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.
Setting
There are a few basic statements we can say about Skaro that seem beyond doubt – and which are equally true of most other planets on this and other TV shows. For one, it has a gravity essentially indistinguishable from that of Earth. In reality, only a small minority of planets are going to be exactly Earth-sized, and a difference in gravity is likely one of the first things you’d notice if you stepped out onto one. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Skaro has the same physical dimensions as Earth, since gravity would also be determined by the planet’s density, but that it’s at least in the right ballpark seems a good working assumption.
The atmosphere is breathable, with an oxygen-nitrogen mix that’s also seemingly very similar to that of Earth. Given a planet that, judging from the local intelligent species, has a biology that is also much like our own, this does make sense; the oxygen levels in our atmosphere are in large part due to the fact that we have plants that photosynthesise. Planetary temperature is a little harder to judge since we don’t know where we are relative to the equator, but there’s no evidence that the sun looks radically different to ours from the surface so, again, it’s probably similar.
The day is at least approximately 24 hours, but the year could potentially be much longer. This is because we are told that Skaro is the twelfth planet from its star. Now, it could be that this is simply a planet-rich solar system or that the Thals are more generous with the definition of ‘planet’ than we are; maybe there’s an inner asteroid belt and they are counting some of the larger objects within it. But a more obvious interpretation is that Skaro is far out from its sun and that the star in question is hotter and brighter than ours, keeping it habitable at a distance that would leave it entirely frozen in our own solar system. Set against this is the fact that the Thals say they have been travelling for ‘four years’ and indicate that Dyoni has grown by about as much as you’d expect a human to in that many Earth years. Much may depend on how thorough the TARDIS translation circuits are being.
Skaro appears more times over the course of the show than any other fictional planet apart from Gallifrey, so it’s not surprising that the tie-in media have used it frequently as well, giving us a wide source of potential information. For instance, we know from the TV story that Skaro has a moon bright enough to make a difference at night (Ganatus mentions ‘moonlight’) but the tie-in media state that there are either two or three moons – something neither stated nor contradicted in the original.
The image of Skaro from space in the 1996 TV movie shows a red world that looks devoid of oceans, but perhaps this is a product of recent catastrophes since it is unlikely Earth-like life could evolve without them. Indeed, published sources about the planet generally agree that it has continents and seas, even if they aren’t entirely consistent about how many there might be. The closest thing to an official map, from a children’s TV annual published in 1964, shows three continents, two of which are joined by a wide isthmus and that have several fanciful-sounding features doubtless intended to appeal to a young audience.
Looking at a more local scale, the Dalek city is located in a rocky plain with a range of high hills or mountains on one side and a petrified forest on the other. The forest is described as a ‘jungle’ and appears to have once been lush, given the numerous creepers and so on. From this one might infer a rainy climate although, while we do see a thunderstorm, the budget of the show precludes visible rainfall. The Thals’ clothing implies a warm climate, but they wrap up in heavy cloaks at night, so it probably isn’t fully tropical. According to the story, the petrified forest is about an hour’s walk away from the city.
Mention of the petrified forest naturally brings us to the “neutronic bomb” that created it. This is obviously meant to evoke the real-world concept of the neutron bomb, but even if it’s intended to be the exact same thing, the effects are quite different to those of the real device. Despite the common understanding that a neutron bomb does minimal physical damage, this is only true relative to other tactical nuclear weapons. The blast radius is far wider than that of any conventional explosive; it will leave a significant crater and buildings hundreds of meters from the detonation site will be heavily damaged or even destroyed. The difference is that the radiation spreads out over a much wider area than the physical blast, and it’s in this broader area that humans die but buildings still stand.
What we see, however, is arguably closer to the effects of nuclear fallout following a more typical nuclear exchange – it’s just that the nuclear weapons in question didn’t hit the Dalek City directly or fall close enough to strip the leaves from the trees in the forest. Or there could have been several ‘dirty bombs’ – regular explosives packed in radioactive material to throw the stuff everywhere and make an area uninhabitable.
