Good idea. I think this comes under the "doing something remarkable" application of Story Points, less in terms of bending the plot/reality and more in thinking of something the GM didn't and in the PC taking control. It's an obvious conclusion, so make it 1 Story Point.

Sorry for the wait, I was away and didn't get a chance to update.

Who currently has the Temporal Trace Locator?

Pretty sure Tarys has it, unless she was using her spooky knife to detect the anomaly a few scenes ago. In that case I might have it. No idea. :D

Ah, Tarys was the last to have it in the game thread, so I imagine she still has it.

It seemed like you weren't keeping the whole Time Lord thing secret any longer. :)

I only mentioned N-Forms for background. It's a thing from a New Adventures novel, Damaged Goods (by Russell T Davies, an exploration of late-80s gay culture set against the backdrop of a London council housing estate and the incursion of a horrific Time Lord weapon something like the ending of Akira, featuring a Tyler family and a bunch of other things he'd reuse later), where I got the idea for Patrex artistic weapons from. It's not actually relevant to this.



Hey, it's your superweapon. You're probably safe. ;)

Davies was the one who invented N-forms? My goodness, no wonder he wrote about a Time War. He'd already had horrifying ideas for the kinds of weapons Time Lords would employ. o_o

Nah, the Time War was ripped off of the War arc in the Eighth Doctor Adventures, devised by Lawrence "Mad Larry" Miles (they called him mad, before he was actually diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia...), and the series has been retreading it since. Twenty years on, and Doctor Who is still in the shadow of Alien Bodies.

Davies used to be a much angrier writer, Damaged Gods is an "everybody dies (except the gays)" kind of story.

Yeeeaaaah, I did kinda see the cover of the book and immediately noped right out. That was pretty gruesome. Half a corpse dragging itself out of the grave by its robo-tentacles. Does not exactly feel like a happy story.

I never really felt the two Time Wars were similar enough to really consider the new one a rehash of the old one. Just had similar names, really. (And the new one is much less freaky. Granted, we got to see way too much of it for there to be any real horror left, but that was super recent.)

I'm completely lost...

Lemme see if I can help unpack this.

The Yag Haz were picked on by other species until eventually being able to fight back. They ended up mad at the universe. They hooked up with the Daleks, who suggested "hey, that's a nice planet ya got there, it'd be the opposite of a shame if somebody were to...turn it into a starship and fly it into another planet." They thought it was a great idea, turned it into a starship, and tried to fly it into Gallifrey during the Time War. Gallifrey responded with one of the Time War's mind-shattering horrors, the Memento Mori, a Type 103 (or higher) Time Travel Capsule that had essentially been turned into a murderous zombie monster. Everyone died but Toz Raz, then we showed up and started thawing things out. The planet, also, is back on its collision course with Gallifrey.

Now Toz Raz wants to kill us, but can't because we're more or less badassish, and we are accidentally unleashing something that could literally erase the universe from reality. We need to figure out a way to stop the Memento Mori before it does something horrible, stop the planet from going all Final Fantasy VII on the Time Lords, stop Toz Raz from killing us, stop Professor Ortega from betraying us all for his mad ambition (I've seen enough Doctor Who to know where he's going, plotwise), try really hard to prevent any of the cool NPCs from needing to sacrifice themselves to save the day (also seen enough Doctor Who to know this one, and I like all of these NPCs, no sacrifice for them! They took Osgood from me, you leave Hali alone!), and also ensure the Time Lords present don't overshadow the Not Time Lords present, because the system was intended for you guys to be awesome even in the face of overwhelming exposition.

Did I get that all right, boss?

That's... actually completely correct. :D

Okay, there's more to come, but that's a start. ;)

And don't forget the longer-term aim of preventing the Doctor and now yourselves from being erased from time, again, by either collecting the temporal traces or the points of continuity (actual campaign-specific continuity references between adventures) that could lead you to the Daleks' secret base sooner. (Tarys already has one. ;) )

Though you may be overselling the threat of the Memento Mori. Certainly it could kill all of you... But erasing the universe isn't in the Time Lords' best interests. (At least until "The End of Time", but the less said, the better.)
This message had punctuation tweaked by the GM at 07:29, Sat 10 June 2017.

If it's a TTC, then I am totally not overselling it's capabilities. If it decided that was necessary, it totally could. The Doctor's Tardis totally could, if someone accidentally flipped two wrong switches, and that's an old model with fewer capabilities. Granted, this thing probably doesn't want to do that, which is good for us. Unless we really piss it off, which player characters are the best at. :P

But, uh. Yeah, I am down for someone coming up with an awesome plan before the time machine Terminator Crow zombie wakes up. :D

EDIT: Fortunately, Axander's trousers comes in brown already.
This message was last edited by the player at 03:17, Sat 10 June 2017.

I knew about half of that...

Unless pulling a rabbit out my hat can 'save the day', I have no idea what Bluetooth can do to help the situation.

Like I may have said before, I'm like Captain Janeway--temporal mechanics give me a headache!

