On the occasion of completing reviews on Doctor Who's first series on Disney+, I should like to re-imagine it as a role-playing game campaign using Cubicle 7's Doctor Who RPG. (Go back one, to D+ Season 1.)
Russell's biggest problem is still his players (though he might want to look inward to see if he's asking too much of them). He had this grand plan for Ncuti and Millie, but the schedule really doesn't suit the latter and she'll only show up from time to time. So Russ finds a new Companion player and tries to make it work with her. And THEN, Ncuti says HE needs to move on after this season, so the GM scraps a lot of his plans to give him an ending, just not a very satisfying one. Seat of your pants GMing can do that, sometimes. Between the disappointments and the extra work, Russell thinks this will be his last "season" too, but he hasn't passed the campaign's baton to anyone yet.
The Players
-Ncuti was in it to win it, but life gets in the way, and gaming schedules aren't always a priority (#relatable). So he bows out at the end of these game sessions, perhaps regretful that not everything ties together as well as it should (but hindsight is 20/20).
-The new player is Varada, and her companion is called Belinda Chandra, a nurse who won't want to travel with the Doctor, at first. This ties into Russell's (transferred) plans to make her time inaccessible to the TARDIS, forcing her to warm to the Doctor over various misjumps. She and Ncuti have great chemistry and it's not long before that starts to affect Belinda herself.
-And Millie is still around for about half the games, but her inconstancy means that can be a bit awkward for the group, who has to quietly sit through her "cut-aways" (or not be there at all).
-Nicola plays a one-shot character for Christmas, "Joy Almondo" (eech), a hand-out pre-designed by the GM who has a very specific story in mind for her. So let's get into it...
Joy to the World. Basically, Russell has given Nicola a pregen who is fated to become the Star of Bethlehem as part of the semi-annual Christmas game's theme. So Nicola is often asked to do things because she's being mind-controlled, and ultimately has to resolve the plot as written. The highlight for Ncuti is resolving a paradox in which he (as NPC) gives himself (the PC) a way out of the story through the Time Hotel, and playing through a montage of a year living with a present-day hotelier called Anita. Russell was taking notes and would bring all of this back.
The Robot Revolution. To integrate Varada's character into the game quickly, the GM puts forth a few mundane scenes for her to work through - a toxic boyfriend, a medical situation, bad room mates - before having her kidnapped by robots named after her. The Doctor is already on their planet (also named after her) - whatever Ncuti says in exposition about how he got there becomes campaign truth - and together they stop the big bad, who, of course, is the toxic boyfriend. (Had Verada not taken the bait, Russell might have done some quick improvising, but still kept this reveal.) Also introduced is the fact that Belinda can't return to her time.
Attributes: Awareness 2, Coordination 2, Ingenuity 1, Presence 3, Resolve 4, Strength 7
Skills: Fighting 3, Knowledge 2, Marksman 4, Technology 3, Transport 3
Traits: Armour (10), By the Programming, Enslaved (by Alan Budd), Fear Factor 1, Networked, Robot, Weakness (Minor: Due to a fault, the robots cannot hear every 9th word spoken). Story Points: 4
Home Tech Level: 7 (Equipment: Blaster 4/L/L, Rocketship)
Lux. With skills rolls revealing that the Doctor has to set up "Vindicators" all around space and time to triangulate an opening in the day Belinda needs to return to. First stop, 1950s Miami, systemic racism, and the birth of a cartoon god. The GM goes all out when he traps the PCs in a cartoon, then television, reality, and the players are up to the challenge of using "TV rules" to figure out how to resolve the situation. Crazy scene: When the GM had the PCs meet their players, and made them wonder if they were just stat sheets.
The Well. Russell brings back the nameless entity from his own, old scenario, Midnight, and since the Doctor's player only really knows it from Knowledge rolls, he can change the rules of how it works a bit. Belinda dies and gets a level of Unadventurous, but she already had that Trait as part of her design. The GM decides that it's retroactively the same level (timey-wimey), why not?
Lucky Day. At the end of the previous session, the GM has the PCs meet a little kid on a New Year's Eve. In THIS session, played on a night Verada couldn't make it, but Millie COULD, Russell has the Doctor and Ruby reprise their "season 1" roles to fight hunting monsters called the Shreek before turning the game over to Millie more or less alone. Her mission is to give a Shreek antidote to a podcaster who was there that night, it turns into a romance, and then the GM pulls the rug out from under Ruby as Conrad Clark turns out to be the real villain (and one seemingly ripped from the headlines). Ncuti, watching all this as a strict observer, gets to play a scene at the end where he "punishes" Conrad with exposition (which is sold to him as "campaign truth" again, but Russell is lying about that, or else, "truth can be rewritten", which was kind of the point).
