So it looks like the Doctor Who RPG sessions are going to come a little closer together for the time being. The original plan is that four of the five players of the Wednesday group would take turns running a game, but one of them's had to withdraw said game for a while due to various concerns (he'll still be playing, however). But this means that I'll be running War Orphans every three weeks or so instead of once and month. At least for now.
Just a warning, this session is likely to intersect pretty heavily with canon so there may or may not be an excess of linkage.
We begin with a man standing in the spotlight of a dark room. He's bound, standing, and has just concluded a lengthy trial. He's restrained with a helmet and a device across his shoulders tied to the ground. He speaks:
"I do hereby make my last will and testament... If I am to be executed, and thus cruelly deprived of all existence, I ask only that my remains be transported back to my home planet by my rival Time Lord and nemesis - he who calls himself... the Doctor."
At which point the court screeches "EXTERMINATE!" and reduces him to ash right there.
Cue opening theme.[0]
We then cut to our characters, desperately trying to escape the retrieval command the Time Lord High Council has sent to their TARDIS, only to find themselves deposited on Gallifrey and unable to take off again.
The Magpie, in an attempt to make sure everyone's story is straight, wants to blame the ghosts. For whatever reason, all of them were just... inspecting this TARDIS, when the ghosts kidnapped them in it. Eska wants Galaxion to uses his mental powers to try to make the story stick (it's unclear whether he means altering the other characters' memories to help sell the story, or to try and use his powers of persuasion on whomever they wind up answering to). Galaxion wants to go with the Magpie's plan and just go out and thank the Council for 'saving them from the ghosts.' Given that the Dreamcatcher was actually captured and menaced by the ghosts for most of the length of their trip, they consider sending her out first and let her sincere panic sell the story.
So the TARDIS is in a small foyer with a set of double doors flanked by guards. Their TARDIS -- looking like a generic time capsule right now -- bursts open and they just all come out at once, shrieking about the ghosts. The guards are unimpressed, and lead them into the chambers where they are confronted by Lady President Romana. She's also not particularly impressed by the story about the ghosts, knowing a thing or two about rogue Time Lords.
She spells it out that the group is going to have to go on a mission to earn their freedom (with possibility of negotiation for ownership of the TARDIS later), after stealing the TARDIS and running off like that. The nature of the mission?
Well, first off, the Master is dead. Recently executed by the Daleks. He's been working with the Daleks for a while, as tensions have increased between the Daleks and Gallifrey, and in an attempt at diplomacy the High Council has been trying to get them to extradite the Master. But as he was working for them on something, the Daleks refused... until he did something (as yet unknown) so egregious and offensive they made a big show of putting him on trial and sentencing him to death, possibly out of spite for the Time Lords who wanted him back.
The High Council want his ashes back -- even with his mind in a Trakenite body, nobody wants to leave the Master's remains in the possession of the Daleks -- and find out what it is that he was doing for them. They already have someone heading to Skaro to do this, and Romana wants the characters to assist.
Oh, and by the way -- The Master's last request was that the Doctor retrieve his ashes. Which means the group will be working with him. Which, in some ways, means that they're getting punished by getting the sort of thing they would want -- going on an Adventure with the Doctor. (But Romana is also hoping that this will get that 'adventuring urge' out of their systems and afterwards they'll be willing to come back and be good little Time Lords and Lady) Of course, this does mean going to Skaro. They obviously accept the offer, and she hands them an old sonic screwdriver of the Doctor's that wound up with her stuff when she left, to give to him and make sure he has one.[1]
(At one point they explain that their TARDIS is indeed haunted, but Romana points out that that's kind of what happens when one steals a time capsule from the 'Condemned Bay' where it was going to be broken down and rebuilt if they hadn't taken it.)
So the group goes back to the TARDIS, mostly thrilled about meeting the Doctor (except for Eska, who's all 'I'm not much of a fan, really, I'm just here because I'm friends with the rest of you guys,' perhaps vying for the nickname of 'The Hipster'), but equally concerned about the fact that they're traveling to frigging Skaro, homeworld of the frigging Daleks. Galaxion gets back into his Gallifreyan robes, having previously discarded them for spare U.N.I.T. fatigues, and he also pulls on some gloves so he can do the whole 'shake the Doctor's hand and never wash that hand again' thing without being entirely gross.
It takes them a while to get entirely comfortable with the whole 'we're going to Skaro' thing, but eventually comfort themselves by remembering that they'll be fine because the Doctor will be with them.
So with the help of time-space coordinates sent to their TARDIS, they head for Skaro.
They arrive on a blasted, mostly-abandoned (at the moment), well-ruined planet with constant acid rain and overcast in blood red clouds. The Doctor's TARDIS, the bright blue box, is easily visible next to a landed Dalek ship. They land and hail the Doctor, and he greets them and tells them the situation, informing them he's heard about their escapades thus far. The Master's ashes are on the ship, in the 'courtroom' where he was executed, and any information about the Master's work for/with the Daleks will be located in a lab nearby on the planet itself. He knows a good way to get in and out of the lab without too much hassle, so the tricky part will likely be the ashes.
