Where & When
The exact date is never given in the story, but we do see an old 2164 calendar, so it’s no earlier than that. While there is some wiggle room depending on exactly how old the calendar is, based on a line in a later story, fan consensus generally takes the year as being 2167. The story is initially set in London and later moves to Bedfordshire.
Setting
The story is set ten years after the beginning of the titular invasion, when the Daleks bombarded the Earth with a fake meteor storm that turned out to be carrying a deadly plague. Even in the richer parts of the world, a significant proportion of the population was wiped out before a vaccine and/or cure was developed – so much so that, even in London, the authorities had to remind people not to dump bodies in the Thames. We don’t know by how much the population was reduced, or, for that matter, what it was before the outbreak, but the approximately 50% death toll of the Black Death may be a valid benchmark.
Whatever the effect on the population, this led to a societal breakdown that the Dalek invasion force then took advantage of. We’re told that New York, among other cities, was “destroyed”, likely as retaliation for some resistance to the invaders on the part of the United States. Once the planet was secured, it’s implied that most of the invasion force left, leaving behind a smaller team to subdue any remaining resistance and conduct the mining operations that prompted the conquest. This, apparently, is why they need the robomen to assist them in their rule of the planet; the Daleks themselves aren’t numerous enough.
At least in Britain, the effects of the plague and subsequent conquest include the abandonment of London and other population centres. Most of the city stands empty, with weeds growing everywhere, although most buildings look to be largely intact. For some reason, the protagonists are unable to hear any birdsong; a lack of human-created refuse might be bad for feral pigeons, but you’d think it would be a net positive for most other wildlife. We also know that alligators escaped from London Zoo and established a breeding population in the sewers, so there must be something for them to eat down there.
So far as we know, the only inhabitants of the city are the resistance fighters and ‘scavengers’, many of them also hiding in the sewers to stay away from Dalek patrols. To be fair, ‘scavengers’ could just be what the resistance fighters call anyone that isn’t part of their movement, given that there is no functioning economy. It’s implied that rural areas, and perhaps even medium-sized towns, are much better off; the only one we see has a very limited population, but this is probably a local situation, due to the need for an extensive slave labour force nearby.
We can reasonably assume that the technological level of the world was beyond our own when the attack started, since it is almost 150 years in our future. “Moving pavements” are mentioned, although we don’t see even ruined ones, so perhaps they were restricted to key shopping areas such as Oxford Street. But whatever it may have been beforehand, by the time of the story, it’s clear that the electrical supply grid is down along with many other parts of the technological infrastructure. We’re clearly in a “post-apocalyptic” environment, with all of the limitations that that implies.
There are four primary locations in the London segment of the story. The TARDIS lands at the base of a Victorian-era bridge over the Thames, with some warehouses nearby. Battersea Power Station is visible from an upper floor of the warehouse, but not from the base of the bridge, suggesting that it’s most likely to be Vauxhall Bridge (although, for what it’s worth, the relevant outdoor scenes were filmed at Hammersmith, further upriver). This connects the Vauxhall and Pimlico areas of London and, in the modern world, is close to residential districts, many of them with very expensive Georgian-era buildings, as well as the Tate art gallery.
The second location is the resistance base, which is obviously harder to place. Our only real clue is that Barbara has to cross Westminster Bridge to get from it to Whitehall, so not only is that the closest bridge (unless one of the others has collapsed, which is not impossible) but the base is south of the Thames – and apparently not very far away. It’s therefore probably in either Lambeth, the South Bank, or Elephant and Castle. These are predominantly residential areas, including high-rise flats, although there are also hotels, theatres, art galleries, a university, and some older historical buildings.
The third location is the landing site for the Dalek saucer, stated to be at “Chelsea Heliport”. No such place has been built as of 2024, but Ian estimates it to be somewhere near Sloane Square. Unless buildings were demolished to make way for it, Sloane Square itself is probably just a little too small for a heliport, but such places don’t need to be large, so the nearby Lennox Gardens might do.
Finally, there’s the Civic Transport Museum that the resistance uses as a meeting point in the event they become separated. There is a London Transport Museum in Covent Garden, but this didn’t exist in 1964 when the serial was filmed. Judging from the route the characters take to get there, the fictional one is probably in Kensington, perhaps near the Natural History Museum. Having said which, it changes almost nothing to use the location of its real counterpart instead.
For that matter, even beyond switching around some of the locations, there is no reason, in a game, why the story has to be set in London. Arguably, it’s more effective if the city is one that the players are familiar with, with some key landmarks damaged or laid waste and others standing defiantly in the near-abandoned streets.
