Where & When
Most of the story takes place on a space station orbiting the Sun between Earth and Venus. No date is given in the serial, although it’s heavily implied to be the mid to late 21st century, when humans have started colonising the solar system, but have yet to develop faster-than-light travel. Any more specific date that we pick will end up contradicting at least one other story somewhere. A later audio story, however, indicated that Zoe joined the TARDIS crew in 2079 and, for lack of anything better, this date is now often accepted as canon.
Setting
The story starts on the Silver Carrier, a 4-man sublight cargo vessel hauling supplies from Earth to Station 5. This type of vessel tends to receive little attention in most SF RPGs, which focus more on FTL starships. (The Expanse would be an exception here, but it doesn’t fit the basic idea of invading alien cyborgs.) However, they should be easy enough to design. In Traveller, for instance, just take the stats of a Beowulf-class free trader, strip out the jump drive, associated fuel tanks, passenger cabins, and low berths, and use the space this frees up to store more cargo.
For that matter, it doesn’t really matter to the larger plot whether or not the ship is sublight. So long as travel between the take-off point and the station isn’t a daily event, the plot would work just as well with an FTL ship hauling cargo from another star system.
When it arrives at the Wheel, the ship is 87 million miles (140 million km or 0.94 AU) off course and 9 weeks overdue at Station 5. This leads the commander of the Wheel to conclude that everyone on board must be dead. Since the possibility of an accident affecting comms and navigation doesn’t occur to him, this may suggest that the life support on the ship doesn’t last that long if it’s occupied.
I’ll also note that the dialogue indicates that the ship didn’t have enough fuel to travel more than 20 million miles when it was last contacted, and therefore must have been refuelled en route. This makes no sense as written, since a vehicle in space only needs fuel to accelerate, decelerate, or change course. So long as it does none of these things, it can travel as far as it likes with the engines switched completely off. Of course, the ship does decelerate when it approaches the Wheel, but it would have to do that anyway, and it has computerised autopilot capability that can operate without human intervention, so that part isn’t remarkable to anyone on the station.
In terms of facilities, as shown in story, the Silver Carrier has only four rooms – the cockpit, engine room, cargo bay, and living quarters. The crew all share a single cabin, with only two beds between the four of them, which they are supposed to alternate using. Food is available in a compressed form, with the flavour adjustable via the dispensing unit. The ship has ‘artificial gravity’ of the near-magical sort that’s standard in most SF RPGs and TV shows, which fits with the level of gravitic technology we see in The Moonbase (likely set around the same time).
Depending on which class of ship we replace it with in an SF RPG, some of the details of the above may have to be changed accordingly.
87 million miles is a long way, even by the standards of the inner solar system – it’s a good deal further away than the Sun would be from the Wheel’s position. It does, however, indicate that Station 5, the intended destination, can’t be too far out – it’s unlikely to be at Mars, for example. Although it’s never stated, it’s perhaps most likely to be in the same orbit as the Wheel itself, but 120 degrees away. But there are other possibilities, such as placing it near Mercury. In any event, it presumably isn’t equipped with what the Wheel has, or there would be little point in the Cybermen diverting the ship in the first place.
The Wheel is officially designated “Station 3”, but the other three (or more) stations that this implies are never mentioned, as they are too far away to affect the plot. It could be that all five stations are ringed around the sun in the same orbit, assisting transit as the relative positions of Earth and Venus change. But it could be that the earliest ones, in particular, are placed somewhere else, and they just kept upping the numbers as they built more without regard for location. Although if so, the third one being where it is implies more of a focus on building stations inside the orbit of Earth than towards the more obvious target of Mars, so perhaps there’s a different numbering system out there.
This brings us to the Wheel itself. The name suggests a ring-shaped station that generates artificial gravity by rotation, but the shape turns out to be a mere coincidence. It consists of a disk-shaped upper portion with a central dome and a long central core surrounded by large struts that project from the underside. This latter portion may contain the power plant and other engineering essentials, since the limited view we see of the station’s layout indicates that all the inhabited parts are in the main disc, with storage tanks and ‘ballast’ occupying the outer rim.