The Doctor's plan? The Daleks have officially offered to take him to the ashes and let him leave with them as a diplomatic show of good faith. Everybody knows it's a trap. So the Doctor's plan is to create a diversion that will let him get away from the Dalek guards, find an alternate route to the ashes, and then improvise a way out.
He invites the group over to his TARDIS to hammer out some details and also so they can bring him the sonic screwdriver. Eska tries to run ahead of the group with the screwdriver, for some reason insisting on running out ahead and alone, but their TARDIS actually refuses to let him leave until the others have caught up.
So they get to the police box, he invites them inside, and lets them make proper introductions while he lets them gaze in awe at the inside of his TARDIS. He accepts the screwdriver and fills them in on the details of his plan -- in particular, his making a distraction with the Nitro-9 that Ace 'didn't leave in the TARDIS' and hands them a couple of cans of it to use. He explains that Ace isn't traveling with him at the moment and he certainly wouldn't bring her to Skaro if he could help it in any case.[2]
So they figure out what they're going to do, and decide to split up. The Doctor will retrieve the Master's ashes, with Galaxion coming along pretending to be a companion. The Magpie, the Dreamcatcher, and Eska will sneak through the sewers of Skaro (which the Magpie is not pleased with, as his scarf once belonged to Marcel Marceau, but the Doctor lets him leave the scarf in his TARDIS and he can get it later) to get to the Master's lab and go into his files. They could go in through a regular entrance, but there are likely Dalek guards in the building and the Doctor assures them that the sewers are the best means of reducing their chances of encountering a live Dalek. (The Magpie is also not pleased with that specific choice of words)
So the Doctor and Galaxion go to the Dalek ship, which opens up a ramp for them and a couple of Daleks to escort them to the courtroom. Galaxion does his best to convince them that he's a plucky, easy to kill human who travels with the Doctor. They head into the ship without issue.
We cut to the others as they make their way through the city. The Magpie, looking for a place to put the Nitro-9 to good use, tries to convince himself that this is going to be fun. Eska finds a chemical tank full of something that might help increase the yield of the Nitro-9 and maybe drop a building, and the Magpie gives it a once-over and confirms that it will do the trick. So they drag it over to a building in the right spot to drop it across a road and make it hard for Dalek patrols to get back to the ship. They tape a canister of Nitro-9 to the tank and take off running.
Back on the ship, Galaxion and the Doctor are being lead towards the 'Parliament Chamber' where the ashes are. Then the ship shakes as the bomb goes off, and two of them take off running down a side corridor. They duck into a vent and due to Galaxion's more recent knowedge of Dalek ship designs guesses which way they need to go.
Meanwhile, the others have found a storm drain and climbed into it, dealing with all manner of unholy sludge. The Magpie's knowledge of chemistry comes in handy as he identifies the pipes likely containing stuff that's been dumped down a lab's drain. As they move closer to it, though, they hear an unsettling sucking noise as something starts dragging itself through the muck after themm. They take off running, until they find a hatch that leads into the lab and climb up into a room that smells of stale chemicals and rotting bio-samples.
Elsewhere, Galaxion and the Doctor are climbing through ducts, and as he spots a Dalek through a grate, Galaxion accidentally makes a noise and gives them away. Cue the shrieking of "EXTERMINATE!" and blasts into the vent from below as they try their best to keep ahead of the Daleks, giving them the slip and eventually dropping into an alcove with a terminal that they can access. The Doctor's screwdriver's an older model and he's not as sure of the controls as he could be, so he lets Galaxion have a shot at hacking it with his screwdriver and he succeeds. He finds them a route to the Parliament Chamber and closes and locks doors to stop the Daleks from cutting them off.
Back in the lab, Eska's managed to get the computer up and running. A quick glance of the materials present is reports that the Master was apparently tinkering with the Dalek genome in a way they didn't like, such that they sealed the files when they dragged him off for trial. They consider hacking the computer and the Magpie is concerned about how long that will take. Eska's pretty sure he can decrypt them quickly, and makes the attempt.
We cut back to Galaxion and the Doctor. They've arrived at the Parliament Chamber, currently empty, and locked the doors to keep from being interrupted. The Master's ashes sit in an urn on a pedestal in the middle of the room and Galaxion's prodigious telepathic talent picks up a sense of the Master's presence in there. He's dead, but not entirely gone, and the warns the Doctor about that. The Doctor, thanking him[3], then starts to consider their way out. At the Doctor's suggestion, Galaxion uses his screwdriver to find a transmat system in the room. He tries to hack it, and while he can't properly break in, he does find evidence that it's been booby-trapped. The Daleks foresaw the Doctor using it as an escape, and now they're trapped in the room with the Daleks closing in on the doors!
