tIn quS Qujmey

The 23rd century used to be a very different place. I am old enough to remember when the Star Trek films were very new and rather exciting additions to the world created by the original TV show, a world which was enthusiastically studied and extrapolated upon by a generation of fans throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. At that point, Star Trek really belonged to its fans, and they happily seized upon every little point of lore and casual reference as they expanded the universe of the show.

The lack of any prospect of new Trek gave this project a freedom to innovate and go beyond the limitations of the TV show – not necessarily by dragging it into a mature readers ghetto of gratuitous sexual content and other graphic material (although there was certainly an element of this), but by treating the show like the serious SF it had always aspired to be. In the 1990s, certainly, Star Trek became the McDonald’s of science fiction, omni-present, reliable, safe, samey. But some of the early books from the 1980s are much more like the real stuff: they’re SF set in the Star Trek universe, rather than simply TV tie-in books.

Time moves on, of course, and while some of these books have lasted reasonably well, others have fallen foul of subsequent developments in the TV and movie canon. Looking at these books now is an undeniably odd experience – they often still have that authentic Trek feel to them, despite the fact that they are frequently totally at odds with the ‘real’ history of Trek.

This is particularly noticeable with The Final Reflection, a novel by John M Ford. This book was originally published in 1984, the same year that Star Trek III was released. One of the noteworthy things about Star Trek III is the fact that it’s the first movie that deals in-depth with the Klingons as we have come to know them today – although their presentation in the film is not exactly in depth, the ‘standard’ Klingon make-up debuts here, along with the familiar Bird-of-Prey ship design, and of course Marc Okrand’s Klingon language. Other writers, most significantly Ronald Moore, would take these things as a starting point and go on to develop the Klingon culture in much more detail.

The thing is, however, that John M Ford was there first, creating his own vision of how Klingon society functioned, and doing so with the approach of a fan rather than a professional. The makers of Star Trek did not explain the radical difference in appearance between the Klingons of the original TV show and those in later versions until the mid 2000s, but fans of the show had come up with their own explanation decades earlier – not being as adverse to genetic manipulation as their Federation rivals, the Klingons had re-engineered themselves into a number of different sub-species, some of which (the lumpy-headed ones) were more pureblooded, while the fusions (the ones more closely resembling human actors in face paint) had been created for the purposes of interaction with other species. This and many other things form the fabric of the story of The Final Reflection.

The story itself is partly a coming-of-age novel, partly a political thriller. There is a very brief frame story set aboard the Enterprise some time after the end of the TV show, but most of the novel takes the form of a story set nearly half a century earlier (TV characters are referred to or implied to appear). Krenn, an orphaned young Klingon, finds himself adopted into the house of a senior strategist, joins the Imperial Navy, distinguishes himself in border skirmishes with the Romulans, and soon rises to become captain of his own ship, no mean feat given the omnipresence of both rivals and Klingon Security.

This leads to him being given a singular mission: to travel to Earth and collect Emanuel Tagore, the first ambassador from the Federation to the Klingon homeworld. To say there are political tensions and factional disagreements on both sides regarding this is an understatement. Is Krenn’s mission even intended to succeed? Could it just be intended to provide a pretext for the war which some in both the Federation and the Klingon Empire seem to desperately want?

The Final Reflection is written with considerable elegance and skill, Ford skating through some potentially tricky areas (involved descriptions of space battles) with impressive deftness. I would have to say that the different sections of the story don’t quite tie together to form a thematically satisfying whole – the early chapters’ desire to provide an insider’s perspective on life in the Klingon Empire don’t really have a direct connection to the more involved plot of the rest of the book.

On the other hand, I imagine that many people reading this book will just be wanting to read about Klingons being Klingons, and Ford does not disappoint, expanding on the (actually really tiny amount of) information from the original series and The Motion Picture to create a rich and coherent culture. Ford’s Klingons have their own naming conventions, their own set of idioms (the seat of Klingon emotions is apparently the liver, not the heart), and their own pop icons – apparently the most popular entertainment franchise in the Empire is the suspiciously familiar-sounding Battlecruiser Vengeance, a long-running series about the exploits of a Navy cruiser and its senior officers. Central to all of this is the notion of ‘the Perpetual Game’, the idea – fundamental to their culture – that all Klingons are involved in an unending struggle for success and glory. The Final Reflection takes its name for a term from klin zha, essentially Klingon chess, which is a motif throughout the book (needless to say, rules for playing klin zha – though presumably not the most prestigious version using live pieces – are available on the Internet).

Most of this is created out of whole cloth, but somehow it all feels ‘right’ and convincing – for original series Klingons, anyway. Reading the book does remind you of just how much of what we learned about the Klingons in those initial episodes has been quietly erased from history – you can argue that references to Klingon slave camps are just hearsay based on faulty intelligence (in one episode a Klingon character seems equally convinced that the Federation practices slavery too), but we do see Klingons using personal torture devices on-screen, and the brutal methods employed by Kor in Errand of Mercy seem to be institutional, not just an example of one psychopath in a position of power. Certainly The Final Reflection acknowledges the existence of slave races within the Empire, and the paranoid, vicious nature of Klingon society (Vulcans travelling within the Empire, for instance, must consent to having the telepathic centres of their brains excised). One of the few criticisms I’d make of Ford’s world-building is that his Klingons do come across as, well, rather more Romanesque than the Romulans themselves, with their adoptions and slave-holdings and gladiatorial games. It’s difficult to think of an alternative set of cultural reference points, though.

Fascinating and thorough as this mostly is, virtually none of it meshes with the details of Klingon culture established since, mainly in Berman-era Trek (let’s not even get started on the Klingons of Discovery). The canon Klingons are almost wholly different – the inconsistencies in their appearance have an alternative explanation, and their biology is hugely different too – Ford’s Klingons mature and age more rapidly than humans, with sixty counting as a very ripe old age, whereas one of the biologically peculiar things about canon Klingons is that while they do grow to adulthood at a highly accelerated rate, compared to humans anyway (Worf’s son Alexander is conceived in 2365 and only ten years later is serving as weapons officer on a warship), they remain healthy and capable for a very long time (Kang, Kor, and Koloth are all senior officers in the late 2260s and are still around and active, albeit a bit elderly, a full century later).

The same goes for the Klingon language developed by Ford (he names the Klingon homeworld Klinzhai, by the way), which seems to be completely different from the entity unleashed upon the world by Marc Okrand. Okrandian Klingon translates the word ’empire’ as wo’, for example, whereas Fordian Klingon opts for komerex or kemerex (literally ‘that which lives and expands‘, thus providing another window into the Klingon mindset). It says something about the lasting impact of Ford’s book on the perception of the Klingons amongst a certain type of truly dedicated fan that even today you can find websites for a Klingon fan group calling itself Khemerex Klinzhai.

The thing about Ford’s Klingons is that they are subtle and nuanced and oddly ambiguous in a way which canon Klingons aren’t, really: canon Klingon society is basically just a red-lit room with a bunch of guys shouting ‘Honourrrrrrrr!’ and head-butting each other – easy to get a handle on for an hour-long TV show, I suppose, but probably less interesting as the protagonists of a genuine novel.

But then again, as I say, the influence of this book has been huge and enduring, although not always very obvious. One of Krenn’s more unexpected traits is his great fondness for fruit juice of different types, which is apparently not unusual amongst Klingons – this must surely be the source for Worf’s well-known love of prune juice. And, by one of those strange coincidences, literally hours after finishing The Final Reflection, I came across The Hidden Universe Travel Guide to the Klingon Empire, a – for want of a better word – spoof travel handbook for anyone planning a holiday in Klingon space. It’s all very much in line with Berman-era canon, but odd little things jump out at you – the Klingon star is named Klinzhai, for instance. The guidebook recommends visiting a klin zha parlour in the First City of Qo’noS. There is a box-out describing the enduring appeal of the Battlecruiser Vengeance franchise, and an advert for a Vengeance theme park ride. And page 94 is dedicated to a sidebar entitled ‘Appreciating The Final Reflection’, which tells of how a Federation anthropologist named J.M. Ford wrote his famous novel while living undercover in the Empire, basing it on historical events.

Not many three-decade-old tie-in novels are still well-regarded enough to get this sort of shout-out, especially ones which have no claim whatsoever to even apocryphal canonicity. Yet it seems entirely appropriate in this case – you can’t honestly claim that John M Ford wrote the book on Klingons – at least, not any more. But he did write a book on Klingons, and one which is still influential and entertaining today. Practically essential reading for the serious student of all things Klingon; a fine SF novel for everyone else.

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Fide Nemini

Every time someone on TV changes their socks these days, it’s billed as a life-changing event, but unless you’re a struggling sock merchant who happens to be endorsed by someone hugely influential it’s almost certainly a lie. Not many people honestly and truly had their existences transformed by the revival of The X Files at the beginning of the year: like many people, I suspect, the main feeling it left me with was of something which was rather better in concept than in execution.

Still, a (very) mixed bag though the new episodes were, it got me back into the habit of watching the show, and when the revival shuffled off I got my hands on a complete boxed set of the original series (well, everything except the second movie) and settled down to relive a particular slice of my youth. As usual, I rather underestimated how long this would take: about eight and a half months, more or less, albeit with a bit of a detour near the end to watch The Lone Gunmen spin-off again.

A big show, then: nine seasons, two-hundred-plus episodes, a couple of spin-offs (does Millennium really count? Hmmm) and movies. I’m pretty sure that even the most dedicated fan of the series would happily admit that it outstayed its welcome, the question is by how much.

