Question: What is the current status of the Psychic Mutant Dalek Brains?  Did the power outage affect their life-support systems (i.e are they in "trouble") or are they still very alive & active (and dangerous/hostile)?

Trace didn't say he was trying to destroy them specifically, so they're still alive. I presume they can generate enough power to keep themselves alive, and the shutdown of power is slow yet progressive.

So, they're alive and kicking, but not hostile. Trace is still allegedly doing work and hasn't triggered the defenses.

Basically, they're machines with a built-in defense system, but they are organic and psychic rather than technological and electric.

So, fortuitously excellent timing with both parties achieving what they set out to do, simultaneously. If you have no more plans, I can move things forward, get the groups back together, and bump you along to the Temporal Exterminator.

I'm ready and excited. Part of the idea is to send the prisoners to the bits of the Temporal Exterminator they know about and work together to sabotage the thing, and I'm not sure if that's what's already happening or if that requires more rolling, but once they've been sent on their way, we should definitely be able to regroup with the others with no further delay. :D

Also, I am completely loving that emergency door. "In Case Of Emergency, Kill Everyone"

I'm cool with moving forward.  I imagine Trace did a "bang up job" on the power generators sufficient that repairing them is either not plausible or would take too much time?

That's right. The power is down for the foreseeable.

Some of the qualified prisoners will follow you to the Temporal Exterminator to perform sabotage. However, to avoid them being exterminated on sight, you'll need to make some kind of distraction or misdirection or find a way of getting them into position. That's what was outlined from Axander's post in #66.

I figured that realistically all doors could well lock up to stop prisoner escapes, loss of atmosphere, etc. Then I realised these were Daleks and safety and common sense weren't a priority. :)

And there you go, right to the finale. You may recall we started at the end of the campaign too. ;)

I find the way that the number of scientists goes from six, to five, to four in post #133 without any fuss rather disquieting. :)

... Not half as disquieting as having to use anything which is '#66' as a point of reference.

I have issued Post 66. Soon we shall eliminate the Jedi Daleks. Once this battle station Temporal Exterminator is operational, Skywalker's fall to the Dark Side the Doctor's rescue will be complete. <s>I have</i> Tarys has foreseen it. Eh heheheh...

And here we are at last, what we've been waiting for, the climax of the finale! :)

You may want to remind yourselves of your answers to my questions in the RTJ. :) Writing all that was a chore.

Sorry for the delay, got caught up with some RL issues.  I will post IC tomorrow when I get home from work.

Who here has played the old Robots/Daleks BSD game? :)

So, one hell of a cliffhanger coming up. ;) You get one post and one action before you're erased from time. Make it count. :p

Now would probably be a good time to point out that you can spend Story Points to prevent having been hit at all. Each StP spent reduces the degree of failure. Bluetooth was hit for a "Bad" result, for instance, and one Story Point can bump that to a "Success", meaning he doesn't take any damage at all. Not sure if it's necessary to cover just 2 damage, but bearing in mind that one more point against him would have been Lethal damage instead of 4, it's a good investment of points.

Thinking of something to do. Might be able to dump story points for a flashy last action, but not sure what, and not sure if it would be useful. Ideas?

Guys, don't fret about it. I do not believe we've been put into a "Figure out exactly the right thing to do, or everyone dies!" scenario.

Yes, think carefully about that 'last' action; but don't burn all your story points or anything just to do it.

Um.  I feel like "a dark doorway" isn't much detail to make a post about.

Okay, I hope my temporal shenanigans won't be too confusing or frustrating for all of you. If they are,  I apologise.

Obviously, we started at the end of the campaign, and I said before we started that we'd go back and find out how you got here. It'll make sense soon, I promise. I have some ideas as to how you can get out of this, and that's largely going to be campaign setup. I'm just leaving this opportunity for you to either work it out yourselves or come up with something different I can work in. This is an epic, big, end of the universe, time war type of problem,  so a solution will be of the same magnitude, costing lots of story points. Consider your character's powers and gadgets, particularly Time Lords. But if you're stumped,  that's fine, just give your character's reactions and we'll move on.

A dark doorway (or other thing you're seeing) isn't much to go on,  no. The aim is to go inside.

Bluetooth, you jumped the gun in your previous post. I only asked for intentions for the round,  because the round itself was stolen by the Exterminator. I needed the Dalek Commander alive for the story,  so spent his SPs to avoid your attack. I forgot you could have used SPs to evade or ignore the Dalek's own attack. But it's a good indicator of what happened, so the Daleks will spend SPs to keep it.

In the next adventure, you'll be awarded SPs for this moment being a bit of a railroad.

... It's a Doctor Who game.

In my view; it's seeming like a Moffatt-era (who likes to use Time Travel as a plot hook, rather than just a means of getting there) or possibly Key to Time season. It's working.

Hm. End of campaign, and we're probably gonna circle back to the beginning of the campaign before we understand what's going to happen, and we have the opportunity to set up a big finale.

Would it be a stretch to do something dramatic-looking, drop all of our Story Points at once, and come back to it when we finally finish off the whole thing?