Attributes: Awareness 4, Coordination 3, Ingenuity 5, Presence 4, Resolve 5, Strength 3
Skills: Athletics 2, Convince 5, Craft 2, Fighting 3, Knowledge 3, Marksman 3, Science 1, Subterfuge 4, Technology 3, Transport 2
Traits: Adversary (Major: UNIT), Argumentative, Attractive, Charming, Friends (Major: Online following), Obsession (Major: Take down UNIT), Single-Minded (Major), Voice of Authority. Story Points: 12
Home Tech Level: 5
The Story & the Engine. "You need a haircut and you know just the place in Nigeria" is quite the plot hook. Ncuti and Russell had had a quick Play-by-Email (well, by-Texting) session in between games where the Doctor saves a boy from a fire, setting this up. Using African myth as the basis for a wild adventure in a barber shop makes for one of the most interesting scenarios this year, though the players misgauge what the hook means and Bel has to find the story engine by herself late in the game lest she be stuck in the TARDIS all session. The GM squeezes in the vision of a little girl to foreshadow his plans.
The Interstellar Song Contest. The game session is the same day as the EuroVision finals and the group plans to watch, so the GM weaves a crazy future EuroVision set on a space station, with a terrorist attack that, due to a crucial critical fail, the Doctor almost dies in (visions of his granddaughter are used to bring him back). Russell has some songs on his computer for this occasion and in a cut-scene (mystifying to the players), he reveals Mrs. Flood - a recurring NPC - is really the Rani from the old campaign notes.
Attributes: Awareness 5, Coordination 3, Ingenuity 9, Presence 5, Resolve 5, Strength 3
Skills: Athletics 2, Convince 4, Craft 3, Fighting 1, Knowledge 5, Marksman 3, Medicine 4, Science 5, Subterfuge 3, Survival 2, Technology 4, Transport 3
Traits: Adversary (Major: The Doctor), Arrogant, Attractive, Biochemical Genius, Block Transfer Specialist, Boffin, Distinctive, Doctorate (Biology, Chemistry), Eccentric (Minor: Theatrical), Friends (Major: Mrs. Flood), Indomitable, Last of My Kind (Time Lords are sterile and few), Obsession (Major: Resurrecting the Time Lords), Reverse the Polarity of the Neutron Flow, Technically Adept, Time Lord, Time Traveller (all Tech levels), Tough, Voice of Authority, Vortex. Story Points: 7
Home Tech Level: 10 (Equipment: Time Ring, Sonic Screwdriver, Anti-mav scooter)
Wish World/The Reality War. In the two-part finale, the Doctor and Bel suddenly find themselves married with a child, in a retro-conservative world created by, who else, Conrad Clark (through an infant god who makes wishes come through, and the manipulations of two Ranis). Millie/Ruby is on hand as the one person who kind of remembers the original timeline, and in the second part, Bonnie is back as Mel (the GM uses her as an NPC in the first part), too. They spend a lot of time exploring Conrad's world before Ncuti shrugs off the Wish and realizes who he is, and so the actual final is a bit of a rush. The GM gets rid of the new Rani quickly, and the monstrous Omega she released only requires a single roll to get rid of. The players are really very invested in Poppy, the little girl from Part 1, so it's all about saving her in the end, but the GM (who would originally have given the daughter to Ruby, and tied it in with the Doctor's granddaughter, etc.) has to wrap things up differently and so he takes little Poppy away, which Ncuti takes as a hint to use regeneration energy to set things right, so Poppy becomes Belinda's daughter (no Doctor DNA involved), the one she was always returning to. To try and make it special, Russell calls in a couple of alumni, and from a screen, Jodie reprises her role as the Doctor for a quick conversation and a Technology roll (she has the higher score), and as a regeneration ender, Billie - Russell's first Companion player - who answers "Oh hello" as he flips his phone around to the players. Well, maybe she'll say yes to getting back in the game, but that's not entirely up to Russell, is it?
With all these snap departures, the future of the campaign is uncertain, though a short UNIT side-campaign is already planned. Who will pick up the dice in the future, and how soon?
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