Having seen it all again fairly recently, for me The X Files falls reasonably neatly into four or five different phases, some of which are of considerably higher quality than others. The first year of the show, for instance, is quite a different animal from anything that follows: in the absence of a significant on-going metaplot, every episode buzzes with a genuine feeling of untapped possibilities – I remember watching this in 1994 and 95 and finding the sense that almost anything could happen almost addictive. At the time, I recall interviews with Chris Carter where he admitted that he didn’t expect the show to be renewed, and certainly not a big hit, hence the downbeat conclusion to the first season with Mulder and Scully separated and the X Files shut down (the first of many times).

Then we roll into what I suppose we must call The X Files’ imperial phase, where it dominated the media landscape and pop culture generally (I have to say I still prefer the first season). I would say this covers seasons two to five (although this a bit of a drop-off in quality towards the end), and is probably the version of The X Files most people remember – the mixture of ongoing meta-plot episodes with the Syndicate and the Smoking Man, with monster-of-the-week stories, including the startling innovation of comedy episodes (the best ones from the pen of Darin Morgan). At this point you can watch the episodes about the Syndicate and still convince yourself that the writers have a clue as to where it’s all going, while the standalones haven’t yet started to repeat themselves too obviously.

One of the interesting factoids I came across in the course of this re-watch was the revelation that the original plan was to conclude the TV show at the end of season five (the name of five’s final episode, The End, is a bit of a clue to this) and switch over to doing a movie every few years. Part of me wonders if this wouldn’t perhaps have been a better idea than what we got, because while there are some good episodes in seasons six and seven – I’m particularly fond of the weirder stories like Rain King, X-Cops, and Hollywood AD – there is a general sense of the show starting to flail about and consume itself. The original Syndicate storyline wraps up in the middle of six, and what follows it is frankly somewhat baffling and lacking in focus or a sense of anyone knowing what it’s leading up to (if anything).

Still, it is at least still recognisably The X Files, which is not necessarily true of seasons eight and nine. It’s hard to see the decision to continue in the absence of David Duchovny as being motivated by anything other than reluctance to conclude a profitable series. You can’t help feeling a bit sorry for Robert Patrick, a very able actor landed with the hospital pass to end all hospital passes as Mulder’s replacement, the dogged Doggett. Doggett’s habitual aura of bafflement and frustration could well be coming from Patrick himself, as any chance of him being able to establish himself in the show is perpetually undercut by episodes and characters banging on about Mulder all the time. Classic elements of the older episodes, such as the Bounty Hunters and the Oil, still crop up, but what’s actually going on is anybody’s guess.

It gets even more baffling with season nine, with the introduction of the bemusing plotline about the Super-Soldiers and Scully’s wonder-baby, not to mention Annabeth Gish as Monica Reyes. Looking at some of the episodes with Doggett and Reyes, you can almost see how the show could have worked and been as vital and interesting as ever with this new duo – although it would obviously have lacked the role-reversal element (intuitive man, rational woman) which was arguably one of the things that made the early seasons so compelling. The thing is, though, that the show is never about this new duo, for Scully and the memory of Mulder are always wafting about the place, and it all feels slightly out-of-whack, looking back over its shoulder.

That said, the decision to axe the show seems to have had the effect of concentrating the minds of everyone involved: the news apparently came during the production of the not-bad standalone episode Scary Monsters, and everything that follows – the series’ equivalent of putting the chairs on the tables and turning off the lights – at least seems to have a point to it. While I would be the first to say that the series does not wrap itself up in the most elegant of manners, there are some genuinely moving moments in these final episodes – the deaths of the Lone Gunmen, Scully giving her child up for adoption. The final standalone, Sunlight Days, is arguably a much more satisfying episode than the actual finale, in the way it plays with the audience’s knowledge that it will very soon be over. ‘The X Files could go on forever,’ smiles Scully, marking the point at which you know the episode will not have the unambiguously happy ending it seems to be heading for, while Doggett’s happy comment that he ‘finally seem[s] to be getting the hang of this job’ also feels knowing and poignant. The fact that the episode is informed by people’s love for classic TV series of years gone by is also surely an acknowledgement that The X Files itself will soon just be a memory.

The finale itself is, I fear to say, hopelessly clunky and contrived, with Mulder on trial in what’s basically a kangaroo court, accused of the impossible murder of a man who was actually an alien (a premise seemingly pinched from an episode of The Invaders), and having to prove the existence of the alien conspiracy within the government in order to save his own skin. It attempts to recap the entirety of the meta-plot from the preceding nine seasons in a matter of minutes, and does so in a manner unlikely to satisfy anyone. One can only assume they were mainly intent on setting up future movies, for nothing is resolved, nothing really concluded: it ends with the X Files shut down (yet again), Mulder and Scully on the run, and Doggett and Reyes zooming off to an undisclosed location with looks of bafflement and frustration on their faces.

Which just leaves one to wonder why the subsequent iterations of the series – the 2008 movie and the revived series this year – haven’t really picked up on the new ideas seeded into the finale. In the final episode, Mulder learns that an alien invasion is scheduled for December 2012, but this never gets mentioned again: unless you count the incipient pandemic from the final episode of the revival.

One consequence of watching the main series again is that it has made me like the revival much less, in the way that it cheerfully attempts to ape the style of the show’s imperial phase while disregarding later developments for both the story and characters (all right, so there was the odd mention of young William, but even so) – I might even get slightly cross about the way they reveal Monica Reyes has been a sell-out for the Cancer Man all these years. Will there be future instalments? The jury is still out, but if they do go for another movie or TV series (and it would wonderful to see a show as smart and subversive as peak-period X Files cast its eye over Trump’s America), they must surely think about giving us some kind of resolution of the main plotline. On the other hand, if the series teaches us anything, it’s that the search for the truth is often a lot more fun than actually finding the truth. That, and that workplace romances aren’t necessarily a bad thing.

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Faith of the Integrated Cardio-pump

A few years ago now I wrote a long and slightly smug thing (no pun intended) about the enormous influence of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness on the development of SF and horror throughout the rest and the 20th century and beyond – or, to put it another way, this is a story which people have ripped off a lot. It occurs to me now that, retentively comprehensive as I tried to be, I still managed to miss an instance of insidious-alien-threat-discovered-buried-in-the-arctic-ice, namely Regeneration, a 2003 episode of Star Trek: Enterprise (yeah, I know the show was just called Enterprise at the time, but come on).

I’ve been watching more Trek than usual recently, but I found I’ve been sticking mainly to Next Gen and DS9. The perception certainly is that Voyager and Enterprise mark the point at which the franchise started to run out of ideas and disappeared into a creatively unrewarding fannish grotto. I’m pretty sure I haven’t watched an episode of Voyager in nearly 15 years; I hadn’t watched any Enterprise in over ten, until I decided to give Regeneration another look.

The story starts promisingly enough, with a science team at the North Pole uncovering wreckage of a mysterious alien ship. One of the things about this story is that the discerning viewer is way ahead of all the characters pretty much throughout, but there is still a bit of a frisson when the scientists discover a Borg drone frozen in the ice. (These are the Borg who travelled back in time from the 24th century to the 21st in the movie First Contact, and who’ve been frozen for a hundred years at this point. Does this seem impenetrably convoluted in terms of back-story? If you think so, then I can’t honestly bring myself to argue with you.)

Well, upon being dug up and defrosted, the Borg initially do what comes naturally to them and assimilate the science team, but then, in a somewhat surprising but plot-enabling move, steal the research team’s starship (a research team at the North Pole have their own starship? Really…?) and flee the solar system. As luck and narrative demands would have it, their course takes them into the Enterprise‘s area, and Captain Archer and his plucky crew are ordered to intercept…

Now, am I going to restrict myself just to talking about this episode or use it to try and figure out if Enterprise as a whole is any good or not? Hmmm. I have to say that my impression is that this is a well-regarded example of a superior Enterprise episode, which – if true – leads me to confidently say that as far as the best TV versions of Trek go, Enterprise is somewhere in the top six.

It all starts very promisingly with a nicely ominous sense of foreboding as the innocent scientists completely underestimate the potential Borg threat, and some long scenes of them examining the mysterious cyborgs and trying to work out just what the hell they are (not a bad way of making the Borg seem fresh again, I suppose). But the problem is that this distorts the story rather, with Archer and the gang not even making an appearance until after the first commercial break and a rather frantic pace afterwards. The plot is almost entirely procedural from this point on. There is, I suppose, the glimmering of a character arc where Archer’s initial desire to rescue the assimilated scientists is replaced by the realisation that the only good Borg is a prejudicially-terminated one, and another one where jolly Dr Phlox gets partially assimilated and has a bit of a gaze into the abyss, but neither of these is what you’d call developed or honestly resolves itself in a properly developed fashion.

And it’s hard not to shake the idea that this story was essentially hobbled from its conception by the requirement not to muck up the established continuity too much. This is primarily achieved in classic Enterprise style by the cunning ploy of the Borg not telling anyone what their name is (what, does this even apply to Phlox, who was briefly a member of the Borg collective consciousness?). But the need to keep the Borg mysterious and unknown limits the ability of the characters to interact with them in a meaningful way.

You could also argue that Regeneration also has the big problem of nearly every other Borg story from the 1990s onward, which is what you do with the Borg in the first place. Their reputation near the top of the pile as Trek antagonists rests on their first couple of appearances, in which they are pretty much the definition of an unstoppable menace. Part of the reason why the Borg are scary, particularly on their debut, is that the regular characters are themselves scared of them. Picard is clearly desperate at the end of the episode, openly admitting to being frightened, and his fear is partly because he has come to understand the nature of the Borg. Archer, on the other hand, never really seems that fussed about what the Borg exactly are and his attitude to them is more a sort of non-descript stoicism.