So far as we can tell, gravity is, as on the Silver Carrier, generated by a fictional technology, similar to that which exists in many SF games and space opera settings. Which makes sense, once that technology exists, and gets around some of the problems that would apply to a traditional rotating station that isn’t of exceptional size.
The Wheel orbits the Sun between Venus and Earth, periodically swinging away from one or both planets as it moves along its path at an intermediate speed. (This is why there would likely be other stations in the same orbit, so that at least one is always reasonably close.) According to Zoe, the closest the station ever gets to Venus is 0.26 AU, which is roughly the closest approach that Earth makes. This would place the Wheel in, or at least just inside, Earth’s own orbit, which is hard to make sense of. A GM may therefore choose to move it further in, or have it be on a route to somewhere other than Venus, given that the latter plays no direct role in the plot.
We don’t know the size of the station’s crew; we see a total of 18 characters (including extras), so that’s the minimum, but the total is surely higher than that. They are international in origin, although, unlike those in The Moonbase, they don’t have national emblems on their uniforms. They appear to be civilians, with administrative but not military rank. In this light, we can note that the second-in-command of the station is the medical officer, while the third is a communications and astrogation specialist. Which certainly isn’t the way Starfleet normally organises things.
Apart from Zoe, everyone else we see is either a technician or a security guard, although ‘technician’ would logically cover a range of specialities (electronics, life support, mechanical engineering, gravitics, etc.) The Controller answers to “Earth Central”, but we don’t know whether this is a world government or an international version of NASA.
The Wheel has a wide range of functions, of which the most important is probably as a way station for spaceships travelling between Earth, Venus, and, potentially, Mercury. However, on average, a ship visits only once every one to two weeks, so they are hardly busy on that front. Given the cramped living quarters we see on the Silver Carrier, there are likely decent stopover facilities here, albeit not on the level of Deep Space 9’s promenade. Other functions include a signal-boosting relay for communications, scientific research, and the monitoring of solar flares.
Inside the Wheel, we see the control room and a medical facility, and we are also told that it has a loading bay and at least five airlocks. The room that houses the power unit for the defensive laser (connected, perhaps, to the main power plant beneath) also plays a key role in the story and has a small, unofficial arboretum attached to it, thanks to the chief engineer. The novelisation also mentions a computer room and areas devoted to astronomy and monitoring space weather; given the size of the Wheel, there are clearly many others.
We don’t see much of the area where Zoe works, but it is described as a ‘parapsychology library’. Despite this, it’s actually a laboratory for genetic and astrophysical research, and perhaps other fields too. The name may refer to Zoe herself, who has been trained and raised in a specialist facility isolated from the outside world in order to boost her intelligence and logical thinking skills. The term for this practice in this universe seems to be ‘parapsychology’, although this has a very different meaning in the real 21st century; perhaps it is meant to have changed over the decades. If the City, the organisation responsible for this training, rents out the laboratory in exchange for providing scientific support to the station, this might explain the first half of its name, if not why it’s called a library.
Here, we can also note that we’re told that everyone working in space has to take drugs that protect them against being mentally controlled by outside forces. Why this should be is never explained, although it implies that there must be a very real concern about the possibility. In any event, it proves useless against the Cybermen, who use a novel (to humans) technique that the drugs don’t protect against. However, the station crew, and possibly others, are also fitted with a “Solanski capsule” that detects mind control (suggesting, perhaps, a recognition that the drugs aren’t as good as they’re cracked up to be), sending a signal back to a control panel, but only when somebody thinks to check it.
The station’s defences are also key to the plot. The Wheel has ‘anti-magnetic’ and meson shields for defence against small meteorites. Quite how these would work is unclear, but for gaming purposes, they are just regular deflector shields, or whatever the equivalent is in the system or setting being used. In settings that don’t have shields, they can just be hull armour, since they are only intended to repel small (if fast-moving) objects.
