much higher marks than he did, although, to be fair, the Doctor may have been the sort of person who was too busy messing about to actually study. Be that as it may, Romana is, for obvious reasons, vastly less experienced than her co-traveller. This, as it turns out, affects both the skills on her character sheet and, more generally, her personality.