I suppose treating the Borg as the explicitly terrifying juggernaut of extinction that they started off as was never an option in a story set in the 22nd century and thus required to keep the characters in the dark is to their nature. Again, this kind of defies logic and common sense, as, given the ease with which Borg cubes have been depicted destroying large swathes of Starfleet, one would expect even a small infestation to go through a significantly less-advanced planet like a particularly salty dose of salts, and having the Borg simply run away into deep space rather than attempting to assimilate Earth is a bit out of character for them. But the needs of the story outweigh the needs of consistent characterisation (and isn’t that the definition of melodrama?).

So it’s hard not to be forced to the conclusion that this episode is mainly a result of the dog-whistle appeal of the Borg when it comes to the fanbase, which makes it rather unfortunate that these are the same fans most inclined to be nitpicky about Trek continuity. Shall we do this here…? Oh, I suppose not, suffice to say that there are, to put it mildly, differing indications as to when the Borg and the Federation and/or humanity first became aware each other, and when the Borg first started operating near Federation space, and Regeneration’s worst crime in this department is only to add to the muddle by pushing the date of their first encounter back in time by about 140 years.

Doing something with the Borg in Enterprise was probably a fairly obvious idea, but obvious ideas are not always necessarily good ones. Possibly if the story had been differently structured, with the Enterprise central to the story throughout and some of the Thing references trimmed, it might have meant there was more of an engaging story and that character arc for Archer might actually have worked. But I’m not entirely sure – the most engaging part of the story-as-broadcast is Phlox’s plight as the Borg slowly assimilate him, and yet even this is resolved in the most perfunctory manner, as he comes up with a cure with the greatest of ease. The story neither grips nor rewards, it just sort of trundles past. I must confess this is the first time I’ve watched an episode of Enterprise with my critical subroutines engaged since the pilot, but I have to say I still remember it being better than this. I’m just not sure I’m willing to make the time investment involved in finding out for sure.

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Shat to the Heart

Well, I’ve been a bit poorly recently, and – as you would – I took to my bed with Netflix and ended up watching a bunch of William Shatner movies. Not the Trek ones from the 80s and early 90s, as you might expect, but rather more diverse fare. A friend of mine recommended I try to get hold of White Comanche, a 1968 paella western in which the great man plays good-and-evil twins, but for some inexplicable reason Netflix has decided not to lay out on the rights to this movie (and it’s not on YouTube either). But you can’t have everything.

What Netflix does have is a couple of documentaries Shat (as I fondly think of him) wrote and directed, The Captains (from 2011) and Chaos on the Bridge (from 2015). You may be able to discern a bit of a common theme here, for it appears that Shat, like his castmates, has come to terms with the fact that – regardless of his achievements as a singer, novelist, horse breeder, and guest murderer on Columbo – it is Star Trek for which he will inevitably be remembered.

There is perhaps a certain oddity to Chaos on the Bridge, in that it largely concerns an iteration of Star Trek with which Shatner himself was not directly involved: the formative years of Star Trek: The Next Generation (henceforth Next Gen, to save my aching fingers). This was the first of the comeback TV shows, starting in 1987, also known to the general population as ‘the one with that bald English guy’.

As all but Next Gen‘s most rabid fans will admit, the first couple of seasons are tough viewing (‘almost unwatchable’ in the words of Ronald Moore, a later participant in the franchise and also the creator of New BSG and Outlander). I myself stuck with it when it eventually turned up on the BBC in 1990 because, well, it was Star Trek, wasn’t it, and there wasn’t any other new SF being made at the time. (I do think the total lack of any competition was a significant factor in Next Gen‘s survival and eventual success. Given that TV is hardly short of SF and fantasy shows nowadays, expectations for Star Trek: Discovery – coming next year – will obviously be significantly higher, and that show may well be in for a rough ride on all fronts.)

Watching Chaos on the Bridge I was kind of struck by the odd notion that while Star Trek may have been created by Gene Roddenberry, its ultimate success was in many ways despite him. A possibly heretical idea in Trekkie circles, but if you look at the dodgiest, stodgiest, least sexy bits of Trek made in Roddenberry’s lifetime, many of them occurred when the Great Bird was at his most hands-on as a producer. There’s an argument to be made that by the time of the late 80s, Roddenberry was more interested in being recognised as a humanist visionary than in actually making good TV, but there are enough horror stories in circulation about the behind-the-scenes shenanigans on Next Gen to suggest that there was a definitely clay-like texture to the great man’s feet.

In terms of actual Roddenberry-bashing, the documentary’s contributors are relatively circumspect – no sign of the ‘goddamned lying, hypocritical, deceiving, thieving, son of a bitch… bullying bastard’ which was writer David Gerrold’s considered opinion in a recent book on Trek‘s production history. Most of the opprobrium is instead directed at the shadowy figure of one Leonard Maizlish, Roddenberry’s lawyer, who took up residence on the show and actually started rewriting the scripts despite having zero experience (this contributed significantly to Dorothy Fontana’s decision to leave the show). Interviewees fondly recall imagining pushing Maizlish out of second storey windows, and so on.

The decision just to cover the early, troubled years of the production is a curious one, mainly because it deprives the narrative of a proper conclusion. Doing the full seven years, over the course of which Next Gen found its identity as a much more consistent and impressive show, would have made for a rather different (and longer) film. It couldn’t just be that Shat only wanted to shine a light on a troubled version of Star Trek in which he had no personal involvement or responsibility? Surely not. Anyway, the film has enough life and inventiveness about it to make up for the fact that there’s probably not much here its target audience doesn’t already know about.

And so to The Captains, an arguably poorly-titled documentary from 2011 in which Shat tracks down his successors as lead actors on Trek and interviews them mano a mano (or mano a womano in the case of Kate Mulgrew from Voyager) about their lives and experiences. I say ‘poorly-titled’ as it is not really about the captains as a group, or indeed as individuals, but mainly creates a suitable venue for everyone involved to talk about Shat, whether directly or indirectly. Shat himself (note to self: awkward phrasing, think about possible alternative) is clearly in his element, and one is ineluctably reminded of Nick Meyer’s assessment of him as ‘all vanity, no ego’.

Various lesser stars from the Trek constellation make appearances – Nana Visitor, Robert Picardo, Jonathan Frakes – along with a fairly substantial interview with Christopher Plummer, there because a) he was the Shakespeare-loving Klingon villain of Star Trek VI and b) he was a mate of Shat’s way back. But the most arresting stuff is the set-piece interviews with the other actors. (The Netflix version of the film, by the way, appears to have been edited down a bit, removing the unauthorised footage of Leonard Nimoy which was the cause of the final estrangement between him and Shatner.)

Shat buzzes around between the different coasts of the US and even over to Oxford to talk to Sir Patrick (apparently ignoring the Keep Off The Grass signs at Christchurch College in one shocking sequence), and it’s fair to say that some of these discussions are more interesting than others. Patrick Stewart is always good value, but some of the other chats can get a bit earnest and are really memorable only for the little stunts Shat contrives: hiding in a cardboard box while waiting for Kate Mulgrew, singing show-tunes on horseback with Scott Bakula, arm-wrestling Chris Pine on the sidewalk outside Paramount Studios, and so on. Most of them are pretty much as you’d expect, with the real exception being Avery Brooks, whose consciousness still appears to be spending some of its time in the Gamma Quadrant. There’s some singing here, too, and at one point Shat asks Brooks if he’s ever thought about life after death, with the one-time Emissary responding by playing the piano and laughing to himself. It is quite magnetic to watch, somehow.

In a way you can’t help thinking that this would have been a more revealing film if it had been directed by somebody else. Some of the most interesting footage is of Shat appearing at a Trek convention in Vegas and interacting with the fans – ‘a rapturous reception’ and ‘eating out of the palm of his hand’ don’t begin to do justice to how this goes down – and very briefly we see a glimpse of a Shatner who isn’t a tongue-in-cheek self-promoter, but someone rather more thoughtful and human. But then it inevitably occurs to one that we’re just seeing this because Shat let it go past in the editing process, so is it the ‘real’ him?

In the end this is probably more of interest to Shat-watchers than Trekkies generally, but such is its occasional weirdness I can imagine it finding something of an audience amongst people who enjoy watching really, really odd vanity projects, as well. What I suppose it comes down to, ultimately, is that there are two kinds of people in the world – people who can’t get enough of William Shatner and all his works, and the sane ones. The former group at least are well served here.

 

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The Trek of a Lifetime

At the cinema the other day I finally came across the trailer for Star Trek Beyond (I have been routinely referring to it as Star Trek Up The Khyber or Star Trek Beyond A Joke for some time now, so you may get some sense as to the modesty of my expectations), in all its Beastie Boys-playing, motorcycle-jumping, everyone in constant jeopardy-being absurdity, and even though I knew what to expect I felt a tiny sliver of my soul shrivel up and turn to ashes at the sight of it. Just another sign of the terrible pop cultural malaise of our times, if you ask me: Star Trek doesn’t really feel like Star Trek any more, James Bond doesn’t feel like James Bond, Star Wars doesn’t feel like Star Wars (actually, it isn’t, as friends are bored of hearing me say), and (most especially) Doctor Who doesn’t feel like Doctor Who. (It has been put to me that I am far too much of a purist in these matters. To which my response is, obviously: no I’m not.)

