Where & When
The date is specifically stated: the main story takes place between the 12th and 14th July 1966, with the brief final scene six days later, on the 20th. The action is almost entirely confined to the West End of central London, from Bloomsbury to Fitzrovia.
Setting
While the story is set in ‘60s London, this isn’t an essential part of the plot. Indeed, the intended atmosphere is “real world in the modern day”, and the director includes things like street signs in the shots, with no attempt to pretend that we’re anywhere other than the actual filming location. Thus, while one could certainly stick with the setting as presented in the story, it’s also reasonable to argue that we would be hewing closer to the original concept by modifying it.
That doesn’t just apply to shifting the date 60 years to our current time, although that’s part of it. London is meant to be familiar, so that the story is showing us a science fiction threat encroaching on somewhere we know. Since there is little specific about London that directly affects the plot, we can therefore move it to wherever the players would find most familiar.
The main requirements are that the city be large and have a reputation for high technology, so that it’s plausible for WOTAN to have been built there. Within the UK, Manchester and Edinburgh are probably the best candidates, but there are many (arguably better) options for overseas players. In the US, while many cities would work, San Francisco and New York are the leading contenders, while moving further afield, Berlin, Amsterdam, Tokyo, and Seoul are all good fits. Whatever works for your group.
Of course, I can’t cover all of those options here, and even they aren’t exhaustive. So, let’s look at what we have in the serial as broadcast.
The TARDIS lands in Bedford Square, a fenced-off enclosure of trees surrounded by grandiose 18th-century townhouses that are now mostly occupied by offices. This is also where the (fictional) Royal Scientific Club is located, the site of the press conference in the first episode, and Sir Charles’ base from then on.
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The building is an unusually narrow cylinder, around 20 metres (66 feet) in diameter, giving it a particularly distinctive look. In the serial, the room holding WOTAN seems to occupy almost the whole of the cross-section of the cylinder, but, in reality, each floor is a doughnut shape wrapped around a central concrete shaft that contains two high-speed lifts, an emergency stairwell, ventilation ducts, and cabling.
The Tower was originally constructed to hold microwave antennas to transmit and receive telecommunication signals across the surrounding area without losing line-of-sight. Most of the interior held technical equipment for supporting this function, although there were viewing platforms and, famously, a revolving restaurant near the roof with an (at the time) unparalleled view across London.
As its name indicates, it was operated by the General Post Office before its telecommunications arm was split off as the company now called BT.
If we’re moving the setting to another city, we don’t need to ape this unusual structure too precisely, although if some major landmark in the city could plausibly hold a groundbreaking computing facility, go for it. Otherwise, we’re just looking for wherever such a program might be based, preferably in a building that isn’t used for much else, but that isn’t some impenetrable government bunker or the like.
The remaining two locations are the Inferno Club and the warehouse where the first War Machine is constructed. These are both located at Covent Garden, about 1.5 km (1 mile) south of the Tower. At the time of the story, it was a grocery market, but it has since been turned into a more general-purpose shopping centre. It’s no longer a place likely to hold a nightclub, or, indeed, a warehouse (although this may have been different when it was still a market), being surrounded by shops and historical buildings such as the Royal Opera House… but it is in central London, so there are certainly nightclubs within close walking distance.
Since there is nothing particularly special about either the Inferno or the warehouse beyond their proximity to one another, this should also be easy to transplant to another city.
We are told that eleven further War Machines have been constructed at ‘strategic locations’ in a 20-to-30-mile radius of the GPO Tower. This is basically the entire metropolitan area of London, so we really just mean that the locations are dotted across whichever urban sprawl we are using. Having said which, the only other War Machine we see first appears at Charlotte Place, which is less than 1 km (~800-900 yards) away from both the GPO Tower and Bedford Square.
This machine heads south to Battersea, about 3 km (2 miles) away – so likely via Hyde Park Corner, unless it went straight down through the central government district (which you’d think would have been mentioned). Rather than crossing Chelsea Bridge to get there, however, it turns and heads northwest, where it is eventually cornered at Cornwall Gardens in Kensington, an expensive residential district close to the Natural History and Science Museums.
