Getting characters involved in pure historicals

[CountClockwise]

I'm in the very very early stages of planning my next campaign and some things have occurred to me. I'm interested in doing quite few pure historicals and apart from a few big finish audios, I haven't seen/heard that many. I probably won't just do pure historicals but I want to keep players on their toes when they go back in time, roughly a 50/50 split maybe weighed more towards sci-fi historicals. I'm currently struggling to think of ways to get characters involved in the plot of a pure historical when they might be hesitant to do so.

The obvious way to get players involved in 'modern' historical is to show them aliens or time anomalies of some kind and then get them to work putting history back on track. From what little I've seen, pure historicals tend to be extremely character focused and I'm struggling to think of a sure fire system to design hooks for this style of adventure. So far I have 'mistaken for a historical figure' or a 'personal mystery or goal that will be resolved by going back in time and seeing history'.

If people can think of any more styles of hooks that don't necessarily conform to a particular setting that would be really helpful.

Happy Holidays

[misterharry]

A plot device used in some of the early TV historicals is "the characters become separated from or lose access to the TARDIS" - see Marco Polo and The Aztecs for inspiration.

Another was "the characters become separated from each other and/or some of them are locked up/taken prisoner" - see The Reign of Terror and The Romans. This one might not work too well with a group of players, as the GM will need to run separate sessions for the separated characters.

It would be helpful to have at least one character with an interest in history and throw some historical mysteries at them - entice them into investigating who killed the Princes in the Tower, or finding out who Jack the Ripper really was, or what really happened to Ambrose Bierce.

[Stormcrow]

Doctor Who itself struggled with this problem, and mostly resorted to the One Of Us Has Been Captured plot. The time travelers typically have to get involved in the setting to rescue their companions.

The very best way to solve this problem is to ask the players if they'd LIKE to explore historical settings just for the fun of it. If they say yes, then you don't need any hook but the availability of history. If they say no or aren't sure, then you probably shouldn't force them to, or at most throw them into a One Of Us Has Been Captured plot from which they can escape before they leave.

[Eryx]

I've always found the idea of running a pure historical scenario rather daunting but I think that is because I know the sort of players that I have. They are good roleplayers but wouldn't put much consideration into not altering events if it suited their needs.

[misterharry]

Dec 26, 2017 19:45:23 GMT Eryx said:

I've always found the idea of running a pure historical scenario rather daunting but I think that is because I know the sort of players that I have. They are good roleplayers but wouldn't put much consideration into not altering events if it suited their needs.

Why not let them do that, and then show them the consequences - a different future coming into being, perhaps changes to their human PCs or the negation of the timelines they come from, damage to the Web of Time, and so on.

[misterharry]

Another way to include a historical adventure would be if you have a quest lasting several adventures (a la The Key to Time), then have one of the quest's objectives being located in an otherwise historical setting. A bit like The Androids of Tara, in which the segment of the Key to Time was a very minor part of the story.

[olegrand]

One of the problems with "pure historicals" is that they always seem to "miss something" - this extra touch of weirdness / sci-fi / fantastic elements that are the staples of the Whoniverse... but seem is the right word here because you can actually counterbalance the absence of this "essential" element in a number of ways:

- As pointed out by previous posters, plot devices like "being separated from the TARDIS" or "having to rescue captured companions" work well in purely historical stories, especially since the necessity to preserve history and keep it on the right track tends to force the characters to act more cautiously / prudently / deviously than in purely "alien" or "futuristic" stories where (oddly enough) nobody really seems to care about the course of history, unwanted domino effects etc.

- Not having a "fantastic" element can also give you more story room (so to speak) to explore other stuff - including some roleplaying-heavy interactions with famous personages or even (and why not?) romantic relationships, existential choices and other character-driven elements.

- Last but not least, the fact that the characters ARE time travellers can, in itself, represent that missing "fantastic element" - if only because, well, they shouldn't be there at all and their very presence "at the wrong time in the wrong place" may set off potentially dramatic history-altering consequences - so it's no longer about repairing some arch-villain's damage to the timeline, it's about dealing with the consequences of your very own actions.

In the latest Lady Penelope episode I've run (it was last saturday - I'll post the blurb as usual as soon as we've played the third episode of the new season but I digress), since the player-character had decided to remain in the same time period for at least two episodes in a row, I wanted to avoid the famous "trouble magnet" pitfall - you know, "everytime I go somewhere / somewhen, I end up fighting some evil or being embroiled in an ohterworldly mystery - why are these things always happening when I'm there?". So after some brainstorming, I devised a scenario where the Time Lady actually had to ensure history went the right way - which it wouldn't have if she hadn't been here (making her a true architect (as opposed to a "saviour" or "repair person") of history-as-we-know-it - which I found was a nice twist on the usual "let's prevent the bad guys from derailing the continuum". In this particular case, the cause for the dramatic potential shift in history was the decision of King George III to completely prohibit / suppress the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (as opposed to "just a few sections and illustrations about midwifery and female anatomy"). So this radical decision (which would have changed the face of British history as we know it) was taken by the monarch without any outside / alien / psychic / whatever intervention or interference - and Penelope had to alter the "natural" course of history so that it could become "history as we know it".

[Stormcrow]

Dec 27, 2017 13:32:12 GMT olegrand said:

One of the problems with "pure historicals" is that they always seem to "miss something" - this extra touch of weirdness / sci-fi / fantastic elements that are the staples of the Whoniverse... but seem is the right word here because you can actually counterbalance the absence of this "essential" element in a number of ways:

I object to the idea that weirdness is essential. The historicals of Doctor Who work just fine.

