I've Done It... With Time To Spare!

Promo image for season four of The Game of Rassilon

In a genuine "first" for me, I have listened to all three seasons of The Game of Rassilon actual play podcast to date, readying myself for the new season which begins next month.

As I said, earlier this year when I started this journey, I'm generally not a fan of 'actual play' podcasts as I don't consider roleplaying games a spectator sport on the whole and I've found them to be overly verbose and chaotic (to the extent that I can't follow what's going on or know which characters are doing what).

But The Game of Rassilon managed to circumvent all my reservations and become an addictive addition to my podcast feed (I rationed them out so that I would listen to one episode of the game, then a different podcast, then an episode of the game, then a different podcast and so on).

I've still got some of the 'behind-the-scenes' Patreon podcasts to listen to, but I'm up to date on the actual campaign, which is the main thing ahead of the June 1 debut of season four.

I can also pretty much credit this podcast with giving me the confidence to start working on my own Doctor Who RPG campaign for the Tuesday Knights.

Not only did the podcast demonstrate how streamlined and elegant the game mechanics are but it also  inspired me with its use of televisual/cinematic tropes such as cold opens, cutscenes, flashbacks, beginning a game in media res etc

None of these were new to me, per se, but I'm not sure I would have had the chutzpah to roll them out at the table before.

While I employed a kind of 'flashback' system very satisfactorily during my long-running Heroes & Other Worlds campaign (using Paizo's Plot Twist: Flashback cards), I now have the impetus to pull out these other tropes from my gamesmaster's arsenal as well.

On a related note, as part of my programme of inspirational research, I've also read the extensive overview of The Lanchester Calling campaign (aka The Mikros Campaign) in the free PDF fanzine Diary of The Doctor Who Roleplaying Games #17.

This campaign has run, on and off, since 1996 and like The Game of Rassilon places itself within the continuity of the TV show - while the podcast is a continuation of The Doctor's adventures at some unspecified point in the future, the Mikros Campaign weaves itself around the TV show, featuring a very different Time Lord and his companions.

My own ideas for the proposed Magic Haddock campaign - at the suggestion of the Tuesday Knights themselves - is that our campaign will be an alternate reality, where The Doctor isn't, and has never been, the protagonist of an encyclopedia's-worth of cosmic adventures.

This certainly makes it more akin to the Mikros Campaign, in the sense that our group's primary Time Lord won't be one of The Doctor's many faces, but it will also - hopefully - be its own thing developing continuity from the ground up, cherry-picking the elements we like from the Whoniverse and blending them into our own unique recipe as we go along. 

We will start small and build from there.

The great thing about a Doctor Who RPG is that anything is possible, any setting, any time period, any antagonists.

The multiverse is our oyster.