Monday 11 January 2010

DW RPG: Our Adventures in Time and Space

There were three of us. Smith (played by Blair) was a CIA Time Lord agent (we sidestepped the issue of exactly when, in regards to the Time War, when this game took place). Schread (myself), an empath androgynous being with an unknown background, but seems to know far more than her (as I mentioned, we used 'her' and 'she') should. Smith found Schread in the heart of some machine that was controlling a population. S (played by Tim), a girl with a limp and an ability with a gun, and daddy issues (later found out that S was short for, I think, Esmeralda). We picked her up from a hospital.

First up, our GM (Morgue) adapted the FASA module, Lords of Destiny. We got split up pretty early on, which while common for Doctor Who, isn't as good during an RPG game. Still we got by, swapping focus from one group to another. The basic setup was that there are a series of ship modules where everything was provided for the population... it was hell in there. Schread was completely without irony in the sense that people should live how they want to, even if that wasn't in luxury.

One important point was that there were no porthole or the like, so the idea of other worlds, etc, was just a story. Oh, and we found out that the ship consumed worlds to feed the population, with another one in the immediate path, so that wasn't good. As soon as I heard that there was a 'viewing area' (globe on top of the ship), that was where I had to go. That wasn't without issues (an amusing moment where my technical ineptitude meant I couldn't operate the lift so got one of the natives to come with me). We recruited an old ex-Lord and got to the area, but not without his sacrifice. It was very moving.

However, it was mainly about Smith, who, fascinated with the technology on display (there were guard robots), ended up talking with the computer at the heart of everything. There was a huge climatic moment at the end where Smith's discussions were broadcast to the ship, as was my commentary from the globe. (I remember spending a Story Point to join the rebels in on the communication. The rebels were there for a while, then disappeared. I felt like they should be there.)

It came down to basically one roll to convince, done by Smith with us pitching in. Nice focus of events. Guess what? We got away, in a broken TARDIS (broken by some strange event), a broken TARDIS which was a plot thread that continued. We got away, to other adventures (to be continued...)

[END]

2 comments:

fantomas said...

I was curious if the adventures for the previous RPGs would work with this. From your re-counting, it appears they may!

Do you by chance know how much work/effort was involved to convert over & how much of an easy fit it was?

Jamas Enright said...

From what I recall (and I really hope morgue does his own set of posts on this), it was fairly painless. Something like: '5's in FASA were very good, so map them to '4's in DWATS, etc. (Don't know FASA well enough to know if it had traits.)

As long as you can make up the stats, certainly the story is translatable! ;)