As pointed out by previous posters, plot devices like "being separated from the TARDIS" or "having to rescue captured companions" work well in purely historical stories, especially since the necessity to preserve history and keep it on the right track tends to force the characters to act more cautiously / prudently / deviously than in purely "alien" or "futuristic" stories where (oddly enough) nobody really seems to care about the course of history, unwanted domino effects etc.

Doctor Who historicals typically have nothing to do with preserving history; the protagonists are participants IN history. At most there's a nod to not being able to change something in history we'd like to change.

Not having a "fantastic" element can also give you more story room (so to speak) to explore other stuff - including some roleplaying-heavy interactions with famous personages or even (and why not?) romantic relationships, existential choices and other character-driven elements.

This is the main point of doing historicals. Having your TARDIS seized by some petty lord is one thing; having it seized by the great Kublai Khan, and recruiting Marco Polo to help get it back, is quite another.

Last but not least, the fact that the characters ARE time travellers can, in itself, represent that missing "fantastic element" - if only because, well, they shouldn't be there at all and their very presence "at the wrong time in the wrong place" may set off potentially dramatic history-altering consequences - so it's no longer about repairing some arch-villain's damage to the timeline, it's about dealing with the consequences of your very own actions.

This is not how historicals work. You can do this, but then it's not, strictly speaking, a historical.

[olegrand]

Dec 27, 2017 16:13:22 GMT Stormcrow said:

I object to the idea that weirdness is essential. The historicals of Doctor Who work just fine.

Well I agree completely with you on this so perhaps my explanations were not crystal-clear

I don't think that weirdness is essential - I only said that many people think that way... that's why I put quotation marks around "essential" and used a verb like "seem" (rather than "be").

But I realize I could have been clearer

Dec 27, 2017 16:13:22 GMT Stormcrow said:

This is not how historicals work. You can do this, but then it's not, strictly speaking, a historical.

Here I beg to differ. Unless you don't consider, say, "The Aztecs" as a pure historical: in this story, the fact that the heroes are time travellers does change pretty much everything and Barbara WANTS to actually alter history and is stopped from doing so by the Doctor. All of this wouldn't be parts of the story if the characters weren't time travellers in the first place.


That being said, I have no intention of entering a debate on the "correct way" (?) of doing or understanding "historicals" in DW - I was merely offering some thoughts and advice as a GM regarding the question raised by the original poster.

[Catsmate]

Dec 27, 2017 10:50:45 GMT misterharry said:

Another way to include a historical adventure would be if you have a quest lasting several adventures (a la The Key to Time), then have one of the quest's objectives being located in an otherwise historical setting. A bit like The Androids of Tara, in which the segment of the Key to Time was a very minor part of the story.

I did one like this for a different time travel game called A Weekend in the Country ^[1]. It was a rip-off^[2] of a rather obscure mystery novel called Love Lies Bleeding^[3] and basically added two elements to the plot of that book; the PCs and an out-of-place artefact, a flaky holographic pendant that seems to show the PCs with a man in Elizabethan dress^[4].

It started, in classic Golden Age form, with the PCs arriving in the English countryside on a fine summer's day and stumbling over a corpse. They soon became embroiled in a mystery that involved possible temporal contamination and a

SPOILER: Click to show

lost Shakespeare play.

There was no actual weirdness other than the pendant (and that was soon broken by Professor Rufus Marsh) but much paranoia, a missing teenage schoolgirl, a manic dog and several additional murders. 







[1] Borrowed from Jack Carr
[2] Or homage.
[3] By Robert Montgomery aka Edmund Crispen an undeservedly forgotten Golden Age mystery writer whose output was badly effected by his alcoholism. It's worth a read though it's not his best.
More.
[4] Guess who...

[moondragon007]

Dec 27, 2017 13:32:12 GMT olegrand said:

 I devised a scenario where the Time Lady actually had to ensure history went the right way - which it wouldn't have if she hadn't been here (making her a true architect (as opposed to a "saviour" or "repair person") of history-as-we-know-it - which I found was a nice twist on the usual "let's prevent the bad guys from derailing the continuum". 

Reminds me of the Star Trek: The Animated Series episode "Yesteryear", where Spock had to go back in time to save his younger self.

[jay042]

I can think of one possibility for the pure historical that could be played for laughs.

The players having to constantly save the exceedingly hapless Adolphe Sax inventor of the Saxophone who suffered a multitude of near death experiences. Even make it a running gag anytime the characters are in Late 19th Century Paris of having to save him from some terrible accident.

[CountClockwise]

Jan 26, 2018 21:35:59 GMT jay042 said:

I can think of one possibility for the pure historical that could be played for laughs.

The players having to constantly save the exceedingly hapless Adolphe Sax inventor of the Saxophone who suffered a multitude of near death experiences. Even make it a running gag anytime the characters are in Late 19th Century Paris of having to save him from some terrible accident.

Huh. The more you know. I might use him one day

[Catsmate]

Dec 27, 2017 10:50:45 GMT misterharry said:

Another way to include a historical adventure would be if you have a quest lasting several adventures (a la The Key to Time), then have one of the quest's objectives being located in an otherwise historical setting. A bit like The Androids of Tara, in which the segment of the Key to Time was a very minor part of the story.

Such quests were a staple of "kids" television back then; Children of the Stones, Into the Labyrinth, T-Bag et cetera. A good source of ideas.