Once upon a time (1985, to be exact) FASA issued the Doctor Who Role Playing Game. I don’t recall anything of the rules, or much of their non-canonical setting material, but I do remember a short campaign I ran at the time. With my current immersion in the new series on DVD I started knocking around ideas of how I’d run a Who campaign today, based on how I ran one then.
Any campaign has to start with three elements: a Time Lord, a Tardis, and companions. Obviously, the roles of the companions fall to the players. If they all play Time Lords, you lose the flavor. If you allow one player to play a Time Lord, you risk allowing one character to overshadow the others. Making the Time Lord an NPC seemed the best option to me at the time, and still feels the most viable now (although I’d allow one player to assume the roles, depending upon the group I was with). The trick, then, becomes one of not railroading the players and forcing them play second fiddle to the gamemaster’s Mary Sue.
The solution I devised back then, which is one I would gladly repeat, was to get the Time Lord out of the action as quickly as possible to allow the companions to have the spotlight. In the first scene the Time Lord gets knocked unconscious, or is kidnapped. He sends the companions on an errand while he fixes the Tardis, or engages in business that removes him. The companions, exploring a strange new place, get lost and can’t find their way back to the Tardis. Or, simply, the Tardis malfunctions while the Time Lord is repairing it, standing the companions. Note that in all of these scenarios, the Time Lord can conveniently reappear to act as the cavalry if the player characters get in over their heads: he (or she) wakes up, gets free, comes and finds them, and so on. Not a device to be used lightly, but there if the players paint themselves into a corner.
Creating a Time Lord NPC who isn’t a bad Doctor clone is trickier. You want to utilize the resonant tropes — a sort of rogue Time Lord, a malfunctioning Tardis, someone who needs human companions — without repeating them directly. To fill this role I created Zed, and to be terribly American circa 1985 I modelled Zed on Bobcat Goldtwait. I’ll pause now while you groan and wretch, but wait for the character concept and recast to suit your needs. Zed appeared to be a bumbling idiot, Patrick Troughton on crack. A comic relief character, and kind of annoying sometimes, but he had a cool time machine. He seemed to accomplish things more by happy accident than through any sort of plan, although after the fact the players had to wonder whether it was really by design all along. Zed had a Terrible Secret, and was being pursued by an unknown enemy who was out to get that Secret. Over the course of several sessions, the players would get clues and be given the chance to figure it out.
Zed lands in Los Angeles in 1985, L.A. picked at random for a city with story potential. The player characters had to be in L.A. in 1985 at the start of play; I allowed nearly any character concept, human, alien, robot, whatever, so long as the play could explain why they were there at the start of the first session. He sets down there for repairs and to resupply, but gets involved in some local mayhem and meets the player characters, who at the end of the adventure become his companions and travel with him to the next adventure.
The Tardis doesn’t function entirely properly, which Zed chalks up to damage taken in a fracas with his as-yet-unseen arch enemies, a race of deadly aliens who wish to steal the Tardis and exploit its secrets for personal gain. He doesn’t always land exactly when, or where, he wants. It does have a mostly-functioning chameleon circuit, so it can change into things other than a police call box, but it doesn’t always work exactly as planned. This was played to humorous effect, of course, with the Tardis being disguised as everything from a porta-potty at a construction site to a Fotomat booth.
The secret, which my players never figured out, is that Zed’s not really a Time Lord. He was ahuman maintenance technician on a space station from somewhere in the future. He changed light bulbs, unclogged toilets, replaced burned-out circuit boards in the walls (as so many space stations on TV and in movies seem to have circuit boards in the walls that need replacing by lowly jumpsuited technicians), and stuff like that. The Tardis is stolen, and he was going to try to use it to make a quick buck, Biff Tannen style. He had just enough technical knowledge to make it go — it’s not broken at all, he just doesn’t know how to drive. The alien enemy that’s pursuing him are the real Time Lords, trying to get their Tardis back.
Long-term, I’d started to develop a replacement Time Lord in the event Zed was captured and the players didn’t want to go on the run with him. One of the Time Lords who caught Zed would absolve them of any crimes committed as they’d been duped, and offer to take them home to L.A. 1985. Of course, he just had to make this one stop along that way, where something went awry and yet another adventure would being, and something would always come up that would keep them from getting back home…
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