In any event, of course, nuclear weapons don’t turn forests into stone. But what we see here is that all flora has been petrified, leaving even fragile flowers otherwise intact, and animals killed so instantaneously that they remain standing, fixed in place. Most living organisms in the soil have also been killed, since it appears to be no more than sterile sand although, if the Daleks survived it’s likely that some bacteria did, too. This is science fiction, with no real-world analogue.
For game purposes, how it worked is irrelevant. What matters, beyond it creating a cool-looking environment and some mutated creatures, is that, hundreds of years later, whatever it is that it kicked out hasn’t decayed enough to stop being deadly. The contaminant has a long half-life, which could fit with any of several elements, plutonium being the most obvious.
On the far side of the city from the forest is a range of low mountains and, beyond that, a wide area of marshland surrounded by lakes. This is stated to be four hours travel from the edge of the forest (apparently crossing at least a steep ridge to get there) and is full of bubbling pools. The fact that the group lights a fire without setting off an explosion indicates that whatever gas is being given off isn’t methane. The life has not been killed off here, with the plants consisting of actual wood, rather than stone, and mutated monsters surviving in both the lake and the swamp.
While, in later stories, we will be introduced to such things as varga plants and slythers, we see just two animals in this one. The magnedon is a natural, native lifeform, with the one we see having apparently been killed in the final nuclear exchange. Since everything else we know of on the planet is squishy and organic, it seems more likely that the metal structure we see is a preserved exoskeleton than the all-metal creature that the Doctor hypothesises, although the name the Thals give to it indicates that he’s right about it being magnetic. If it was carnivorous, it may have been quite formidable in life but on the other hand, if it eats only plants or minerals, it was probably no more dangerous to humans than a giant tortoise.
The other creature is a starfish-shaped animal with a pair of glowing eyes. It’s presumed to be dangerous, although we don’t see it do anything particularly menacing. There’s also whatever created the whirlpool that kills one of the Thals, since whirlpools don’t form spontaneously, and he was standing on dry ground at the time… but whatever it is, we don’t get a look at it.
Then, of course, there are the Thals themselves. They are physically perfect people visibly indistinguishable from humans. In the ‘60s worldview of the time, their physical perfection is indicated by them all being blond and pale skinned but, if they were ever to reappear in the modern show, they'd almost certainly be shown as multiethnic. A GM running a modern game could obviously pick either aesthetic, depending on how closely they wish to hew to the original.
In a similar vein, aside from the pacifism, the Thals in the story hold to ‘60s ideas of gender roles. There are both men and women in the travelling group (children, too, according to one line of dialogue, although we never see any) but the former see it as their role to protect the latter and find even Barbara’s independence surprising. This, too, is probably something you’d want to change in a modern game in the setting.
The Thals state that they live on a plateau, which, at least until recently, was suitable for fertile agricultural land. They use tents in the story, because they’re travelling, but evidently have buildings back home. Although they have remnants of older technology, their basic tech level as shown on screen is perhaps roughly equivalent to mid-20th century Earth; we see electric lanterns and a felt-tip pen, and their cloaks at least are made from some artificial fibre that’s only described as “not nylon”. For what it’s worth, though, the original script implies Iron Age technology – the electric lanterns were provided by the props department – so that may be a more "authentic" interpretation.
The Thals describe themselves as farmers, although the presence of manufactured goods implies that can’t literally be true for all of them. We don’t know how they are governed; they do have leaders that are elected in some way but mostly seem to be egalitarian with no sign of any stratified society. Their extreme pacifism suggests that their home has few predators or other outside threats in it and we can infer a utopian, if unsophisticated, society when food is plentiful. They are also likely vegetarian, and not just through necessity. A “make love not war” philosophy without many sexual inhibitions is consistent with what we see, although they do seem primarily monogamous, so it doesn’t automatically follow. (Whether such a thing would be worth bringing up for any given gaming group is, of course, another question entirely).
