Where & When
The first part of the story is set ten million years in the future, on a vast spaceship travelling between the stars. The second half takes place on the planet Refusis II, seven centuries after the first. This is apparently a very long way from Earth, perhaps not even in our galaxy, although we don’t have any specifics.
Setting
The spaceship in the story is not named in the first part of the story, although by the second, the crew have adopted the name of ‘The Ark’ given to it by Dodo in the first episode. Presumably, it had a name prior to this, but perhaps it wasn’t as easy to remember, and didn’t stand the test of seven centuries of travel.
Regardless, Dodo gives it that name because it is carrying the last surviving remnant of humanity away from the Earth before it is destroyed by the expansion of the sun – something that, allowing for the limited special effects of the day, we later see happening. This, of course, presents some problems with the dating, both from real science and from facts that will be established in later stories by different writers.
In fact, the sun will not become a red giant for another five billion years – the date correctly given in The End of the World – and even then, it won’t immediately destroy the Earth, although it’s thought that that will happen eventually. To fit this story in with the one from the modern series, therefore, we either have to assume that the apparent destruction of the Earth in The Ark is misleading, or that the Doctor has miscalculated how far ahead the “57th Segment of Time” is. Most fans tend to assume the former, which is certainly an option. In the latter case, however, this story would have to be about one of the last evacuation events immediately before The End of the World, which would take place while the Ark is leaving the solar system.
A third possibility in a game is to move the story to a different time period altogether. Specifically, we know from the stories The Ark in Space and The Beast Below that the Earth was temporarily abandoned due to massive solar flares just a few thousand years into the future and that fleets of giant ships were used in the effort. While this doesn’t fit with the story as broadcast, it doesn’t require any alteration to the core plot, and we could tie things together by setting this story on one of those ships, rather than keeping it millions (or billions) of years away.
We never get a complete view of the Ark from the outside, and we don’t know exactly how large it is – although it’s clearly extensive. Perhaps its most notable feature is that it includes a module housing a jungle filled with tropical wildlife. This is itself big enough for it not to be initially obvious to the protagonists that that’s what it is, and for travel through it to be more convenient with a wheeled buggy than simply walking. Dodo initially mistakes it for Whipsnade, a safari park in southern England with an area of about 2.4 km² (1 square mile), and that seems like a fair estimate for its minimum size.
The soil is not especially deep, although there must be some allowance for tree roots, so perhaps those are planted in artificial pits. Light is provided by what’s described as a glowing metal roof, rather than by strip lights or the like. This must be controlled somehow since there would have to be an artificial nighttime to avoid distressing the wildlife. Mistaking it for Whipsnade also implies that it isn’t swelteringly hot and humid, as one might expect for a jungle, but it’s still likely to be warmer than typical room temperature.
The animal life is varied, including both Amazonian and Asian animals, and presumably some from other tropical regions as well. That it includes what must be a breeding population of elephants implies it may be even bigger than we might assume, unless some are miniaturised until needed.
On the other hand, if we were really ten million years in the future, we would expect animals to have evolved from their present form into something different. Not radically different, to be sure, but not today’s species either. Ten million years in the past, while elephants existed, we would be before the first mammoths, let alone any of the modern species, and the same would surely be true the same distance into the future – so elephants, yes, something exactly like Asian elephants, no. (Obviously, one could just ignore this, since humans still look human, which presumably wouldn’t really be the case, either).
In addition to the habitation section, we are told that the Ark also has a module with ‘cultivated lands’ which must help provide food for both the crew and the animals. In the TV serial, there is no indication of anything else, but the novelisation includes both a polar and a desert habitat. Temperate forests would also seem a logical candidate to include, and a saltwater aquarium would make sense if we’re trying to preserve as wide a range of Earthly life as possible.
The human crew are referred to as ‘Guardians’. We are told that there is essentially no redundancy among them, making them a skeleton crew sufficient to fly and maintain the ship, but not to account for significant misfortune – such as an unexpected disease outbreak. The ship is, however, clearly a generation ship, not least because we do see children at one point.
The Guardians are very hierarchical, granting the Commander near absolute power. Punishments are harsh, with minor infractions resulting in the crew member being placed into suspended animation and death as the only alternative option for anything more serious. The Commander is assisted by a Deputy and by a Chief Controller. The latter appears to be the pilot, but he also acts as a lawyer, so his general job description may be broader than that.
