New Sci Fi Setting Seeds

[Astromancer]

It occurs to me that, if you have regular STL interstellar travel, that subcultures might live on the ships. In Europe, especially England, when you had barges regularly travelling up and down the canals you also had communities of people who lived on the barges. The Romani and the Irish Travelers were both itinerant for economic reasons. There were many groups in Southeast Asia that lived in boats and took their whole community with them on their travels.

Having cities on STL ships would make sense. The ship's crews and their families would run the ships, grow crops onboard, run hostels and/or hotels for the short term passengers, run schools and other social services needed for the crews. The Cities in Flight novels by Blish, might be the best resource for this kind of campaign.

[Luke Bunyip]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

...The Romani ...were ... itinerant for economic reasons.

SNAP! Was thinking of them whilst I posted above.

Originally Posted by Astromancer

... There were many groups in Southeast Asia that lived in boats and took their whole community with them on their travels.

IIRC there are still communities which live like this in the Southern Philippines, and Eastern Papua/Melanesia.

[Astromancer]

Try this one...

Tick-tock goes the Clock/ Even for the...

Normally here at the Time Patrol (assuming normal can be applied) we tend to avoid the Doctor like the plague. Sure they seem to be basically good-hearted, but that doesn't make them less deadly. Still, even the Doctor can screw-up royally.

The fifteenth Doctor brought down a government on the planet New Usonia in order to get them into a war to preserve the Rightly Guided Caliphate of New Cordoba. Well New Usonia's fleet won the war, but wasn't near New Usonia to prevent a mass bombardment of the planet which killed 60% of the population, The New Cordobans, desperate to restore their industrial base and feed their people, started slave raiding the planet destroying what was left of New Usonia's culture.

This blunder not only allowed the New Cordobans to form an aggressive empire but aborted a major renaissance that occurs in most timestreams on New Usonia. Thus making the whole sector hopelessly vulnerable to a Dalek expansion a few centuries up-time.

Worse, a slave sold by the New Cordobans was present when the Seventeenth Doctor was infiltrating a fascist dictatorship. The slave had Psionic powers that let him recognize the Doctor. The slave, hating the man who murdered his world, stabbed the Doctor.

Recognizing that they had a TimeLord in their power, the Fascists tortured the Doctor to force him to surrender all of their secrets. When we rescued the Doctor they were down to their last regeneration and that had gone badly.

The Time Patrol normally stays way clear of the Doctor, but this time we must stop him. His motive for saving a brutal theocracy like New Cordoba over a democracy like New Usonia was personal. Someone the Doctor deeply cared about was living there. An anthropologist who had been a companion of the Eighth Doctor. So changing history back to its proper course will involve a brutal struggle with the Doctor.


Basically, a cloak and dagger Space Opera espionage setting with a truly awesome opponent. New Usonia is a stand-in for the New Deal USA, but a USA heading for a far brighter future. New Cordoba is best simulated by getting a copy of Phil Master's masterful GURPS: Castle Falkenstein: Ottoman Empire and replacing all the magic with Ultra-Tech and Aliens.

[Inky]

Very good. (Although surely somewhat un-Doctor-like, but since canonically the Doctor more or less by definition does the right thing, you'd have to go somewhat out-of-character to allow the good guys to be fighting him, and that is a game worth going somewhat out-of-character for).

You'd have to reckon with the perennial problem of defining what the Doctor is allowed to do, though. Everyone I've seen attempt to put Time Lords in an RPG seems to complain about this: in the series, the Doctor (and the Master, and any other Time Lords who appear) is basically able or unable to do whatever would be awesome at that moment. A bit of that is usual in stories, but Time Lords in Doctor Who are in a different league. And if you did an RPG the same way, with the GM basically able to make up what the opponent is capable of on the fly, that would be a rather annoying campaign. So you would have to do it differently from the series and define roughly what the Doctor's capabilities are in this game ahead of time. But that can be done, just as long as you know to do it.

Also, couldn't the whole thing be circumvented by just kidnapping the anthropologist?

Presumably what's left of the future Doctor agrees with the Time Patrol about all this, having realised by this time that that had been a really terrible plan. Just having future Doctor explain that to Fifteen won't work, though (or, at least, you have an excuse for it not working), as it's canonically established that when two different Doctors meet the earlier one forgets all about it as soon as the later one leaves.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by Inky

Very good. (Although surely somewhat un-Doctor-like, but since canonically the Doctor more or less by definition does the right thing, you'd have to go somewhat out-of-character to allow the good guys to be fighting him, and that is a game worth going somewhat out-of-character for).

Both sides could be working off limited data.

You'd have to reckon with the perennial problem of defining what the Doctor is allowed to do, though. Everyone I've seen attempt to put Time Lords in an RPG seems to complain about this: in the series, the Doctor (and the Master, and any other Time Lords who appear) is basically able or unable to do whatever would be awesome at that moment. A bit of that is usual in stories, but Time Lords in Doctor Who are in a different league. And if you did an RPG the same way, with the GM basically able to make up what the opponent is capable of on the fly, that would be a rather annoying campaign. So you would have to do it differently from the series and define roughly what the Doctor's capabilities are in this game ahead of time. But that can be done, just as long as you know to do it.

