[Question] Can you find a TARDIS for Jenny?

[Polar Bear]

The kids just saw The Doctor's Daughter (series 4) for the first time, and they've become entranced with Jenny.  They're interested in doing their next DWAITAS season with her as the Time Lady, which is fine with me, bar three problems:

1) She doesn't have a TARDIS.
2) Gallifrey is time-locked, so she has no way to get a TARDIS.
3) Even if she got a TARDIS, she would need to be trained in the proper use of her (though I could probably draft River Song for that task, so okay, that problem's solved).

I suppose I could just hand out four vortex manipulators and four babel fish, but it loses a bit of the romance that way, you know?

Okay, so any ideas on how I could, in an opening adventure, find a TARDIS for this Time Lady?

[da professor]

Problems 1 & 2 could be solved by her finding a TARDIS which was lost or abandoned during the Time War- as the Jenny in my campaign did.
Problem 3 could be solved by having the TARDIS teach her, as it did River in 'Let's Kill Hitler' or part solved by having a former time agent aboard who at least knows something about Vortex Theory, but not enough to get it exactly where he wants it every time- and it won't leave Jenny behind because he doesn't have a Rasillon Imprimatur

[Hedgewick]

Feb 9, 2014 8:37:21 GMT da professor said:

Problems 1 & 2 could be solved by her finding a TARDIS which was lost or abandoned during the Time War- as the Jenny in my campaign did.

I've been working up similar plans for a future campaign. (In my case, I need to get the Master a new TARDIS.) I'm thinking much like Da Professor here. Despite their tendency towards isolation, the scope of Gallifrey's power suggests they would have reached many planets and extended into all sorts of pocket universes. I'm planning a module that involves an extra-dimensional dumping ground for abandoned Time Lord technology, a sort of junkyard for scrapped TARDISes. It has the potential to be a strange and intriguing setting, and I plan to set an entire adventure there.

If the TARDIS junkyard concept doesn't strike your fancy, you can always fall back on Russell T Davies's suggestion that TARDISes are grown, not built, and that a new one could be grown from a fragment of the Doctor's own. (He nearly did just this at the close of "Journey's End.")

[mthomason]

The other option of course is that not every time travel device has to be a TARDIS or a Vortex Manipulator. It's possible to build other types of time capsule (see The Two Doctors), and we've seen spacecraft with time travel. You could have an adventure where the party defeats a group of Daleks and end up with their ship, for instance.

Hedgewick's scrap yard idea meshes nicely with what we saw in The Doctor's Wife - personally I feel it's a combination of the two, with a TARDIS being grown, and then optionally having a Gallifreyan console installed to provide an interface for the Time Lords to use, although a TARDIS is equally capable of building that console if you go by the C7 books - perhaps that's something that it learns from examining and connecting to its first one, knowledge it gains with age, or something it learns how to do from other TARDISes? Use whatever you feel works best with your game, of course

[Polar Bear]

These are great ideas! I'm really enjoying reading your thoughts.  

[Curufea]

You could of course, have Jenny get picked up by a TARDIS that she builds at a later time...

[Polar Bear]

I think Da Professor's answer is easiest, and it could easily be integrated into any pre-existing post-TW module with Daleks in it. Curse of the Cyclops, perhaps. Just add in a war TARDIS, throw in River as an NPC, and I think the problem is solved.

Thanks, all!

(EDIT: Ooh!  It's "booty," like in my old AD&D days!)

[Catsmate]

She could pick a small space craft (use one of the deckplans available on the net) and fit it with a time travel drive of some sort. Either land on a planet or stay in orbit and use small craft or a teleport/transmat/transporter to go up/down (with the commensurate possibilities for things to go wrong). Give the players a change from TARDISes, a sensation closer to space travel, a touch of claustrophobia.
Her personality seemed more.......militaristic than the Doctor's so this might suit her better.

[Eternally Lost Zeppo]

In the campaign I'm running (possible spoilers for Exiles of Time players, so stop reading NOW):




Jenny encounters the remnants of the Time Agency, and works with them to rebuild the agency from scratch. At some point in their early years, the group sets up base in what was formally the Torchwood Hub, after discovering a TARDIS in its early stages of growth there. (Captain Jack had a piece of TARDIS coral in his office, which presumably is still there somewhere among the wreckage of the Torchwood Hub, though its growth may have been affected by the explosion.)

Jenny and a select team of scientists have been working to aid the TARDIS' growth, and get it operational, a project that is referred to as 'Project Prometheus'.

Later in the series, after seeming to have been taken out by the bad guys, the Temporal Security Agency will later reappear having managed to get their TARDIS operational and escaped in it, making it their new mobile base of operations.

This is pretty specific to my campaign, but you might figure out some other way for your Jenny to come across the TARDIS that was growing in the Torchwood Hub?

[jennysfan]

I am having a flashback here...I did the same thing. I used the Master's 'War' TARDIS. It did mean we had to go to the end of the universe, (I decided to have it be somewhere in the Silver Devastation). That was actually the end of our first Story Arc. Previously they had been a Time Agent and 'civilian consultants', with Jenny being the 'Sherlock/Doctor' consultant. Had a very 3rd Doctor feel, now that I think about it.

Anyway, I asked Marnel about what defenses the Master might have in his TARDIS since that is what I thought the story called for. I stuck with known factors, (the Master had a TARDIS at the end of the universe), but considering that the Doctor's plan for the TARDIS in the event of his death was to 'let it die, just leave it alone to be forgotten about', I don't see why an abandoned TARDIS couldn't exist.

What is doing where the players stumble upon it and why it let them in could be great story hooks too. Especially if the chameleon circuit is working.
"I was trying to play hide and seek with this grumpy old cyborg on Tytilus Gamma-7, when I stumbled in here. No literally, I thought it was a supply closet but oI tripped on the steps. The most amazing ship in the d and I found it. Now if only I could figure out who built it..."