Elsewhere, Eska's opened up the files and lets the Magpie look at them to decipher what the Master was doing with his knowledge of biology and chemistry. He finds evidence that the Master was ostensibly supposed to be building a weapon, but instead tried to build a hybrid Time Lord-Dalek body. One that was nigh-unkillable and could regenerate by consuming time energies and maybe even life force from other creatures. In theory, he'd produce one and transfer his mind into it. Eska, upon hearing this and imagining the implications, became physically ill, adding to the already unpleasant odors in the lab.
He couldn't get it right, though; all he produced were insane mutants that could regenerate, sure, but their forms were too unstable. The Daleks had been so offended by such a perversion of their genetics, even with the potential for improvement, that they immediately sentenced the Master to death and ordered the files sealed. They couldn't destroy the 'prototypes,' either. They just kept regenerating, mutating, and losing cohesion. The Daleks called them 'degradations'[4] and couldn't think of anything to do with them other than bottle them up and throw them at planets where they could potentially consume all life there. A copy of the files was also sent to someone as 'the Cult,' which the Magpie recognized as possible confirmation of a myth regarding a Dalek faction who think in distinctly un-Dalek ways as a tactic. The Magpie, however, is pretty sure that he (or someone else) with the bio-data on these things could eventually find some way to stop or disable them. They download all of this into a portable drive of some sort.
Back on the Dalek ship, the Doctor and Galaxion can't undo the trap built into the transmat and try to see what other computers they can access on the network. They do find one, in a lab somewhere. They connect to it, and are suddenly conversing with the rest of the group in a video call! They explain the problem with the transmats and the group finds a transmat in the lab. Linking the transmat systems together, they get around the booby trap and teleport Galaxion and the Doctor into the lab.
Which activates the security protocols, which indicate that the room is going to burn in 30 seconds. They all get the hatch open and flee into the sewers just as Dalek guards arrive, and run like hell for the storm drain. The lab catches fire... as does the gas in the sewer, blowing it all up (including the creature they heard earlier, hopefully). They all escape just in time, diving out of the way of the explosion. (The Magpie is really glad he wasn't caught in the blast, as he still has a canister of Nitro-9 on his person.)
They head back to the Doctor's TARDIS, and on the way the Dreamcatcher takes a picture of the destroyed building with her camera so the Doctor can show Ace that in her own way she left her mark on Skaro. They get back to the Doctor's TARDIS where they use the Dreamcatcher's camera to produce a copy of their memories of the adventure and load it into the Doctor's sonic screwdriver so he can show Ace what she's missed out on. The Doctor also has one of them help him with his Chameleon Arch -- he's tinkering with his DNA without doing a full overwrite so he can lock the TARDIS to a retinal pattern that the Master shouldn't be able to match, should he somehow escape his own death and show up. In effect, the Doctor is temporarily rendering himself half-human. The Doctor tells the group to get straight back to Gallifrey to show them the data on the Master's project, while he takes a longer way around to draw off the Daleks and he'll catch up with them later.
As the Magpie reclaims his scarf (putting it in a plastic bag as he's still covered with sludge), Eska leaves the Doctor with a time, date, and place on Earth where they'll meet up later in case something goes wrong.[5] Afterwards, the group heads back to their own TARDIS and takes off back to Gallifrey, and we leave off there. Cue ending theme.
Sadly, what none of them could know is that the Doctor didn't make it back to Gallifrey right away...
[0]-- I considered doing this early on, but I've decided to go ahead and open up each session with an opening theme, following either a cold open or a 'previously on' sort of thing. I've got a 'generic' theme I'm going to use, but if the characters are interacting with a specific Doctor I'll use his specific theme instead.
[1]-- The Doctor lost his sonic screwdriver in his fifth incarnation, but canonically has it at the end of his seventh. I thought this would be a cute way of tying off that loose end.
[2]-- Continuity note: There is a lot of Expanded Universe material between Survival and the TV movie. While I'm willing to make nods to the novels and audio plays (especially those I've heard) from time to time, I'm not going to delve into trying to untangle all of that just to explain where Ace is unless I absolutely have to. So I'm just saying 'she's probably back on Earth' and leaving it at that for now.[6]
[3]-- Just for the record: Andy, Galaxion's player, did a very good job of portraying both Galaxion's eagerness to have this adventure and his internal squeeing whenever the Doctor paid him a compliment or something like that.
[4]-- I'm primarily linking just for reference's sake. My Skaro Degradations aren't based on the ones in the novel linked there, as I came up with them years before it was written.
[5]-- John, Eska's player, left it up to me to determine when and where this location is, for whenever they decide to tug on that thread.
[6]-- Just for the record, in case it becomes relevant in the future as he is not in this adventure, I do know where Davros is. Moo-hoo-ha-ha.
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