For anything bigger, they need the X-ray laser. This is mounted as a cannon on the main superstructure and can be aimed and fired from the control room. At different points in the narrative, we are told that it has either a 10,000- or 50,000-mile (16,000 or 80,000 km) range. Which sounds like a lot, but it is firing in a vacuum, so there isn’t much to weaken the beam. However, the exact details don’t matter, and we can easily replace it with any moderately powerful ship-mounted weapon from our chosen setting, be that a phaser, turbolaser, or particle weapon.
We can also briefly look at the rest of the solar system. That the station is a transit point makes it clear that there is some sort of manned facility on, or more likely orbiting, Venus. It’s also stated that Duggan has some plants from Venus in his mini-greenhouse. This is rather unlikely given what we know of Venus today, but again supports the existence of a base there. We are also told that there are manned operations in the asteroid belt, although how permanent they may be is unclear.
Given its closer proximity to Earth than the Belt and that it is more habitable than Venus, it’s difficult to believe that there are not also bases on Mars. (And, while it was written 40 years later, we can also note that the story is thought to be set 20 years after the events of The Waters of Mars, by which time something new has surely been built.) There is no mention of bases on Mercury or around the outer planets, but no hard proof they don’t exist, should we wish to build the setting into something more like The Expanse or Transhuman Space.
There are protesters on Earth opposed to the space program, whom the crew of the Wheel at least believe to be capable of sending saboteurs. In the story, their existence only serves to cast suspicion on the Doctor and Jamie, but they provide an opportunity to do more if we want to create a new scenario in the setting. (Here, I will reference the Star Cops audios from Big Finish, where the “Mother Earth” storyline deals with exactly this sort of issue).
Moving the station to an existing RPG setting should be fairly simple in most cases. As depicted in the serial, mankind has made significant progress in colonising at least the inner, and possibly the outer, solar system, but has yet to develop faster-than-light travel. For example, it’s apparent that the staff at the station are unaware of sentient alien races, even if they know of non-Earthly life in their own system.
This is a level of development not often explored in wider-ranging SF settings; civilisations without FTL travel are usually depicted as still stuck on their own world. The implication of such games is that FTL travel is relatively easy to develop, and that civilisations will spend only a brief time in the STL in-system exploration phase. In Star Trek, the Prime Directive presumably applies, as the civilisation is still pre-warp, but with large space stations in use, it would be a distinct change from the usual.
It’s even harder to justify in settings such as Star Wars that don’t have a prime directive, and TL8 is pretty high for a Red Zoned world in Traveller. Fortunately, the lack of interstellar contact has no real effect on the plot. All we need is a space station beyond the main planet in a stellar system, preferably one that isn’t often visited.
For example, it might be placed around an outer gas giant, while most refuelling and helium/hydrogen mining takes place at an inner one. Alternatively, it could be either on the way to or in orbit around an inhospitable world that has no permanent population. It might even be that the station is the only settlement in the entire system. With little to trade, especially if the system isn’t on an extended Jump-1 trade route (or equivalent) that slower ships have to pass through, the idea that visitors might show up only once a week or so may not seem so strange.
Scenario
A key problem with the story as presented is that the Cybermen’s plan is overly complicated and doesn’t really make much sense. Used as is, the players are likely to spot the flaws and possibly waste time chasing down alternative explanations that aren’t correct. But let’s try to break this down to see what we can salvage if we’re trying to use this in-game.
The initial problem with the plan is that, when the now-unmanned Silver Carrier gets close to the Wheel, the standard operating procedure is apparently to blow it up. The only reason this doesn’t happen – and that the scheme isn’t scuppered at the outset – is that the Doctor and Jamie coincidentally happen to be on board and manage to send a signal.
