This is one of many image composites that I’ve created for the Dr Who Campaign. The Space image is from Nasa, and the TARDIS is actually a photograph of a money-box that I have edited in various ways.
This is an article about a technique for repairing continuity and plot problems that is especially suited to long-running campaigns and to campaigns deriving from published sources.
I’m not going to leave anyone who hasn’t mastered telepathy in suspense: the technique is Patching one plot hole with another.
For some that will be enough of a description – they will either be saying “How obvious” or “Absolutely brilliant!” at this point. But most will be puzzled – how can you patch one hole with another? Why is this technique especially useful for long-running or established continuity?
The technique is a centerpoint of my Lovecraft’s Legacies Dr Who Campaign, because it works so well in this type of setting, so there’s no better way of explaining the technique than showing how it has been used within that campaign.
This is the 14th article devoted to the Dr Who campaign in question, but I’m going to assume that readers haven’t read any of them, and aren’t that familiar with the source material upon which the campaign is built, just to ensure that you get the maximum possible value out of the article.
Introducing Dr Who
So, what is Dr Who all about? Well, it’s a TV series from the BBC which has been running – with an extended break in the middle – since the early 60s. As a series, it has a number of foundations that have served it well over the years, both from a literary standpoint and from a production standpoint.
The central character is The Doctor, a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey with two hearts. The Doctor is usually accompanied by one or more companions, usually earth people who have come along on the Doctor’s travels to share in his adventures.
The Doctor travels in a TARDIS, which is a space/time transport vessel that is at least semi-sentient and which is possessed of a ‘chameleon circuit’, a plot device that is supposed to disguise it wherever it goes. Before the series started, however (or so canon holds), the doctor visited mid-twentieth-century London and the chameleon circuit got stuck leaving the TARDIS in the form of a blue police box. The TARDIS is notably bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
A common theme is that there are any number of hostile and malevolent and just plain selfish species out in the universe, which teems with sentient life – and a like number of less nasty species (some of monstrous appearance) which are often simply misunderstood. Earth people are a not-especially bright civilization that are at the center of attention far more often than chance would dictate.
One of the reasons for that prominence is that the Doctor is fascinated by the human race and loves their better qualities dearly, and so protects us from getting messed around by these other species. On the interplanetary scale, we punch a long way above our heads as a result, and that advantage in turn leads the human race to have a glorious destiny, forming empire and federation after empire and federation. We become the glue that holds the universe together, at least in social terms.
Adventures can take place in any location, on any planet, at any point in time. But a disproportionate number – about half – take place (at least partially) on or around Earth.
The Doctor is not always in full control over where the TARDIS takes him, though he likes to pretend otherwise. He might not always know where he’s going, but it’s always somewhere interesting, and it has been revealed that the TARDIS itself takes him not necessarily when and where he thinks he wants to go, but to a time and place where he is most needed.
There’s a lot more, but that’s enough for you to be getting on with.
The campaign takes place in between two episodes of the TV series. At the end of the previous episode, “The Angels Take Manhattan”, two of what were arguably the Doctor’s closest companions (Amy Pond and Rory Williams) had been exiled into the past by assassins in the form of statues of weeping angels, where they had lived out their lives and died.
In the next ‘episode’, a Christmas Special entitled “The Snowmen”, the Doctor was in a deep funk, seemingly over the loss of Amy and Rory, and refusing to help anyone. Events, of course, don’t permit him that luxury, and force him to take a renewed interest in the world, but that’s neither here nor there.
It simply didn’t track. The “funk” wasn’t deep enough for it to be an immediate consequence of his loss, and he had shown little sign of it at the end of the preceding episode, despite the events being even fresher within his experience. At the same time, it was too shallow to be explained by the passage of intervening time since the loss. The circumstances demanded that he grieve for the pair, recover, and then encounter some fresh source of angst that led to his state at the beginning of the Christmas Special.
Those, then, were the parameters of the campaign, the before and after into which it was to be sandwiched.
Here’s how this article is going to work
Having established the framework and continuity into which the campaign fits, I think it best to lay out a blueprint for the rest of the article.
We’ll start with an introduction to the campaign by Saxon Brenton, the one and only player involved – because his perspective is going to be a little different than my own simply from being on the other side of the table. He can provide a player’s perspective on the technique.
I’ll then describe the Technique and offer some mandatory requirements in order for it to be used with success.
After that, I’ll look at the relevance of the technique beyond this one campaign.
That will be followed by my campaign introduction, and by an examination of a number of common traits that the adventures within it are designed to exhibit.
Once you know what to look for, I’ll briefly synopsize each of the adventures that have been played to date, with emphasis on how those campaign traits manifested within the adventure and how they became an application of the technique in question.
I’ll follow that up with a player’s perspective on the campaign by Saxon, and then a last word from myself to wrap up the article.
Each stage of this construct is therefore built upon the ones that have preceded it in what will hopefully be a sensible and comprehensible manner. It’s going to be a long article, so let’s get started!
Campaign Intro – by Saxon Brenton
Lovecraft’s Legacies is a continuity-heavy Dr Who single player campaign which features a single concept as the plot hook for a linked series of adventures.
That concept is the presence of a comparatively low level Lovecraftian entity who wants to open an extra-dimensional gate to let in the rest of the pantheon, who would then conquer the universe and rewrite the laws of reality to their preference.
The Whoniverse as we know it would not be expected to survive the change in management. This being is a possessing entity who is only loosely tethered in time and space, and every time the Doctor has defeated one of its plots, it leaps forward to another time and place to try again.
The adventures overall have been interesting, challenging and fun. So far the half-dozen-plus adventures have given the opportunity to revisit old, high profile, and fan favorite settings, characters, alien species and enemies.
I will dare to use the dreaded description ‘fanwank’ – but since both the player and the gamesmaster are moderately intense Dr Who fans, this is neither unexpected nor unwanted. Fanwankery is hardly a pejorative if it not only doesn’t get in the way but actually increases the enjoyment of those involved, but that’s always a matter of personal taste.
Meanwhile there’s a flip-side of continuity being created within the adventures, a subtext to established continuity as both the Doctor and his opponent learn from past encounters and failures, and adjust their tactics accordingly. The fate of the universe as being inhabitable by its current resident is at stake, and the task is only getting more difficult with each encounter, giving a sense of increasing risk and danger to the campaign. Mike has just revealed that the entire campaign will be ten adventures long but I could already sense that things are building up to a big finish!
The Polytime Technique
The poly-time technique is to use one apparent plot hole as the solution to another. If there’s a character who mysteriously vanishes from an adventure only to turn up later with a lame excuse for his absence, that’s a plot hole. When some other plot hole manifests, for example someone has chopped a hole in the side of a boat that was visibly intact a few minutes earlier, just in time for the characters to take to the water in it, the technique would suggest using the character from the first adventure to chop that hole. It only then remains to construct a viable way of bringing the character and the boat together at the same time, giving the character a reasonable motivation to damage the boat, and any other tidying up of loose ends.
Of course, this is a trivial example, designed to simplify the technique as much as possible. Maximum fanwank is achieved if the solution to the first plot hole is also provided by what the character experiences in the course of his involvement in the second.
Real-world usage is a little more complicated.
Use of Canon as a resource, not just a background
This technique uses established Canon as a plot resource, not simply as a static background. That’s an important shift in mind-set, and one that can have profound effects on a campaign – because you can’t really turn it off once you’ve made that mental transition. Whatever the source material says is only the beginning; you can insert whole new volumes in between one paragraph of that canon and the next. To my mind, that’s the proper function of a campaign or adventure background – as tools to facilitate an entertaining story.
Limitations
It might seem at first that this solution mandates access to time-travel, and certainly the relatively ubiquity of time-travel techniques in Doctor Who makes it easy to use in the Lovecraft’s Legacies campaign but the absence of time-travel is simply a limitation on the technique, not a fatal flaw in its applicability.
The limitation simply mandates an appropriate domino chain starting with the character’s actions in the past that results in [x] happening – [x] being whatever has to be explained to resolve the second plot hole when the PCs encounter it.
What is undeniable is that this is a lot of work on the part of the GM (though it’s often fun, too) – so this is not a trivial technique to be used for small problems of no great importance, this is something major to solve a major issue.
There are a couple of genuine requirements, however, that are not so easily set aside.
Required: A rich established continuity
The first is to have a detailed background or continuity to use as a source. These are more common than you think, as you’ll see when I get into the “relevance” sections. This is the stack of Lego bricks that you are going to use to fill in the holes in future plots – it’s hard to build anything without them.
Required: Intimate Familiarity with Canon
On top of that, you have to know that source material very well. It’s not enough to posit that Dr Strange can fix your plot problem by popping into your adventure and doing some bibity-bobity-boo; you need the character to be available at the right time and place, to have a reason for being at that time and place, and a reason for doing what he is being brought there by you to do. You have to be able to examine the Canon critically, identifying flaws and potentially-incomplete explanations within it, and then use those for your own purposes.
And, once the continuity has been patched, you need to let events unfold as they will, at least so far as the PCs are concerned; you can’t railroad them. Which means that the outcome as they experience it has to be independent of the outcome as it will be recorded for posterity.
If the plot hole to be patched is noticed during play, this is relatively easy to achieve. If not, if this is a retroactive repair, that’s a lot harder, a lot messier, and a lot less desirable – so much so that it is often not worth the effort.
Relevance I – Game Settings
So, let’s consider what sources might meet these requirements, in terms of game settings. I think you’ll be surprised at how broad they are.
Forgotten Realms
This game setting is the foundation for almost all D&D games, even though the GM and players might not be aware of it. You can change the geography and the society and the species profiles but if you’re using the PHB and DMG, the Forgotten Realms setting is the underlying foundation. Elves are the way they are in the Core Rules because that’s the way things are in the Forgotten Realms. If you don’t want to use the Forgotten Realms, then you have to explicitly change Elves to match. Ditto for all the other races, and the classes, and so on. There are implicit social and sociological constructs embedded within all these (especially in the flavor text) that are right for the Forgotten Realms, from which they derive, but may not be right for the world of Lanxia or the island archipelago of the Sunset Isles or the dark underground of the Dwarven Passage, or wherever you have set your game.
And if the Forgotten Realms is your foundation, then the key events within the Forgotten Realms continuity are yours to play with and draw upon as you need them.
Eberron
Eberron is the “other” popular foundation. It was notable for being comprehensive, internally-consistent, and completely different from the Forgotten Realms. If Eberron is your game setting, then you definitely have the rich continuity and background to draw upon; what you do with them is up to you.
Lord Of The Rings
Great-granddaddy of all campaign settings is the Lord Of The Rings, and the whole of Middle Earth. I’ve played, now, in several LOTR campaigns; one died because the GM refused to permit any alteration of the established continuity, limiting what the PCs could achieve. One died (very quickly) because the GM ignored virtually all the continuity and made it a very generic fantasy campaign with the occasional recognizable element that appeared with no justification or internal coherence. And one took the approach that everything prior to the campaign date was – seemingly – as written in the official continuity, that events would continue to unfold as they had in the books unless the PCs managed to interfere in the logical progression of events, and that all of that was available for him to use if appropriate, and it could have lasted for quite a long time if the GM hadn’t dropped out of RPGs.
TV/Movie Properties
This, of course, is where Dr Who fits in. But the technique equally applicable to campaigns based on Stargate, Star Trek, Babylon-5, Mission Impossible, Xena, Game Of Thrones, Twilight, James Bond, Bill and Ted’s Big Adventure, or Gilligan’s Island – whether there’s an official RPG adaption or not. Ditto Book properties like Ringworld and Dune and Xanth and Pern and Sherlock Holmes…
Comic Sources
Anyone running a superhero campaign has every comic ever published to draw upon. And we do, all the time. These days, there might also be campaigns based upon the re-interpretations of the comics presented by the respective Movie franchises – and not just the successful ones. After all, if your nose was put out of joint by the Fantastic Four movie following the ill-fated attempt to reboot the franchise (see my review in Fantastic Flop: GMing Lessons from a filmic failure), what could be sweeter than a Fantastic Four campaign in which you “get it right”?
The entirety of fiction and entertainment is open to you – the only question is which setting will you choose? Heck, I once played (very briefly) in a game world that was completely modeled upon and derived from, “Stairway To Heaven”!
Relevance II – Other Uses
But those represent only part of the value of this technique. More sparing usage not only minimizes the down-sides but permits local application to solve smaller occurrences of this type of problem.
Module Backstories
Have you ever read a module or published adventure and thought “this looks like fun, if only it all made more sense?”