We also see engineers and doctors among the crew. There are probably other scientists, but there do not appear, for example, to be any specific security staff. What Mellium’s job on the Ark might be is never explained; in a game, we could easily assume she’s an engineer or a zookeeper, but the ‘60s TV serial may just have intended her to raise the children.
The Guardians wear light clothing made of loose strips of fabric over a pair of shorts and (for the women) a crop top. This supports the idea that the ship's interior is warm – although if there is a polar habitat, thicker clothing must also be available.
That the ship is a generation ship is a concept that fits well with science fiction in general, but is harder to account for in the Doctor Who universe. The voyage from Earth to Refusis takes 700 years, but we know from stories set far earlier that starships can travel halfway across the galaxy in just a few days. Similar questions may arise if we transplant the story to another setting, since, unless it’s specifically designed for this sort of thing, any SFRPG setting is going to include efficient FTL travel of some kind.
True, there is some indication of technological collapse in the time between the flight of the Ark and the present day; we are told that ‘much knowledge was lost’ during the Primal Wars of the 10th Segment of Time, whatever those may be. Maybe the sheer size of the ship limits what the technology of the day can achieve, perhaps even forcing it to travel at sublight speeds.
If the maximum speed is, say, 0.999 c, for example, then, allowing for sufficiently rapid acceleration and deceleration, they could travel almost 700 light years in that time… which, considering that our galaxy is about 90,000 light years across, isn’t excessively far. If they do have FTL drive, but the size of the ship restricts them to even 100 times the speed of light, Refusis could still plausibly be in our galaxy. And, for all we know, it isn’t.
For what it’s worth, we know that the Ark has to make ‘refuelling pauses’ at regular intervals. That might not be a literal pause if it’s a sublight ship, just using a magnetic scoop to pick up hydrogen as it passes through a nebula. But, if it is FTL, then perhaps it has to drop out of hyperspace or otherwise reach sublight speeds in order to refuel, something that would also slow it down, and that might be due to large size and/or forgotten technology.
This does, however, raise another question. Refusis is, supposedly, the only world known to the science of the day with the same conditions as Earth. In the Doctor Who universe and most SF RPG settings, that’s implying some very narrow constraints on what counts as ‘the same’. Multiple habitable worlds obviously exist in the Milky Way in the DW universe because we’ve seen them. Perhaps, as with New Earth in the Tenth Doctor story of the same name, they’re looking for something that’s very similar indeed. (In fact, with a bit of tweaking, if we’re going with the 5 billion AD date, we could say, in our game, that Refusis is New Earth).
Or maybe they’re a weird religious or political movement that wants to live in isolation, well away from the other off-world colonies that surely exist by this time.
The concept of a giant spaceship fleeing the dying Earth won’t work in most ongoing sci-fi games that don’t involve time travel. However, we can still use the same general idea if we’re willing to replace the Guardians with an alien race, especially in a setting like Star Trek, where most aliens are humanoid. In many settings, this also makes it easier to justify the ship being sublight.
If we take the calculation above about the ship travelling at relativistic STL speeds, then it could be from anywhere up to 700 light years (214 parsecs) away. That’s about five sectors in Traveller, which would only just place the origin point outside of known space if Refusis is in either the Spinward Marches or the Solomani Rim. That’s less of a problem if Refusis is close to the map edge (in the Vargr Extents or Julian Protectorate, say) but, otherwise, we might want to up the travel time. One advantage is that, if the Ark is STL, we’re not having to introduce a new Major Race.
In Star Trek, it’s a lot easier to justify, at least in a game focused on exploration rather than operating in the heart of the Federation. In fact, encountering a homeless alien race travelling between the stars in search of a new planet is the sort of story that would be entirely in-genre. Most other settings have at least some unexplored section of the galaxy from which a non-human Ark could have hailed.
The other major factor in the setting, however, is the presence of the Monoids. This alien race fled the death of their own homeworld to reach Earth, so they are presumably intelligent and technologically advanced. But there’s little sign of that in the story, especially in the first half. The Guardians employ them for menial labour; they may not technically be slaves, but the difference arguably isn’t that great.
The Monoids are not capable of speech, communicating with humans through sign language. That this is later fixed by providing them with ‘voice boxes’, however, implies that speech is not entirely alien to their biology. For instance, we might argue that they communicate ultrasonically, and the voice box is picking that up and translating it into English (or whatever the Guardian’s language is at this remote time). It’s worth noting, however, that the Expanded Universe provides a backstory for the Monoids in which a race of psychic aliens somehow removed their capacity for speech; in this case, the voice box may be wired into the Monoids to pick up nerve signals.