The remaining location is the Dalek City, given various names in the tie-in media, but only ever referred to by its description in the TV series. This is large, although hardly a metropolis on the scale of London or New York, with an unknown number of subterranean levels below the visible buildings. The above-ground sections are extensive, with multiple towers and long walkways, although it seems likely that anything of real value has been stowed away below over the centuries.
For budgetary reasons, we see no more than four Daleks on screen at any time, making it difficult to determine the size of their intended population. It may be that the bulk of the city is empty, or that the catacombs don’t extend very far compared with the surface, but it’s more likely that it is truly large and that there are supposed to be hundreds, or even thousands, of Daleks living underground.
The Daleks of this story cannot leave the city, their casings being unable to work without an external power supply delivered through the metal flooring. They die quickly when removed from their casing, so even that is not an option. They also aren’t especially dangerous, beyond the fact that they have guns that (mostly) kill in a single shot; assuming you can stay out of their firing range, they aren’t all that difficult to defeat by anyone with a modicum of combat skills.
Even so, Dalek technology is explicitly more advanced than that of the Thals. What that would mean in game terms is variable, given that different systems have different visions of what future technology will look like and how high tech levels are defined. However, they don’t have space flight and much of what we do see – nuclear weaponry, spy cameras, growing food with artificial sunlight and so on – arguably isn’t that much further ahead than early 21st-century tech. So ‘near future’ is perhaps a better bet than ‘space opera’ levels.
Scenario
In many respects, the story has a structure that already resembles an RPG scenario. After their arrival, the party explores the surrounding area, learning about their environment. True, they only explore the city because the Doctor tricks them into doing it, but most PC groups won’t need any encouragement to do that of their own volition. Indeed, even within the context of the original setup, the Doctor merely needed to point out that there could have been something in the city that would have fixed their position and time, which was what he needed to navigate the TARDIS.
Once in the city, they get captured by the Daleks and Susan is sent out to recover anti-radiation drugs, where she meets the Thals. This, even if following the original story, is something you’d likely want to change since it involves splitting the party and rendering most of them useless through radiation sickness. At any rate, the party escapes and meets up with the Thals as a group. Which is when we get to properly discover the planet’s backstory and have the opportunity for a multi-day sojourn with the Thals, should we want one. (Romantic entanglements with 'physically perfect' and openly friendly humanoids optional).
Once they discover that they have to return to the City, there’s some NPC interaction as they persuade the Thals to join them, then they do the D&D thing and put together an adventuring party to travel through a dangerous swamp and a series of caves before entering the city and defeating the Daleks. In a game, we do, of course, need a reason for them to do this, and they’re unlikely to have taken anything so essential with them that they’re stranded if the Daleks confiscate it, which is what happens in the original. But the Daleks are planning to wipe out the Thals, so, really, they should just need to discover that before they leave and get no opportunity to stop it earlier. In a game, we could also throw some additional monsters or other threats into the sequence where the characters travel through the caves; giant spiders and a volcanic fissure were featured in the first draft of the script.
Much of the story as written works, however, because the protagonists are far less well equipped and prepared than the typical group of PCs will be in most other sci-fi genres. It’s hard to see this working in, say, Star Trek, not least because they’d check the radiation levels before beaming down. Other parts of the outline might work if the landing party are somehow isolated from their starship or, in a more typical sci-fi RPG, if the story results from a small spaceship (say, a Traveller Far Trader) being damaged and forced to land so that the PCs had to seek out something in the Dalek City for their repairs.
However, it is possible to use the general setting without the specific plot. There’s enough here to make a decent sandbox without any railroading and it’s possible, for example, to have the PCs meet up with the Thals early on and join them on their expedition, facing mutant monsters along the way before they reach the Dalek City and have to decide what to do. The exploratory nature of the scenario does require that the planet be a mystery, however, which may be tricky in some SF settings. In a one-off scenario, the PCs could even be the Thals, although, to get a decent mix of playable characters you’d probably want to tone down the pacifism in this case.