In the serial, we’re told that the Dalek force on Earth is relatively small, focussing on the key inhabited areas and ignoring smaller towns and villages. The initial parts of the story work better in a large, now emptied, city, but that still gives plenty of options. It could be New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Tokyo or any of several large, regionally important, cities. For that matter, if their mining operations need to be in a particular place, it could be somewhere short of a true metropolis (Reykjavik, Auckland, Regina, etc.) where part of the initial mystery is why the Daleks are so interested in that part of the world when you’d think they’d care more about Moscow or Beijing.
Speaking of the rest of the world, we know that the entire Earth is under Dalek rule, although more rural or backwoods areas are potential refuges, given the limited size of Dalek and roboman patrols. In the case of Britain, for instance, we’re told that the south coast of England is relatively safe and that Cornwall is largely deserted. Setting the story in such places limits what PCs can do, other than hide, but they could serve as a home base… and one that must be protected, lest the Daleks retaliate against it once they realise saboteurs are laying low there.
Further afield, places that are remote in the real world would still be so in this era, as long as nobody draws the attention of Dalek saucers. This applies to much of rural America, for example, as well as Australia, Canada, and so on. We’re told that the plague before the invasion particularly affected Africa, South America, and southern Asia, but the resistance fighters in London say that they have lost contact with an ‘Africa Group’ so there is (or was until recently) some activity there, and likely elsewhere, too.
The references to the parts of the world decimated by the plague are doubtless meant to reflect the Third World – places the writer assumed would be particularly ill-equipped to handle a pandemic that’s apparently far deadlier than any real one has proved to be since the Black Death. Thus, it likely isn’t meant to include, say, Japan and Korea, and probably not China either. But it’s easy enough to ignore or minimise this if one wants to set a story somewhere like Singapore or Rio… or not, if population destruction will aid the post-apocalyptic feel.
There’s also a question about what might be happening away from Earth. We’re told that an “astronaut fair” in London was a major event, so space travel must still have been relatively novel at the time. The woman who says this is in her sixties, however, so she may be referring to events decades prior to the invasion. Indeed, another character leaps to the conclusion that the protagonists must have come down from a “moon station”, so those clearly exist, and are presumed to be both functional (and hence, self-sufficient) and cut off from Earth events.
Going purely from this, and earlier serials, there’s no evidence that permanent human habitation has spread beyond the moon – the only prior serial in which it has done so is set six centuries later. However, later serials will establish not only that there are significant bases elsewhere in the solar system by the late 21st century, but that humanity discovered faster-than-light travel around 2100. If so, there are surely off-world colonies around other stars by this point, although even more cut-off than the moonbases and without any ability to fight back to regain the homeworld.
The second half of the serial is set in Bedfordshire. In the present day, this is a predominantly agricultural county, although more densely populated than most, with a few large towns but no true cities. In the story, however, much of it has been laid waste by the Dalek’s mining operation, although at least some settlements remain on the outskirts and we see both collaborators and a black marketeer among the non-enslaved populace – the latter implying at least some kind of informal supply network.
With due respect to its real-world inhabitants, there’s nothing exceptional about Bedfordshire that means it can’t be replaced with any other rural or wilderness area that happens to be near a city standing in for London in a game. For instance, part of the initial mystery may be that it lacks any obvious mineral resources, unless you count quarried gravel and clay for making bricks. Contrary to what we see in the story, in the early 21st century about a quarter of the population is non-white.
The centre of Bedfordshire is about 40 miles (65 km) or so from the centre of London. About a third of the journey there involves crossing the outer parts of the metropolitan area, after which one has to pass through Hertfordshire, a densely settled county incorporating a significant chunk of the London commuter belt. In the serial, Barbara tries to get there by driving up the M1 or (more likely) nearby backroads to stay out of view. She has to abandon the lorry somewhere near Edgware, a suburb at the northern end of the London conurbation close to the Hertfordshire border. Her plan is to head up through St Albans, presumably entering Bedfordshire somewhere near Luton, although we don’t see the details – nor those of the Doctor and Susan’s route, which may be keeping further from the main roads.
The Daleks govern the planet from their saucers and are clearly very spread out, even allowing for Earth’s reduced population since the plague. Instead, they control the populace through the use of robomen, captured prisoners whose brains they have surgically operated on, implanting circuitry that turns them into wholly obedient slaves. In fact, the robomen are close to being zombies, apparently having no memory of their past lives and no free will. Their headsets allow radio communication with the Daleks, and alert them if the roboman dies or becomes unresponsive.