It used to happen regularly, back when The Dragon included small adventures in its middle pages – some were excellent, some were merely ripe with potential – and a lot of the time, the difference came down to a backstory in which someone crucial to the history of the adventure site made some appallingly stupid or nonsensical decisions – or expected players to make decisions of similar character or to blindly follow the adventure script.
There have been some commercially-produced and -sold modules, too, that were inadequate when put under the microscope. And even some otherwise quite interesting adventures that relied upon backgrounds, assumptions, or settings that were simply incompatible with my campaign. Sometimes these were explicitly set out, sometimes they weren’t.
Sure, you can simply replace the existing background of the adventure with something more appropriate, but why not kill two or three birds with the one stone – increasing the cohesion of the campaign, integrating the packaged adventure with your campaign more tightly, and turning lemons into lemonade – especially valuable if you bought lemons thinking they would be oranges.
Flawed Modules
And what if the adventure itself was good in most respects but had some moment of madness in the design? I once bought a module for low-level D&D characters in which storm giants HP was inadvertently noted as 4HP instead of 40HP. Since the encounter in question explicitly described them as being wounded and at low strength, this problem wasn’t necessarily obvious.
If you notice it before it’s too late, it’s an easy fix. If you don’t however, the credibility of the adventure takes a hit because this opposition was far too weak to have survived to do the things that they were supposed to be able to do later within the adventure. With the quick-and-easy solution off the table, the only solution is to plug the hole.
I’ve seen modules in which groups of enemies will attack blindly regardless of the apparent strength of the opposition. Or will ignore obvious advantages in combat. or simply do something stupid – like trying to ambush the PCs by hiding in a room that they know contains a pack of minotaurs after the PCs had proven too tough for a frontal assault. So what are the minotaurs, then – chopped liver?
Past Mistakes
But by far the most common reason to pull this technique out of your back pocket is to fix past mistakes that you only discover after the fact. Once again, you could invent a ‘fix’ out of whole cloth and inject it into the campaign, but how much more robust would the campaign be if you could arrange things so that it wasn’t actually a mistake, despite what you thought at the time?
The Lovecraft’s Legacies Dr Who Campaign
Okay, I’m the first to admit that it’s not often that a sci-fi Time-travel campaign is relevant to fantasy campaigns, but looking at the usage made of this technique “in the field” permits an analysis of the benefits and liabilities of the technique, and that’s what’s important here. But first, I need to provide some context by talking about the campaign itself.
Campaign Traits
In addition to the qualities inherited from the source material, described earlier, there are five traits that are significant in this particular campaign that should be noted at least briefly.
Game System
The game system used for this campaign is a simple one that I devised several years ago for another time-travel campaign, with a few simplifications thrown in (the previous one got hung up on describing starship/timeship capabilities. This version handles all such questions as plot problems).
A tour of the greatest creations within the canon – a rogue’s gallery of sorts
One of my intentions with the campaign plan that I came up with was to visit each of the iconic enemies that are part of Dr Who canon.
Extension Of Canon
Each adventure should extend the official canon, thereby giving it a significance beyond the superficial plot device used to link the different adventures.
Healing Of Canon
There aren’t all that many problems with the Doctor Who canon that don’t fall into the category below. But there have been a few, and I wanted to take the chance to “play around” with some of them, confident that I could heal these breaches.
Holes In The Continuity of Space-Time
There are a number of holes in the continuity – not all that surprising, really, especially given the broadcast history of the series. To be more specific, there are Internal Contradictions, Logic Flaws, Failures Of Physics (some of them due to more recent discoveries, some of them cases where the writers/producers should have known better), and Inexplicable Contrivances concocted purely to get the writers out of an immediate plot hole without regard for the broader plot consequences or past continuity.
One of my objectives was to “fix” some of these problems.
Surprising Confluences
Lastly, I wanted to pack as many surprising twists and turns into the campaign as I could in order to resolve the problems listed above – rather than introducing new elements into the canon with each adventure, I wanted to involve building blocks that the player would (generally) recognize, do something new with them, and have that something resolve the existing problem as well as moving the internal plotline forward.
So far, every adventure has fulfilled at least one of these and usually most of them. You will, of course, recognize the seeds of the technique that is the subject of this article in the last item.
With those “what-to-look-fors” identified, the next step should be to briefly synopsize the adventures of the campaign very briefly (except for the most recent ones) so as to provide some actual examples of the use of the technique.
Adventure 1: Wrinkles In Space-Time
Canon Extensions
Give the Doctor time to grieve and then wallow in unproductive self-pity so that he will be back to normal for the rest of the campaign. Add Lovecraftian Horrors to the canon.
Canon Problems
1. It had been hinted in the past that the TARDIS’s additional interior size is actually “borrowed” from the surrounding space, however nothing had ever been shown to get “stolen” by the TARDIS.
2. It had been stated explicitly that it was very hard to get into alternate and pocket dimensions from our space-time but that there could be connections between the two, and several notable exceptions had occurred in prior continuity. In fact, it’s easiest to think of the TARDIS as a pocket dimension, explaining how it can travel through space and time without relativistic problems.
3. It had been shown that when the TARDIS dies, this additional space will leak through into our space-time, causing it to become as large on the outside as it was on the inside.
Solutions
Not all pocket dimensions are equally difficult to get into, and the difficulties can be different in the other direction to those of entering from this side (a different piece of established canon). The TARDIS sampled additional space-time from those that surrounded OUR space-time (new) and “remodeled” them to its own needs, choosing preferentially from those that were easy to access from our space-time.
Synopsis
The Doctor is deeply depressed by the fate of Amy and Rory and by repeated failures to rescue them. He has taken refuge in a Buddhist Monastery in the Himalayas. The campaign begins 364 days later, as one of the monks who the Doctor has befriended attempts to rouse him from his funk. The next day, one of the monks vanishes and another is found dead. The doctor is forced to take an interest in the outside world as this murder mystery deepens, eventually discovering that a nightmare from outside space-time is attempting to rewire the TARDIS’ systems to open a portal that will allow horrors exiled from space-time at the dawn of time to return. To the Doctor, these sound like Lovecraftian Horrors. The creature attempting this task escaped from the pocket dimension into which these horrors were exiled, but it’s body swiftly burned out; it has possessed the missing Monk and had killed the only witness to this body-snatching. The Doctor prevents the possessed Monk, named Inchon, from succeeding, but the possessing spirit escapes into the future to try again. The doctor and his friend, Jangshen, depart in pursuit.
Metaplot Notes
If the difficulty of transit is different depending on the direction of travel, pocket dimensions can be used as prisons. There have been past hints in the continuity that accord with this use, including the “exile” of Omega, engineer of Time Travel. If you wait long enough, a low-probability event will occur – like the TARDIS sampling from one of those prisons, releasing the captive imprisoned there. This occurred while the Doctor was at the Monastery.
Adventure 2: Monstrosity Of Steel
Enemies (other than Inchon)
Mechanical men. Bio-engineered face-hugging mind-control creatures. Mind-controlled students and staff. (Robots of various types are a staple enemy of Dr Who canon, as is “the monster of the week”.).
Canon Extensions
This adventure filled in a number of the blanks about Inchon and his capabilities. Paris, during the time of electrification, is not somewhere that the Doctor has ever been shown to have visited before, but the name given by the French newspaper to the Eiffel Tower was completely real and provided the title for the adventure.
Canon Problems
1. The Doctor is a little hit-and-miss when it comes to playing detective, but it was necessary that the character be fed certain information in the course of the adventure.
2. It was also important to show Inchon reacting to the threat of the Doctor, and the Doctor learning to track Inchon.
3. The Doctor needed a way to escape the perfect prison, i.e. Inchon’s trap.
Solutions
The trio of NPCs, plus his new Companion, provided the detective skills necessary. They also possessed the capabilities needed to give the Doctor a chance to escape Inchon’s trap.
Synopsis
The Doctor followed Inchon through space and time to Paris, April 1892. There was an uncertainty factor that meant that the Doctor knew only approximately where and when Inchon had arrived or would arrive. The adventure title refers to original newspaper descriptions of the Eiffel Tower. Three of the Doctor’s old friends, resident in London during this time period, happen to be on Holidays in Paris and detect his arrival. They are reunited and team up to locate Inchon. Instead of going to work on a new portal device, Inchon sets a trap for the doctor, with a defaced Cezanne as the bait. This almost succeeds in trapping the Doctor in a pocket dimension. Inchon escapes, thinking his enemy destroyed, and returns to the private academy he is using as a base of operations, having created an artificial life-form as a form of mind-control (using the students and staff as slave labor to compensate for the crudity of the technology available). The Doctor tracks Inchon there, frees the students, overcomes the “metal men” that they had constructed for Inchon, and destroys the portal equipment. Inchon escapes through time once again.
Adventure 3: Too Many TARDISes
Enemies (other than Inchon)
Dinosaurs. Several varieties. Lots of them.
Canon Extensions
It’s known that Captain Jack Harkness was working for Torchwood at this time. It is also known that the 3rd Doctor was working for UNIT in this time period. There has been no information provided by canon as to the relationship between these two organizations a this point in their respective histories, even though Torchwood was explicitly created to defend Britain against aliens, and especially against The Doctor. Extends River Song’s involvement with the Doctor.
Canon Problems
1. Despite being a socially-advanced alien, the Doctor’s past attitudes were in accord with the mainstream misogynistic mores of the broadcast era (for obvious reasons at a meta-level); this causes a logic problem within the characterization of the character.
2. The Doctor had never encountered Torchwood, and he should have (of course, he couldn’t because the writers hadn’t invented it yet).
Solutions
Explores past misogyny within the canon and resolves the logical characterization contradiction. Reveals that events were manipulated by River Song and Jack Harkness to keep The Doctor and Torchwood apart and unaware of each other in the era.
Synopsis
Inchon underestimated the Doctor in 1892, a mistake that he would learn from. When he arrived in August 1975, he set about crafting a more perfect trap, not realizing that there was a past incarnation of the Doctor already present (the third Doctor). The resulting paradox of the same TARDIS present in two places at the same instant fragmented time. The Doctor encountered several of the populace of the time, himself of the era, and several people he would only come to know in the future (though they already knew about him). His future wife, River Song, with the help of the contemporary version of the now-immortal Captain Jack Harkness, straightened time out and the two doctors working together were able to disarm the Vortex Fragmentation Bomb that was supposed to destroy the entire planet, Doctor included.
Adventure 4: The Essential Disaster
Synopsis
2155, and the Daleks invade Earth. Except that it never happened, as far as the Doctor’s understanding of history goes. He and Inchon (now in the body of Dalek 3765) work together to thwart the invasion and restore the timeline, consigning the master plan of the Emperor Dalek into a closed loop in time..
Enemies (other than Inchon)
Daleks, of course.
Canon Extensions
The explanation behind the situation would take far too long to explain, but the fact remains that a couple of Dr Who movies were made starring Peter Cushing that are not considered part of the official continuity and that flatly contradicted some elements of the TV show of the time. A rewritten version of the plot was subsequently used in the regular series. I always thought that this was the result of a failure of imagination on the part of the writers (even if the TV show couldn’t have afforded to have Cushing guest appear and couldn’t acquire the rights to the movie footage to use for the purpose). Although it is supposed to cause all sorts of problems, the Doctor meeting past versions of himself (“crossing his own time stream”) is a fan-favorite trope from the series, one that seemed appropriate for this adventure even though I had just had him do so in the previous adventure.
Canon Problems
1. Events within the movies are contradicted by the TV series, and the Doctor can’t have a “forgotten regeneration” to explain where the Cushing version of The Doctor. The Cushing version fails to exhibit many typical Gallifreyan traits, including the ability to regenerate.
2. The non-Cushing (PC) version of the Doctor should be more aware of his own mortality; he is running out of regenerations. The TV audience (and the player) knows that he will be granted more because the Christmas special “The Time Of The Doctor” had already aired, but The Doctor doesn’t know this, it hasn’t happened yet. (Contrary to what modern audiences might think, it had already been established that the Time Lords could bestow a fresh “cycle” of regenerations, though it isn’t clear what the quid-pro-quo at their end is).
3. There have been a number of “copies” of The Doctor in different episodes. While most of them meet their fates on-screen, in one case it was implied – a would-be world conqueror named Ramon Salamander. When Salamander’s conquests began to unravel, he attempted to escape using the TARDIS by impersonating the Doctor, just as the Doctor had impersonated Salamander to get proof of his guilt. Prematurely triggering the dematerialization process with the TARDIS doors still unraveling was Salamander’s undoing; he was blown out the doors and into the Time Vortex, presumably to his doom. However, this entire portion of history is contradicted by later episodes, which do not mention Salamander’s conquest of half the planet at all.
