Wednesday, March 16, 2011

About That Doctor Who Campaign

We're still playing. Not as often as I hoped, but just the fact that we've managed to get together on something approximating a monthly interval is good news for this group. I may start doing regular session logs again. Or not. Haven't decided. I've been kind of busy.

In case you were wondering, our heroes discovered that the Editor probably is a Time Lord, although Alan is convinced that he's from an alternate reality. He lost "the greater part of [his] past" when the Time War was locked, but was not fully trapped because of his "temporally distributed" cybernetic consciousness. How this might fit in with the story of the near-identical guy from "The Long Game" has yet to be addressed because the characters didn't see that episode.

They have since foiled the Editor's attempt to punch a hole through a string of alternate realities with a zygma (yes, that's how it's spelled) beam, commandeered his time capsule (yeah, I tried - unsuccessfully - to fight the inevitable tendency to call it a TARDIS) met my version of the cybermen and helped them defeat some of the walking tank cybermen from the show, tracked down a criminal from the group they were helping, and they're in the middle of trying to stop multiple Editors from constructing a "temporal lynchpin" which would cause a-bad-thing-that-hasn't-been-fully-revealed.

One thing I've discovered: the trick to making adventure after adventure feel more like an episode of the show, and avoiding the dungeon-crawl-ish sequence of "explore maze, find bad guy, kill bad guy, collect treasure, repeat" seems to be non-player characters - lots of quirky, chatty, non-adversary (although often morally ambiguous) NPC's with stories of their own. I'm finding that this is where most of my prep time goes anymore, and it seems to be a good investment. Once the extras are introduced, the story sort of twists and turns and solves itself in all kinds of ways that I couldn't have predicted. I suppose this wouldn't work so well with crappy players who just want their non-player allies to carry the lantern, but luckily I haven't had that problem.