One of the elements of the story is that WOTAN is to be connected to other key computers across the world. A chart on the wall at the press conference lists which ones these are to be, including computers belonging to the Royal Navy, the Royal Air Force, Parliament, and the European Free Trade Association (Britain not being in the EEC/EU at the time). Further afield, it will also hook up to the Telstar satellite communications system, the White House, and the European, American, and Australian rocket launch sites. Six further systems are also listed on the chart, but the camera angle prevents us from seeing what they are.
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| 1 - GPO Tower 2 - Bedford Gardens 3 - Charlotte Place 4 - Covent Garden/Inferno |
If we transplant the story to a modern or near-future setting, however, it’s possible that the players may not find the idea of a worldwide web that computers can connect to inherently sinister. Here, perhaps we can note that WOTAN never gets anywhere near doing this and plans to start wiping out humanity days before it’s due to happen. If we keep the ‘60s setting, it’s potentially alarming, even if only because it’s going to change real-world history, but otherwise we can ignore it without having to change any of the plot.
If we want one, an alternative might be to hint at WOTAN creating an unbeatable computer virus that’s going to spread across the internet and spark a disaster. It probably doesn’t want to bring down the power grid or otherwise damage the infrastructure it relies on (by, say, sparking nuclear war), but there are still plenty of key facilities humans need that it doesn’t. For that matter, it might just want to wipe out all of its potential silicon rivals, something that would still cause plenty of chaos.
It is also possible to use the basic idea in a more traditional science fiction setting. Here, the planet has to have a tech level similar to our own – although it could be a level or so either way, so long as that wouldn’t make sentient AI commonplace. It’s more likely here that WOTAN is the product of some offworld scheme, having been produced with higher technology from elsewhere that the locals don’t fully understand. On the downside, this may be difficult to justify if the world isn’t isolated from the wider galactic community (such as the Imperium), as may WOTAN’s hypnotic abilities if such things aren’t normally a part of the setting.
However, this is less likely to be a problem if we transplant the story to a superhero setting. Fighting off giant robots is entirely in keeping with that genre, and WOTAN’s ability to control minds probably won’t seem particularly strange either. Again, alien technology could have been involved in its creation (something like Marvel’s Kree, perhaps) or it could be down to a single mad genius – who, in this instance, ends up controlled by his creation. Depending on whether we’re “four colour” or “street level”, we may want to beef up the War Machines, as well as providing more defences for the GPO Tower or whatever the equivalent might be in Gotham/New York/Freedom City/etc.
Scenario
In the serial, the Doctor decides to investigate WOTAN because he’s curious and has a feeling that there’s something sinister in the GPO Tower. Assuming none of the PCs have access to precognition, or we don’t just want to have Danger Sense (or equivalent) go off when they’re randomly passing, we’ll need another reason to get them involved.
Fortunately, since WOTAN is supposed to be a major news story, this isn’t difficult. Perhaps the easiest option is to have the PCs be agents of some government authority. This makes it much easier to justify calling in the army in the later sections of the story, if we want to keep that element in. On the other hand, that won’t work if we want to fit this into a campaign where that isn’t already the premise. Here, the PCs could be freelancers employed by somebody suspicious of what’s going on, or just journalists or investigators trying to get some background information. In this case, they may initially suspect Brett, or even Sir Charles, of being up to something sinister when they’re not actually to blame.
After investigating the GPO Tower and probably not finding very much, we need to draw the PCs’ attention to the warehouse where the War Machines are being constructed, since this is where the real action is going to take place. In the serial, this comes about through a chain of events triggered by Dodo spontaneously deciding to go to the Inferno nightclub nearby. We can’t rely on a PC making such a random (if plausible) decision, so we likely need another reason to get the characters there.
A possibility here is to have them need to meet someone at the club, such as an informant, or somebody with security codes that they need to steal. If it’s the former, perhaps WOTAN has been acting strangely before it suddenly goes psychotic, and some technician not in the serial noticed this but was then sidelined. A character standing in for Polly could point the PCs towards the technician and know that they frequent the club.