Oh well, if nothing else, it reminded me of the fact that – as I have said in the past – while Star Trek may not own my heart, it has a perfectly valid claim to one of my lungs. No-one has the capacity to hate Star Trek more than its own fans, in the same way that no-one is more critical of a poorly-performing sports team than its own supporters – the emotions and the dedication are more intense in every way. Anthropologically, I’m sure that the major fandoms are functionally very similar to the great religions – they all have their articles of faith, their canons, their subdivisions, splinter groups, and heresies. It’s all a question of devotion.

And it’s articulated quite well in Set Phasers to Stun: 50 Years of Star Trek, a look at the franchise in its entirety by Marcus Berkmann, writer, journalist, and semi-professional Fifteen-to-One contestant. (Berkmann’s credentials as one of the faithful are already known to those of us who remember his stint as a columnist for DWB twenty years ago, although I notice this doesn’t appear in his author biog.) With (as the title suggests) Trek‘s golden anniversary looming, I would predict a lot of this sort of thing before the end of the year (my own contribution is in ATB Publishing’s Outside In Boldly Goes – not sure whether this counts as full disclosure, a cheap plug, or both), and Berkmann has made the quite sensible decision to pitch his book at a general audience, presumably reasoning that the dedicated fanbase will likely pick it up anyway, while a more specialist tome would struggle to attract casual readers.

The result is, essentially, a narrative history and appreciation of Star Trek in all its many incarnations, starting with Gene Roddenberry deciding it would be a good idea to create his own new TV show, and concluding with CBS All Action deciding it would be a good idea to recreate someone else’s old TV show (Berkmann is generous in his assessment of Roddenberry’s role in the creation of the original series, but the sheer weight of circumstantial evidence does paint a picture of a rather unpleasant character). As mentioned, this is a book more for the general reader, and the narrative is paced to reflect that – so the genesis of the original series and its various travails (network indifference, behind-the-scenes tensions, Fred Freiberger) are dealt with in considerable detail, as are the origins of the early movies, but as the franchise continues the focus pulls out to present a more general view, with Voyager and Enterprise receiving only the most general of overviews. (Occasionally he goes off on a tangent and delivers a quick appreciation of Space: 1999, Galaxy Quest, or the new Battlestar Galactica, and these may in fact get more attention than either of the most recent shows.)

(To be fair to him, Berkmann does say some very complimentary things about Deep Space Nine, which to my mind is the crowning achievement of what I suppose we must currently call mid-period Trek, but he makes the reasonable point that it does mark the moment at which the franchise left the cultural mainstream and took up residence in the cult ghetto.)

And I have to say that it’s all rather winningly done, extremely readable, highly informative, and often very funny indeed. I am, as you may have guessed, fairly well-versed in matters of Trek, but this is such a thorough and comprehensive telling of much of the story that I still feel like I learned a lot: and Berkmann retells some of the old stories, such as the extraordinary shenanigans surrounding the writing of the script for Wrath of Khan, so well that it’s no chore to go through them again. Berkmann has a very engaging prose style, although the general tone of the book – glib, ironic, amused – may not be to everyone’s taste (yes, yes: pot-kettle interface approaching).

His analysis of the episodes, too, is quite interesting, although inevitably tastes vary: he is very critical of Who Mourns For Adonis? and The Omega Glory, two episodes I personally find I can watch over and over again without feeling much in the way of fatigue, although on the other hand we (mostly) agree as to what the greatest treasures of the Trek canon are. Some of his more general observations chime very strongly with me too, unfashionable though they may be – I was particularly tickled by his crack that if Voyager were to be made today, Tom Paris, the only white male human amongst the principal characters, ‘would probably only have one leg’.

One common occurence when dedicated fans find themselves writing about the object of their devotion for a general audience is that they seem to feel obliged to establish their credentials as a ‘regular person’ – ‘hey, I’m one of you, I don’t take this stuff too seriously’ (when it’s fairly clear that they really do). Hence, from my own bailiwick, the notorious ‘any old **** with an Equity card’ gag which took Mark Gatiss so firmly off the Christmas card lists of Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy. Things kick off in a similar vein here, with the author at pains to make it clear he’s not really a Trekkie himself (yeah, right), variously describing dedicated fans as ‘odd’ and ‘deranged’. Beyond this, Berkmann is really quite breathtakingly rude about certain of the Trek regulars – hilariously, but even so. ‘God knows what the food is like on Vulcan, but he appears to have eaten all of it,’ is his comment on Scotty/Jimmy Doohan putting on a fairly substantial amount of weight between Star Treks III and IV, while TNG should appeal to tree-lovers, we are told, because it features Jonathan Frakes, ‘who is about the same size and shape and apparently made of wood’.

In the end, though, the overall tone of the book is deeply appreciative, even loving. (When it comes things which are beloved in quite this way, even the mickey-taking is really a sign of love. Even the hate is a sign of love.) And I find myself to be quite on the same page as Berkmann when it comes to the current state of Star Trek, under the grim hand of JJ Abrams and his associates. Never mind what he says of the Freiberger episodes: Into Darkness is a ‘travesty’ that ‘MAKES NO SENSE’ (Berkmann’s caps). Again and again, this chimes with me, I know these feelings – Doctor Who stories like Meglos and Timelash are horrific duffers, but I hope and expect to watch them a few more times before I am absorbed into the great Matrix in the sky, whereas you would have to pay me a very substantial amount of money to watch most of Peter Capaldi’s episodes again.

Which leads me to wonder about the state of Star Trek today. Looking back on it, you could argue that the franchise underwent a surprisingly swift resurrection – rather less than five years passed between the end of Enterprise and the dawn of the Age of Abrams – but it’s whether you consider the recent movies to be a glorious reinvention of the concept or just cack-handed attempts to milk a well-known brand name made by people with no essential understanding of what makes great Star Trek so special. Were Star Trek‘s wilderness years surprisingly brief, or are we still, actually, in the middle of them? I suspect the incoming TV series, which it saddens me to realise I am probably quite unlikely to see, will help to provide some resolution. In the meantime, the series remains beloved, and I would say deservedly so, and Set Phasers to Stun does an excellent job of reminding you why this should be. A book as engaging, informative, and funny as this is a credit to any TV or film series.

 

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Dice in the Dark Times

Say what you like about the new movie, and I see that many people have, but if nothing else it has certainly succeeded in putting Star Wars back at centre-stage when it comes to popular culture: books, models, DVDs, toys, games, a veritable deluge of the stuff. Now, I feel I should make clear that whatever my attitude to the Disney films and JJ Abrams, my affection for Star Wars in general remains entirely undiminished, which is probably the main reason why I recently checked out Fantasy Flight Games’ Star Wars RPG system.

It took a relatively long time for an official Star Wars RPG to come out – 1987 or thereabouts, with WEG’s fondly-remembered D6 system, which I of course bought, along with several of the supplements. I still have good memories of the simplicity of the basic system, which was a welcome step away from the more crunch-heavy percentile- and d20- based games I’d mainly been playing up to that point.

Later there was a d20 Star Wars game, which I steered clear of, partly because I wasn’t doing any gaming and partly because it looked a bit too much like D&D. (There may well have been even more Star Wars RPGs that passed me by completely: it’s not as though there was ever any shortage of demand for Star Wars games. I’ve seen homebrew supplements cooking up Star Wars-specific rules for lots of other systems.)

And so to the FFG system, which I am reluctant to call a game, singular, as the company have opted to release a triptych of Core Books, each dealing with a different aspect of adventuring in that galaxy far, far away. Edge of the Empire focuses on shady doings and underworld life on the fringes and in the dark underbelly of the Empire, with players most likely playing smugglers, bounty hunters, and other equally dubious characters. Age of Rebellion is the book for anyone wanting to play a member of the Rebel Alliance (the default setting for the game is around the time of Episode IV, though I suspect it’s easy enough to adapt for adventuring during the era of the Old Republic, the Clone Wars, or either of the post-Episode VI continuities) – pilots, diplomats, commandos, and so on. Finally, Force and Destiny is the Jedi-centric book, with players adopting the roles of survivors of Order 66 or other Force-sensitive individuals with a modicum of Jedi training.

The first potential brick to be slung in FFG’s direction is the decision to release the above as three hefty (and fairly expensive) 200+ page hardback books, with a fair degree of duplication of material within them, certainly as far as the core rules go. One wonders why they didn’t just produce a single book with just the game rules in it and then three setting-specific sourcebooks, and it’s hard not to conclude that the bottom line is ultimately the overriding concern. I can’t really imagine any group wanting to role-play in the Star Wars universe being entirely happy limiting themselves to playing just scoundrels, or rebels, or Jedi, so purchasing multiple core books is probably going to be a requirement for most groups wanting to run this game.

Another potential bone of contention is with the core rules themselves, which use a set of special proprietary dice. Now, to be fair, you don’t actually need to buy these dice: a conversion table for using standard D6s, D8s, D12s is provided (an electronic dice roller is also available on t’internet), but I suspect this would result in an extremely cumbersome gameplay experience until everyone got familiar with the table.

…hmmmm.

Set against this is the undeniable fact that FFG’s system is interesting and fun and potentially very creative for all concerned. The typical resolution mechanic of most RPGs is to roll either a d20, or d100, or some other dice pool, and attempt to beat a specific target number set by the GM. While many games incorporate the possibility of really good or really poor results (or ‘criticals’), this is still essentially a binary-based, succeed or fail, mechanic.

The FFG system is anything but binary. When carrying out an action check, you assemble a pool of ‘good’ dice based on your abilities, skills, and favourable conditions, and add to that ‘bad’ dice based on the difficulty of the task and any unfavourable conditions, and roll them all together. The various good dice generate positive results, called Success, Advantage, and Triumph, and the bad dice generate their opposites, Failure, Threat, and Despair. They key thing is that Success and Failure cancel each other out, as do Advantage and Threat, but your Success does not reduce your level of Threat, nor your Advantage your level of Failure.