The control is, however, not permanent, and when it breaks down, the roboman becomes insane and suicidal, not surviving for long. We don’t know how long this takes – and it may vary between individuals – but it does mean that the Daleks require a constant supply of new subjects for conversion. How they are selected is also unclear. High intelligence is, perhaps surprisingly, one desirable trait – perhaps this improves the chances of longer-term survival. Otherwise, you would assume that they want physically fit people who might look intimidating. In the serial, they only pick men, but it’s hard to see why the Daleks would care about that or why the female brain should be any harder to rewire than a man’s; again, it may be an intimidation thing.
The ”robotisation” process is conducted on anaesthetised humans on board the saucers. Although there are clearly control rooms, store rooms, and so forth elsewhere, a portion of the saucer is given over to an open-plan area containing the surgical equipment and surrounded by cells for holding prisoners – whether destined for robotisation, or simply being transported elsewhere. The cells are bare, without even beds nor (so far as one can tell) toilet facilities; they are presumably intended only for short-term use.
Aside from the saucers, the only other Dalek facility indicated in the story is the mine facility in Bedfordshire. This is the base for the Black Dalek, who uses the title ‘Supreme Controller’. Earlier on, we see a black-and-grey striped Dalek who is apparently also an officer, perhaps in charge of the forces local to Britain – or the whole of western Europe, given that there are so few saucers on Earth that they can all be destroyed in a single blast at the climax of the story.
Scenario
As noted above, we can easily swap out London for some other major city without altering any of the key elements of the plot, and it makes sense to do so if the players are more familiar with wherever it might be. The initial part of the scenario consists of the PCs exploring this environment, building up the creepy abandoned nature of what should be a bustling metropolis before encountering the resistance and/or the robomen.
Hopefully, once the players realise the situation, they won’t need to be prevented from fleeing in their original transport without helping out, but it may be useful if they either arrive in search of something specific or have a motive to scope out the place first. This could be as simple as the PCs being explorers hired to map out a previously unknown period of history or an alternate reality but, if it is some specific resource, it need only be one that isn’t trivially available in a post-apocalyptic environment, which could cover a range of things.
The serial as written splits the characters up so that they uncover different elements of what’s going on, only re-uniting towards the end. In a game this is unnecessary, and what you have is more of a sandbox. The resistance fighters are out there, the saucer is picking people up to take to the slave mines or turn into robomen, there are patrols to be dodged, and a wide range of potential facilities across any city that might be useful in the fight – if only you can find, and possibly restore, them.
Scavengers are also mentioned in the story, although we don’t see any unless you count the black marketeer. These could be foes for the PCs, although they would probably work best as inconvenient mooks, leaving the real threat to the robomen and their masters. There’s also no reason why the alligators have to stay in the sewers and, if we move the setting from London, other predators such as wolves, cougars, or venomous snakes could have moved into the largely abandoned settlement.
On the other hand, scavengers could be something for the PCs to protect. They’re not actively taking part in the resistance, but if they’re trapped in the city, perhaps because one of them is ill or injured, they will still be hiding from the patrols. Or they could be a mixture, with most of them in need of protection, but one secretly betraying them to the Daleks at some point to save his own skin.
At some point, the PCs have to head out to Bedfordshire. It’s possible, of course, that they will do this anyway if enough hints are dropped that it’s important, or if they uncover direct evidence to that effect. But this needn’t be the case. Another possibility, close to that in the serial, is that they need to go there to rescue someone, either out of simple charity, or because they have some key piece of information or skill that the Daleks are unaware of. That would turn out to be a bust if the target has been robotised, but they may simply be enslaved and, even if not, if the PCs discover what’s really going on, they have a reason to stay and foil the larger Dalek scheme by that point.
This brings us to the biggest weakness in the story if we’re using it in a game with questioning players: the Daleks’ plan is completely bonkers and couldn’t possibly work as described. Dropping even a really big bomb (which it isn’t) into the centre of the Earth isn’t going to hollow out the core, and if it somehow did, the rest of the planet would just crack open. And, if you could avoid all of those problems, we’re told that the Daleks need Earth because of its unique properties… which turns out to be the fact that it has a core, which is anything but unique for a planet of its size. There’s no reason they couldn’t just do the same to Skaro, since they’re unlikely to care much about any environmental effects.
If we ignore that last part, we can perhaps get around the other issues by changing the plan slightly. It’s worth noting here that the surface of Earth’s core is about 2,900 km (1,800 miles) down, which is much further than the shaft could run if it is as described. One could interpret some of the dialogue as implying the existence of a natural fissure deep under Bedfordshire that the Daleks were digging to reach the top of, but this isn’t scientifically possible either. Besides, the surface of the core is about 3,900 °C (7,100 °F) and there’s no way what we see is going to survive that without melting even if the shaft or fissure could stay open against a pressure of 1.37 million atmospheres.