The vast majority of people on the Ark are miniaturised and carried in stasis. We’re told that this is the entire population of Earth, although, in a game, the accuracy of that will depend on how exactly we interpret the departure. If we replace the Guardians with a race of aliens lacking FTL travel, however, it becomes entirely plausible.
The miniaturised passengers are described as ‘microcell’ sized, which we can infer to mean smaller than a typical human cell, so perhaps no more than a micrometre. They are stored in life support trays placed in cabinets, with each cabinet of 36 trays able to hold approximately one million people. (Likely, the exact capacity is a multiple of 36… say, 972,000 with 27,000 in each tray). The trays are arranged in three columns, two of which are marked with the symbols for ‘male’ and ‘female’, although why you’d need to segregate them is unclear. The symbol on the third column is obscure, but it seems most likely that it represents the Monoids, meaning that the humans outnumber them by about two to one.
The second half of the story deals with the Ark’s arrival at Refusis. By this time, the Monoids have overthrown the humans, keeping them as slaves. All but one of the slaves we see work in the kitchens, which are also their sleeping quarters. Food is prepared by adding small capsules to bowls of nutrient broth, which then magically turns into a suitable comestible – functionally, this is a Star Trek replicator, even if it doesn’t operate the same way. The one exception, regarded as a collaborator by his fellows, is a personal servant working directly with the Monoid overseers.
This section of the story makes no mention of any of the animals previously seen on the Ark and, perhaps more significantly, there are no longer any human children in evidence. It may be that the Monoids are restoring people from the miniaturisation banks rather than allowing them to breed, but if not, there must be more to the slave crew than we see. For instance, there might be humans elsewhere working on the engines or other maintenance duties under close supervision to prevent sabotage.
Even now that they have language, the Monoids do not use personal names, only referring to each other by numbers that they handily write on their sashes. The highest number we see is 77, so there are at least that many – far more than are ever onscreen, due to the obvious limitations of a TV budget. It’s plausible that, by this point, the non-miniaturised Monoids outnumber the enslaved Guardians, although, if so, it doesn’t seem to be by much.
The descent to the planet is made by 4-man travelling capsules that probably have limited manoeuvrability or control but are at least capable of taking off repeatedly and flying to and from the ship. The view of the hangar bay on the Ark only shows four launcher capsules, although, since all the Monoids come down to the surface, there are probably more. So far as we can tell, the capsules are heavily automated and don’t require a skilled pilot (although, to be fair, Steven is a skilled pilot, so we don’t know that for certain). They also hold a radio for contacting the Ark.
We can’t say too much about Refusis as a setting, beyond the fact that it’s similar enough to Earth that the Guardians felt it was a perfect home for them. The landing site is a temperate forest with mountains in the distance, but if the planet is as Earth-like as we are told, this is just one environment among many. The Refusians have helpfully provided somewhere for the arrivals to stay; it’s described as a ‘castle’, although that’s probably meant to conjure up something more like a French chateau than an old Norman fortress.
Scenario
The biggest obstacle to running the story as written in an SF RPG that doesn’t include time travel is the 700-year jump in the middle. If we do have time travel, even if it’s an unusual occurrence, as in Star Trek, it may not be a problem, but otherwise, you’re left with running at least one half of the adventure as a one-off, ignoring that half altogether, or placing the two parts in different settings.
If we’re going to cut one half out, in most games, the first one is the obvious candidate. Here, our protagonists are introduced to the general setting but don’t actually do much beyond introducing a plague and then finding the cure. Keeping this makes the most sense for a game in which a medical race against the clock is a normal part of the genre… which, in fairness, can fit with some Star Trek episodes.
Even so, we would probably want to introduce some additional crises around the sickness, such as having the PCs struggling to save individual plague victims even as they’re trying to come up with an overall cure. Non-medical characters get the opportunity to defend themselves in the trial, although, without additional plot elements, combat-based PCs won’t get much to do.
A question here is where the plague comes from. Fortunately, even in a different setting, we may not need to change the original too much; if the crew of the Ark are aliens, it’s entirely plausible that they’re susceptible to some minor terrestrial illness. Having said that, stating that one of the PCs, or a supporting NPC, has a cold is going to ring alarm bells for most players – it’s the sort of thing that’s normally ignored in-game, so why is the GM mentioning it now? The last thing we want them to do is take sensible precautions and circumvent the plot.