As a result you can succeed in a task but still generate Threat against yourself, or fail and generate Advantage – it’s not a binary Yes/No system, but one with a huge range of possible Yes, And…/Yes/Yes, But…/No, But…/No/No, And… results.

How does this work? Well, let’s say I’m playing the game and I want my character to swing his lightsaber at an annoying stormtrooper. As a moderately well-trained Jedi, I get two proficiency dice and an ability die, and the trooper is taken somewhat by surprise (a situational effect) so my kind GM has granted me a Boost die to reflect this. On the other hand, the GM is adding two Difficulty dice as this is a standard close combat check. I roll the six dice and get…

Well, let’s say I roll 2 Successes, 1 Triumph, and 3 Threat (a Yes, But… result). The combined Successes and Triumph are enough to make this a solid hit against the trooper, doing more than enough damage to take him out (individual troopers are relatively puny, so only a single saber hit usually disposes of them). But, and this is something I can’t think of any other system incorporating, I still have those 3 Threat to resolve – I’ve taken out my enemy, but it’s left me at risk somehow, in a manner to be negotiated with the GM. Maybe I’ve left myself open to an attack from one of my opponent’s allies (granting them a Boost die on their next attack check), or the rigours of combat are wearing down my resolve (reducing my reserve of what are called ‘strain’ but are essentially kind of non-lethal hit points).

I’ve seen it suggested that there are essentially 18 possible results of any dice check in the FFG system, but even this seems to me to be ignoring the fact that the degree of Success, Advantage, etc, generated is also an issue. Generate enough Advantage and you can activate the special features of your weapon (using a lightsaber to sunder an opponent’s weapon, using the linked laser cannon on an X-wing to hit multiple times from one check, and so on), for instance.

It’s an innovative and appealing system but there is the expense involved in buying all the proprietary dice required, and it makes playing over a web platform like roll20 almost impossible unless you really know your stuff technically. Plus there is the complexity involved in bringing new players up to speed on the system – most people can grasp ‘roll a d20 and get 12 or more’ fairly swiftly, but the learning curve here would be rather longer and steeper. This is a shame, as any system based on Star Wars should be an ideal ‘gateway game’ to get new people into RPGs, especially right now. (To be fair, FFG have released a ‘beginner game’ for each core book, which apparently breaks the newbies in gently, but yet again they are open to the charge of simply padding out their profits – you need to buy the beginner box and the core book to play the full game.)

I suppose the rules are hackable into something more traditional using regular dice, but it would be an extensive hack and lose much of the charm and potential of the system – and if you were sufficiently unimpressed with the FFG system to do that, I suspect it would be simpler just to use the WEG rules (for instance).

Apart from the central resolution mechanic, the rest of the game seems like a fairly solid system, with perhaps a touch more crunch than I personally like in the rules that I use. Character creation is fairly straightforward – you choose a race, a career, and a specialisation for your character, and invest a number of starting experience points (XP) to bring them on a bit before the game starts.

Many of the obvious Star Wars alien races are covered in the different core books (Wookiees, Rodians, Mon Cal, Twi’Lek, Zabraks, and so on – no sign of Gungans or Ewoks so far, shockingly), along with a few rather more obscure ones, especially in the supplements (yes, you can play a Hutt, if you really want to). (Droids also count as a playable ‘race’ for game purproses.) As someone who would want his Star Wars RPG to actually resemble Star Wars (which is, after all, humanocentric), I’m not sure how I would head off the possibility of the entirely non-Human party, short of putting an outright ban on non-human Player Characters except by GM consent. Perhaps giving human PCs substantial bonus starting XP and well-played alien PCs bonus in-game XPs would be a possible solution, but here we’re drifting on to one of my personal bugbears when it comes to RPGs, so let’s move on.

Each core book provides half-a-dozen careers for characters – so Edge of the Empire characters can be bounty hunters or smugglers, for instance, Rebel characters can be aces or commandos, and Jedi can be guardians, sentinels, mystics, and so on. Each career is further broken down into three specialisations – so, for instance, a smuggler could be a pilot, a scoundrel or a thief. Each specialisation has a number of special abilities tied to it which can be purchased in-game, along with a set of skills. Fifty-four starting specialisations covers a lot of territory, with more available in the various supplements, so there’s no shortage of possible character types. Characters can belong to more than one specialisation, too, not necessarily from the same career (though this is more expensive) – so if you want to play a fallen Jedi Makashi duelist from Force and Destiny, turned underworld enforcer from Edge of the Empire (there’s a potentially terrifying melee combatant…), you can – GM permitting, as usual.

There is, inevitably, quite a lot of crunch to negotiate here, with the commensurate risk of the spectre of D&Dthink manifesting itself and endless discussions as to the best talent and career options ensuing, but I suppose this is all a question of play style, and discreet game-management by the GM should keep this sort of thing to a minimum. Overall, I would say number-crunching and rules are kept to reasonable levels, except perhaps in the section on equipment, which seem to assume every weapon and vehicle possessed by players is going to get heavily modified fairly quickly.

Rules for the Force are, inevitably, most detailed in the Force and Destiny books, but again they are not excessively complex and mesh well with the narrative/cinematic style of the game. If you are running a composite game, there’s the question of how to handle the tricky issue of a character’s relationship with the Dark Side – this is fairly central to Force and Destiny, as you’d expect, but the other core books skip over it.

In a similar way, each core book introduces a specific mechanic – Obligation for EotE (perhaps that pesky debt your character owes the local Hutt crimelord), Duty for AoR (the consequences of signing up with a military organisation), and Morality (one’s Light/Dark Side balance) for FaD. How to combine these in a game featuring multiple character types is left to the individual GM, but it’s my understanding that this mechanic also gets quietly dropped in many games. (I’m not entirely surprised that the FFG system often gets house-ruled, to be honest.)

Moving on from the actual system, the books themselves are extremely handsomely presented pieces of work, stuffed with lovely and evocative pieces of art, and equally evocative text pieces introducing parts of the Star Wars universe that people only familiar with the movies may not know that much about.

I’m going to go off on a bit of a tangent here and just take a moment to praise, and indeed marvel at, the consistency and coherence of the way the Star Wars universe has been presented in other media over the years. Given the rather ramshackle development of the fictional universes of most comic book companies, or that of Star Trek or Doctor Who, LFL’s devotion to incorporating as much as possible into their canon is – or was – hugely impressive. I picked up The Imperial Handbook recently (published this year), which in addition to being completely compatible and consistent with 27-year-old sources such as the old WEG Star Wars Sourcebook, also has a go at including things originally existing as slightly dubious models in the old Kenner toy line. The quantity and quality of detail is almost irresistibly convincing – to the point where you really feel the pain of those hard-core fans outraged by having many years of post-Episode VI ‘history’ – the Yuuzhan Vong invasion, the fall of Darth Caedus, and so on – obliterated to make way for the Disney incarnation of Star Wars.

In short, there’s a wealth of detailed setting material – places, people, races, history – freely available on sites like Wookiepedia, most of which can easily be interpreted in game terms for the FFG system. Added to the immense popularity of Star Wars in general, the result is an almost uniquely appealing setting for an RPG. Whether this is the ideal set of rules to exploit that is another question, but the system is an innovative and imaginative one, and one I’m looking forward to giving a proper try in the not too distant future.

 

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D&Dthink

Those who know me even passingly well will be aware that the playing of games has been a significant element of my life for a very long time. This year in particular has been somewhat notable, as I’ve stuck with my usual regime of board, card, and computer games, but my long-standing involvement in tabletop wargaming has come to what feels like a very definite end, while I’ve spent more time on role-playing games than in any year I can recall.

Having been out of RPGs in a serious way for the best part of two decades, one of the interesting changes in the hobby is the way that people have been giving serious thought as to what makes these games appealing and how best to approach running them as a referee/storyteller. So I thought I would offer a couple of small thoughts on this front, mainly to do with the massive influence of Dungeons & Dragons on the whole genre and how it affects play-style and attitudes.

As I’ve said before, when it comes to synonymity, Dungeons & Dragons is to role-playing game as Hoover is to vacuum cleaner – maybe even moreso, with the rise of Dyson and so on. I routinely refer to my ‘Saturday night game of D&D’ even though I don’t believe I’ve played any flavour of the game in 25 years. The reasons for this association are not exactly obscure – if D&D didn’t invent the genre, I’ve no idea what did, and it was certainly the game that made the biggest cultural splash back in the late 70s and early 80s.

So it shouldn’t really come as a surprise if we find the influence of D&D over RPGs generally to still be incredibly strong. It continues to be a massively popular game. How popular is it? Well, a friend started up an RPG club recently, which he almost-inevitably called ‘Dungeons and Dragons and other roleplaying’. He probably needn’t have bothered with the ‘other roleplaying’ as the majority of the respondees made it fairly clear they were only really interested in playing either 5th Edition D&D or Pathfinder (a game originally derived from the more complicated 3rd-and-a-Half Edition D&D ruleset). More objectively, nearly two-thirds of the games run on roll20 – the website which facilitates most of my current gaming, which is web-based and international – are of some variant of D&D, or a system closely derived from it.

And one gets the impression that even when veteran gamers say they want to play something other than D&D, and end up playing a different rules system, on some subconscious level they still think they’re playing it – or perhaps the subconscious assumption is that all RPGs are really like D&D when you actually get down to brass tacks. And I’m not sure this is always necessarily a good thing. Hopefully making people more aware of the implicit biases and assumptions of D&Dthink will help them shake them off, and lead to more interesting and varied gaming experiences.