Agreed, you'd need to define the Fifteenth Doctor. But the PCs and players need not know that.;-)

Also, couldn't the whole thing be circumvented by just kidnapping the anthropologist?

A viable solution. Make sure to complicate things.

Presumably what's left of the future Doctor agrees with the Time Patrol about all this, having realised by this time that that had been a really terrible plan. Just having future Doctor explain that to Fifteen won't work, though (or, at least, you have an excuse for it not working), as it's canonically established that when two different Doctors meet the earlier one forgets all about it as soon as the later one leaves.

You can play that as you like. But the Final Doctor is way to sick to help.

[Flyndaran]

The War Doctor shows that ethics can be incarnation specific.
And we certainly can't forget The Valeyard even if he's not been mentioned in the new series that I know of.

The Doctor has made some horrible mistakes in the original series though usually off screen and pre-episode.

[Inky]

"The Face of Evil" :-D

[dataweaver]

An idea that I had a while back: a kind of mixture of Dr. Who and Quantum Leap. The Time-Dreamer is an exceptional woman, a college professor of history who really knows her stuff. What people don't realize is that this is because every night when she goes to sleep, the has the ability to project herself into the past. The mechanism for doing so involves collecting artifacts from the time she wants to go to and meditating on them as she drifts off to sleep. She then awakens in the body of someone from that era.

However, her time in the past is not synchronized with the present. She can, and she has, lived entire lifetimes in the past, only to wake up the next morning and continuing on with her modern life until it's time to sleep again. As a result, although she's physically in her mid-30s, she is mentally thousands of years old, with all the experience that that entails.

It's not so much a setting seed as a character idea; but there you go.

[Prince Charon]

Originally Posted by Inky

Very good. (Although surely somewhat un-Doctor-like, but since canonically the Doctor more or less by definition does the right thing, you'd have to go somewhat out-of-character to allow the good guys to be fighting him, and that is a game worth going somewhat out-of-character for).

The Doctor 'always doing the right thing' consistently according to the narrative (as opposed to the viewers, who have a pretty wide range of individual opinions, frequently varying by episode) is a pretty recent thing, AFAICT dating mainly from the Chibnall era, as earlier showrunners had the Doctor as more 'generally right and good most of the time, but having flaws and being capable of mistakes that were narratively-acknowledged.' It varied a lot, but Chibnall is the first DW showrunner to apparently make it a requirement that The Doctor could not be morally wrong.

[Astromancer]

Try this one...

...the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.

When the first settlers came here to teraform this world they named it Lakshmi because peace begets wealth. Then they started to war with each other and collapsed our society. Since then we've all been terrified that some culture would recover first and conquer our world like Europe conquered Earth in the 19th century only without other European nations to slow them down.

The Red Dragon Republic has been going from strength to strength in the last few decades, But as their lands were tightly restricted by the deserts to the east, the sea to the west, icy mountains to the north, and our empire to the south, few feared them.

Now we find that the Red Dragons are trying to create an injection event. We've long known the vast deserts in the continent north of us was centered around a vast shallow basin that well below sea level. Like the ancient Death Valley on Earth, this basin is in the rain shadow of high mountains between the coast and the basin. As no river flowing into the basin was large enough to create even a stable lake and the basin was far from the sea, no one though the basin could be flooded.

The Red Dragon Republic has always sought to revive the old knowledge and they didn't miss the uses of cartography. And in improving the maps of their republic the Red Dragons seem to have discovered a long valley that runs from the basin to within twenty miles away from the sea. And a deep Fjord bring the sea within eight miles of an area of the long valley that is below sea level. Worse, most of the stone in this area is soft! Water impermeable, but soft.

If they dig a deep enough canal the pressure of seawater will cut it deeper and wider and a vast bay will both shield them from the desert tribes and bring moisture laden winds to their vast areas of desert under their rule.

With the new wealth and population the Red Dragon Republic will quickly industrialize and soon rule the world.

Basically, this is a combination of Swashbuckler/Espionage with Napoleonic warfare in a mountainous frontier area.

The Planet Lakshmi has a higher water to land ratio than the Earth, but not by much. The planetary moon, Vidya is larger, denser, and nearer to Lakshmi than Luna is to Earth, so the tides are half again as high. The Red Dragon Republic and the Imperium are on the same continent and both based on the West Coast. Picture the Red Dragon Republic as being centered around San Francisco and the Imperium as centered around Peru and you've got the distances.

The Republic started when colonies from Wales and Taiwan joined together for mutual support. Later, other colonies from Europe, the Antipodes, North America, and Indonesia, joined voluntarily. The Red Dragon Republic is a democracy, although not a very progressive one by present day Earth standards. Still they are improving and widening both the franchise and access to education.

The Imperium is an outgrowth of the Combine, the corporation hired to terraform Lakshmi. The Imperium is a highly aristocratic oligarchy, the Council of Princes is the ruling body and it runs as unicameral legislature. The Head of Government is the Premier and the head of State is the Emperor who has been in suspended animation for decades and is unlikely to ever be awakened.

More later...