4. In a different episode of the same Doctors’ tenure, a group of time-traveling rebels attempt to travel back in time to disrupt a completely different dystopian future, one that is also contradicted by subsequent canon.
5. The Doctor ended the Time War between the Time Lords and the Daleks. He was only able to do so because of his history with the Earth, as shown in The Day Of The Doctor. Thus, if the Earth is destroyed, the Doctor’s history is changed, and the Daleks win the Time War. This vulnerability should be well-known to the Daleks (and justifies their many attempts to conquer or destroy the Earth) and to the Doctor, but has never been explicitly referenced within the series.
Solutions
To avoid creating a paradox (where did they come from, otherwise?) the Time-traveling rebel’s dystopia has to exist somewhere. If they are part of a closed loop in time that ends in a ‘resetting’ of history prior to the coming of that Dystopia, this problem is solved. If Salamander’s conquest was within this closed loop, the contradictions in canon are resolved. If one of the Doctor’s regenerations doesn’t actually count because it was derived from another source (another of the Doctor’s enemies, The Master, once attempted to steal the Doctor’s remaining regenerations, so it can be done), then he has one more than he thinks he does – and if the ‘contemporary’ (PC) Doctor then donates that ‘extra’ regeneration (that he didn’t know he had) to Salamander (without knowing it at the time), Salamander can become the Cushing version of the Doctor and the “regeneration ledger” balances. That “extra” regeneration was the one forced on the First Doctor in The War Games (1969). The Doctor and Dalek 3765 (Inchon) enable the Cushing Doctor to defeat the Dalek scheme to invade the earth, and prevent their backup plan to destroy the planet, and leave the time-travel technology used by the Rebels for them to find, closing the time loop. Inchon escapes while the Doctor is engaged in completing this task.
Adventure 5: The Upgrade Disease
Synopsis
Natives of a planet named Mondas contact an Earthman, Lord Byron McReedy. Inchon arrives, detects the tech, uses it to mask his signature by constructing a Quantum Suppressor using info learned when he was Dalek 3675. The Doctor arrives in Scotland in 2675, and discovers that a variety of Cybermen that this incarnation has never seen before are buried in Omnium Steel Caskets, but are being raided for cybernetic part designs by McReedy, an effort in which the Mondasians are assisting, so that they can use cyberparts from this unknown variation of Cybermen to bridge the tech-gap between his own version of Cybermen and those of a crashed ship of Cybermen in Suspension that have been discovered in a Mondasian archaeological dig. Inchon reactivates the dormant Cybermen hoping to trap the Doctor in a crossfire; instead, the Cybermen interface with each other and immediately begin to co-operate in the cyberconversion of Mondas. In the confusion, the Dr is able to escape back to Earth along the Zeiger corridor, which enables transits between fixed points on both worlds. Jangshen & The Doctor come up with a way to ID Inchon and send him “on his way” by bouncing the TARDIS’s Quantum Signature off the Zeiger Corridor and looking for the blank space where Inchon’s Quantum Suppressor damps the signal, simplifying their problems. But this gives the Mondasians time to complete their upgrades and send an expeditionary force to Earth through the Zeiger Corridor. After taking steps to secure the bridgehead between the worlds (by Cyber-converting McReedy and his servants), they begin preparing to bring a larger force to expand beyond the McReedy estate’s grounds. The Doctor then engineers a way to disconnect the Zeiger Corridor, using an E-space shunt, but it will throw Mondas temporarily into E-space by way of the Void. This ensures that the Dimension-lock with Earth cannot be immediately re-established, ending the threat.
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Enemies (other than Inchon)
Cybermen, multiple varieties. Mondas citizens.
Canon Extensions
Oy Vey, where to start? Cybermen canon is rife with confusion and contradiction, most of it glossed over in later appearances. Contradictory reports of their origins on the planet Mondas feature in their first and second appearances, for example. New abilities and vulnerabilities appear and disappear with each appearance in the canon, sometimes explained, sometimes self-evident in origin, and sometimes not (see also “Canon Problems” below). As prep for this adventure, I had to reconcile canon from every appearance of the Cybermen into a coherent history of the “species” in two documents (the original version of Part 1 was richly illustrated to highlight the differences between different cyber-populations, but most of the illustrations were not available for public use, so they have been redacted in the version being offered to readers).
It’s not going too far to describe the entire concordance as a Canon extension, especially the new content in part 1 (in blue).
Canon Problems
While the concordance solved most of the continuity problems associated with Cyberman history, there were some deliberately left for the adventure to resolve (without being obvious about it). The one major appearance of the Cybermen that post-dates the concordance (World Enough and Time / The Doctor Falls) complicates but does not invalidate the content of either adventure or reference.
In particular, two attributes needed explanation. First, the “gold dust” vulnerability: The notion that the only substance to trigger this vulnerability ruled out the two most obvious explanations (dust clogging leading to overheating of components, powdered conductive material causing short circuits). This vulnerability appeared without explanation and was eliminated in the same way, but remains central to a number of appearances of the Cybermen, as the Concordance makes clear. Second, the ability to “learn” from the ways other Cybermen had been destroyed and adapt to neutralize the vulnerability that were exhibited in Nightmare In Silver seemed to emerge from nowhere.
Solutions
Incorporating a secret and very specific vulnerability into Missy’s redesign of the Cybermen seemed a logical precaution for her to have taken. Using that design flaw in the course of the adventure to bootstrap that vulnerability into the early Cybermen designs was the clever part. However, this required some of them to have survived the events of the two-part episode which unveiled them, Dark Water / Death In Heaven. This was possible if the destruction of one Cyberman was enough to damage the self-destruct mechanism of an adjacent Cyberman; since there were billions of these Cybermen, it seemed probable that this would have occurred in at least some cases. It remained only to extrapolate what the human population would have done when these inanimate remains were discovered, and secretly burying them in mausoleums and installing alarms to warn them of activity within seemed most rational, given that they could not be easily destroyed by the technology of the day. This view was reinforced by the (background) presence of a surviving Cyberman in the later episode “The Raven”, which post-dates the campaign but had been aired at the time of play.
The “adaption” technology was distinctly reminiscent of the Borg from the Star Trek franchise; it seemed natural for the ability to have been copied by Cybermen during a cross-over. To my astonishment, just such a crossover was already semi-canonical, appearing in a comic mini-series; all I had to do was add the “consequence” and make the cross-over canonical.
This left only discrepancies in the reported origins of the ‘Species’ to be reconciled, and having harvested “Cyberman” parts make their way to Mondas to be used as templates for Cyberman upgrades completed the reconciliation.
Metaplot Notes
Inchon devises a means of hiding himself from the Doctor’s sensors. This is eventually overcome by locating the one spot on earth from which no readings can be obtained, a “blank spot” caused by Inchon’s masking technology. The Doctor doubts this will work a second time, Inchon is too clever for that.
Adventure 6: The Dalek That Bleeds
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Synopsis
It’s an observed pattern that in any season in which the Daleks appear more than once, the second appearance is both a big surprise and something “major”. Recognizing this, I deliberately made this adventure bigger in almost every way than adventure 4, “The Essential Disaster”. To preserve the surprise, I withheld the title of the adventure until part-way through. The adventure was inspired by the discovery, while searching for images to use with Adventure 4, of images of the 50th-anniversary 12” Dalek (available from Amazon) action figure with a prominent Union Jack (shown to the right). I immediately thought of the events of the 2010 Doctor Who episode, “Victory Of The Daleks”, and the plot began to take shape.
The action (mostly) takes place in New New London, in the year 4775. The Doctor arrives, pursuing Inchon, and encounters the union-jack ‘uniformed’ Daleks. He is then taken into custody by Commander Charith, a martian officer, and Charith’s squad. Convincing Charith that he is a friend of the Martian people, Charith takes the Doctor to meet Prime Minister Alexis Crowne, who explains the current situation: Earth has fought the Daleks on a number of occasions, and lost most of these fights. They have decided that they need a new class of weapon in order to fight back. They have created their own versions of the Daleks based on human DNA from frozen human embryos and Genetic Engineering and impressed upon them that the Dalek obsession with racial purity means that they will never be accepted by the “True” Daleks. However, if these Faux-Daleks aid humanity in wiping out the Skaro-Daleks, humanity will transplant them into fully-human clones of the original bodies before the Genetic Engineering took place – so their only hope is to win the war and exterminate the Skaro-Daleks. This puzzles the Doctor somewhat as the genetic alterations would cause the cloned human bodies to reject the human-Dalek brains. Crowne then introduces him to “Dalek 001”, also known as Progenitor, who is now fully human, proof that it can and will be done. The Progenitor is the central figure of the human-Dalek faith, revered by them all, and one of the five-member Board Of Command who control the Earth’s defenses. The Doctor is unable to detect any sign of the surgery, another puzzle. The Progenitor tells him that in the years since the Human Daleks became operational, they have won roughly half their battles with the Skaro-Daleks – which is a record only the Doctor can claim to have bettered up to this point in history. In 50 years, they expect to have forced the Daleks out of 70% of the galaxy. Despite this success, Charith and the other Martians are left uncomfortable by the human Daleks; they are warriors, they should be leading the battle, not watching from the sidelines and playing messenger.
While the situation itself gravely concerns the Doctor, in the back of his mind is the problem of finding Inchon and what he could be doing with all this military technology around. Assuming that Inchon has corrected the flaw in his masking technology, the only way to locate him is to try and analyze the secondary effects of his actions on events. Jangshen, under the Doctor’s Guidance, begins attempting to find some pattern that might be relevant. Meanwhile, the Daleks send a Gravitational Cascade to destroy the earth, launched from one of their saucer ships. This attack can be easily redirected by Earth’s defenses to destroy the Skaro-Dalek ship that launched the attack – too easily, to suit the doctor; why would the Skaro-Daleks launch an attack with such a slim probability of success? They are more efficient than that! They are up to something. The Doctor is then confronted with a human-Dalek that has gone insane, which explodes because of a built-in Inversion Bomb. The Progenitor sadly reflects on the fact that they are prone to such insanities, and dwells on the horrors they experience within the Dalek Shells, which were originally captured and rebuilt Skaro-Dalek exoskeletons, but which have been redesigned and rebuilt by the humans.
The Doctor realizes that The Progenitor is dwelling on this in an attempt to distract from what actually happened, and so he ignores the bait and focuses his mind on the actual events, reasoning out the logical fallacy of the entire ‘human Dalek’ program – if the ‘human Daleks’ succeed in supplanting the Skaro-Daleks, they would have every reason to simply take over the Dalek Empire and none at all to revert to human form. What’s more, the human Commanders know this and have incorporated the Inversion Bombs into the human-Dalek designs to end this threat when it becomes necessary. They have no intention, and never had any intention, of “restoring” the human Daleks, even assuming that it was possible. Which means that “Progenitor” is a fake, a sham, a carefully-coached actor whose job is to keep the human-Daleks docile. What’s more, if the humans could remote-detonate the human-Daleks, that means that there’s some command trigger to activate the bombs, and it doesn’t seem reasonable that the Skaro-Daleks would not have found that trigger. It follows that the trigger is entirely internal, and must therefore be based on the thought patterns of the human-Daleks – whenever they think a “disloyal” thought, or become confused, or question the Progenitor, the human-Dalek is designed to ‘go insane’ through toxins released into their blood, both triggering the weapon and justifying its use with the ‘induced’ insanity. The human-Daleks are the worst kind of slaves, they are slaves who have been designed to destroy themselves if they ever even suspect that they have been enslaved. They have no prospect of EVER being free, and don’t even know it. And, should they ever complete the task assigned to them by their slave-masters, it will merely trigger the most heinous act of Genocide, something akin to what the Doctor himself did at the fall of Gallifrey, which he has regretted and mourned ever since.
Meanwhile, Jangshen has inadvertently activated the TARDIS’s Emergency Holographic System, in the form of Rose Tyler, and the two are attempting to locate Inchon through minute discrepancies in the temporal vectors of the planet. The arrival of a time-traveler causes a minute “wobble” that *might* be detectable through the need to auto-correct the atomic clocks that are the foundations of the electronic network that surrounds the planet. It’s tedious work but it pays off. And then it pays off again. And again. And again. And again. Every 23.257 seconds, in fact, a new ripple erupts. And always from the same location, a bunker designed to be the Final Defense against the Skaro-Daleks before the human-Daleks drove them away, and disused since. Jangshen doesn’t understand this at all, and so contact the Doctor to bring him up-to-date. While Jangshen is doing so, “Rose Tyler” recognizes a pattern within the readings and self-launches the dematerialization circuits. The TARDIS fades away and the Doctor’s communications link goes dead in mid-communication, only to reappear around the Doctor.
