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Post by Carreaux on Jan 22, 2010 22:07:42 GMT
Over on the "Episode Titles" thread, I mentioned that the continuity for my campaign is radically different to that of the series. I've always liked that in the series' original run, assorted alien incursions have been hushed up and so maintained an air of mystery. RTD's love of ostentatious "a cyberman in every home" style invasions has inverted that to the extent that nobody on the DW Earth can possibly deny the existence of aliens without appearing delusional. Thus, I'm altering or scaling down all those sorts of things that have occurred in DW, SJA, and Torchwood, with the exception of "The End of Time," which I am totally removing from my campaign continuity. So, after I stepped back from what I'd done with the RTD years, lowered my chainsaw and wiped my brow, I got to thinking that I cannot possibly be the only one that's happily playing merry hob with "canon" continuity. I don't mean by adding things to it -- that's the nature of the game in any case. I mean by radically changing or removing events that occurred in the transmitted episodes. Has anybody else monkeyed around with DW "history" and, if so, in what ways and why? For those interested, my original post is here; dwaitas.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=seeds&action=display&thread=66&page=2#4171 I'm sure there's a more elegant way of presenting URLs, but I don't know it.
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sutekh
2nd Incarnation
Posts: 64
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Post by sutekh on Jan 23, 2010 1:14:35 GMT
Don't forget that any show featuring time travel offers a number of ways that you can alter established continuity without simply denying its existence - look at the recent reboot of the Star Trek franchise as an example.
Another example is the year when Harold Saxon was Prime Minister - this continuity was subsequently wiped and only a few people have any memory of what actually happened.
Incidentally, I hope that the new production team either moves away from the recent 'public' invasions or deals with the implications of the idea properly.
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Post by ugavine on Jan 24, 2010 19:54:20 GMT
I'm going to keep as much canon as possible. If I choose to change something, or even re-run a TV story with my group I'm pretty sure they won't mind. After all, it's our game and it's all about having fun.
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Post by allenshock on Feb 4, 2010 13:15:19 GMT
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skagra
2nd Incarnation
Posts: 59
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Post by skagra on Feb 7, 2010 20:03:37 GMT
I'm going to mostly avoid present day earth altogether. The only time I'll be in this era will be during UNIT stories, in which they have special knowlege anway.
I'm also planning on running most of my stuff with a former Doctor before the time war.
So for me that just won't come up.
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Post by Carreaux on Feb 14, 2010 19:06:50 GMT
Hmmm, on a purely etymological point, I do wish Cornell would crack a dictionary now and then; "canon" had non-theological senses long before the Holmesians coined it. I digress. He does overstate his case, though. If there's no canon at all, then there's no continuity. The Doctor could be a rogue Gallifreyan Time Lord one week and a plasticine squirrel the next (or has Paul Magrs already done that?). There has to be a core concept that is always employed, or the thing just turns into an incoherent and unengaging mess. Generally, however, I take your point, not least because that is exactly what I'm doing myself at least with regards to the game -- I dislike many of RTD's more grandstanding excesses and have stricken them from the timestream with the Tipp-Ex of Rassilon. It does, however, raise the question of player expectations. My Daleks can't fly without resorting to flight discs/hoverbouts/solar discs. My Master has never looked like John Simms (He looks like Derren Brown, is very quiet and controlled, and appears on film and video as a featureless black smudge because he no longer exists in the conventional sense of the word). MY UNIT still stands for "United Nations Intelligence Taskforce." Cybermen did not appear in everybody's homes, and the skies over London's docklands did not swarm with zillions of Daleks being flung from a spinny thing. The list of things I'm changing is so long it's actually quite depressing. On the plus side, it means that the list of freaky stuff that the PCs will have heard about is quite short. I'll do it as a little player handout to control expectations.
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Post by ugavine on Feb 15, 2010 14:47:50 GMT
While I want to keep Doctor Who continuity I don't have any hangups on crossing the timelines so much - unless it suits me as GM.
Therefore;
- I'm going to be using Classic Era Daleks, I'll bring in the uber-post Time War Daleks in later adventures.
- I'm going to be using classic Era Cybermen. And I want to show the Cybermen as a major force and have the PCs invovled in the Cyber-War.
- I won't rule out the PCs bumping into any version of The Doctor.
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