Settings: Inside the Spaceship

Not all of the stories in the Doctor Who TV series will lend themselves to the sort of posts I’m doing in this series, and so it is with the third serial, The Edge of Destruction. A major reason for this is that I’m focussing primarily on the setting, and how it can be expanded upon or used elsewhere and this one… doesn’t have a setting. Or, rather, apart from the teaser for the next serial, the story is set entirely inside the TARDIS with no guest characters, monsters, or anything else external.

This is therefore going to be a much shorter post than usual.

A second reason is that the story, as written, is unlikely to work well as an RPG scenario. There are no NPCs or monsters and, in game terms, what’s basically happened is that the Doctor has fumbled a roll operating the TARDIS and it takes everyone the better part of an hour to figure that out. During which time, they act strangely for no particularly good reason; the story relies on them doing that and not finding the source of the problem early on. That could happen in a game, certainly, but you probably wouldn’t want to rely on it.

This isn’t to say that a story set entirely in the TARDIS, or whatever other conveyance a science fiction RPG might use, can’t work. Even the basic idea of a malfunction that must be fixed is a viable one, so long as the solution involves some high stakes and is a bit more involved than a broken switch. On a regular starship, perhaps a dangerous spacewalk on the outer hull is required, for instance. The First Doctor Sourcebook from Cubicle 7 provides some other good examples, which there’s no need to repeat here.

A key feature of the original story is that it gives the protagonists the chance to bond and work out their differences – largely due to the Doctor having basically kidnapped Ian and Barbara. Such ‘downtime’ isn’t a scenario per se, but, with the right sort of group, enforcing some could lead to roleplaying opportunities and the chance to expand the characters and how they interact. Critical Role often does this with night watches, taking the opportunity to have pairs of PCs just chatting to one another for a while.

The Edge of Destruction is not an especially popular episode, and one thing that many reviewers coming to it from the modern show comment on is that they feel it would work better if it turned out that the TARDIS really had been invaded by a hostile force, as initially appears to be the case. Certainly, it's likely that doing this would give a better basis for a scenario. It's the sort of thing that sets up some of the "bottle shows" in Star Trek, for instance.

In other science fiction games, the equivalent here is, say, a story set entirely on a Traveller Free Trader while it’s in jump space. It’s the ultimate example of being cut off; there’s no way to call in support, and no way to escape if you don’t deal with the issue yourself. In the case of a Free Trader, it could be a problem with one of the passengers, but perhaps a better bet is that some cargo they are carrying is more dangerous than they expected. 

Which is more or less the plot of Alien.

It’s also, perhaps more relevantly for our purposes, the basis of the Doctor Who audio play Relative Dimensions, which has some parallels to Edge of Destruction. It still has plenty of time for the character interactions that characterise the latter, but there’s more for the protagonists to do than fixing a switch, and it doesn’t rely on them suddenly freaking out and attacking each other with scissors. Another alternative is a comedy interlude, with something inconvenient, but not deadly – a small robot or living creature that causes havoc with the TARDIS’s systems until the PCs can track it down. Which is going to require more than just using the console room as the original story does.

But that’s probably best left for a different post, so I’ll leave it there for now and head on to the next serial.