However, an alternative is to argue that they merely want to punch a hole through the crust and drop something into that, with the mine workings serving as a sort of exhaust vent. It’s still crazy but perhaps not quite as crazy. And maybe they need several such holes, each with an FTL drive placed in them, that eventually link up to move the whole planet – thus allowing for the existence of mine sites on other continents as well. In this case, we need a reason for all the saucers to gather at one site, since that’s how they’re eventually destroyed in the story, or, alternatively, for some other way for the entire invasion force to be driven off.
Although perhaps just blowing up their headquarters might be enough to do that, especially if it has some vital resource that the saucers need.
We can also use the setting for entirely new stories. In-universe, the occupation lasts for close to a decade, so there must have been plenty of other things going on during that time, and a randomly travelling time machine is surely as likely to arrive in the 2160s as in the 1960s. So we could assume that the events of the TV serial unfold as they do, but that our story is set somewhere else, and perhaps a few years earlier.
For instance, even if we keep the site of the Dalek mines in Bedfordshire, there is still plenty of room for post-apocalyptic action and rebellion against pepper-pot tyrants in other parts of the world, since they must have several bases. While they may be mobile in their saucers, the Daleks still need to regularly visit population centres to maintain their stock of robomen and to ensure that nobody is organised enough to effectively resist them. They may also have mines or other facilities elsewhere on Earth, stripping the planet of its resources. Any of these could provide opportunities for smaller-scale stories against the larger backdrop, especially if the players are aware of the eventual outcome – not every WWII story has to be about the fall of Berlin, after all.
Strictly speaking, we don’t even need to involve the Daleks in any given story. Especially in more backwoods areas – such as rural Wyoming, say – there could well be many of the more typical post-apocalyptic threats, such as bandits or single-town dictatorships. Realistically, the Daleks can’t be everywhere, and the collapse of regular human society will inevitably have its own consequences, as seen in numerous other works of fiction and in some specifically designed RPGs, such as Aftermath!, The Morrow Project, and Mutant Year Zero.
On the other hand, those have their own, rather different premises, and the primary draw of a post-alien invasion setting is that the PCs will, indeed, face aliens… even if we replace the Daleks with something else, in the style of V. (A Star Trek analogy would be setting a game on Bajor during the Cardassian occupation, although that would be an odd choice for the franchise and wouldn’t quite have the same vibe).
Another, perhaps less depressing, option is to continue where the original story leaves off, and deal with the rebuilding of the shattered Earth society. Here, it should go without saying that some Daleks will turn out to have survived, along with the occasional slyther or other alien menace, and that some former collaborators or criminals will try to take advantage of events for their own gain. In fact, this precise setting has been explored at least twice in the spin-off media: the generally unpopular novel Legacy of the Daleks and the somewhat better audio After the Daleks.
Rules
In addition to the Daleks, we need statistics for the slyther and for the robomen. The former is only vaguely seen, a large blob-like creature with long eyestalks and numerous clawed appendages. Other than the fact that it’s native to Skaro and carnivorous, we don’t know much about it. Still, we know it’s slow-moving with a thick hide and that it can’t survive being dropped down a deep mineshaft.
The robomen are, for the most part, simply mooks which, in some systems, lowers their individual threat. So all we need are stats for a reasonably fit human with basic combat skills. They are slow-moving and unintelligent but inherently intimidating – apart from lacking any features associated specifically with the undead, the way that zombies are described in many game systems may serve as a template. Most of the ones we see are armed with either batons or whips, but one at the mining camp carries a rifle so firearms are also in use. The latter may be rare because of the limited supply of suitable bullets with all the arms factories out of action.
We’re less likely to need rules for robotisation, since it’s a death sentence. Still, if it is ever employed on an NPC significant enough to have stats beforehand, it would reduce DEX or equivalent by a set amount, while lowering intellectual stats to almost as low as they can go, and adding an intimidation skill if such a thing exists. It’s likely that they are able to ignore significant pain, being little more than automata, so that may boost stats that reflect the ability to take damage and still keep functioning – hit points in 5E, High Pain Threshold in GURPS, or CON in systems like BRP.
Since there is no effective way of fighting them, we probably don’t need stats for the saucers.
One piece of equipment that might be useful to describe, if the story goes in that direction, is Dortmun’s acid bomb. Granted, this doesn’t work against the Daleks, which was the whole point of it, but there’s nothing to stop PCs using it against robomen or other targets if it makes sense to do so. These bombs can be handled as grenades, except that they do acid damage instead of the normal sort for such weapons – if the system specifically has phosphorous grenades, they might be a better fit for modifying than a standard fragmentation grenade.
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