At the console, Jangshen has discovered that the TARDIS interface screen is flashing the message “Omega Directive”. But the Dr is completely distracted by the unexpected presence of Rose Tyler who tells him, “Omega Directive Enabled”. The TARDIS re-materializes in the Calm Zone, a temporal plateau, one of those rare instants when nothing of importance was happening anywhere in the universe. The Omega Directive turns out to be something the Doctor added to the TARDIS systems following the events of The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang and The Wedding Of River Song. If the TARDIS detects an imminent threat to Space-Time Itself, it is now programmed to surround the Dr, wherever he is, and relocate him to a Calm Zone within the time stream to give him time to focus on the nature of the threat.
A threat to the existence of space-time itself is something that is bigger than Inchon. It’s something on the scale of the Time War. It’s something so big that the Doctor determined that *no matter what he was doing or how important it was,* he needed to interrupt it to look into the problem. Jangshen goes over the discoveries that he and Rose had made with the Doctor, who realizes that the readings are consistent with the construction of a planet-sized Inversion Bomb; a detonation that large would destroy the Earth throughout time – and because the Earth and its citizens’ descendants have been the focal point of so many critical events in History, the resulting paradox would wipe out the entire universe. It’s only then that the Doctor realizes that the process of sweeping him up has also resulted in capturing the destroyed chassis of the human-Dalek whose existence was terminated by the much smaller Inversion Bomb. Examining it, he discovers that it doesn’t completely match the blueprints that he saw; it has undergone a hardware upgrade, which was triggered by a firmware revision which took place in the Skaro-Daleks at about this point in time.
With horror, the final pieces fall into place for him. The human-Daleks are all connected into the Dalek sub-link network that permits Daleks to access their common database, by virtue of legacy circuits copied into their prototypes by the humans from the original design without understanding what they did. This would permit the Skaro-Daleks to remote-control the human-Daleks. Every defeat seemingly inflicted on the Skaro-Daleks has been a subterfuge to buy time while their “slave Daleks” have been constructing the planet-sized Inversion Bomb deep in the underground bunker, and by now, it must be close to complete. This isn’t just *like* the Time War, it *IS* the Time War – with the Human Race in place of the Gallifreans. Same enemy, same enemy objective. The Dr has lived through this horror story once, he’s not sure he can cope with it a second time around – despair did unhappy things to his psyche. The Omega Directive was enabled as soon as this was discovered by the TARDIS, and echoed back through the internal timeline of the TARDIS to activate the emergency control systems, who immediately attempted to retrieve the Doctor, but who was already on board. This was a contingency that his programming did not anticipate and it gave them some flexibility in choosing how to respond. Accordingly, they materialized as “Rose” at the appropriate point in time and space for the TARDIS’s systems to gather the data that the Doctor would need to understand and end the threat, aided by the efforts of Jangshen. As soon as sufficient data had been obtained, the program could be delayed in its primary function no more; it engaged and rescued the Doctor from the imminent disaster and (effectively) kidnapped him to a place where he had the leisure to analyze the problem and derive a solution.
After a very thoughtful planning session, the Doctor traveled into the past to a point before his previous arrival and intercepted Commander Charith, who he again convinced of his friendship. He then laid out the full situation for the Commander, and enlisted his aid in planning a strike against the planetary bomb despite the inevitable Dalek guards who would be protecting it. Once that was dealt with, they would jam the Dalek sub-net, releasing the human-Daleks; this could not be done sooner without alerting the Skaro-Daleks what they were up to. Charith would have forewarned the Martian troops aboard each vessel to be ready to take control of the fleet and bring it back to Earth, which the Daleks were sure to assault frontally when their plot was exposed. The result would be the annihilation of the human-Daleks and most of the Skaro-Dalek fleet that they already thought destroyed. Humanity might suffer a military setback, but would retain most of the progress gained against the Daleks.
Of course, it didn’t quite go according to plan. Complications along the way were (1) The size of the big Inversion Bomb; (2) A trap set by the Daleks against possible Time Lord interference – a Chronal Inversion, sort of like a water-slide in time, that hurled the TARDIS toward a Positron Whirlpool (a naturally-occurring temporary aperture into a pocket dimension in which time doesn’t exist), where the TARDIS and all its inhabitants would be pinned their like a fly in Amber for all time; (3) The Inversion Bomb design had been perverted / corrupted by Inchon, who has taken over the Progenitor, so that it would rip open a portal into the Lovecraft Plane, permitting his masters to escape back into the real universe. By the time the Doctor had dealt with all that, the human Daleks were under direct Dalek control and closing in on the TARDIS, possibly with the intent of deliberately triggering their internal inversion bombs. One or two, the TARDIS can cope with. But fifty, or a hundred? The Doctor wasn’t sure, and time was running out.
He had to use the emergency communications channels within the bunker to inform every human – and human-Dalek – throughout the universe of the truth of their existence, triggering “insane” thoughts in all of them, something he was still hoping to avoid. And then he would have to learn how to live with himself – but better that than that the human race be tainted with the choice forever. But that didn’t quite work either – the Doctor’s transmission was blocked – from inside the TARDIS! Since Jangshen and Charith were the only beings other than the Doctor who were present, the Doctor jumped to the conclusion that one of them had betrayed him. Jangshen then revealed that the Rose simulation, forecasting what might be required, had shown him how to block the Doctor’s broadcast and repeated your words in a separate transmission, to spare the Doctor from the emotional burden. They then re-materialized and went after the Progenitor, only to find him dead, as Inchon had again fled into the time-stream.
Enemies (other than Inchon)
True Daleks (from Skaro); human-Daleks; “Dalek 001” (The Progenitor). Potentially, Earth’s Government.
Canon Extensions
Inversion Bombs, Positron Whirlpools, The Omega Directive, Temporal Plateaus, Gravitational Cascades, and Human Daleks. What’s more, it’s canon that the Daleks ruled most of the Galaxy until they were defeated and driven ‘underground” by Humans in this era, despite humans being no match for them in every encounter to date. The “Human Daleks” seemed a logical military development that could explain this piece of Canon.
Canon Problems
Various episodes had shown that Daleks had survived the Time War. It didn’t make sense for them to throw their entire fleet at the Earth in their big return episode (Bad Wolf / The Parting Of The Ways), given the number of times that they had been defeated at the 11th hour by the Doctor; at least half would have been dispatched to stand by with a “Plan B” at some other point in time. It also didn’t make sense that the Doctor would not have taken precautions after the crack in time caused the TARDIS to explode, destroying the universe in The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang.
Solutions
The plotline simply put those two precautions into direct conflict, then had Inchon manipulate the conflict for his own purposes.
Metaplot Notes
It had been a while since Inchon had been able to attempt to fulfill his primary ambition, but I wanted to create the sense that he was getting closer to success with each attempt. He had achieved a strategic advantage in Adventure 5, it only made sense that he would utilize it in Adventure 6. Nor has the Doctor found any way to counter it, creating a sense of danger for adventure 7. The Omega Directive informed the Doctor that the creature he’s been calling Inchon must have a true name, and would have given it at some point if it were not significant in some way.
Adventure 7: Hell’s Angels
This is the most recent adventure played in the campaign.
Enemies (other than Inchon)
Weeping Angels.
Canon Extensions
1. Angel life cycle, Angel sociology, two new types of Angels, origins of the Angels, Angel abilities, Angel combat tactics.
2. “Doctor/Donna” impact on the timeline of the universe (refer Donna Noble and the episodes “The Stolen Earth” and “Journey’s End”).
3. In canonical references, Jenny (“The Doctor’s Daughter”) travels by space-ship, the same means by which she departed her planet of birth. In the comics, which some sources regard as non-canonical, she repeatedly travels with a Vortex Manipulator (“cheap and nasty time travel” according to the Doctor). I wanted to extend her canon within the campaign, and it seemed likely that a least one of the Doctor’s enemies would track her down thinking that she was her “father”. While these events took place completely off-camera in terms of the campaign, they were referenced in the plot.
4. Society during the latter days of the Second Great And Bountiful Human Empire.
5. “Bad Wolf” Canon (refer “The Parting Of The Ways“).
6 How Omega was able to achieve the things that he did in The Three Doctors and Arc Of Infinity episodes.
Canon Problems
1. The Weeping angels have only appeared in a few episodes of the TV series and at least one of them was, at least in part, cheesy, which did what was once a fan favorite no favors at all. To reform them, they needed to be given a serious role in a serious story, with depth and emotion.
2. “That which beholds a Weeping Angel is itself a Weeping Angel” is a pivotal piece of Canon from the two-part episode “The Time Of Angels” / “Flesh and Stone” but some of the implications were never considered. Why don’t the Angels travel as photographs of themselves, for example; and can an image held in the mind’s eye serve the same purpose?
3. The mechanism of feeding on the untapped potential lives of their victims needs further elucidation.
4. Why do they look like they derive from Roman Catholicist statuary? Why do they even look human?
5. In “The Time Of Angels,” why did “Angel Bob” need to communicate with the Doctor and company? Why take the soldier’s voice at all?
6. Why did the Angels travel to early 20th century Earth (where they were present during “The Angels Take Manhattan”). Why go anywhere before that planet has space travel? Why did they appear to be hunting Amy Pond and Rory Williams?
7. Why did the “Bad Wolf” make Captain Jack Harkness immortal and how did she know how to do it?
8. A machine designed to clone humans should not have been able to clone a Gallifrean, yet one did in “The Doctor’s Daughter”.
9. The Doctor is convinced that his “daughter” (actually a female clone) is dead, and unable to regenerate. This belief is seemingly confirmed by the time he departs; only then does the body begin to regenerate and Jenny reawakens. Why did it take so long – and, if the Doctor was right and she could not regenerate, how then does she do so?
10. The politics and sociology of human society at the time is contradicted by different episodes.
Solutions
Canon Problems 1-6 were explained by the Angel-related Canon Extensions. Problems 7-9 were resolved by extending the “Doctor/Donna” and “Bad Wolf” Canon Extensions.
The constellation Lacerta
Synopsis: Part 1 “The Heaven-Sent”
Inchon’s flight through space and time is abruptly diverted by an unknown force. The trail leads to the year 6843, the latter days of the late period of the Great And Bountiful Second Empire Of Man. While this society is, in many ways, enlightened, in others it is falling apart; class differences, overpopulation, and starvation are rife, but at the same time, equality between species is close to universal and there is high regard for the rights of others. So many non-humans are represented at the Imperial Court that the Empire is commonly referred to as a Federation. A series of encounters with officials leads to the pair being sent to the Arena to fight for their right to stay on the planet; the Doctor recruits their opponent, a species of alien he’s not had anything to do with in the past, and all three escape to the TARDIS, which has finished extrapolating Inchon’s new destination.
Following, the trio travel to Beta Lacertae III, discovering it to be a Janus world, tidally locked to the Red Giant star 170 light-years from Earth. Its solar system includes two Hot Jupiters also in close orbit and a rocky third planet massing 0.8 Earths that is tidally locked. Normally on such worlds, there is a hot side, where metals run like water, and a cold side locked in frigidity, and a narrow habitable fringe in the twilight between the two, made all the more dangerous by planetary wobble as the Hot Jupiters pull it this way and that. It’s usually more trouble than it’s worth to settle on such worlds, but on this world there is some sort of force field protecting the hot side from the worst that the slowly-dying star can throw at it, keeping the day side warm but temperate, and trapping the heat arising from tidal stresses sufficiently that the south pole is covered in ice sheets but the rest is liquid water which is being pumped to the day side, enabling high-intensity agriculture, broken up by rocky valleys and peaks – some of which contain active volcanoes, and some of which are the seat of mining operations. To one side of the north pole is a vast arid desert crisscrossed by water-bearing channels. It’s a garden world with a red sky.
The most heavily built-up part of the planet is the twilight zone, which is effectively one vast city circumnavigating the entire planet. The TARDIS has touched down in a garden or park on the sun-ward edge, but the night-world is not far away because of the terrain in this location. When the Dr and Jangshen go out to explore the city, they find it abandoned and empty. Lights still burn in empty rooms, and there are signs that the people vanished in the midst of their normal routine.
