Never mind cracks in the Universe or amnesiac Time Lords abandoned on the edge of the Silver Devastation – I’m almost loathe to link to it, but angelshavethephonebox.com is a singular waste of an entirely usable web address. Admittedly the owner took the time to stick a picture on it with appropriate Doctor Who quote, but what a massive waste of a perfectly good opportunity to do so much more with it. I hate to say it, but a link farm would be better than this static page. The owner registered the site in 2007 and it recently renewed in May – and I suspect it has looked like this the whole time. Damned waste!
Category: General Musings
I attended the Birmingham UK Games Expo at the weekend. Cubicle 7 had a stand, so I invariably needed to go ask the big question.
So, “What’s happening with the Doctor Who game? When can we expect the next supplement?”
Okay, so that’s two questions – but, I can’t remember exactly what I asked. I’m hazy on a lot of things. I admit (unfortunately) this has nothing to do with alcohol. I just have a poor memory – especially for names.
Anyway, I was talking to this guy on the stand (long, dark hair and glasses, facial hair… maybe).
The response, a positive one. I won’t try to map out the details, but Cubicle 7 have all the enthusiasm for this game that you’d expect. For them, Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space represents their number one best selling game, a license of massive potential. Do you charge ahead creating stuff in a great gush and run the risk of falling foul of the license holder? I mean, that’s what pretty much happened with FASA, Star Trek and Paramount. Get too carried away and, before you know it, you’re producing supplements without full approval… and then you’re producing no supplements at all.
Having to wait for approval for stuff from the BBC does complicate things – I know that from previous experiences with other licenced holdings that if you need to have everything checked with the owner of the subject matter, expect to see your production time double. To add to the complications, with Doctor Who you also have a series in transition, with a regeneration meaning a need for a bit of a change – both in characters and branding.
The alien supplement remains incoming and should be ready for GenCon, which means an August release. After that, we have a Matt Smith makeover for the core rules, with the inclusion of both the 11th Doctor and Amy Pond as characters, and then future supplements will all have the new look of the current series.
Personally, I think the slow progress means those playing the game have had an opportunity to shine. The DWAITAS board I frequent has enough character, alien, adventure, gadget and skill/trait related material to create a supplement in it’s own right.
The guy on the stand referenced customers who make it sound like without more supplements they simply don’t have what they need to run a game – but, in my honest opinion, the simplicity of the game system, the wealth of background from the TV, and the support of other fans means that there’s a lot you can pick up and use without needing anything else official. You have no excuse not to be running DWAITAS right now.
I planned to run a game at the weekend, and all I took was the official DWAITAS screen, the ‘Start Here’-type booklet from the boxset and the pre-generated character sheets – and for a simple game I think that’s all you need. Once the players understand the basic rule and the principle of Story Points, what more do they need to know. Roll them dice, improvise some Story Point tokens and get on with the action.
So, when new stuff comes, that will be great – but no one should be putting the game into storage thinking they can’t play in the meantime. I appreciate what Cubicle 7 have provided so far and while I’d love to see more soon, I also think the delay makes for a positive experience for every potential Doctor Who GM.
Tarvuism, the fastest growing religion in the world (“It’s SO easy to join”) – and just the sort of thing that the Doctor would get sorted out in a moment, undermining the evil intent beneath the cult within the conspiracy, like some intergalactic star-hopping David Icke
Folk watching ‘Victory of the Daleks‘ have questioned how the British could have got Spitfires into space in a matter of minutes. Admittedly, a story conceit makes for a more exciting episode; but, with the right frame of mind you could find the means to get close to an explanation within the context of the story.
Edwin Bracewell, inventor of the Ironsides and pawn of the Daleks, has a schizoid existence, believing himself to be from a small village in Scotland and yet really being an android and devastatingly dangerous bomb. He showed an amazement to The Doctor that these ideas he had just seemed to pop into his head – forcefields, propulsion systems, and the Ironsides themselves.
For some reason, I have this weird need to associate him with Data (or B-4 from Nemesis) in one of those situations where he’s been stripped of his memories – whether because of damage or an insidious override. He has all the abilities of an android, without any real recollection of the situation. I can envisage Bracewell overcome by his ideas and visions, hands and mind racing beyond normal human limits, creating incredible devices without really understanding the process. The Dalek programming kicks in and Bracewell phases out for a moment, technology streaming from his subconscious bypassing the conscious personality imprinted into his android mind.
Bracewell showed The Doctor his blueprints for the forcefield and propulsion systems, and already had Ironside parts – like the weapon-systems – lying around his lab. It’s easy to imagine that he also had half-developed versions of those blueprint technologies – and that when pushed to complete them the same android speed could kick in without Bracewell being overtly aware of it. Before you know it, they have the jury-rigged bolt-on devices they need – and it seriously was a case of jury-rigging. Just as The Doctor creates tech from household devices at the drop of a hat, so Bracewell could undoubtedly do the same – except, he had some genuine pieces of technology already half-completed sitting around his lab.
At least, that’s how I suspend my disbelief…
I waited with baited breath for the sneak peak of the start of ‘The Eleventh Hour’. Alas, the clip proved a little on the underwhelming side. I don’t know… I got it into my head that we’d be getting a minute, so I must have read that on the site somewhere. However, in the end we got 35 seconds, of which only the last half seemed to feature the Doctor and only hanging off the lip of the TARDIS door, struggling to get back inside. I like a bit of CGI excitement as much as the next fan, but this didn’t really get my juices flowing.
