Home Artists Posts Import Register

Downloads

Content

Patreon backer Andrew brings you this special episode all about using classic Doctor Who monsters in Dungeons and Dragons!


Thanks to Ray Otus for our thumbnail image. The intro music is a clip from "Solve the Damn Mystery" by Jesse Spillane, used under a Creative Commons Attribution License.          

Comments

Steve

Gonzo bricolage as the aesthetic does find its place in things like the Alice in Wonderland scenarios (although that's probably too much of a straight copy) and more so in the Expedition to the Barrier Peaks (which is gaining a soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMhtFETeW-roWQPHfzDgNZg/videos?view=0&sort=da&flow=grid). I did something similar in Owl Hoot Trail by having a dinosaur valley in my F20 Western game. I tried a sort of Arabian Nights thing too, but that really didn't fit at all.

Steve

So the Doctor wanders about space and time, on the whole bumping into situations where something is either wrong about space or time (or both). There's some kind of intrusion of something alien to the background situation (or occasionally some kind of ecological disaster). Intrusion of Lovecraftian horrors fit the bill, but you've already covered them, and the Aboleth menace. It might also be dealt with by the resurgence of a long dead or forgotten god and its minions. Pyramids of Mars, except all statues are fair game for the recently released ancient spirits which start to excavate the body of the dead god from under the city, and set about freeing its spirit from the Blue Gem. Or perhaps like the Nestene conscience, they are building an antennae (like the Nazcar lines perhaps) through which the enemy can arrive. Like the Wirrn, the insect plague in MJ Harrison's Viriconium also fit the bill. It's a clash of old and new civilisations with a completely alien paradigm. Like cicadas which come back every 17 years, perhaps certain weird insects start to emerge and there's a race to find out how previous age dealt with them. Perhaps a certain fungus must be deployed, although the cure might be worse than the disease. Jeff Vandermeer goes down this route in Ambergris. I think there might be space for Daleks. They're weird squishy pincushions put inside war machines. Some neighbouring kingdom is next to a magical rift caused by an earlier war, or where a god died. This cause mutation and illness amongst the locals. Their leader is buying up all the golems, and putting mutated locals into them.

monsterman

One of the reasons I didn't really talk about Pyramids of Mars or similar is that in many cases they're already fantasy plots -- "an archaeologist has brought mummies back to his mansion and wants to summon an ancient god" is already a Cthulhu or D&D scenario. When you translate it back into a fantasy idiom you're merely returning it to the genre it came out of when it was translated to Doctor Who.