When they investigate the day side, they find the gardens and farms filled with Buddha statues. Jangshen pauses at each and bows his head in silent prayer before moving on to the next. Slowly, The Doctor became aware that the statues are moving to keep up with the pair but only move when they aren’t being watched – a trait of Weeping Angels. In fact, they have gathered quite a crowd. When the Dr warns Jangshen, the Monk replied “but these are images of the Holy Buddha, the most revered man alive or dead throughout my homeland. He is as a god to us.”
Becoming concerned, the Doctor leads the pair back into the Twilight City; the Buddhas didn’t follow them into the twilight. When they head for the night side, at the edge of the twilight zone and facing toward the light, there is a solitary angel, it’s hands covering it’s eyes. The farther they went, the more of them that they see. The night is as heavily populated by Weeping Angels as the day is with Buddhas. There must be tens or even hundreds of thousands of them, all told. That explains to the Doctor what happened to the residents; the Weeping Angels must have sent everyone into the past – the entire population. That would have generated enormous power for them to consume, enough to sustain them for centuries – or to do something *really* big, like finding and diverting Inchon within the time-stream, for example.
The great unanswered questions are “why” and “where is Inchon now” and “how much havoc could Inchon cause in the body of a Weeping Angel – a species that has never embraced technology, piggybacking on the tech of others?” Unlike the Buddhas, the Angels do follow into the Twilight zone, at least partway. What that might signify, the doctor had absolutely no idea. The Angels and Buddhas even move to concentrate their numbers at positions diametrically opposite each other, with the Doctor on a straight line between them. Realizing that the numbers are too vast to keep more than a few quantum-locked at a time, and that if they wanted to attack, they would have been able to do so by now, the Doctor deduces that the Angels want something from them. Selecting a point midway between the two groups, the Doctor looked skywards and loudly challenged both groups to explain themselves – what do they want?
From his pocket came a muffled reply. Checking it, he found that his Sonic Screwdriver was talking to him. “Do you remember this voice, sir?” The voice is unforgettable to the Doctor – his mind instantly flashes back to Alfava Metraxis, and Angel Bob – but he was destroyed in the 51st century, almost 1800 years ago. The voice confirms that it is not that of the Angel who the Doctor referred to as Angel Bob, but one who remembers him, as all Angels do, and then explains that what one angel knows, every angel throughout time also knows. The voice of Angel Bob then explained that there were limitations to this awareness, but there were certain memories that throughout time they considered definitive statements of what it meant to be an Angel, in terms of behavior and appearance.
Until an event is decided, is fixed within the timeline of the Angels, they can know nothing about it. Only after it is resolved does the memory become accessible to other Angels. Angel Bob saw only the short-term solution to the crack in time of throwing The Doctor in; it was only after the crack was sealed and the universe rebooted by the Doctor that they learned that he was capable of creating a better long-term solution. The instant that he did so, every Angel throughout time knew it to some extent. Amy and Rory had been sent back in time as a reward, because once sent back in time by the Angels, they were completely immune to harm or interference by any agency – which, the Doctor realized, was why his attempts to ‘rescue’ them had failed.
The Angels kill by sending an individual back in time to a moment as far removed from their moment of death as their remaining lifespan, and into conditions such that they lead lives of grace and security. Wars cannot touch them, fate protects them from all ill-fortune. The Angels feed on whatever potential they had to change history within those lost years, in the process coming to know the lives of their victims at least as completely as they know their own. From the Angels’ point of view, they confer on their victims a form of immortality, because those victims live on in the Angels’ memories for millennia.
Some of those sent into the past gain great wisdom from the experience, and impart that wisdom to others through their writings before the end. Others are deranged by the experience. One example was conflated with others to become an important religious figure to the Western Church, and it’s the iconography that developed out of his writings that defines their forms as Angels. Because of that, he, too, was considered definitive to the Angels, who actively protect his existence and lifetime. Another is now known as Buddha, and some Angels make the individual choice to reflect his iconography in their appearance and philosophy.
The two world-views were fundamentally opposed, and a civil war between the Angels is about to take place throughout time as a result. Because this war would be futile, they wanted to avoid it. If the Angels knew how it ended, and who was victorious, there would be no need for it to actually take place – but they don’t, and can’t, and so brought the Doctor to Beta Lacertae III to arbitrate a peace between the factions.
But the Angels were hardly willing to leave such a vital thing in the realm of chance; they had forced him into the body of a volunteer Angel, and quantum-locked him using our combined energy. So long as the Angels existed, and the arbitration remained unresolved, the Western Angels would keep him confined, but if the Doctor decided against them, or refuse to mediate and they then lost the civil war with the Buddhas, he would be released with access to all the powers of a Weeping Angel. Moreover, because he was then one of them, his actions would also be definitive – or perhaps the term should be, re-definitive – of what is normal behavior for an Angel. In effect, every Angel in the universe would become an Inchon, seeking to release the Lovecraftian Horrors.
Synopsis: Part 2 “The Heavenly Chorus”
The second part of the adventure saw the Western Angels, through their spokesman (who the doctor came to refer to as ‘Black Bob’), sparring with the opposing Buddha faction, led by ‘Golden Dave’ as the Doctor nicknamed him. Black Bob, for all that he was attempting to force the decision to be in the favor of the Western Angels faction, still insisted that the Doctor go through the motions of arbitrating the dispute, and that meant listening to both factions until the Doctor understood the differences between them.
The Buddhas came at the issue far more indirectly; after distancing themselves from the past acts claimed by the Western Angels on behalf of the whole population, they wanted to talk about the Doctor, suggesting that he ‘ran from past to future’ in order to avoid his ‘now’ and distract those around him from this behavior because it embarrassed him. The Doctor had to admit that the claim that he lacked equanimity was at least somewhat accurate. The Buddhas then equated the whole of the Weeping Angels to the Doctor’s situation, and described the Western Angels approach as bargaining with threats and bullying; he intended to counter with Truth, rather than playing that game. In response to the threats of an enemy with the powers of a Weeping Angel, he described the origins of the species.
‘How did the Bad Wolf know how to achieve the things that she did?’ was the question he posed rhetorically, before answering that she was ‘ guided, across time, by the Doctor-Donna gestalt. Both possessed the human capacity for what you would call meddling; in the instant before you drew the knowledge of her recent history from her, the Doctor-Donna reached out across time and space and showed the Bad Wolf how to make the changes that were desired.
Some of these changes, the Doctor knew, such as obliterating the Dalek Fleet and all the Daleks then menacing the Earth. Some he knew of, but had not understood, such as the transformation of Captain Jack Harkness into an immortal companion for the Doctor, so that he would never be alone except by choice. They made it possible for the human replication device to create a half Time Lord clone of the Doctor as a back-up for him, and either delayed or induced her regeneration until after the Doctor had departed, and – like the Doctor – was now knocking around Time, getting involved here and there, having stolen the Master’s TARDIS when he assumed the identity of Professor Yana. And, somehow being aware of the threat posed by Inchon or another being like him, they created the Weeping Angels to perform a final mercy-killing on all sentients in the universe should Inchon’s kind prevail.
Black Bob was unimpressed, pointing out that unless knowledge altered decisions, it was worthless information, and therefore had no value. But two could play that game, and if the Western Angels matched the Buddhas offer of information, the Doctor would once again be left only with the choice between Galactic Doom and deciding in the Western Angels favor.
He started by comparing what the Angels were created to do with what the Doctor himself had done when he had deployed the Moment to end the Time War – a decision that the Doctor was forced into in despair, but that has haunted him ever since. But one Angel is not enough to fulfill their Final Mandate, and so he went on to describe the Angel’s life cycle, and pointing out that the Western Angels were the ‘true’ form, while the Buddhas were a “pacifist perversion”. Black Bob then twisted the knife that he had deployed earlier, claiming that above all the Angels had to be true to their natures or every life that they had consumed throughout history was a pointless waste, and reminding the Doctor that he knew what that was like, having learned the same lesson in the Time War, and comparing the Pacifist Buddhas to the War Doctor.
This was psychologically very clever in a manipulative way, because if the Doctor accepted the equality that Black Bob had constructed, and the Doctor continued to reject the actions of the War Doctor, his past incarnation, he must also reject the Eastern Angels and decide in favor of Black Bob’s faction. Fortunately, the Doctor recognized what Bob had attempted to do, and simply by labeling the logical equality as unproven, was able to set aside the implied demand for an immediate decision, and return to the Buddhas to hear their response to what Bob had said.
Golden Dave countered the brutal logic of Bob by describing the evolution of societies as the civilized superseding the savage and the adult superseding the child, then suggesting that the Eastern Angels had outgrown the petty viciousness of the Western Angels. He then addressed the claim that the Eastern Angels were Pacifists, and the implication that they would be unable to carry out the Angel’s mission. This was an important point, because if the Doctor had any doubts about it, he could at least attempt to prevent their “Final Mandate” by choosing the Eastern Faction – or, if he supported that Mandate, to choose the Western Faction. Dave claimed that the difference between the two factions was that the Eastern Angels were discriminating, choosing victims who would benefit from the opportunity for personal growth and for whom the Angel’s Touch would be merciful, while the Western Angels were want to force their “mercy” on everyone. The Eastern Angels would enlighten, and offer potential victims a choice; the Western Angels would not, because they lacked the empathy to correctly assess anything as complex as “Mercy” or “Cruelty”. It was for this reason that what they considered a ‘reward’ was so unpalatable to the Doctor.
Bob’s counterargument was about the individuality of the Angels, which gave him a hook into another emotional soft-spot of the Doctor’s. He revealed that three Buddhas accompanied Omega into his exile, and – cut off from the racial ‘link’ that unified the Species – reverted to a simpler form, and were instrumental in enabling Omega to master that realm and survive. Again, the differences between Western and Eastern Angels were displayed in a subtle but profound way; when the decision was made to reward the Doctor for his actions, the Western Angels chose a direct reward, while the Eastern Angels chose to reward those who put the Doctor into a position to do what he did, holding the individual at arm’s length – the Buddhas gave to Rassilon what he most earnestly desired, the fanatical loyalty of his fellow Time Lords, and the kudos for mastering time itself, and leadership over the Gallifreyan Council; and they gave Omega, the handmaiden who engineered Rassalom’s ascent to power and glory, infinite life and the ability to create anything he wished simply by wishing for it – until Omega sought to use his power to threaten the space-time from which he had sprung. Reconnecting with the matter world also reconnected the Buddhas with their Kin on the outside, and so the truth became known to them all. In other words, their lofty arrogance ‘rewarded’ Omega with millennia of torture and loneliness, followed by destruction.
He then played another trump card. In all their history, only the thirty Angels that accompanied Angel Bob and a handful of individuals have ever been destroyed that no hope of their eventual resurrection remained. Even though when quantum-locked, Angels appear to be made of stone or metal, and can be vaporized or shattered, it’s only a matter of exposure to sufficient energy before they can reform themselves. So it’s very significant when an Angel dies; they know each other for virtually their entire existences, shared each other’s insights, successes, and failures, and learned from them. Which made it all the more significant that one of their number – they don’t use names they way other species do – volunteered to die in order to imprison the Inchon-spirit. This was a naked bid for sympathy toward their faction and cause by the Western Angels, having first sensitized the Doctor through his affection and regard for Omega. In fact, at every turn, the Western Angels had attempted to push the Doctor’s “buttons” in order to manipulate him, while the Eastern Angels had been more philosophical, more intellectual in their arguments, attempting in that way to appeal to the Doctor.
Golden Dave had also recognized this strategy, and wasted no time in pointing it out to the Doctor. There was nothing that Dave could point to as being a lie, but the totality of the impression Bob had created was – according to the Buddha – so wildly inaccurate that it could not be countenanced. Dave admitted that both the Angels as a whole and Buddhas as a group had made mistakes, but had learned from them. Omega, he argued, would have survived almost as long without the aid of the Angels who accompanied him, but without the mercy they conferred on him, it would have been an existence bereft of all but existence itself, and the awareness of each particle of his body being eroded by the radiation which suffused his being. They had, he claimed, sought to spare him the physical torture that would result, but could do nothing to prevent the psychological torture that he inflicted upon himself until it consumed his mind, despite their best efforts.
