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.

5 comments:

  1. yeah, I tried - unsuccessfully - to fight the inevitable tendency to call it a TARDIS

    Me too. I do my best to call it the ship, after the old Hartnell stories, with a smattering of "capsule."

    Doesn't always work out. Meanwhile, the players keep calling their Time Lord "Doctor," so I can't feel too bad.

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  2. Tyler: Hehe, yeah, I could see that happening if we had a Time Lord. I hadn't heard you mention your Doctor Who campaign before. Are you using the new game or one of the older ones?

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  3. I keep trying to get everybody calling it the Taxi.

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  4. Robin: I'm using Unisystem with a fan-written netbook.

    And this is where you can find my notes about the campaign so far.

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  5. Cool! Got it added to my blog roll (which, actually, I just now created). Looks like a fun campaign. I'll have to take a look at the rules thingie later.

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