Perhaps the single most defining and influential feature of the original D&D rules was that they developed out of tabletop wargaming (or ‘toy soldiers’ to the uninitiated). Commentators have observed that the perceived weaknesses in the original conception of D&D, many of which have filtered down to us today, arise from the fact that it was originally intended for each player to control a whole bunch of characters rather than just one, in something much more akin to a skirmish-style wargame.

To some extent that’s what D&D remains to this day – it is, at least, the most basic playstyle of the game. Players generate a team (traditionally ‘party’) of characters, who then wander about in tunnels usually killing everything they possibly can and looting the place of treasure and other good stuff. The rules were originally not much more than a combat system with rules for character advancement, and while recent editions have addressed things like character backgrounds and motivations, there’s not much mechanically in the rules that requires these to be enforced. The default setting of D&D is the dungeon-crawl rather than any kind of structured narrative, and the default role of the DM – in theory – is to impartially implement rules procedures.

I write this as someone who doesn’t play D&D, as mentioned above, so bear in mind I may be biased – but that kind of experience appeals to me less and less as time goes by. Perhaps this makes me more sensitive to apparent occurences of D&Dthink when I’m playing other games – but I do think this is a genuine phenomenon.

What kind of thing am I thinking about? Well, earlier this year I was trying to figure out what a game was (it was a slow day) – in short, what is it that a board game like Chess and a freeform RPG like Fiasco share, that we can call them both games? I couldn’t come up with anything solid, but it did occur to me that in Chess, one player wins – it has a defined victory condition. That’s also true of most tabletop wargames – games usually have winners and losers (and occasionally tied results).

Every D&D rulebook I have seen says that, in the game, everyone wins by having fun, and maybe they’ve meant it, but many of the D&D groups I’ve played with seem to have had the working assumption that everyone ‘wins’ by getting through to the end of the dungeon/adventure intact, having won every fight on the way (or at least run away from the big monsters successfully). And so ‘winning’ at D&D becomes primarily about being good at combat, both individually and as a team.

Individually, this takes the form of learning the rules backwards and coming up with the best choices, options, equipment and combos to make your character the baddest ass possible, regardless of all other considerations. Interesting characters are discarded in favour of optimised ones, and people spend hours cooking up absurd creations like half-Elf multi-classed sorcerer/monks, based solely on how their numbers stack up rather than any character- or story-based reason.

As a group, a similar thing happens – there’s a kind of Mission Impossible mentality, where every group has to have a fighter, a healer, a ‘face’ character, and so on. To be honest I have less of an issue with this, given the diverse group of comrades is such a trope of fiction from Lord of the Rings to The A-Team, but what I do find is that people still have the D&D team ‘roles’ in their head when thinking about groups of characters for other games.

I have seen D&Dthink in action quite a few times this year, in most of the games I have played. The main games have been Numenera and Mutants & Masterminds. Numenera is essentially the D&D experience re-skinned as a science-fantasy game, with a very simple and elegant ruleset which does not give extra attention or emphasis to combat as a means of conflict resolution. M&M is a fairly ‘crunchy’ game rules-wise, and it does assume combat as a major resolution mechanic, but this is because it is intended to simulate the action in superhero comic books, where every problem can be solved by a fist fight.

Overall, D&Dthink seems to be less of a problem the less complex and more abstract the ruleset is – D&Dthink is all about working the rules to your advantage – and so it was less of an issue in Numenera. Nevertheless, maybe it’s just the nature of fantasy RPGs – there was a lot of worrying about combat and intense, serious discussion about how best to divvy up treasure, and one keen young player asked many questions about the possibility of making a particularly vicious monster into a playable character type.

M&M is a lot crunchier and prone to min-maxing (this is RPG-speak for super-optimising your character to absurd degrees). As a comic book purist, I am a noted pain in the neck as an M&M GM, as I insist on characters having strong concepts and logical rationales for their powers. I think I must have helped eight or ten people come up with characters for M&M games this year – and it was here more than anywhere else that I saw D&Dthink casting its peculiar spell.

No matter how carefully I explained that I was hoping to recreate the feel of a ‘classic’ superhero team, very odd choices of characters and powers kept coming back to me – lots of interest in Healing as a possible superpower, not because it’s common in the books or particularly logical for that character, but because years of playing D&D had conditioned folk to believe that every team needed a healer. Someone else wanted to play the long-range support specialist, sniping from concealment – again, a solid choice for a D&D character, but not really the stuff of super-teams.

On one occasion I agreed with a potential player that he would play a super-speed character. He came back to me with a creation the most notable feature of which was a magic electrical sword which paralysed anyone it hit and did extra damage 20% of the time. None of this was remotely rationalised, it was just the best way to spend points and wreak the most havoc in combat, both of which would have been absolutely the way to go in most D&D games.

(Needless to say, this guy, like several others, ended up not participating in our game, mainly because I wouldn’t allow them to work the rules as they desired. One of the things about D&Dthink is that the rules are treated much more as some kind of holy text, not as something to be hacked or modded to make a better experience for the group.)

One of the most useful ways of thinking about RPGs that I’ve come across is something called the GNS triangle, G standing for Game, N for Narrative, and S for Simulation. These are, it is suggested, the three main approaches to RPGs – some want to have a game-style experience where it’s all about cleverly working the rules to ‘win’, others want to tell a genuine story, others want to replicate the style of a particular genre of fiction (maybe even a specific movie or TV series).

D&D is absolutely a Game-style RPG, as I hope I’ve made clear. Numenera and its sister games probably tend towards Narrative-style gaming. M&M, at least when we play it, is very Simulationist (although inevitably providing a good narrative is part of the genre experience). It seems a shame that a Game-oriented approach like D&Dthink should crop up when people are running N- and S-style games, but given D&D‘s dominance it’s only to be expected.

I don’t know. Hopefully, as players, people can make themselves aware of the existence of these kinds of thought patterns and try to go beyond them – my own M&M players have proven to be quite flexible when I pointed out just what was going on. And, perhaps more importantly, GMs can keep an eye out for D&Dthink and do their best to close it down before it gets started. When you’re actually playing D&D, D&Dthink can be perfectly logical. When playing a game in a different style, the best you can hope for is that the game will be odd and a little unsatisfying; at worst, it can wreck the whole experience.

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The Black and White Spidey Show

Which weighs more, a ton of oranges or a ton of feathers? It’s a trick question, of course: they are, in one respect at least, equal. But not identical: I know which one I’d prefer to nibble on – and which one I’d choose to nap upon, for that matter. I think this distinction between the ideas of identity and equality is an important one, too often overlooked.

This has been brought to mind by, of all things, the fall-out from the Sony hacking scandal, one of the consequences of which has been Sony relinquishing its death grip on the Spider-Man movie rights license and agreeing upon a sort of time-share agreement with the people at Marvel Studios itself. And one of the consequences of this looks like being the sacking of Andrew Garfield as Spider-Man’s on-screen embodiment, with open season being declared on recasting the character.

The internet has reacted to all of this with its usual restraint and objectivity. (Apologies, by the way, to any of the friends who’ve already seen me articulating some of the impending opinions in a different venue, and indeed to anyone who feels I misrepresent views which I disagree with.) One of the issues is – I am tempted to say ‘inevitably’ – that of diversity, and the possibility of casting a non-Caucasian performer as Spider-Man’s alter ego.

There is a wrinkle here. The casual movie-goer may be very aware of Spider-Man’s best known secret identity, Peter Parker, who has been a fairly middle-class straight white dude since 1962 – said movie-goer may indeed be sick to death of him, given there have been five Spider-Man movies since 2002. Rather less familiar, however, may be Miles Morales, a parallel-universe version of Spider-Man who’s been around since 2011. The key difference is that Morales is, ethnically speaking, black-Hispanic.

So it’s not just a question of whether the new Spidey should be white or not, but whether they go with the Parker or Morales character. There are, I would say, sound reasons for going with both versions: Peter Parker is almost as famous a character as Bruce Wayne or Clark Kent, with the kind of audience investment that goes with this. On the other hand, using Miles Morales could spare us yet another instance of Uncle Ben taking a bullet, in addition to inevitably garnering some publicity for the change of character, and, yes, increasing diversity in the on-screen superhero community.

(I should say I am generally pro-diversity, but not militantly or dogmatically so, quite simply because I am dubious about using mainstream entertainment as an instrument of top-down cultural engineering.)

Having found the Webb-Garfield Spidey films rather dull, certainly compared to the Raimi-Maguire ones from ten years ago, I’d personally be more interested in seeing a Miles Morales Spider-Man film than yet another incarnation of Peter Parker. But I wouldn’t be surprised if famously-cautious movie moguls opted to go with Parker again.

What does bemuse me a bit are suggestions that they go with Peter Parker again but change his ethnicity. This might make a bit more sense if Miles Morales didn’t exist as a popular alternative version of the character, but given a diversity-friendly alternate exists, why make fundamental changes to a 50-year-old and much-loved character? I can’t figure it out.

It’s not as if the movie is going to be called Peter Parker, after all: the name with marquee value is Spider-Man. There’s no reason why people wouldn’t go to see a Miles Morales movie that wouldn’t equally apply to one with an ethnically-transformed Peter Parker. If people aren’t going to go and watch a movie with a black superhero, it doesn’t make any difference what his civilian name is, and if they’re only going to see a movie featuring the Spider-Man they grew up reading, then they’re not going to go and see one with a black Peter Parker because the comics character has a five decade history of being white.

