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Post by Captain Rachel on Aug 7, 2011 6:32:23 GMT
Okay, I'm working on a game for my college RPG club and I need help.
Summery Of Game: The party are a bunch of "ordinary" humans who have been kidnapped by a TARDIS (not the Doctor's TARDIS) so that they can help her look for her crew. They've discovered a hypercube which informed them that, just before the Time War ended, several Time Lord children were put through a chameleon arch and hidden throughout time and space.
The TARDIS has decided to find those children and un-chameleon arch them. The hypercube had data in it which enables her to start scanning the universe to try and find the hidden Time Lord kids. She detects 3 signals and the party gets to chose in which order they investigate the signals.
So 3 signals = 3 game sessions. I've written 2 of those 3 and here's whee my problem lies... those two are real downers.
One ("The 1,000 Year Fair") takes place on the homeworld of the Catkin and involves a group of racist priests who want to kill a 12 year old girl because she's human and brainwash an 11 year old boy whose the heir to the throne.
The second ("The Lost Colony") has the party arrive too late to save a village. Then they think they can save the remaining two children, but they're only able to save one (if they're lucky). Oh, and some of the group think that they've been "infected" by the bad guy and are going to either tun into a bad guy or die horribly.
Oh, and the two children whom the party thought were chameleon arched Time Lords were just normal kids. The hypercube had made fake signals to protect the real Time Lord kids.
So you've got two depressing adventures... and I've already got more depressing adventures planed in the future. (For some reason I tend to come up with depressing adventures...)
Long story short: I need some sort of "vacation" for my players, some sort of happy adventure that they can go on. So can anyone give me some suggestions?
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Post by starkllr on Aug 7, 2011 21:52:50 GMT
Here's something I'm planning to use in my online game -I don't have all the details thought out, but the basic idea is a sequel to the Tom Baker story "The Androids of Tara" tardis.wikia.com/wiki/The_Androids_of_TaraBasically, the TARDIS arrives 3 generations after the events of that story. Things are great, except that it's coronation time and there are two possible heirs to the throne: twin siblings, in their late teens (brothers, sisters or brother and sister depending on the gender mix of your PC's. Taran law states that the heir must be married before he/she can be crowned. Unfortunately, several suitors to the heirs have recently met with mysterious "accidents" and so there are no suitable candidates willing to step forward. If neither heir is married by noon on Coronation Day, the throne passes to a distant branch of the royal family, represented by the great-grandson of the original story's villain Count Grendel. Needless to say, he's been causing all the "accidents". And of course, like his grwat-grandfather, he's the best swordsman in the land. When the players show up, they are immedately seen by the heirs as marriage material. And they are targeted by Grendel's great-grandson as impediments to his claiming the throne. There's plenty of opportunity for farce, romance, swashbuckling and swordplay, with small stakes and no angst. You could also include referecces to the original story, if your players are fans of the classic series.
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Post by Captain Rachel on Aug 7, 2011 22:24:07 GMT
I'll have to rewatch that episode, but it just might work... however I'm a bit wary of using it since I'm fairly certain the majority of my players haven't seen much (if any) Classic Who.
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Post by starkllr on Aug 7, 2011 23:38:51 GMT
By te way, love te quote. Winter's Tale is my favorite novel.
Hmm...pearly Soames and the Short Tails would be interesting antagonists to show up in a DW game. So would Jackson Mead, for that matter!
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Post by Craig Oxbrow on Aug 8, 2011 0:52:17 GMT
Less inescapably doomed children would probably help... Indeed, keep the death toll fairly low. (Probably not zero - this is Doctor Who after all - but nobody whose death would be a real bummer.) A definite win would be good too. Let them definitively help people, a lot more than are hurt or killed by the threat. It sounds like you haven't played the second adventure yet, so could you let them save (most of) the village, or save both kids if they come up with a third way? After all, if they aren't really Gallifreyan, you don't have to bring them on board the TARDIS, so they can stay behind in the (largely) saved village. Anyway, I have a bunch of adventure hooks lying around on my blog, some fairly cheery by default, like the comedy episode, the caper, to a lesser extent the action story, and definitely the Children In Need special or the Christmas specials.
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Post by Captain Rachel on Aug 13, 2011 18:22:52 GMT
Thanks to both of you for your suggestions!