Well, the non-Time Lords in the party do have a ton more Story Points than we do, and you can spend them to get flashes of insight from the GM. So yes, pulling a rabbit out of your hat is absolutely written in the rules, and you're the ones expected to be doing that most often. :D

Short of other plot-based events and NPC actions going on around you, at this point, what you do and how you solve the problem is all up to you PCs. Whatever ideas you have, no matter how crazy, are on the table.

For more basic actions, you could explore the Computer Core (command centre) some more, particularly checking the flight path. Is the planet still going to hit Gallifrey, and when?

The "Rocket Shaft" is now free of ice, so you might check that out. Since you know the Daleks motorised the planet, it's the same as the shaft to the centre of the Earth in "The Dalek's Masterplan".

You can also get back to work on escaping this place through the ice-fall.
This message had punctuation tweaked by the GM at 12:01, Wed 12 July 2017.

I'm not sure if all of us have the exposition that the planet is a rocket, or that there were Daleks here. Tarys learned a bunch of stuff that hasn't had an opportunity to be shared yet, what with the discovery of the creepy monster man.

My current deal is hoping the not-Time Lords can get a chance to do something, since we've been getting quite a lot of screentime as exposition fairies. Don't want people to feel like Tarys and I are the only ones who can play, and kinda feeling like people are feeling like that. <_<

Can I please have a hands-up on who's still here and playing, and who's disappeared into a hole in time? The waiting hurts the game for everyone.



I've been busy for a bit and I still need to think of something appropriate. But what kind of nudge were you looking for? Would you like an idea on what to do next, or a plan for defeating the Memento Mori monster?

I gave some simple things you could do next up in post #314. Or do you want something more definite?

Otherwise, I could give a sudden realisation for some of the clues and information that have been overlooked.

And as I said, you're overselling/overestimating the threat of the Memento Mori, which is making it harder to deal with. :p

The DWAITAS modules tend not to lead parties by the nose, but rather present a set of events and locations and expect the PCs to pull something out of the arses to solve the problem, while giving a few possible ideas for what to do. If you're up for defeating the Memento Mori, then what's your preferred approach? Blowing it up, technobabble it, shut it down, peaceful resolution, run like hell, something else?

Still here, ish.

Same

I'm still here! Though I suppose...that's pretty obvious. Hi! :D



You did, and I totally forgot you did because that was a month ago. Should be able to do some of those things at the very least, but I was indeed looking for some GM-nudged ideas on ways to deal with the monster that sound like they'd work. Speaking of...



Yeah, I recall that. I really should have asked for some input on what it is we're looking at. And not just that it's a super scary advanced time machine Terminator zombie monster, but what can it do?

My expectations were as follows:

The Doctor's Type-40 TTC is an old, wimpy, outdated model, and is fully capable of wounding or even destroying the Time Vortex, destroying stars, creating entire planets within it (seriously, it once recreated Gallifrey inside it when an evil Time Lord from the future, which is impossible but happens all the time, stole it to destroy the Doctor). The Type-40 is incredibly dangerous in the wrong hands.

The humanoid TTCs are super advanced models, and I expect they're more powerful rather than less. Then again, it doesn't seem like Compassion did anything too outside the bounds of what the Tardis did, except be humanoid.

My assumptions are that the Memento Mori can be at least as destructive as the Tardis, but we should probably dial down our expectations so the GM doesn't feel obligated to destroy half the galaxy when that ice melts. So what should we expect from the monster, boss?

Myself, I'm trying to think of something, but it feels like so much of the site is still frozen away from us that there are probably all sorts of interesting resources we haven't seen yet.

I feel like the fact that whatever else it's capable of, the Memento Mori is predisposed to kill, and probably to backfire on whoever is trying to pick something different for it to kill (as that might be an otherwise good solution to the Yag Haz, to get rid of whatever originally set them down a xenophobic spiral) is immensely tricky to think one's way around.

I think it's fair to say the Doctor's Type-40 TTC is "more than just another TARDIS". :) It has a history of doing things regular TARDISes can't. Meanwhile, the Memento Mori is a zombie TARDIS, and zombies tend not to do all that much, but shuffle and groan and kill things. :)

And erasing from history/existence isn't a common threat nor something that can easily be weaponised. The De-mat Gun and Rassilon's Gauntlet are unique and special artifacts of the Time Lords, and the Dalek's Temporal Cannon/Temporal Exterminator (I've mashed the nigh-identical superweapons from Engines of War and the Doom of the Daleks module into one here) is still prototypical, having just had its first test firing on your future selves.

Okay, I've wound up giving a whole bunch of nudges. Probably much more than is proper for one Story Point, but it gets us moving. Mostly these are clarifications or expectations of the threat and things you might have deduced in time. There are three main ways of dealing with the Memento Mori, and I've suggested some ways you might attempt them. Remember this is Doctor Who, you get to work inside and outside the box, and anything is on the table.

We have new blood! A new player has taken over Vax Kent, the NPC. Bid him welcome!