Once there, we have the part of the story where Dodo is hypnotised by WOTAN. We likely don’t want this to be a PC at this point, but it should be someone the PCs have an interest in. The obvious candidate here is the stand-in for Polly, thus merging her role from the serial with Dodo’s. Bonus points if you can make this character a PC’s romantic interest, whether or not that ends up going anywhere. It’s worth noting that they don’t even need to meet the informant, since they can take the role of the murdered tramp whose death leads them to investigate the area around the club and find the warehouse.
Even if it’s not that, it probably won’t be hard to come up with hints that something suspicious is going on in the neighbourhood. And, once the PCs have found the warehouse, what they then do about it, and about the other eleven sites across the city – whose locations they don’t know – forms the rest of the adventure. The only things we need to throw in at this point are at least one attempt by WOTAN to hypnotise a PC (because that’s part of the fun) and, if appropriate, having the second War Machine go berserk and rampage through Kensington, Pacific Heights, Charlottenburg, or wherever the local equivalent is.
Involvement of the army is optional, depending on what the PCs are likely to achieve by themselves, and how cool it’s going to look.
Rules
Since the setting is, at least by default, simply our present-day reality, there are few rules decisions to be made beyond describing WOTAN and the War Machines. The former is unlikely to need full statistics, but we do need to describe how its mind control works, which, in some systems, might require it to have an Intelligence rating, POW stat, or psychic ability level. In the story, it rarely fails, but Polly partially breaks free of it, and the Doctor resists it altogether, so it isn’t infallible. In a game, we would want to provide some saving throw against the effects – since many systems already have rules for Charm effects or the like, it should just be a matter of setting the target number appropriately.
The War Machines themselves are potentially more complicated, and decisions as to how tough they should be will depend on whether you want to force the army to get involved and how likely it is that the PCs can defeat one without direct combat (as happens in the serial). In the original, however, the War Machines are covered in heavy metal plating that’s probably equivalent to an armoured car but not to a modern tank.
In Savage Worlds, we’re talking a Size of 4 and Toughness 15 (6), but not “Heavy Armour”, while in GURPS, Size would be +3, and it could easily have 30 points of armour. In BRP, it’s about 18 points of armour, and a SIZ of 50 with 45 hit points. In 5E, the armour class will be high, since a few inches of solid steel are clearly more effective than worn plate armour, although this might be offset by the large size and lack of mobility. Deciding how high will depend on the abilities of the PCs – and, again, whether you want them to rely on outside help.
The War Machines are armed with a powerful hammer for close-up combat. This can easily be modelled as the equivalent weapon, perhaps with an extra level or so of damage to reflect the larger size, but mainly affected by the Machine having a strength off the normal human scale. So that’s a minimum strength of 20 in 5E, BRP, or GURPS, or d12+2 in Savage Worlds – and it could plausibly be higher.
For ranged attacks, the War Machines in the serial appear to spray deadly gas at their opponents. In one scene, the gas sets fire to a pile of wooden crates, although how it would do so is unclear. In any event, gas is easily circumvented, so, after the initial surprise, it isn’t much of a threat against a prepared enemy. It would make far more sense, therefore, to arm the Machines with heavy weapons appropriate to the setting; machine guns seem an obvious choice in a modern game. We’re told, incidentally, that the weapons only have a range of 30 feet (10 metres), although this limitation may be due to the sighting mechanisms rather than the nature of the guns. We may wish to change this if there’s a good chance of the PCs sniping at it with powerful weapons at long range, since even in a cluttered urban environment, this really isn’t all that far.
Most notably, however, the War Machines can jam weapons in their vicinity. We see this work on handheld firearms and a tripod-mounted machine gun, but it probably extends to anything with a mechanical firing mechanism, such as anti-tank weaponry that could otherwise penetrate their armour. Trigger mechanisms for grenades and bombs should also be affected to remove that option. In a more futuristic setting, we would likely want to add common beam weapons to that, if there are any.
We probably want this jamming ability to simply work without a roll, forcing the PCs to battle through the armour physically or to use electronic trickery, but there may be some exceptions in certain settings.
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