We don't know he's the Doctor but we do really...

[knasser]

...but we don't.

I'd quite like to do a Doctorless campaign of the Find a TARDIS tradition. I want a Time Lord there in the background and what I'm planning to do is having a locked or force-fielded room in which the unconscious Time Lord owner of the TARDIS resides, like a zero room or similar. Either the PCs will be able to see into the room and make out the figure, or else I'll provide clues in some other way that there is someone frozen in there.

Now what I want is for the players to assume that they're in the Doctor's TARDIS and that, for whatever reason, the suspended owner of the TARDIS is the Doctor. Of course the PCs wont know this, but you know what players are like.

I want the Time Lord to be The Master and I want his awakening to be a dramatic and nasty shock.

So what I need are ways that I can (very) subtly lead the players into thinking that the Time Lord is the Doctor without actually providing too many reasons why the PCs should make assumptions about the owner. Secondly, I need ways of providing clues to the dangerous nature of the owner that will only be obvious in retrospect.

The obvious way of leading the players to assume it is the Doctor, is to have it actually be the Doctor's TARDIS, perhaps stolen by the Master. I'd actually prefer to have a different style of TARDIS, but I haven't been able to think of a way of doing this. What I could go with, is that it is the Doctor's TARDIS, the Master has stolen it, the Doctor trapped him in some way and the TARDIS is trying to find its way back to the Doctor, which is what leads it to make so many interesting jumps with the PCs in it. So I also need a way in which the Doctor can try to draw the TARDIS to him... something Timey-Wimey, I'm thinking.

Any thoughts, ideas?

K.

[Craig Oxbrow]

if the TARDIS looks like something other than a blue police box, the players will probably not assume it's the Doctor.

So it could be the Doctor's TARDIS... or the Master's in that form, because he was in the process of framing the Doctor for some crime against a warlike alien species. That would also give a reason for the comatose figure to be dressed in shabby bohemian style rather than neatly turned out all in black. But he does have nicely polished shoes...

Or it could be the Doctor's stolen TARDIS used for the commission of said crime, with the Master posing as the Doctor, so you can get the Master's deliberate trickery and the Doctor calling the TARDIS back to him.

(I'm imagining him rigging all the TARDIS keys in a circle around a large resonant object - like a space elevator - and hitting it with the sonic screwdriver in bursts of Morse code. So to get the TARDIs back he's hanging off the tallest manmade structure in history... and probably being attacked by Daleks as he does it into the bargain, knowing his luck.)

And maybe by then, the Master has awoken, and decided to play along with the characters' mistake. After all, he can be quite affable at times and the Doctor can be pretty grim. So when the TARDIS lurches out of control and they find themselves in the middle of two men both claiming to be the Doctor...

I've never been particularly good at subtle clues obvious only in retrospect, I'm afraid. But then I've rarely seen players catch them when they're inserted into adventures, for that matter. Off the top of my head, they run into a classic monster (like the Daleks or Cybermen) and they identify him as "you are an enemy of the Daleks" or whatever and seem suitably wary of him, but never call him Doctor.

[themyth]

Have the outside be a police box, design the inside however you like, but litter it with objects that fans of Doctor Who know to be connected to him:

a long, multi-colored scarf
a recorder
a copy of something by Agatha Christie
parts to a robotic creature resembling a dog
a wardrobe full of Victorian clothing
some jazz records
a pin shaped like a kitten

You get the idea.