‘Peter Parker is not fundamentally white’ runs the counter-argument here, but I am not even completely sure what this is supposed to mean. It reminded me of a similar discussion – possibly I am gilding the lily here, because at the time it felt like an argument – about whether a particular character had any ‘essentially male traits’. The suggestion in both cases seems to be that being white, or being male, is not a trait – is meaningless in and of itself, and contributes nothing to a person’s essential identity.

If you discard things like gender, race, orientation, and so on, I wonder what is left as a basis of personal identity: memories and experiences, I suppose, but aren’t those fundamentally informed by all the elements I just mentioned? These things are not just cosmetic labels you can pull off and move around without it impacting every aspect of an individual – I said as much when articulating my misgivings about DC’s decision to make a character with seven decades of history as a straight guy suddenly gay. Changing any of these things basically means you’re creating a new version of the character, if you ask me, and to claim otherwise is a bit silly.

Championing the idea of a non-white Peter Parker seems to me to be an attempt at having your cake and eating it: you want to hang on to the name recognition and audience investment that a character has accumulated over decades of publishing history, while simultaneously making fundamental changes to that character in the name of diversity. It completely disregards the fact that characters as popular as Peter Parker have lasted so long precisely because people have invested so much in them: dedicated fans of Spider-Man, which I will freely confess to not being among, really care about Peter Parker, and think of him almost as a real person, complaining when he’s presented inconsistently, and so on. The one thing guaranteed to annoy this kind of fanbase is to make arbitrary, glaring changes.

It almost feels as though there is some kind of secondary agenda at work, one which is trying to suggest that notions of race, gender, and orientation are not just equal but actually meaningless, in the sense of expressing any real difference. I don’t see any problem with accepting that people of different ethnicities or genders or orientations are fundamentally of equal value as human beings. I believe that myself; you would be some kind of medievalist not to, I think. But that doesn’t mean there are not deep and fundamental differences between men and women, or between the cultural histories of different ethnic groups. Equivalency does not equate to identity.

I can’t help but see a parallel with another issue which has caused me some vexation and indeed heartache recently. Not long ago the BBC broadcast a series called Atlantis, about the adventures of a straight white guy. This was the replacement for a series called Merlin, about the adventures of a straight white guy. This in turn followed Robin Hood, about the adventures of a straight white guy. Now, there are arguably sound reasons for making Robin Hood a straight white guy, and also to some extent Merlin the wizard. But the main character in Atlantis was an original creation, and the BBC had a blank slate to do whatever they liked. Did they get any stick at all for not being even a tiny bit more adventurous? Not that I ever noticed.

Yet the voices clamouring for a more diverse recasting in Doctor Who are sort of relentless, once again despite the long history of the character operating in certain terms and the accumulated weight of fifty years of unequivocal masculinity. The demand is once again for absolute continuity and fundamental change at one and the same moment.

Just as the militant pro-diversity movement seems much more interested in interfering with the Doctor’s identity than in persuading the BBC to lead a less high-profile fantasy show with a non-white or non-male character, so there seems to be rather less interest in using the already-existing, diversity-friendly Miles Morales character than in bringing about arbitrary change in the much better-known Peter Parker. And I can’t help but wonder why. You want a non-white Spider-Man? Use the non-white Spider-Man who’s been appearing in books for years. Insisting on turning an established white character black when a viable alternative exists only suggests that this isn’t simply just about diversity.

 

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A Ramble with Time

There was a moment in the middle of last week when it occurred to me that it was past time for some Doctor Who on DVD, but I honestly couldn’t decide which story to go for. I have been meaning to share some thoughts on the subject of Christopher Eccleston for a while now, so something from his brief and strangely overlooked tenure was on the cards for a bit. But then it occurred to me that the tenth anniversary of his series is only a few weeks away, so I may as well hang on until then. I consulted an old and wise friend for suggestions, and he came up with some very sensible ideas, but unfortunately all for stories which I’ve watched relatively recently. A bit more thought and he came back to me with The Time Meddler, which I hadn’t viewed in a slightly longer while. So off I went.

Ah, The Time Meddler. I first saw this story on its repeat at the start of 1992, 27 years after its original broadcast: and it gives me a bit of a start to realise that if you were to repeat 27-year-old Doctor Who nowadays you’d be showing McCoy’s second season. Crikey – tempus very much fugit. To say that seeing the story was an unexpected pleasure is a bit of an understatement: modern UK viewers may find this slightly incomprehensible, but there was a time when the BBC didn’t repeat Doctor Who. No, not even the recent stuff: in fact, there was a seven-year stretch between Summer 1984 and New Year 1992 when I don’t believe they showed a single re-run of the series. So that’s a point of distinction for the story, at least.

We are for once spared the semi-obligatory when’s-it-set sidebar, as the specifics of the story’s setting are central to the plot. It is Northumbria in late summer of the year 1066, and the Doctor turns up with his young friends Vicki and Steven. Life seems to be going on as usual – a little light peasantry, the occasional Viking raid – until the TARDIS travellers uncover evidence of very strange occurrences in the area. They find a 20th century wristwatch lying around in the woods, and the local monastery appears to have a gramophone…

One has to raise something of an eyebrow at the fact that most of the anachronisms dotted throughout the story date from no later than the 20th century: an atomic bazooka has a significant plot role, but apart from that, it’s analogue wrist-watches, vinyl gramophones, electric toasters, and army surplus first aid kits all the way. The Monk, who is the source of all these weirdnesses, even goes so far as to describe the Doctor’s TARDIS as resembling a ‘modern’ (as opposed to ‘a 20th century’) Police Box. Could it be that writer Dennis Spooner was either unaware of the Doctor’s implied alien origins, or chose to overlook them in order to serve his story? Is he privately thinking of both the Doctor and the Monk as human time-travellers from the not-too-distant future? At this point there was nothing in the canon to exclude the possibility – and, when it comes to discussing his shared origin with the Monk, the Doctor’s only comment is the oddly-phrased ‘I would say I am fifty years earlier.’

You can have a jolly discussion about the retroactive contribution of The Time Meddler to the Doctor Who canon: it would take a more obstreperous person than me to seriously argue that the Monk isn’t a Time Lord, or at least of Gallifreyan origin, and this story marks the point in the development of the mythos at which you can meaningfully start talking about ‘a TARDIS’ (as an example of a type) as opposed to ‘the TARDIS’ (meaning the Doctor’s unique vehicle). To this extent the veil occluding the Doctor’s origins is teased back by the tiniest amount – there are others out there like him, and some of them are less particular when it comes to obeying the laws of time travel than he is.

The story doesn’t really address the apparent contradiction between it and The Aztecs. In the earlier story, the Doctor is adamant with Barbara that she can’t change history – ‘not one line’ – while here the Monk’s plan to blow up the Viking fleet and change the outcome of the Norman invasion appears to have him genuinely worried. So is history mutable or not? In these Moffatilised times, I expect the writer would trot out something about fixed or unfixed points in time, but it seems to me that there’s a much easier explanation, and a fairly obvious one. Barbara is trying to change a history she is a product of, and thus any alteration in the timeline will affect her and probably negate the original alteration (a variant on the grandfather paradox, of course): thus, what she’s trying to do is impossible. As an outsider to Earth history, on the other hand, the Monk will be much less substantially affected by changes to the planet’s history, and thus able to intervene more tellingly. Perhaps this is what being a Time Lord actually means: many other races seem to have time travel capacity of some description, but they appear to lack the ability to make significant changes to history on the scale the Time Lords occasionally do (erasing whole planets from history on at least two occasions).

The story’s biggest indisputable non-retrospective contribution to the series – that’s not at all a heavily qualified clause, is it? – is that it blurs the line between its SF-fantasy and historical threads more explicitly than any previous story. (Then again, I’ve argued elsewhere that Marco Polo and The Aztecs are both much more fundamentally driven by their SF elements than conventional wisdom generally holds, but I don’t want to have to go back and hedge this paragraph’s opening sentence any more than I already have.) That said, it is a notably non-momentous moment – so is the revelation, such as it is, of the Doctor and the Monk’s shared origins. No season finale, this, or at least not as we’ve come to know it: the only concession to its status at the end of the run is the rather charming starfield tableaux of the time travellers at its very conclusion.

Then again, this is an extremely laid-back story, even by the standards of the 1960s. There is, admittedly, some heavily implied sexual violence, and a couple of killings sufficiently nasty to be snipped by the Australian censors, but the rest of the story is almost wholly innocuous: the Monk is hardly malevolent, and is treated by the Doctor as a nuisance more than anything else. And it does amble along at an extremely leisurely pace: it goes without saying that the 21st century version of the show would have rattled through this particular plot in less than half the time. Even the fight sequences have an endearingly relaxed quality about them. More critical minds might accuse The Time Meddler of being slow: but I quite like this change of pace, the fact that you can make your lunch or clean your teeth or perform minor surgical procedures while watching the story and, more likely than not, not miss any crucial plot details.

You may be feeling that this review has rambled and wandered about without getting to the point, even moreso than usual: but then I feel that’s the only appropriate way to capture The Time Meddler‘s special charm. If every story was like this, it would indeed drive me mad, probably. But they’re not, which makes this story just a little more special simply as a viewing experience, as well as something which sneaks quite a few important innovations into the programme without making a fuss about it.