Admittedly, even scrubbing some of the serial numbers off, it’s likely to be clear what you’re doing. While the basic concept of a Dalek (‘small mutant peddling around in a miniature tank’) would work in most SF settings, it’s still likely to be recognisable as what it is.
A more useful avenue then, and one that doesn’t rely, as this does, on the Daleks’ villainy being at least partially ambiguous to begin with, is to see what else we can do with the setting as written. In a sense, every other Dalek story in the show’s history is a sequel to this one but few have re-used the initial concepts so directly. We could, in other words, write a scenario that has the PCs visiting some other part of Skaro and/or visiting the world years or decades after this one.
The Daleks are defeated at the end of the story when their travel machines are immobilised, and, since they contain essential life support, the implication is that they all die. There are at least two ways around this. Firstly, there could well be other Dalek outposts elsewhere on the planet which, by every indication, has a land area at least equivalent to that of Earth. Assuming that there are no others anywhere else would be like assuming that, since you only met one group of X on a post-apocalyptic trip from San Francisco to New York, there can’t be any X alive in Tanzania.
Probably such outposts are small, but since we never directly face an army of hundreds of Daleks in the original story and we’re scaling this for a group of PCs anyway, that’s a good thing.
Secondly, there could be deeper levels beneath the ones we see that hold further Daleks in suspended animation, due to insufficient resources for keeping everyone active at the same time. The Thals will surely want to explore the abandoned city to uncover its mysteries, only to discover they aren’t as alone as they’d hoped. This, in fact, is the plot of the audio story Return to Skaro, which could easily serve as inspiration for a scenario if the players are unfamiliar with it.
Rules
While this would change if you want to stick to the technology seen on screen, rather than what was intended in the script, the UWP for Skaro in Traveller would be something like
I’ve described Daleks in rules terms elsewhere, but what about the Thals? It’s unlikely the PCs will want to fight them, but they might use them as useful allies in dangerous situations, as they do in the story. So we’ll probably want at least some outline stats for them. Their physical perfection is perhaps best reflected in high attributes that reflect physical stamina and beauty (if such exist in the game system). Being farmers in a comparatively non-mechanised society they will be stronger than the average 21st century human, too.
Set against that is their pacifism, and the resulting lack of any combat skills beyond the minimum that a system will provide for somebody so physically fit – so for instance, very little in BRP, but quite a bit more in GURPS. Aside from agricultural skills, which are unlikely to crop up, their long trek at least indicates decent survival skills, basic craftsmanship, and some skill at navigation. In the story, Temmosus has some leadership and oratory skills (not that they do him any good) and Dyoni has knowledge skills that include, as a minimum, history.
A key rules issue that does arise if we follow the original is the radiation poisoning. Certainly, we could ignore this element, since it’s not mentioned again in future stories. But it can serve as a ticking time-bomb sort of threat, even in stories where the PCs are initially more prepared – they somehow lose access to their anti-radiation drugs (or other equipment) and face the challenge of either escaping or getting more before they face the inevitable.
In the real world, radiation exposure at moderate to high doses can lead to vomiting, diarrhoea, spontaneous bleeding, and hair loss… things we probably wouldn’t want to focus on too much in a game. But at lower doses, below about 2 Grays, the symptoms are not that far from what we see in the show: feeling weak and generally fatigued, perhaps with a mild headache and, yes, to be fair, vomiting still isn’t that unusual.
Some sci-fi systems, such as GURPS and Savage Worlds, already have rules for this, and in 5E it’s a clear example of something like “make a CON roll against difficulty 15 every 6 hours and suffer a level of fatigue if you fail”. In other systems, we may be able to treat it as a slow-acting poison or a disease that targets general fitness (usually the equivalent of a CON stat). In most cases, we’d want anti-radiation drugs or other measures to be very effective, at least against the doses encountered throughout an adventure.
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