Character Templates: Alien Rogue

The penultimate character template in my set is another one that's usually very popular. There are, I suspect, at least a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, the concept of a 'rogue' is one that's common to a lot of RPGs - it's a standard character type that's as easy to understand as the combat jock and that has a clear role in any party. Secondly, there are many players who, when faced with a science fiction RPG, are keen to play the aliens; there's an appeal in being something out of the ordinary and a little bit special.

Doctor Who, however, presents a problem with alien PCs that most other science fiction shows do not. If the character is obviously alien, it's going to be difficult to justify them doing much in a historical or contemporary setting. And, in fact, even in mid to late 21st century settings. To get around this, when I have run non-convention games where the players design their own characters, I stipulate that all PCs must at least be able to pass for human on cursory examination, and I've used the same principle in these templates. An alien that simply looks human (such as Trion or a Drahvin) isn't terribly interesting unless, like Time Lords, there's something else inherently cool about them. Human-seeming androids might well work since they, too, will likely have unusual abilities. But your other options are some device that disguises the alien's appearance or... well, shapeshifting.

Settings: Skaro (The Daleks)

The second serial in the TV show’s history is, of course, the one that ensured its survival and first made it big. In many respects, the story has a different version of the titular aliens than appear in any other. I’ve covered Daleks in game terms previously, but here we’re concerned with the setting and story. Specifically, we’re interested in the version of the planet that we see in this particular serial, largely ignoring what will come later. 

Where & When

The story is set on the planet Skaro. The few stories that have attempted to give any hint as to where this might be in relation to Earth generally place it in a different galaxy but all we can say with certainty is that it’s a long way away.

Since the story, taken on its own terms, has no connection with Earth, the date is equally impossible to determine. As one might expect, multiple different theories have been advanced, some placing it very early in Dalek history, before they developed space flight, others in the far future, when a forgotten and degenerate group have been left behind on their home planet, cut off from their fellows. Most go for somewhere in between, often one or two centuries into our future, but it's probably more accurate to say that we just don’t know.

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.

Character Templates: Post-Apocalyptic Survivor

This next character is another one that hasn't proven hugely popular. Unlike the two I ditched, however, it seems to me that this one still fills a useful niche so, at least for the time being, I'm keeping them in the selection. In fact, the character type is one that has a specific subclass suited for them in Doctors & Daleks, so I'm probably not alone in feeling that they're genre-appropriate. It may just be that the players who gravitate towards this sort of character find some of the other options even more attractive.

The character as I've created them for DWAITAS has good outdoor skills - less useful on a space station, perhaps, but handy enough in jungle or rocky wasteland planets, both of which crop up a lot in the show. More importantly, though, they have decent combat skills and ability at first aid. Compared with the UNIT soldier, they also have fewer technical skills, coming from a postapocalyptic world where those are of less immediate use, replacing them with intuition and athletic ability. A key point, however, is that the character has a background that directly fits into a particular element of the Whoniverse.

Settings: An Unearthly Child

I’m going to start a new series of posts here – and who knows whether it will prove any more popular than the previous ones. Not exactly a large audience here, although the D&D posts have done well enough, as did the “companions as PCs” posts back in the day. This is going to be similar to the other Doctor Who related things I’ve done looking at things from an RPG perspective, but with a focus on the episodes and, more specifically, on their settings. 

This has, of course, been done before. It’s pretty much the basis of the DWAITAS individual Doctor sourcebooks that I’ve reviewed elsewhere. But I don’t have a constraint on page count here, nor a publishing schedule to keep up with (these are likely to be very irregular) and, hopefully, I can come up with some different angles and try to avoid duplicating what they did too much.

Character Template: Amateur Sleuth

My original set of pre-gens for convention games included a couple of characters that did not prove popular. One was a nurse, intended to fill the "support" role that's exemplified by the Stalwart in Doctors & Daleks and that maps to characters on the show such as Rory or (to a lesser extent) Rose, Polly and so on. If I was running Doctors & Daleks rather than DWAITAS that would could well be more popular, but I'm not, and it isn't. The second was a barbarian warrior in the Leela mould, which I think proved unpopular because of the low tech, especially in a game that normally isn't heavy on combat. 

So I ditched both of those from the selection and added two new characters to replace them. I've no idea how popular they will prove, but the first of them fills the niche of the investigator now that I've made the private eye more physical since that was the way he usually got played. This time, we have an amateur sleuth, intentionally low on physicality but with observational and problem-solving skills that should (I hope) have an obvious function in any RPG scenario that isn't a straight dungeon crawl. Sarah Jane, as an investigative journalist, is perhaps the closest analogy from the show, at least conceptually (although it's arguable how often that comes into play) although the background details here are very different.