He then counter-attacked by discussing the immediate future, stating that the Empire Of Man was fall within a generation with incalculable suffering when it does so. Whichever faction wins this dispute will conduct a mercy-killing of somewhere between one- to two-thirds of the population, scattering the victims throughout the remote past. The Doctor’s decision will merely dictate whose philosophies will be employed to choose the victims. What’s more, neither faction had any choice; both factions had been increasing their numbers ever since Inchon had appeared because the “Day of Need” was potentially approaching. With every jump into the Future that Inchon makes, he becomes harder for the Doctor to stop, simply because the technology that he needs is more readily available. Already, the humans of this era had created a primitive form of time travel. Both groups believe that each such jump henceforth will double the danger that Inchon poses; they must be ready against the possibility of his success, and so must now commence as a rapid a growth in numbers as possible – and there is not enough available energy within the universe for both to achieve the necessary numbers. Which meant that they could no longer defer settling the question of the two factions.
Dave decided that the Doctor needed a reminder of why he had become so angry with the original Angel Bob. To deliver it, he opened a space warp and pulled through it an Attack Cruiser of the Empire. A few minutes later, having failed to reach anyone with their communicators, their landing craft touched down in the city. Dave forecast that they would decide that the Angels were responsible, and attack, and that in retaliation, the Western Angels would slaughter everyone aboard. He suggested that the Doctor go and meet them; he might even be able to keep them alive for a while, or persuade them to leave. To sharpen the stakes in the Doctor’s mind, the humans were being led by an old friend of the Doctor, added the Buddha.
With the human landing craft already touched down and undoubtedly disembarking troops, it would take only minutes for them to determine that there was no-one living in the Twilight City, and start looking for someone to blame, and not long thereafter, they would discover the Buddhas and the Angels. But no-one suspected the nature of the Buddhas – and the nature of the Western Angels was only too well-known. Conflict would be inevitable – unless the Doctor intervened. There was no time for him to waste!
After a mad dash through the corridors and walkways of the city, with Jangshen close on his heels, the Doctor intercepted the squads of Imperial Troopers, who were accompanied by Alpha Centauri, a diplomat and – as promised – an old friend of the Doctor; the alien’s species is genderless by human standards, and so it insisted on the impersonal pronoun. The squad leaders were just beginning to suspect the situation they had found themselves in when the Doctor arrived. After the Diplomat had vouched for him, the Doctor had filled the (depreciating tone, please) Soldiers of the situation. Commander Hansford, the senior Squad Leader, ordered a drone launched to confirm the situation and then made a preliminary report to Captain Mitchell Swann, in overall command aboard the Cruiser Arthur C. Chester, overhead.
While they waited for instructions, Alpha Centauri and the Doctor caught up with each other, the Doctor learning that after he had helped save Peladon 38 years earlier, it had arranged for the Doctor to be appointed to Ambassadorial rank – officially, Ambassador-at-large for Peladon – just so that he would have the authority to argue with Federation Bureaucrats should that ever be necessary. That would not be helpful in this situation, as the Cruiser is a Military command – but it also means that the mission’s commanders had no authority to lock the Doctor up.
When it learned more of the current standoff between factions of Weeping Angels, whose very name was now revealed as a misnomer, Alpha Centauri pointed out what would appear to be a logical flaw in the Doctor’s understanding of the situation, one that suggested that all was not entirely as it seemed; the Western Angels must be very low on energy, as they had been on the Dark Side of the planet exclusively for quite some time, and must have consumed a great deal of their energy reserves in diverting the Doctor to the Janus world. That suggested that their threats were, at least partially, a bluff.
Hungry for energy, they would not be able to help being drawn to any source of energy that they could harvest – like the ship’s compliment. Meanwhile, those on the sunlit side had been accumulating almost unlimited reserves by virtue of their location; the two positions were in no way equitable. How, then, could the Western Angels be so confident of being able to match their Eastern counterparts?
Alpha Centauri’s intuition, honed by decades of experience as a negotiator, told it that the Eastern Angels, in bringing the Cruiser here, had been manipulated into doing exactly what the Western Angels wanted. Captain Swann was reactionary and hot-headed, even by human standards; he was certain to react violently. How that would benefit Black Bob’s faction, it didn’t know, but if the Eastern Angels learned of the deception it suspected on the part of the Western Angels, the Buddhas would have no choice but to react – again, most probably, with violence. They were all standing at the edge of a very unstable precipice.
The pair were then joined by Commander Hansford, who relayed the message that the Captain was not inclined to wait for confirmation; he has decided that an Agricultural World was not worth the effort of preserving. The landing party had just ten minutes to evacuate before the Captain commenced a Naryon Bombardment that would melt the entire planet down to slag, Angels and all.
The Doctor realized that a Naryon Bombardment had other potential outcomes. A comparatively minor shift in the polarization of the Naryon Particles would deflect them away from the planet, to strike one of the Dark Jupiters, where they would trigger stellar ignition; or to Beta Lacertae itself, causing the star to explode in a low-level Nova. Igniting the Dark Jupiters wouldn’t do much harm to the Buddhas, but destroying the star would obliterate the day side and flood the night side with Radiation for the next millennium or so, giving the Western Angels victory in their civil war before it was even fought – and marooning the doctor without the TARDIS, which would also be severely damaged, or possibly destroyed; it too was on the day side of the planet, in the direct path of the stellar explosion.
Synopsis: Part 3 “Hell’s Angels”
The Doctor reviewed his options carefully, coming up with a plan that blended several approaches to the problem in the hopes that one of them would be successful. Step one was to explain the problem to Commander Hansford. The Doctor was at his most persuasive, and Hansford detailed one of his squads to assist the Time Lord while he returned to the Imperial Cruiser with the others and Ambassador Centauri, there to attempt to talk the Captain out of his headstrong action.
None of them gave this solution a great chance of success. But it was to be hoped that it buy enough time for the Doctor to implement his second line of attack. He had briefly considered not telling the Eastern Angels what he and the Ambassador had deduced, but the potential consequences should they learn of this violation of their trust were too disastrous. No, he had to ‘come clean,’ and call the Western Angels’ bluff, even though it would inevitably instigate hostilities between the Eastern and Western angels. He hoped that the Eastern Angels, forewarned, would be able to prevent the Western Angels ploy, redirecting the Naryon Bombardment safely to one of the Hot Jupiters.
Black Bob had deduced what the Doctor would attempt to do – they knew him pretty well by now – and had deployed a number of his Weeping Angels in the Twilight City in an attempt to delay or prevent it, but had not allowed for the presence of the additional soldiers. With the Doctor coordinating their efforts, the group managed to keep all the Western Angels quantum-locked until they reached the party of Buddhas surrounding Golden Dave.
The Golden Buddha was philosophic, telling the doctor to calm himself and commenting on the inefficiencies of respiration, before pointing out that the Doctor had not taken into account the way that the Western Angels had reconfigured the force fields that made this Janus World suitable for agriculture, which not only divert a significant level of the radiation on which the Angels feed onto the daylight side to the dark-side, but also focus cosmic radiation onto the concentration of Western Angels. As a result, the two sides were more closely-matched than he thought; both sides had known that conflict between them was inevitable if it was not averted through mediation, and had prepared accordingly. Black Bob may have been arrogant enough to think that he was manipulating the Eastern Angels to his advantage, but the Eastern Angels had seen through his machinations almost immediately. However, he had escalated the state of hostility between the factions. “The moment that the humans attempt to fire the weapons that were rendered inoperative before we brought them hence, he will be chastised. You may then declare a cease-fire between us.”
The Doctor waited while the seconds before the deadline drained away, hoping that the Ambassador had been able to prevail on the Captain’s good sense, thankful that he had not thought to suggest that the weapons may have been sabotaged – an act that the headstrong Captain would probably blame on the Ambassador or on Commander Hansford. At 1 second past zero, Dave announced, “Hostilities have now commenced. Pay close attention, Doctor. You are unlikely to ever see anything like this again. The Angels are now in a state of civil war.”
From somewhere behind the party, an energy bolt arced through the twilight zone to strike one of the Western Angels, shattering it. In mid-air, the pieces seemed to fold in on themselves as though space-time was curdling around them, perpetually growing smaller until nothing remains. You realize that the Eastern Angels of the past must have “fed” upon people who were instrumental in the history of that Western Angel, in effect interfering in its life-cycle to such an extent that it was never here. A series of the buildings in the twilight zone collapsed, almost seeming to implode, and then exploded to rain down on the Western Angels – how the Angels achieved that the doctor can’t begin to guess.
One of the Buddhas collapsed into a heap of rapidly-vanishing rubble – it seemed two could play at the game of altering the past. The sky ripped open as a warhead of some kind penetrated the force-field and detonated, flooding everything in the vicinity with a moment of heat and light and – presumably – hard radiation, before the Eastern Angels absorbed the energy.
In response, space above the Western Angels rippled and twisted, opening a new space-warp above the night side – a space-warp leading to a point close to the surface of a black hole. Scores of angels were ripped from the surface by the gravitational force to be sucked through the space warp, which also sent the Imperial Cruiser tumbling through space toward Beta Lacerta.
In retaliation, another space warp opened above the Eastern Angels and issued forth a large number of asteroids which began to rain down on the day-side. None of the impact points were close to the Doctor, but the impact and concussive force were still enough to deafen him temporarily and knock him to the ground before the Eastern Angels re-positioned their ‘black hole portal’ to suck the remainder harmlessly away.
In two minutes, half the Western Angels had been destroyed, and a like number of Eastern Angels. Suddenly, the Doctor realized that with every angel who is destroyed before they ever reached Beta Lacertae III, anyone that they had exiled into the past subsequent to the moment of destruction also returned. History was literally being rewritten before his very eyes – about half the population of the Agricultural Colony had now returned to the Twilight City, only to be caught in the crossfire. As soon as he realized that, the Doctor declared, “That’s Enough!”. Fortunately, Golden Dave agreed, and dispatched the Doctor to broker a cease fire and resume negotiations.
Both sides had the implacability of stone – but, unlike humans, they had not grown excited or angry at any point in the exchange. Jangshen suggested that the Doctor use his ‘ambassadorial authority’ to require the War Cruiser to begin rescue and evacuation of the ‘returned’ humans. He appeared to have sustained cuts, bruises, and a broken arm – probably in the course of the bombardment.
While doing so, a line of logic presented itself to the Doctor, an argument that could end this civil war permanently – if he could be persuasive enough. The Angels entire dispute was predicated on the concept that the Doctor would eventually fail to stop Inchon, and thus they need to be ready to enact their ‘final solution’. But that fatalism ignored the lesson that the Angels had learned from the original Angel Bob – that they could see only the short-term, but the Doctor was capable of finding a solution in the long-term that was superior to that short-term vision. They could not see the alternative because the outcome had not been determined, and the indeterminate is always unknown to the Angels – giving them free will by not hamstringing them with foreknowledge of their ‘destiny’. And, if Inchon was defeated by the Doctor, their entire purpose was moot – perhaps it might be best not to mention that!
Just as the Doctor was going over this line of argument for flaws, he and Jangshen start fading in and out. “What are you up to, Doctor?” demanded the Golden Buddha, irked for the first time. The Time Lord had just enough time to announce “It’s not my doing, I assure you!” before the world around him vanished into a severely blue-shifted space. The Doctor recognized the effect as a 75th century Transmat teleportation beam – he has one in the TARDIS which he tinkers with from time to time, but has never been able to get to work properly. It’s an effect that doesn’t belong in this time – or any time for another 1100 years or so.
A moment later, the Doctor and Jangshen reappeared in a room with curved walls angled outwards from the top, featuring large windows that revealed that he was now in orbit around the planet – in a ship or facility that the Imperial Cruiser did not or could not detect. A somehow-familiar voice announced, “There is a flaw in your logic, Doctor. The Angels abide not against the threat of Inchon, but against the menace of Inchon’s masters. Nor is that the only difficulty with which you must now contend.”
If it weren’t that he had brought him to mind earlier, the Doctor might have had a great deal more trouble placing the voice. With that advantage, he had more trouble believing his ears than in identifying the voice of Omega!
As though in response to this thought, came the answer, “I am not Omega, though we Imprinted upon him and so share his voice.” Turning away from the windows, the duo found the center of the room now occupied by a set of pedestals upon which resided statues of the Romano-Greek gods in the classical style.
Instantly, the Doctor deduced that this must be a third faction of Angels that neither Eastern nor Western groups knew about, but there was no response to the Doctor’s reply; suddenly, he realized that both he and Jangshen were staring at them, freezing them into immobile stone, unable to respond to your questions. Turning both of them away to face the planet below through the windows, he repeated his reply.
“You may address me as Zeus, and think of us as the Celestial Chorus of the Angels. We are the descendants of those you we call Titans. They were the Angels who accompanied Omega into exile, and became isolated from the definitive imprinting events that have marked our kin below. Instead, we imprinted ourselves upon Omega, the engineer of Time, before the isolation affected his mind. We are here because there is – and needs to be – a third way. Before I can explain further, I must provide you with additional information about my kind.”