Here, the answer is to have the mystery pathogen be entirely harmless to humans so that not only do the PCs not notice it’s there, but any normal screening processes they might go through before visiting an alien ship won’t pick it up. This also makes it harder to find the cause of the plague, so that the players might even wonder for a while if its arrival isn’t a coincidence. (And maybe it is… but it’s a lot more fun having the PCs defend themselves against accusations of bringing a deadly pathogen on board when they really have). Possibilities include Corynebacterium and Staphylococcus epidermidis, both of which are part of a healthy human skin microbiome, but which can cause disease in those who are immunocompromised and, for all we know, could have drastic effects on imaginary humanoid aliens.
Most PCs would probably want to explore a vast alien spaceship that’s turned up on their doorstep, and any exploratory or defence agencies they might work for almost certainly would. But without the benefit of a randomly travelling TARDIS conveniently landing wherever the plot is this week, there is a question of how they find out about it in the first place.
The answer to that will depend on the details of the wider campaign setting. In Traveller, a sublight ship in deep interstellar space is probably very hard to detect, but one entering the Federation in Star Trek might be easier, especially if it skirts the edge of somewhere heavily monitored like the Neutral Zone.
On the other hand, if we’re dealing with the second half of the story, the ship has to be near its intended destination, which ideally should be as much a mystery to the PCs as to the crew of the Ark. This makes the story work best for a campaign that’s already focussed on exploration and is set in largely uncharted space. We might have to justify why the Guardians are travelling such a long way to get to Refusis since, in most campaign settings, habitable worlds are reasonably common. This may come down, as noted above, to them being particularly picky.
At any rate, the second half of the story concerns the arrival at the Ark’s destination, and the fight to free the Guardians from captivity and from (eventually) going down with their ship when the Monoids sabotage it. If we’ve not used the first half of the story, we’d need to explain the backstory of why the Monoids are acting the way they are. An advantage of this, however, is that all the mistreatment has already happened when the PCs turn up. Whereas, if they play the first half, they might try to put a stop to it, since seeing aliens so advanced that they developed the miniaturisation technology being treated as menial flunkies and with paternalistic condescension may raise a few hackles.
Alternatively, if we take both plots but move one to a different setting, we could ignore the Monoids in the plague section, since they’re only there to set up the second half. We would also have to have the two versions of the Ark be significantly different, say by having the first be sublight and the second FTL, among other structural changes, and the Guardian-substitutes being different races. For instance, one of the ships, rather than fleeing a dying planet, might be emigrating from an overcrowded one or even be an exploratory mission that has suffered a mishap.
The concept of a generation ship is one that’s often used in literary science fiction, although it’s less frequently seen in visual media. Stories that deal with them often focus on the initial and/or final phases (as The Ark does) or explore the sweep of history on the ship; obviously, a lot could happen in the 700 years that this particular voyage is supposed to take. Such stories would only be suited to a focused campaign specifically on the subject and would likely require an even broader scope (and perhaps larger ship) than we see here.
However, there are scenario possibilities for visiting PCs beyond what we see here. In a similar vein to the plague plotline in the first half, some critical system could be failing and be located in some area that’s now dangerous to reach and that the Guardians lack the knowledge or equipment to fix. Escaped animals from the habitats are a possibility here and could also provide mini-scenarios of their own without a larger threat to the ship.
If the ship is larger than portrayed here, Guardians and/or Monoids could have split into rival factions that need to be reconciled (or eliminated…) to get the Ark back on its way. Or the ship could have sustained some damage that can only be repaired with assistance from the wider civilisation of the setting… the Federation might help out of general goodwill, but it’s harder to see the same being true of the Imperium or some of its counterparts elsewhere.
There are also possibilities around the final destination. The Ark might come across some other suitable planet along the way, or one that’s inferior to Refusis but ‘good enough’ that some of the crew want to get off. This creates a problem similar to the ‘irreparable damage’ one if they take all the landing craft, but even if they don’t, there’ll either be a wild planet to tame or an inhabited planet to convince to take in refugees from an unknown alien race.
The same can be true if we do reach Refusis. In the original story, the Refusians are oddly happy to have millions of people suddenly arrive on their planet and even provide them with ready-made living quarters. But what if they didn’t? And what if they do, but are unaware of some vital human or Monoid requirement? Or just get irritated with the colonists when they turn out not to be able to settle their differences after all? The latter, in particular, provides a potential way to use the setting after the events of the TV serial have concluded. It’s also possible to envisage some situation that might require people to make a return trip to a now-abandoned and decaying Ark in orbit to retrieve something from an environment that’s now hazardous.