 

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The Emulation Game

Having recently come to terms with the fact that I am now more likely than not an ex-Games Workshop wargamer, I find my attention sliding back to the pen-and-paper role-playing games which were really the source of this particular interest. Truth be told, my active career as an active roleplayer didn’t last much more than a decade, but I have spent a significant chunk of time since then buying, comparing, and mulling over different games and systems. As I mentioned recently, I have picked up PDFs of Cubicle 7’s Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space game. To say I am rather impressed is possibly an understatement: certainly, all the things that are good about it have made me reconsider the strengths and weaknesses of the games I’ve played in the past.

(Pictured above: the 50th anniversary release of the rules. One of the problems with this game is that Cubicle 7 have to keep re-skinning it every time the Doctor regenerates, which is why it doesn’t seem to be available as a physical product at the time of writing.)

Doctor Who hasn’t been quite the natural fit for storygaming that you might expect, given the imaginative, adventurous basis of the series. AITAS is the third attempt at an official RPG. The last one was Time Lord, written by Ian Marsh and released over 20 years ago by Virgin. The system was simple enough, if a bit bland, but the game had the misfortune of coming out just as the TV show got cancelled, so interest was minimal and it received scant published support (although it does hold the distinction of having had an adventure published for it in DWM).

Rather more significant, if divisive, is the game published by the American company FASA in the mid 1980s. This was a proper game line, consisting of the basic rules set, half a dozen or so somewhat variable adventures, and some pretty solid sourcebook sets for the Master, the Daleks, and the Cybermen. I played this game a lot in the late 80s and early 90s and had some good times doing so, but on reflection this was probably more in spite of the actual rules than because of them.

The FASA rules, like a lot of RPG systems from the 70s and 80s, really betray roleplaying’s origins as an offshoot from more traditional wargaming. Most of these really left the actual roleplaying up to the players, to the point where it was an optional extra: rules systems were almost exclusively concerned with tactical combat and (sometimes) skills use. More than a few early-ish games were not much more than skirmish wargames with advancement and reward systems bolted on. Some of these games were also very narrative-neutral: ‘classic’-style D&D, after all, basically concerns a team of violent specialists exploring a maze, (probably) killing every creature they meet, and nicking all their stuff.

The FASA game at least emphasised the importance of narrative, but the rules also included a bizarrely complex tactical action system and numerous pages of weapon statistics and critical hit and miss tables. The system was authentic to the TV series up to a point, in that combat was unusually lethal by most RPG standards: most player characters could take 20-30 points of damage before dying, but energy weapons could easily deliver double that from a single hit. But it always seemed to me that the system presupposed violent solutions to adventure challenges (indeed, one section giving tips on designing scenarios featuring the Cybermen stressed the importance of including a source of gold in every adventure, so the player group could beat them in combat). Coupled to a hugely detailed and somewhat unwieldy skill system, the result was a game which played well enough but didn’t exactly encourage a style much in keeping with the TV series: more for roleplaying gamers than Who fans.

On the other hand, one of the first things you sense about Adventures in Time and Space – yes, we have reached it at last – is that it seems to have been made in the hope it will be purchased by at least as many young Who fans as grizzled old rolegamers, for a familiarity with the Doctor Who mythos is taken for granted, while a willingness to spend hours learning rules is not. While there are subtle nods to the FASA game in the text, the rules set is much simpler and more accessible. Characters are defined by six basic attributes (things like Strength, Presence, Co-ordination), which are rated from 1 to 6 (usually; aliens can go higher), twelve skills (very broadly defined – they have names like Technology, Knowledge, though you can specialise if you choose), and a selection of Traits which modify your abilities – such as Attractive, which gives you a bonus when being persuasive, or Boffin, which allows you to create new gadgets on the fly. Characters also get something called Story Points, to which I shall return presently.

The basic system is dead simple: the storyteller assigns any challenge a difficulty (the default is 12) and the player rolls two dice, adding the appropriate attributes, skills, and trait modifiers. (For example – trying to work out which Roman Emperor you’ve just been dragged in front of? That’d be Awareness + Knowledge, probably. Trying to fly your TARDIS through an asteroid field at high velocity? Co-ordination + Vehicles. Shooting at a box of gelignite to sabotage a missile some robots are constructing? Co-ordination + Marksman, and so on.) There are a few more wrinkles but that’s basically it.

The result is a system you can teach a newbie player in well under five minutes. I suspect that even the best-prepared FASA GM would struggle to lead a small group of players through character generation in much less than hour; a well-prepared storyteller could take players through the same process for AITAS in fifteen to twenty minutes. I think the importance of this is easy to underestimate: it’s hard for players to get invested in a game where they don’t really feel that they understand the rules, and didn’t shape their character themselves.

It’s a fast-playing, almost free-form system, which seems to me to be very far from the wargamey origins of mainstream RPGs. This is only consolidated by the game’s approach to combat, which is to strongly discourage it. Emulating the spirit and style of Doctor Who is built into the system itself, which is novel: the rules actually include a section entitled Guns are Bad, containing a number of suggestions on how to actively avoid combat. Even if you wanted to run a combat-heavy game – everyone as UNIT or Torchwood operatives, perhaps – you might need to mod the rules quite considerably: Initiative is organised so aggressive combat actions almost always happen last (trigger-happy types like K9 or the Brigadier have traits allowing them to ‘jump the queue’, so to speak), usually giving characters a chance to do something clever and non-violent (or just run away) first, while the systems for recording damage are vague and quite subjective, though also occasionally innovative: you can resolve arguments by damaging an opponent’s Resolve until they give up and concede to you (at which point their Resolve resets). Many weapons have a damage characteristic of ‘L’, meaning they are instantly lethal, no questions asked.

Does this mean bad luck or poor judgement could result in the dreaded Total Party Kill for your first session? Not at all, for this is where your Story Points come in. This sort of mechanic seems to be almost obligatory in modern RPGs: they allow you to either tweak your dice results, or indeed even the game world, in your favour. Two or three SPs will permit you to downgrade that potentially-lethal Dalek zap into a clean miss. Their use extends beyond combat, into general narrative utility: you can use them to affect general skill-use, to get hints if the party are stuck, and on. One of the inherent problems in a Doctor Who-themed game is balancing omni-competent Time Lord characters with mere human mortals, and one of AITAS‘ responses is to reduce the number of SPs Time Lords and other more powerful characters possess. Characters gain SPs by staying in character (playing their negative traits), being appropriately heroic, respecting genre tropes (letting yourself get captured, etc), and so on. (On the other hand, unnecessary violence loses you SPs, which has led some reviewers to call AITAS ‘preachy’ for its non-violent ethos.)

Confession time: I haven’t actually sat down and played this game with other people yet. But I suspect that when I do (and I hope it is ‘when’ rather than ‘if’), it will feel much more like telling a collaborative story and a lot less like something which is second-cousin to a wargame. To this extent I think it is remarkably faithful to the show it is trying to emulate and evoke.

That said, whether you’re dealing with veteran rolegamers or newbie Who-fans, human nature remains the same, and the basic set as written may throw up a few problems. While the game does offer suggestions for scenario set-ups with everyone playing humans (Torchwood teams, spaceship crews, UNIT, etc), the default assumption is that players will be taking on the roles of the Doctor and other TV companions (stats from the 21st century series are provided with the PDF currently available). This seems fair enough, as Doctor Who without Time Lords and TARDISes isn’t really Doctor Who. To its credit, the game offers suggestions on how to deal with the inevitable resulting squabble over who gets to play who (or indeed Who), but my instinct is to avoid letting people play TV characters anyway. In any case, other products in the game line have come up with expanded rules for creating player character Time Lords, which solves this problem to some extent: the main problem is one of the current mythos, in which Time Lords are notably thin on the ground. I think using different levels of SPs partly solves the problem of differing power-levels; the rest of it can probably be dealt with by careful character design (ensuring a degree of ‘niche protection’, where everyone has a ring-fenced area of expertise), and setting your game pre-Time War or in an alternative timeline, or coming up with some other creative solution (Gallifrey finally gets out of that frozen dimension – or at least one TARDIS and its occupant does).

I’m slightly dubious about the adventures included in the version of the game I acquired, as they don’t feel especially Who-ish to me, but on the whole this is seems like a fun, easy-to-grasp gateway RPG, written in an engaging style and with some lovely touches that reflect the style of the series. So many peripheral Doctor Who-related items just take themselves very seriously indeed, but parts of AITAS are much more laid back. You can give your character the rather politically-incorrect Screamer! trait (perfect for those old-school companions), giving you the option of temporarily stunning an oncoming monster with the sound of your shrieks, provided you use your next action to run like hell. (Other traits which old-school fans might especially appreciate include Five Rounds Rapid! and Reverse the Polarity of the Neutron Flow.) Equally, rather than having your character mown down in combat when you run out of SPs, you can ‘borrow’ SPs from the storyteller to save yourself, as long as you also take the Unadventurous trait – the catch being that if you take it three times, your character gets so fed up of the perils of time travel they leave the TARDIS at the end of the current story.

The ethos and style of Doctor Who – freewheeling, combat-averse, story-friendly – are deeply woven into the system here, and I was rather surprised to learn this same game engine has been used as the basis of a couple of other product lines: a RPG based on Primeval (released just about the time the TV show was expiring, hey ho) and a pulp SF game called Rocket Age (which I’m rather tempted to buy just on the strength of the premise). Personally, games which are more about story and less about crunchy combat rather appeal to me, but I’m aware others might feel differently. Certainly some play-styles would not be supported by this game: if you want to play combat-heavy dungeon-crawls in Who-world, you should probably look elsewhere. But if you are looking for a licensed RPG which really works hard to encourage players to emulate the tone and style of its source material, and of course you want to tell your own Doctor Who stories with your friends and family, you could do very much worse than this.

 

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