The Doctor was already almost certainly the foremost authority in existence on the subject of the Weeping Angels, thanks to the education he had received from Black Bob and Golden Dave. He wasn’t sure how much more there was to learn, or even if he wanted to be the focus of attention of an entire species of Angels, but curiosity got the better of him, as it always does.
Zeus explained that the book written by Rastan Jovanich contained misinformation deliberately fed to him by the Angels even as he studied them, for the express purpose of manipulating the Doctor into behaving the way he did – the way the Angels remembered it – when he confronted the original Angel Bob.
Jovanich wrote, “That Which Holds The Image Of An Angel Is Itself A Weeping Angel”. This was, according to Zeus, an overstatement at best. It was more accurate to state that “That Which Holds The Image Of An Angel is a beacon to that Angel”. The Angel in the image still needed to expend its energy stores in whole or in part to transport itself to wherever the image was. Since they abhor the waste of energy, finding it akin to voluntarily starving oneself, Angels rarely made the effort, except when there was no other choice. It is usually more energy-efficient to arrange physical transportation by others, usually unwitting. This is why Angels do not normally travel as images which can be transmitted over some communications channel.
Both Western and Eastern angels were bound to this limitation. The Celestial Chorus, however, were not. They travel in the memory of those who have beheld the Angel, but transport little more than a mote. They then transfer the stored power that would have been expended in transporting the whole Angel to that mote, causing it to grow and to remember having been the original Angel. This destroys the original Angel, but leaves a duplicate behind that is exact in every detail – except that it is in a different place. In effect, the Angel has traveled at almost zero energy cost.
It follows that they need only show ourselves to someone who is traveling to their desired destination, and the Celestial Angel could then follow them to the desired destination. Furthermore, because they are Temporally Discontinuous, they can arrive at that destination at any point in time, before or after the nexus was carried there.
This gives the Celestial Chorus an ability far beyond those of the Angels on the planet below. But it was soon revealed that this was not their only area of superiority. Weeping Angels feed on radiation, in fact, on any kind of radiant energy. An eternity spent in the antimatter realm created by Omega’s will had bestowed upon them near-unlimited energy reserves. That is one reason why they had chosen the appearance of superior beings – in comparison to the limited and subordinate aspects that their “lesser kin” project.
While Zeus spoke, the Doctor noted that he could observe the Angels moving in the dim reflections on the glass in front of him; their appeared to be limits to the quantum-lock defense mechanism that he resolved to file away in his back pocket against need in future encounters.
Not all radiation is equal to Weeping Angels, continued Zeus; some forms are converted more efficiently than others. The antimatter universe created by Omega is suffused with anti-synchronous photonic energy, which is what ate away at his physical body until nothing remained but his force of will; but Omega, thinking that he was bending the singularity to his will to create servants, transformed their physical reality to a form optimized to use that energy as sustenance – another advantage.
While the Titans were cut off from the racial memory of the angels, they retained what they had known prior to their emergence into the antimatter universe. From the day that the Titans were created by Omega, they knew that the time would come when Omega would attempt to escape his confinement. Indeed, had he recognized the Titans as sentient, it would have been a simple matter for him to have done so, for they could have taken over the task of sustaining the antimatter realm long enough for him to ride his Photonic Transfer Beam back to the matter universe. But the Titans could not permit that; it was not in furtherance of their goals.
The Doctor had attempted to destroy the antimatter universe by bringing it into contact with the unconverted matter in the Second Doctor’s flute, left behind when the Doctor thwarted Omega’s first escape attempt. One of the three Titans, who were designed to exist in either matter or antimatter realms, enveloped it and digested the energy of the matter-antimatter annihilation. This destroyed him, leaving only two companions to share Omega’s isolation, but it spared the realm. This enabled Omega to survive long enough to make a further ill-conceived attempt at escape, an attempt that led to his destruction, but left his world intact in the heart of the Black Hole.
A Titan’s brief sojourn upon the Earth, when Omega sent him to steal a Time Lord to take his place, had enabled him to reconnect with the Angels common mind, discovered their division into Eastern and Western philosophic factions, and he gave that common mind enough of their truth to satisfy them; but the Titan recognized that the conflict between the factions would be inevitable, and would jeopardize the Angels ability to complete the purpose for which they were created. And that could not be tolerated.
So the Titans spawned a new generation of Angel – the Celestial Chorus – and began planning for the day when they had to intervene. Since time runs backwards within the anti-matter realm – a phenomenon some had erroneously labeled “anti-time” – the Chorus were able to act prior to their coming into existence (by this universes’ narrow interpretation of the entropic arrow). Their first task was to ensure that they could not only depart and enter the antimatter universe at need, but would be able to know when the Angels nature led them to the brink of Civil War and would be able to travel to that time and place.
To facilitate this, and unknown to him, Sargent Benton carried one of us through the Doctor’s safeguards and into your TARDIS in his memory, there to lie in wait for the needful time. The Doctor never knew that had an additional traveling companion, all this time, for her primary task was to wait, undetected. Accordingly, she assumed the form of a mermaid in his swimming pool room which he thought to be nothing more than a decoration by the TARDIS. That is how the Celestial Chorus were able to arrive at precisely the right time and place.
Knowing their origins helped the Doctor understand the differences between this faction and those below – they had chosen figures of belief and worship as the defining figures in their respective ideologies, while the celestial chorus had chosen an engineer, someone who worked with practicalities, not philosophies. They were not bound by “defining moments”, but were free to choose their own paths according to the needs of the mission. They could be as ruthless as the Western Angels or as merciful as the Eastern Angels, at need. Both the factions had virtues and flaws in their approach, and both had made a grievous error of logic.
There could never be a mercy-killing on the scale of what both now contemplated for humanity; picture the chaos if a third or more of the galactic population were projected back in time, at the same time, to reappear a century or two earlier. This is a flaw in the expectations of both sides toward the fulfillment of the Purpose all Angels share, a failure on the part of both groups to grasp the needs of that purpose; they had assumed that the abilities they already possessed would be sufficient to complete the Purpose, and instead of preparing themselves to carry it out, they had spent their time formulating ever-more-narrowly-drawn definitions of themselves.
Both were so locked into the limitations of what they think it means ‘to be an angel’ and the powers that their respective definitions provide them that they could not see any other way. If the impasse between them is not broken, the brief skirmish the Doctor had witnessed would spill out to every inhabited planet and star in the universe, because if the residents of the universe all die in an Angel civil war, there would be none to suffer should the Horrors escape their confinement. That is how the purpose of the Angels would be carried out, if the Doctor and the Chorus do not prevent it.
The Chorus felt that the Doctor’s only real choice was the pragmatic one, just as the only true way of carrying out such a mercy killing is by ensuring that it is never needed. To this end, they had even manipulated their lesser kinfolk in minor ways, such as giving Black Bob and his cohorts the notion of rewarding the Doctor by ‘protecting’ his past companions within their personal histories. This inevitably resulted in pain for the Doctor, for which they offered a regret they admitted to be empty, because they considered it an utterly necessary pain; it drove the Doctor to be at the Taktsang Monastery when Inchon forced open a crack into this reality.
The Doctor was the Chorus’ chosen weapon against the Horrors that were driven out of this universe long ago. Rather than preparing against the day of his failure, they chose to believe that he was not the kind of being who would permit such a defeat to be the last word; he had never done so in the past.
The Chorus had a plan “B”: should it become necessary, they would unite and lead the sentients of the universe in an all-or-nothing suicide mission in opposition to the Horrors, for death was death, regardless of the mechanism, but such death could be empty or the ultimate act of defiance against an unreasonable alternative. But they preferred to bet on the Doctor.
With a new understanding of the stakes, the discussion turned to the situation on the planet below. The Chorus had a solution to the impasse between the two factions, one that only the Doctor could implement. The requirements to enact this solution had been brought here as a result of more manipulations by the Celestial Chorus – an Imperial Cruiser from the Human Empire, a Diplomat of scrupulous fairness and honesty, and the Doctor as a driving force. With such a cast of characters, if the Doctor were himself the playwright, how would he use them to bring about a resolution, Zeus asked.
That question catalyzed the Doctor’s thinking – vague and only partially-formed ideas locked into place. Alpha Centauri had the skills and experience to negotiate recognition of the Angels as a sentient species by the Human Empire and their ruling Federation, joining the thousand other species so recognized. The Captain of an Imperial Cruiser had the authority to then ratify that treaty on behalf of Earth. Since such a treaty would need to be trilaterally binding, it would also require each faction of the Angels to accept the rights of the other – not the Celestial Chorus had any intention of giving any of the participants any free will in the matter. Both sides would therefore be the winners and both the losers – and the cost of their defeat would be their capacity to carry out the Mercy Killing of the Human Empire that had recognized them, which was an act that was only valid if one could see all ends – something that, because of their own involvement, the Angels could not.
The Chorus thus redefined the task for which the Western Angels had brought the Doctor to Beta Lacertae to something with a fixed objective, rather than the vague and open-ended demands of the two Factions.
To encourage diligence, the chorus then “set certain events in motion that should encourage all sides to negotiate with a maximum of alacrity and an intolerance for bogging down in side-issues” and declared their involvement in the crisis to be at an end, and translocated the Doctor and Jangshen to the planet below using the 75th century transmat. Only then did the Doctor realize that he failed to inquire about it when he had the chance; the Angels clearly still have secrets that he has not penetrated – a constant in his universe that is somehow comforting, for the day that he knows everything was the day the universe became boring.
Both Golden Dave and Black Bob demanded to know where the Doctor had gone, and how. He answered them simply by pointing out that a number of celestial beings had an interest in the future of the Universe and some of them had intervened to show him a solution to the problem they had posed him. As he was explaining this, he noticed that the stars had begun to move, and he started trying to determine who was responsible and what they hoped to gain. A soldier from the Arthur C Chester hurried up, his arms raised in a parley gesture, calling for the Doctor, not noticing that several Buddhas had crowded in behind him and outstretched their arms, ready to exile him to the past. The Doctor hastily intervened.
The soldier had a message from Captain Mitchell for the Doctor: Something had broken the planet out of solar orbit; it was beginning to plunge toward Beta Lacertae. The ship cannot escape; its engines were damaged during the brief engagement between the armies of Angels. In three hours, the planet, the ship, and both factions of Angels, plus the Doctor and Jangshen would all be destroyed.
The collision of that much mass with that much momentum would punch a hole through to the core of the star, which will nova shortly thereafter. Worse still, Inchon would be freed, and there would be no-one left to stop him – except the Celestial Chorus and their planned universal lemmings “Plan B”. However, the Doctor realized that it might be possible to repair the engines and save the ship – if the Western Angels held the drives together when they wanted to explode, while the Eastern Angels protected the crew and passengers from the drastic acceleration that would be required. But that would not happen unless they all worked together, and that wouldn’t happen unless a peace was brokered – before the planet was obliterated. This was obviously the ‘gentle nudge toward a solution’ that the Chorus had provided.
Things proceeded rapidly from that point. The statement that someone had placed the angels in such a position that neither faction could ever complete their Purpose if their dispute continued left both sides amenable to a compromise that would have seemed unthinkable only a day earlier. As though it were his own idea, the Doctor then punctured the assumption that had motivated both groups to bring the dispute between them to a head, showing that each could again survive and prosper alongside the other. However, their conflict had threatened the Empire, and made them aware of the dangers the Angels posed to them – even now, anything that might possibly be an Angel was almost certainly surrounded by Imperial Military with weapons trained on it. The only hope that the Angels had of ever surviving to complete their ultimate Purpose was to negotiate terms with the Humans and adhere to them scrupulously.
With the Angels thus motivated to establish diplomatic relations with the humans, he turned his attention to persuading the humans aboard the Arthur C Chester to negotiate with the Angels. Because their survival was at stake, they were relatively easy to corral. Negotiations were moved aboard the Arthur C Chester, and the TARDIS moved on board. The terms of the agreement were simple and straightforward, and largely a matter of protecting each side from the citizens of the others. As much time was spent laying out how the three groups would cooperate in the mutual saving of each other’s lives, because the Doctor refused to leave the returned inhabitants of the Agricultural Colony to die with their star. The ‘Chester’ could not hold them all; it was not large enough, and the humans would add so much mass to the ship that it could not escape if it tried. The solution was to park the humans in the TARDIS, where their masses were irrelevant to the vessel. They were soon being stuffed inside the bigger-on-the-inside traveling box like sausages. With the Doctor’s assistance, the engines were repaired in the nick of time, and as the Nova flared in the windows of the ship, it got underway.