The scenes on the Silver Carrier, should we wish to keep them, probably work best for a group of PCs with their own spaceship. Since they won’t be randomly materialising on board, all we have to do is say that the ship sent out a distress signal, something that few PCs are likely to ignore. Alternatively, if we are using this as a one-off, with the PCs already being the crew of the Wheel (for example, Starfleet officers at a remote station), they can pick up the distress call and send somebody out to investigate.
When this happens, the PCs should already be on their way to the station, or at least have good reason to visit it once they find the ship. For example, they may be able to claim salvage if they tow it or fly it to the station themselves, or have a reasonable expectation of some recompense if they can deliver its cargo. If they’re Starfleet, or somebody else who would be less bothered about the monetary side of things, flying the ship to the station, supplies included, becomes a moral duty and (given the likely larger size of their own ship) relatively easy to achieve.
This removes the obstacle of the Wheel crew trying to blow up the transport ship when it approaches, but this is a relatively minor part of the plot, and unlikely to fit with settings where the PCs aren’t mysterious arrivals from a different century.
Once it arrives, the Silver Carrier sends spheres holding cybermats across space to the Wheel. The first question this raises is where they would have been hiding the spheres. In the original story, it’s plausible that none of the time travellers checked the cargo, but if PCs get onto an abandoned spaceship, then, servo robot aside, that’s just about the first thing they’re going to do. Loot the body, and all that.
The spheres must have some sort of stealth technology that prevents them from being picked up by a remote scan, but they still need to be hidden somewhere inside the ship, and it probably doesn’t have hidden smuggler’s compartments – and if it does, the PCs might find them. However, the space required to hide one of the spheres isn’t great, so the Cybermen might have constructed their own spaces inside the ceiling or the like, where there’s no need to go or, perhaps more effectively, hidden them inside the partially empty fuel tanks.
In the original, the spheres, once released from the ship, cross over to the Wheel and then merge with, and pass through, the walls. That might be an option in some settings, especially if the Wheel’s shields are down at the time, as is quite possible, but where it isn’t, we just need to get them in through maintenance hatches or the like. Cybermats are probably capable of surviving for at least brief periods of time in a vacuum, so they can crawl about looking for something suitable and override any relevant security protocols to sneak on board; simple vents will do, as they aren’t very big. Drops in air pressure, as in the serial, might accompany this, depending on how exactly they get in, but we don’t want it to be too obvious what’s happening at this stage.
In a game, the cybermats could cause all sorts of problems beyond what we see in the TV serial. In that, all they do is corrode the bernalium rods that the X-ray laser depends on. Bernalium is, of course, a made-up substance, implied to be an energy-dense but non-radioactive metal. If we don’t want to leave it as is, we can replace it with anything that the supply ship might plausibly be carrying and that cybermats could destroy on the Wheel, such as advanced fuel cells or electronic components
Shortly after the cybermats get on board, a star goes nova, sending a cloud of meteorites towards the Wheel. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that there are problems with aligning this idea with real science.
We are told that the star is in Messier 13. This is a real star cluster and, as stated in the serial, it is in the constellation Hercules. It’s also about 24,000 light-years away, and that’s where things get difficult. A nova happens when enough matter falls onto the surface of a white dwarf star to undergo fusion, essentially creating a stellar-sized thermonuclear explosion. This is obviously not something you want to be close to, but 24,000 light-years isn’t close. All that would happen is that a star that’s barely visible to the naked eye would brighten a bit for a few days.
This certainly wouldn’t redirect meteorites and, even if it did, it would be a bit of a coincidence if they just happened to head towards the Wheel. If the Cybermen somehow caused the nova in the first place, they could maybe pick a star in the right direction, but, due to the speed of light, they would have to have done it 24,000 years ago, which, since they don’t have time travel, is obviously impossible. They could have spotted the nova from an FTL spaceship before it could be detected from Earth, but that doesn’t get around the other issues.
So, unless we’re changing things completely, we need an alternative way to direct meteorites towards the Wheel at a time when the cybermats have destroyed the defence laser’s fuel supply. The Cybermen could, for example, destroy and fragment an asteroid, or more likely, a comet, that happens to pass close to the station’s orbit. That’s plausibly achievable with their technology while still having the advantage of allowing Bennett to refuse to believe it’s happening until it’s too late, given how unlikely it would be from his perspective.