I ended up remembering/realizing that several of my players were in a previous (extreamly short) game I ran last school year. In that game the party encountered a version of the 10th Doctor and the Master from an alternative dimension and helped save them from an evil version of Donna Nobel ("The Master-Donna"). At the end of that game 10 was stuck as what the players called a "Chibi-Doctor". Evil!Donna had de-aged him so that he was 7/8 and they couldn't reverse it. My favorite "version" of relationship between the Master and the Doctor is the "friend-enemies" that we see with 3 and Delgado, so the Master promised to stay "not really good... but at least neutral" until the Doctor grew back up. So I decided that the Party's going to run into "Chibi-Doctor" & "Mr. Master". Some rich guy thinks the Master is just a smart human (he got a hold of some old records about Harold Saxon) and wants him to make weapons so he can take over the world. So the Party, the Chibi-Doctor and the Chibi-Doctor's dog Alonso (a Pyrenean Mountain Dog = HUGE white dog he can practically ride) are going to save the Mr. Master.
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Post by zebaroth on Aug 17, 2011 1:27:22 GMT
Thanks to both of you for your suggestions! I ended up remembering/realizing that several of my players were in a previous (extreamly short) game I ran last school year. In that game the party encountered a version of the 10th Doctor and the Master from an alternative dimension and helped save them from an evil version of Donna Nobel ("The Master-Donna"). At the end of that game 10 was stuck as what the players called a "Chibi-Doctor". Evil!Donna had de-aged him so that he was 7/8 and they couldn't reverse it. My favorite "version" of relationship between the Master and the Doctor is the "friend-enemies" that we see with 3 and Delgado, so the Master promised to stay "not really good... but at least neutral" until the Doctor grew back up. So I decided that the Party's going to run into "Chibi-Doctor" & "Mr. Master". Some rich guy thinks the Master is just a smart human (he got a hold of some old records about Harold Saxon) and wants him to make weapons so he can take over the world. So the Party, the Chibi-Doctor and the Chibi-Doctor's dog Alonso (a Pyrenean Mountain Dog = HUGE white dog he can practically ride) are going to save the Mr. Master. that sounds so cool
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Post by Doctor X on Aug 27, 2011 6:17:08 GMT
Got an adventure idea for a "fun" adventure, looking for a better, less-of-a-giveaway title than "Luck Be A Lady." The Doctor takes the companions to Las Vegas in 1959, where they meet his old pals, The Rat Pack. The Doctor or someone else who Feels The Turn Of The Universe notes a small time distortion of only a few seconds, but this keeps happening. While it's going on, people keep losing at the casinos. Crime and suicide rates soar and the city is slowly turning to anarchy as people who lose their shirts cry foul. The time distortion is hard to pin down because it is actually happening because of a series of Probability Extractors located in five different casinos: The Sahara, The Riviera, The Desert Inn, The Sands, and The Flamingo. (Starting to sound familiar to anyone?) Tracing any of these distortions leads to the same source, a Quantum Manipulator hidden in the sewers. Someone is stealing all the luck from Las Vegas! The someone is the last member of a race of fierce warriors whose planet was sealed off in the Time War. Of course, it's previously been thought that it was impossible for any planet trapped by the Time Lock to escape, however, once the Time Lords almost did so, it stopped being impossible and became Extremely Improbable. With the right equipment and an extraordinary amount of luck, it might be possible to escape. To stop this, the polarities of all five probability extraction devices hidden in the casinos must be reversed simultaneously. This will require the companions and the Rat Pack to work together to save Vegas. And naturally, when all that luck is released, everybody wins again. Just this one day, The House Always Loses! (The feedback from reversing the extractors could cause the manipulator to explode as well if you want to have a proper "Come with me, you don't have to die!" "Screw you, Doctor!" ending.) As they're saying goodbye to the Rat Pack, Sinatra says that the experience has given him the idea for a story he wants to bounce off a screenwriter friend.
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Post by starkllr on Aug 27, 2011 18:21:47 GMT
Oh, you should keep the title, it's perfect. Love the story, too. Funnily enough, I wrote up a Rat Pack adventure as well. It's here: db.tt/TPeZX9TI've run it twice, and it proved pretty entertaining both times.
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Post by Doctor X on Aug 28, 2011 12:00:14 GMT
Thanks. Checking out your adventure now. Mid-1959 was chosen because it gives time for the story, then movie "Ocean's 11" to be written. (Actually, a little more research turns up that George Clayton Johnson wrote the original story that Ocean's 11 was based on, and it was turned into a film that same year. So might have to change it to "a writer friend" rather than a screenwriter.)
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