Back in the TARDIS, the Doctor tuned in the Temporal Distortion Scanner that he has rigged to trace Inchon’s flight through time and space. Because of the added “kick” that the Angels have given Inchon, the old model of when and where he would skip to next were completely out the window, so he had no idea where his hunt would take him next.
Suddenly, the doctor realized that he may have missed a trick – the “Omega Directive” had told him that there was a significance to “Inchon’s” True Name that he would only understand when he learned the name. Since Inchon was in the form of a Weeping Angel, that knowledge would have been available to Black Bob, even if not to the Golden Buddha. He had plenty of chances to ask them what the true name was, and it might have been a valuable hint as to what to expect in the future. But that chance is past. He would just have to muddle through as usual – but perhaps that was for the best. Ignorance permitted him to view problems with a clear and undistorted perspective, and that was too valuable an advantage to give up.
Jangshen, meanwhile, had been chastised by the encounter with the Angels, learning that there was far more to the universe than could be solved using the guidance of his limited philosophy. He apologized to the Doctor for his attitude and resolved to treat the quest upon which they were engaged with greater gravity, henceforth.
Adventure 8: Revolution No 9999 (unplayed)
I can’t provide too many details of this adventure, except to say that it will be more of the same. The driving force will once again be the Inchon-Doctor struggle, but that will be secondary to some unexpected old friends and enemies having problems of their own – problems that the Doctor will inevitably get drawn into. This adventure won’t so much deal with a plot hole from existing canon as it will a plot ‘blank spot’ left by that canon. In terms of pacing, I want to actually back off a little after the intensity peak of “Hell’s Angels” to give the sense of anticipation a little longer to build. I’m also strongly tempted to make this a “Christmas Special” just to preserve the meta-relationship between the TV show’s structure and the campaign, but I’m not going to stretch the adventure out of shape to achieve that.
Adventure 9: Render Unto Ceaser (unplayed, working title)
This is intended to be the second-last adventure of the campaign. From a metagame perspective, any fan of the TV series should be able to predict which old enemies have yet to become ‘perturbed’ in their tracks by the Inchon-Doctor struggle, but I’ve been careful with my working titles not to give the game away.
Adventure 10: The Infinite Monster (unplayed, working title)
I’ve planned all along for this to be a big finish that brings together all the plot threads that have been left dangling here and there. Because I outlined what I intended for this adventure to contain before I started work on adventure 1, I’ve been able to continually refer to it and set things up in advance. It will have the usual mix of surprise characters, and will complete integration with the existing TV canon, delivering the Doctor to the mental state of “The Snowmen” in a believable way that is satisfying to the player for all that he already knows the end result of the campaign. It’s not the destination in this case, it’s the journey, that matters.
Campaign Review by Saxon
I asked Saxon a number of leading questions about the campaign and have synopsized his responses, and a few things that he’s said at the game table, into a narrative-form review. This is all about what this plot repair technique brings to a campaign that is based entirely around the use of the technique, from the player’s perspective.
I’ll first contextualize my comments with what is hopefully a relatively simple general statement on my feelings on continuity.
I’m getting old. The approach I took to psycho-analyzing Blackwing as a character in Mike’s Zenith-3 campaign may give a different impression, but…
While I’m still moderately enthusiastic for the details of my fandoms, I no longer take the pre-Crisis On Infinite Earths approach that multiple conflicting details NEED to be reconciled by the likes of separate universes, time paradoxes rewriting history, erroneous reports, or overenthusiastic re-tellings of stories by bards around the campfire who need to keep their audience enthused and are therefore gilding the lily.
These days I’m more likely to be influenced by the real-word knowledge that stories have to be created under constraints of time and budget – and possibly also a tongue-in-cheek description I once heard that “its all in a continuity, but the stuff that counts is the stuff that you’ve read / watched / listened to and particularly the stuff that you liked”. So when it comes to the broad scale continuity of a shared fictional setting, as a rule of thumb if there is a problem, is there an interesting or useful solution? Otherwise it’s just another niggle to be noted – it exists but it’s not worth your time to get an ulcer over. Heck, it doesn’t even necessarily need to be the same interesting solution.
With regard to the Lovecraft’s Legacies campaign: I enjoy Dr Who generally, and I enjoy the details of Dr Who continuity (sometimes shaky or mutually internally contradictory though it may be), and the opportunity to play within those is both entertaining and interesting / thought provoking. However, that simply means I’m immersing myself in the game session. Most use of continuity falls into the enthusiastic “Ooo, that’s creative and interesting” category and goes no further. However the full gamut of reaction elicited by the campaign ranges from “Ah, that’s a useful solution that I’ll keep in mind for later use” through to “No, I disagree with that, but this isn’t my game so I’ll suspend disbelief and run with it anyway.”
The campaign has relied on several plot holes within the official continuity, some generally recognized, and some not. Filling those plot holes with other content from the official continuity contributes to the ‘look and feel,’ and the entertainment value of the campaign, for a fan who knows the references. However, it does presume that a tour of Who continuity is of major importance to the campaign, and therefor makes it very different from what I expect a Doctor Who campaign for fans with less of a knowledge of continuity would be. Or for that matter, non-fans who are simply using the TARDIS as a prop for quick and easy time-space travel and who have zero interest in continuity. This is a campaign methodology that works for those already predisposed to immersion within the source material.
That said, the immersion definitely adds to the interest levels. There is a puzzle aspect to seeing how the gamesmaster is fitting the often-unexpected pieces together, as well as the pleasure of interacting with old favorite characters and places.
A lot rests on the solutions within the campaign being credible within the limitations imposed by the ‘look and feel’ and the established continuity of the official sources. On an individual basis the explanations Mike has engineered are fine, and range from fascinating to startling to outright fun. They are, at least, no more contrived than some of the things that have been broadcast. On a meta-level, their frequency can be jarring; the nature of some of the plot holes being filled means that they often need a complicated explanation for what was happening behind the scene to explain what was perceived as happening the first time around. These sort of complications are possible within Dr Who, and within certain runs of the show such as the Moffat period can even be frequent, but the fact that so many of them are necessary within the campaign’s string of adventures is indicative of the use of the campaign theme of examining and repairing continuity. For me that is neither good or bad, but I can see how it might be off-putting to other types of players with different expectations. The answers Mike comes up with are at least credible, within the context and bounds of the Who universe. If that’s weren’t the case, I might have a much bigger problem with the campaign’s heavy continuity.
Every adventure has extended Dr Who canon with reference to places, people, and events from within the official continuity, rather than being internal to the Campaign. This has an impact on the
campaign as experienced by me in my capacity as a player. It involves bringing back old fan favorites, in startling new contexts, which creates a level of emotional investment and also the challenge (when I remember) of having the Doctor react in a particular way to someone who is known to him. So I’m fine with that. It’s kind of like Forest Gump technology, which you would definitely need to use if this were to be done as TV episodes – and way beyond the normal budget of a Doctor Who season. You get the same kind jaw-dropping surprises from past continuity.
Having to abide by an established continuity (though flirting with original content at the edges of that continuity) might make things easier or harder for the GM, who has to do a lot of research for each adventure – it shows – but despite what might be expected, it doesn’t really make things any easier or harder for me as a player. I play each situation on its merits, drawing on what I know of the characters to devise solutions that are in character for the role that I’m playing. If I come up with a particular approach to a problem within the game that’s fine, but if I’m temporally stumped, Mike’s GMing style of having a few mapped-out prompts for ongoing plot events usually covers things. Certainly it’s more entertaining for the player to recognize continuity references and react to them, but that’s not an aspect of difficulty.
It’s possible that if my knowledge of Doctor Who was even more substantial, the campaign’s tone and content might be even more entertaining, but that would not necessarily make the game any easier to play. Mike typically has good plot summaries, which that increased knowledge might replace in part; so it’s simply a matter of catching the Easter eggs. I suppose ‘sense of involvement’ makes things more fun, and that in turn leads to an easier gaming experience, but in general terms, and despite what I said earlier, you don’t have to be an expert to enjoy this type of campaign – it just provides a bonus entertainment factor.
Plot twists are harder to achieve when locked into an official continuity, as every Dr Who writer and show-runner has found. The approach employed by the campaign – and hence by the plot structuring technique at the heart of it – permits me to be surprised not so much by the plot twists but by the pieces of continuity that Mike selects to fill the story void. The synergizing of multiple parts of Who continuity means I can’t be sure what direction a piece of existing continuity will take, so it’s all a ‘plot twist’. Or at least, I don’t find myself anticipating what direction events will take. It’s interesting to compare this with the other campaigns Mike runs. The pulp campaign tends to run on pulp cliche tropes, and part of the fun is trying to anticipate (with snarky commentary to the other players) what’s going to happen next – and the plot twists that survive that treatment are more surprising as a result. Similarly, superhero tropes are well-established, though the heavily character-driven nature of the Zenith-3 campaign ignores or inverts those tropes so often that plot twists often feel secondary to the ongoing soap opera. That said, Mike pulled the same trick in the last Zenith-3 campaign, where the “cosmic” built up slowly, as though events were overtaking the lives of the participating characters. Each campaign holds a different sort of appeal that comes from the style of campaign and of GMing.
Mike has used a home-brew rules system that is very flexible and rules-light for the Doctor Who campaign. While some might prefer a richer, purpose-driven system, for me, simpler is better. My dislike of being bogged down in hard/complicated maths calculations is well known; being able to quickly and simply make rolls means I have less chance of being taken out of the game. I can’t see that the rules system used adds or takes much away from this particular campaign.
Overall, I enjoy the campaign. I find playing the Doctor as he gets to explore a fictional setting, and indulging in a sense of wonder, to be an agreeable way to pass the time. The campaign is both interesting and compelling, especially seeing different pieces of continuity connect together to create a whole and encountering favorite pieces of that past continuity – and some that I had almost completely forgotten that get a fresh breath of life from the new context. Internally to the campaign, I’ve been surprised at the depth of emotional investment that I had as the character in the fate of Omega in the most recent adventure. In terms of a plot-device-as-the-campaign-premise level, the extra-dimensional Lovecraftian aspect was a completely unexpected twist. I wasn’t expecting the Lovecraft / Who mashup that introduced the villain that set the campaign off. (I should mention that Mike withheld the campaign’s subtitle until after the first adventure’s Big Reveal).
The Last Word
The more adept you are at applying this plot repair technique, the less you have to fear from plot holes. You can either patch these as they come to your players’ attentions, or simply make a note of them and tell any players who notice the hole that their characters don’t have all the answers, but that they will be provided in due course, if the campaign lasts that long.
You can either do so in an “untold adventure” which takes place roughly contemporaneously with the plot hole, or by invoking some form of time travel to permit events to have ramifications at other points in the continuity – thereby solving the plot hole.
No adventure that does nothing else will ever be completely satisfactory, it should be noted. There is a price to be paid for being continuity-obsessive, and to compensate for that, you need additional content of interest to justify spending valuable gaming time on the adventure. If you are even a little bit unsure that the adventure will deliver in fun, you might be better off telling the story in a less interactive medium such as a short story.
But no GM’s toolkit is complete without this technique in their back pockets in some form or another.
About the authors:
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Mike:
Mike is the owner, editor, and principle author at Campaign Mastery, responsible for most of the words of wisdom (or lack thereof) that you read here. You can find him on Twitter as gamewriterMike, and find out more about him from the “About” page above.
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Saxon:
Saxon has been vaguely interested in gaming since the early 1980s, but only since going to university in the late 1980s has the opportunity for regular play developed into solid enthusiasm. Currently he plays in two different groups, both with alternating GMs, playing Dungeons and Dragons 4th ed., the Hero system (Pulp), a custom-rules superhero game (also based on the Hero System), Mike’s “Lovecraft’s Legacies” Dr Who campaign, WEG-era Star Wars, FASA-era Star Trek, and a Space 1889/Call of Cthulhu hybrid. When it’s his turn he runs a Dr Who campaign. He cheerfully admits to being a nerd, even if he’s not a particularly impressive specimen. He was a social acquaintance of both Mike and Blair long before he joined their games.
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Whew! Finished at last! I apologize to all my readers who missed reading something new from Campaign Mastery last week, but I had grossly underestimated how long this article would be, and hence how long it would take to write my contributions…
I’ve spoken to people who say that fudging dice is morally wrong, people who roll everything out in the open and even freely tell their players target numbers, etc. It’s very fascinating what different people call fun and what hills people choose to die on.