Or something like that? I'm basically suggesting we all get our Gadgets ready and march into the darkness together, burning all of our Story Points as one mighty pool. Then go back to the beginning of the story, chronologically speaking, and not find out what happens until we get back here. Which doesn't sound like any more of a clarification than when I first said it. Dang.



Heh. The way I see it, getting hit with a Dalek weapon flat out kills you. It's never left a mark before, it just makes things flash negative for a second and you're dead. The book describes the "Bad" result, taking 4 damage, as managing to evade the shot but getting hurt or worn down in the process somehow. Which means, since the GM flat out described that Bluetooth /got hit/ and is /still alive/, anyone who noticed should be thoroughly freaked out because the laws of time and reality have hiccuped, and that's a huge flashing neon sign. Oh my goodness, that one description can be totally run with right now. :D

Dalek guns have injured before. If they were that good (which is a problem I have with RTD's love of Daleks), the Dalek Wars should have been over before they began. Ian, from memory, got injured by one in a Hartnell story.

I'll grant that the Daleks were severely upgraded with the relaunch; but... back in the day (gods I feel old), it was not the Dalek superior weaponry that made them a scarier prospect than, say, Cybermen. (Who scared me much more than Daleks ever did, especially in Tomb of the Cybermen). It was their ambition, their ruthlessness, and their intelligence. And that you couldn't anticipate exactly what they would do at any point, usually.

I'll stop now before I start comparing various Dalek stories.

Hm. Only time I've seen Dalek guns not kill a target was one really weird Tennant story and their first appearance, when they specifically used stun settings. Unfortunately, I haven't seen all the old series stories. I've also never seen them miss until the new series, so it didn't seem like that much of a power increase to me, as much as a change in special effect.

Also the new series has the Doctor describe them in some way and then say "and that makes them more dangerous than evah!" Every time. Up until very recently, anyway. Still. Always more dangerous than ever. Can't we just accept that they're always dangerous?

I won't go into specifics right now; because people will get bored, but there definitely was a dramatic increase in power.

Yeah, my issues with the 11th-Doctor Moffat era have nothing to do with his use of temporal paradoxes and non-linear storytelling (I refuse to say the T-W word.) ;) It's extremely difficult to do that in an RPG, where I can't control the main character's actions or chance. So, I'm using this point of campaign set-up to have a go.

But I'm not going to engineer a TPK right out of the gate. We won't end if you do nothing. Failure is always an option. :)

Axander: Yes, you don't have to complete it now, or even reveal the plan. In fact, you'll probably need the intervening campaign to consider it and learn more about what else is going on (the odd things missed or overlooked in the current adventure). If anyone has a specific idea, run it by me privately so I can work it in or prepare it. Otherwise, just do something dramatic: stand and looked shocked, fight the Daleks, dive into the Exterminator...

BTW, you noticed the decreasing number of scientists and Stirix's disappearance and reappearance in a different capacity. It shows that you already would have been (temporal grammar) struck by the Temporal Exterminator, and that the broken time-line fluctuates. (My original plan was to remove any PC who disappeared in this way. One RTJ was abandoned at the proposal stage, so you've already lost one fellow time-traveller... ;) )


The Dalek guns do 4/L/L and both Tarys and Bluetooth got the 4 damage. To see what that could be, I checked the wiki at:
http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Dalek_gun
"The Daleks' Masterplan" apparently makes it like being struck by lightning, leaving electrical burns and charring. The other information from later stories seems to support that. It seems that if a Dalek gun doesn't kill outright, it leaves a typical energy weapon or electric burn. So that's what I described when Tarys was hit, and I repeated that with Bluetooth. Plus, I was going with a 60s Dalek aesthetic. :)

Of course, a lost story from the 60s isn't at the forefront of many a fan's mind. :)

Ian's legs were paralysed in "The Daleks", but that could have been a stun setting.

Well, in that case, Bluetooth didn't jump the gun, he just... hiccupped.

... maybe the reason for the lost stories is they were the first adventures affected by the temporal exterminator.

That was the plan. :)

Not meaning to leave you hanging too long, I'll try to get the next posts up for the first proper adventure soon.

And finally done and ready!

So, we've gone back to the start of the campaign. :) A different start to what I summarised in the start to the last adventure, but your time-lines are taking a different track this time around, snaking a bit as they are slowly eaten away by the Temporal Exterminator. This time, you'll have to save yourselves. :)

That's not to say the last adventure was all a vision or never happened – it did, just not in this time-line. Okay, that's a cheat, sorry. But Tarys will remember (though not every detail) and you'll be able to use what you learned the first time around when you come again to the Eternity Citadel. When the time comes, we can either play the adventure out again, or just make some changes and skip forward to the confrontation or after Tarys's action, stronger and wiser and better armed

You can take this opportunity to make changes to your characters, if you like. They can be adjustments to personality, concept, or history, or mechanical changes to your stats and traits, if something didn't work for you in the starter adventure. That is, your characters can literally change in the new time-line.

I'm starting you off divided you into two groups: Time Lords and the archaeological expedition. I'm PMed Bluetooth, Farren, Stirix, and Trace with ideas for getting them involved in the expedition. You'll all be meeting each other for the first time again, though those on the ship may already know each other.