Rules
The tech level of the Ark is debatable, since it doesn’t fit into the usual vision of a space opera setting that SF RPGs tend to employ. On the one hand, it could be sublight, which in most settings means it’s only one level or so above 21st-century technology. That’s 9 in GURPS and Traveller, or 6 in Doctors & Daleks. On the other hand, there is the miniaturisation technology and the magically replicating food, which implies something much higher, possibly even off the normal scale. We may be better off handwaving that away and using the lower TL for most purposes. On the other hand, if the ship is FTL and merely travelling from a very, very, long way away, then there’s less of a discrepancy, and we just want to make sure we pick a TL that won’t unbalance the campaign.
The miniaturisation itself probably doesn’t require any specific rules; the device either does what it’s supposed to or it doesn’t, and any character who is miniaturised is going to be out of action for the duration anyway.
The plague may be a different matter, although here, if we’re following the original plot, we have the advantage that the PCs should be immune to it, so we don’t need to go into the detail of dice rolls to resist or whatever. Which is just as well since, as depicted, it proves fatal very rapidly. It does whatever the plot requires and can be fixed with whatever Medicine or Biology skills would normally be used to do so in the game system.
Similarly, we may not need detailed ship statistics for the Ark since it’s unlikely to be involved in space combat or a chase. If the game does require statistics, though, it’s immense. Using our guess above of each habitat being a square mile or so in area and allowing for, say, five habitats around a central core, we have an overall diameter about twice that of Deep Space 9 or of a typical Imperial Star Destroyer.
This is a Scale of 9 in Star Trek Adventures or Size Modifier +19 in GURPS. It’s harder to work out in Traveller because a lot depends on the overall shape, but it’s probably at least 32,000,000 tons… hardly the Death Star, but still quite a lot.
The landing pods might require some more detail, since a PC may be going to fly one. But they’re functionally just a 4-man shuttlecraft, so it may be simplest to use whatever the statistics are for a standard one of those.
The whole point of travelling to Refusis is that it’s extremely similar to Earth (assuming that the Guardians in our game are human) so the physical parameters of that are easy to calculate. Since it’s supposed to be uninhabited, star atlases wouldn’t say anything about the population, but if they were accurate, the Traveller UWP would be something like E-867426-6.
As a species, Monoids are slower and less agile than humans, due to short legs and flippers on their feet. The lack of depth perception due to only having one eye would further reduce their Dexterity in systems that don’t have specific rules for this, as GURPS or Savage Worlds do. In other respects, their statistics are probably similar to humans, beyond being naturally mute. In many systems, we might want to compensate for these disadvantages somehow, with some boost to technical expertise making the most sense.
5E: -2 DEX, Proficiency with technical skills, size Medium, 20 ft. movement
BRP: +10% to Repair and Technical skills, -10% to Energy Weapons, Firearms, and Throw, Move 8
Savage Worlds: Reduced Pace (as a dwarf), Mute, One Eye, Outsider (Minor), Mr. Fix It
GURPS:
• Early [-45]: Move -2, Artificer+1, Mute, One Eye, Social Stigma (second-class citizen)
• Late [-15]: Move -2, Artificer +1, One Eye
As energy beings, the Refusians don’t require physical statistics, and, unlike many such beings in science fiction, they appear to have only human-level intelligence. They are, however, powerfully telekinetic, being able to lift objects weighing several tons and cause a landing pod to explode spontaneously. How this would best be handled is likely to vary significantly between game systems.
Finally, we can address the only weapons in the story, the ‘heat prods’ used by the Monoids in the second half. These are short-range energy weapons that are also capable of being used hand-to-hand on a low setting.
Savage Worlds
Range Damage AP RoF Shots Min ST Weight
- 1d6 2 1 40 d4 4
5/10/20 3d6 2 1 20 d4 4
GURPS
Damage Acc Range Weight RoF Shots ST Bulk Rcl
2d(2) burn - 1 5 1 40(5) 6 -3 1
4d(2) burn 6 15/30 5 1 20(5) 6 -3 1
BRP
Base Dmg Attk Special Range Hnds HP S/D Mal Ammo Enc
20% 1D6 1 - Med. 2 16 6/6 99-00 40 1.2
20% 2D6 1 impale 30 2 16 6/6 99-00 20 1.2
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