The plan in the original is to force the Wheel crew to send somebody over to the Silver Carrier to collect its bernalium stock, and have them be taken over by the two Cybermen concealed on board so that (and this is basically the whole purpose of the scheme so far) they can hide inside a box and be carried across. This may seem a rather convoluted way of achieving that, and, if it’s hard to hide the cybermats from the PCs who initially discover the abandoned ship, it would be even harder to hide the Cybermen.
Thus, we probably need a different scheme at this point. One option is to argue that the ploy is a distraction that allows the Cybermen to sneak onto the Wheel by some other means while everyone is rushing about trying to ensure they aren’t all killed by the incoming meteorite storm. For all we know, the Cybermen could have just hidden inside a crate all along and been brought onto the Wheel as part of an earlier supply run, but if they have cloaking technology, they could have a small ship nearby just waiting for their plan to reach the right stage.
However they get onto the Wheel, once they are there, the story becomes a fight to get rid of them, while the cybermats sabotage life support equipment that their masters don’t need, and the Cybermen themselves take over key personnel. In the serial, they try to do this by turning the oxygen in the station’s air supply into ozone. This requires a fair bit of energy to do, but it isn’t impossible, and other possibilities exist if we want to shake things up a bit.
One thing that isn’t especially clear is what the Cybermen intend to do with the Wheel once they have it. It’s implied that they can use it to create a beacon that will direct an invasion fleet to Earth and allow it to enter our atmosphere, but it’s hard to see why this would be necessary. An alternative is to state that the Wheel is part of a system-wide defence/monitoring network, and leaving a hole in it will allow the fleet to sneak through. In this case, everyone will be a lot more worried to start with, since they will know what is at stake, and we will probably need to justify a communications blackout sooner than happens in the original to prevent them from telling Earth what has happened.
Rules
The technology of the setting is significantly more advanced than today, but does not include FTL travel. Due to the underlying assumptions of most SF RPGs, this is often a narrow band; it is TL8 in both Traveller and GURPS, and 5 in Doctors & Daleks.
Weapons seen in the serial include the welding laser used by the servo robot and “blaster” pistols that can be issued to the Wheel’s security men in an emergency. Both of these likely represent standard weapons in almost any SFRPG, although the blaster pistols may not be available at the tech level implied by the TV serial. In which case, we can either replace them with whatever hand weapons would be used on a potentially fragile space station, or raise the tech level, since it doesn’t really affect the plot.
The ability of the invaders to take control of humans is similar to that shown in Tomb of the Cybermen, although it seems to take effect more quickly and, perhaps, to be more reliable. We are told that it can be countered by a metal plate with a transistor fitted to the back of the neck. Perhaps it’s a microchip that has to be implanted into the brainstem, and this both prevents implantation and blocks the signal to an existing chip until it can be surgically removed.
On a similar note, we can mention the ‘mind control drugs’ that everybody is supposed to be on, and that prove to be useless. These could be any anti-psionic or similar drugs that exist in the game system, since they wouldn’t be of any use against an implanted microchip. For that matter, since they don’t work, we can just ignore them.
The Solanski circuit may be of more relevance, since it helps to identify who the Cybermen have taken over. It’s unclear how it’s supposed to work; perhaps it needs training to identify a user’s normal brainwave pattern and lights up when it is altered. The detector is probably short-range, and the device may be of little or no use on aliens, especially if they are non-humanoid. It may also take too long to adjust to a user for it to be given to newly arrived PCs, even if the equipment to fit it exists on the station, which it may not.
Finally, there’s the quick-set plastic, which sounds like it should have all sorts of uses in a game, but merely requires a description and little in the way of specific rules beyond indicating how hard it is to chip through or otherwise remove. For what it’s worth, it’s called “construction foam” in GURPS Ultra-Tech.
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