Character Templates: Adventurous Space Pilot

The other new character I've come up with to replace the unpopular nurse and barbarian is another futuristic one. While the TV show, at least in the modern era, has tended to focus on companions from the present day, there is an appeal in games to playing someone that at least has a science fiction theme. Yes, the detective and the soldier are two of the three most popular of the templates in my (admittedly somewhat limited) sample of convention games but at least some players would rather go for the exotic.

In this case, I've picked a space pilot, something that's a common enough idea in more typical SF games. On the other hand, Doctor Who has less need for a pilot than would something based on say, Firefly, so we need to have a bit more scope than that - something aided by the broad skills of DWAITAS. Rather than a hot shot Top Gun sort of pilot, I've gone for one that's more of a space trucker, making her physically tough and with the maintenance skills to not only fix a spacecraft, but most other things as well.

Settings: 100,000 BC

Although An Unearthly Child is marketed as a single story, and was produced and directed as such, it involves two quite different settings and there’s a notable change in tone between the first episode and the subsequent three. Those three episodes give us our first exotic setting to explore, even if it’s one that we wouldn’t normally associate with a science fiction show. For that reason, I’ll treat it separately from the first episode here, and I’ll likely do something similar for other stories that spend significant time in more than one setting, such as The Chase. 

Where & When

Based solely on internal evidence, there is no way to date the setting of the story much more precisely than ‘the Stone Age’. This is a vast stretch of time, perhaps 99% of the whole of human history, depending on your definition. However, we know that the writer envisaged the date as 100,000 BC and that that was even the title used in some early BBC publicity in the days before the serials had onscreen titles. The geographical location is even vaguer, and, again based solely on the story as televised, we can’t even be confident it’s on Earth, since the DW universe has many alien races physically indistinguishable from humans. However, it’s clear that that’s not the intent, so “somewhere on Earth, approximately, 100,000 BC” it is.