Anyway… I suppose we only have a week left to wait.
We have a healthy dose of time travel to come, with ‘Ashes to Ashes’ series 3 starting on Friday and ‘Who’ on Saturday. We finally have a time – 6.20PM – but that very detail worries me, because twenty past any hour feels like a time likely to change. The BBC did it with ‘Merlin’ – and I could have sworn that series does quite well, like ‘Who’. I hate it when you can’t predict the air time of a series from one week to the next. You don’t have to worry about ‘Newsnight’ or ‘The One Show’… unless there’s some charity or key sports event on, you know they’ll be on 10.30PM or 7PM, respectively. So, why treat Saturday evening prime time family entertainment with so little respect? I don’t see ‘Newsnight’ providing much of a revenue stream through character merchandising or spin-off media!
Shouldn’t you treat your cash cows with a little more reverence?
I have finished reading the Doctor Who RPG, but now I have to get the time to play it. I have plans for the game, but…
One way or another, the list of things to do always seems to run a whole lot longer than the hours in the day, so I suppose I will have to do something about that.
I have used the time available to me while doing other work to get in some research, watching ‘The Time Warrior‘ and ‘The Keeper of Traken‘ in the last couple of days.
I enjoyed the Pertwee outing, though the plot seemed stretched a little thin and the Sontaran’s plans seemed very sketchy. Why did he need those hypnotised scientists when he seemed to be doing most of the work? All they seemed capable of was carrying pieces of paper around the castle basement. Also, when the scientists managed to shrug off the hypnotic control, courtesy of the Doctor’s pen torch and a polka beat (or similar), how did the Sontaran fail to hear them discussing their plans to fake their hypnotised state? He was temporarily stunned and bound – not unconscious and deaf. Otherwise, the story had me entertained and introduced Sarah-Jane Smith as a ballsy feminist without any time for male chauvinism of any kind.
The dying days of the Tom Baker period didn’t necessarily show the energy and enthusiasm of his earlier time as the Doctor, and ‘Traken’ feels at once thick and thin on plot. Exposition aplenty blocks up the first episode, but then the plot seems to just revolve around a lot of running through the limited set and some dubious relationships between the good guys and the evil. Traken seems to consist of a throne room, the Source room, a cell and the garden – all of which seem to have connections into one another, both obvious and secret. Despite the peaceful and serene aura that protects Traken, the foul Melkor arrives as a statue and acquires little more than moss over the time that follows – and yet the Trakens’ fail to suspect any foul play. Adric and the Doctor prove capable of jiggery-pokery to make the A-Team weep (“Ooooo! Ooooo! Oh, ‘eck! Look, Dan!” – “I know… they’ve modified the van!“), circumventing the whole functionality of the ancient technologies that protect Traken. The final scene of The Master claiming a new body seem utterly tacked on, like an after thought more than anything else… and the fact The Master survives so easily at all without minimal repercussions seems to undermine the whole story and the effort The Doctor put into defeating him.
Well, I’m not sure I should be engaging in “spoilers”. I usually end up wrong when I guess stuff. So, that first episode of the festive special proved thoroughly enjoyable. I have to admit to a fan-fueled tear at the final shot…
Anyway, I happy for the ‘enemy’ to be defeated provided that doesn’t mean the end of the them. I’m hoping their return presents a permanent fixture and The Doctor has to gone on the run again. I like them and the prospect of their return seems like a good move to add a new dimension to the storyline. I daresay Russell only removed them to simplify the back story for newcomers when the series returned.
We’ll see…
And, finally, what’s the connection between The Doctor and Wilfred Mott? Could it be a sneaky anagram?
Time Lord WTF?
Certain moments in time are fixed…
I’m thrilled to see that the countdown is well and truly running now toward a known air time for ‘The Waters of Mars’. With the new trailer up on the official web site, the date is set – Sunday, 15th November. Just nine days to go… and then the long haul to Christmas.
I’m looking forward to this. I feel like we’ve all been waiting for a really long time. Within 6 or 7 weeks, the 10th Doctor will be gone and a new age for the Time Lord will commence. I trust in the Big T to do the business and deliver a finale worthy of a fine Doctor and an outstanding actor. To do anything less might well be a nail in the coffin.
The new year will bring a new Doctor and the new Doctor Who roleplaying game, too. I hope that the overhaul of the cast and crew will mean great things and will allow the series to maintain the vitality that Russell T delivered when Christopher Eccleston first appeared on the screen in his leather jacket and ear-to-ear grin in 2005.
I think I might be tired of waiting now. ‘The Waters of Mars’ has been a long time coming… and I’m losing patience. If we’re going to have a double episode at Christmas/New Year, then why leave such a short gap before hand from ‘Waters’?
Mind, we have Sarah Jane returning next week, which can’t be bad. Maybe the episode featuring The Doctor somehow interacts with the ‘Waters’ episode and therefore one must follow the other – but, I doubt it..
And I’m left waiting for the Doctor Who RPG also, as Cubicle 7 slip the release into November due to ill-health in their office (the dreaded Swine Flu).
The universe is conspiring against any Who appearing soon… I hope that it’s all worth the wait!
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