Saturday, February 17, 2024

Season 18, Episodes 5-7

Episode 5: The Substitute

Victoria (Australia), 1907. What is happening at the esteemed Bainbridge College for Young Ladies? What dark secrets does Miss Jones, the enigmatic governess, hide behind her severe façade?  And speaking of secrets, the new history and science teacher, Miss Ashworth, does seem to have quite a few of her own in store… A mystery, two strange rocks and no picnic!

Episode 6: The Chemistry of Ghosts

Paris, 1907. One year after the tragic death of her husband Pierre, Nobel prize scientist Marie Curie is about to reveal her latest, extraordinary discovery to a chosen assembly of thinkers and seekers – a discovery involving radium and invisible, psychic presences. Luckily for history as we know it, Lady Penelope (with her three new protégés!) is among the audience…

Episode 7: The Beauty and the Beast

Paris, 1768. As King Louis XV is looking for a new favorite and aristocrats busy themselves with their games of intrigue, a monstrous shadow wolf is stalking the Parisian nights, spreading death and terror in its wake. Could the dreaded Beast of Gévaudan have returned to wreak its vengeance on the kingdom of France? The Time Lady decides to investigate!  


So, our intended mini-series having morphed into a full-fledged season, things have taken a new turn, as demonstrated by our three last episodes!

As can be gathered from its blurb, episode 5 was directly inspired by Picnic at Hanging Rock, with two typically Whovian twists. The first was that the secretive governess Miss Jones was in fact… the Master!  Yes, a new incarnation of everybody’s favorite Time Lord arch-villain (my own variation on Missy, if you will, but with a very different personality and demeanor)… and NOT the Master of Penelope’s own continuum (who, for all intents and purposes, is supposed to be Forever Dead) but the Master from the alternate continuum visited by the Time Lady a few episodes ago (in The Napoleon Stratagem).

At the end of said episode, this alternate Master had been mortally wounded (by Time Agent Jill Harkness – yes, Jack’s own female alternate double) and was starting to undergo the regeneration process – but something (tied to the meta-temporal energies of Abraxas, which he had started to “distillate” in his TARDIS) unexpected obviously happened off-stage, resulting in this new female incarnation AND (more importantly) in her relocation in Penelope’s own continuum… Could the two Time Ladies (who both owe their latest regeneration to the same meta-temporal energies) be tied in some mysterious, Beyond-Space-and-Time way? Only Time (of course) will tell.

The second ‘twist’ tied to episode 5 is that it ended in Penelope taking three young ladies from the Bainbridge College on board of her TARDIS as her new travelling companions (yeah, three’s a crowd – but see the notes on episode 7 below)… removing them from recorded history and actually creating the (imaginary) mysterious disappearances behind the (equally fictional) Picnic at Hanging Rock story!

Episode 6 was based on two ideas I’ve had in store for quite some time: re-use the gaseous (and somewhat underused) Gelth as a story’s main villains and concoct a scenario based on Nobel Prize winners Pierre and Marie Curie’s little-known (but well-documented) interest in mediumship and psychic phenomena – as well as Marie’s very moving expressions of grief (from her private journal) after Pierre’s tragic accidental death. The result was a very enjoyable period piece, complete with the usual DW mix of historical facts, scientific acrobatics (I invented a new, Gelth-related property for radon...) and wild imaginings – and a top-notch performance by Penelope’s player. It was, of course, quite reminiscent of The Unquiet Dead, with a dash of The Girl In The Fireplace for that extra touch of emotion.

Stephen King once defined a story as the encounter of “two previously unrelated ideas coming together and making something new” – and that was the recipe I decided to use for episode 7. The only thing I knew was that Penelope wished to travel to France in the late (but pre-Revolutionary) 18th century (i.e., somewhen in the 1760s or 1770s). So I asked myself: what are the two (preferably unrelated) things I’d readily associate with this setting?  

Answers: Les Liaisons Dangereuses and the Beast of Gévaudan.

So I proceeded to mix these two ingredients, adding a few echoes from Penelope’s previous trip to this historical era (Lost In Versailles, waaaay back in season one!) and her recent discoveries about the ‘self-aware nightmares’ also known as the Vishklar and the result was a very atmospheric, quite dark tale of sordid intrigues, monster hunting and psychic possession (in powdered wigs). It ended with the departure of one of Penelope’s three new companions, who chose to stay in 18th century Paris with her newfound paramour, adding an extra touch of melancholy to the story’s conclusion. 

Another great time, with some excellent salon banter by Penelope’s player.

Next stop: London, 1967!

Friday, January 5, 2024

Happy New Year... and a New Season!

Greetings everyone!

Happy new year 2024 - and for Lady Penelope, this new year starts with... a new season!

After much ruminating, I've finally decided that Penelope's recent (and somewhat unexpected) regeneration was, well, a game-changer... The basic, 6-part plotline I had in mind for the ongoing miniseries was somehow derailed / sidetracked by this dramatic development. In other words, the two remaining episodes would have felt like a rushed job.

So the four episodes we've played so far (yes, we played a fourth one a few weeks ago - see below for the blurb) have been 'retro-fitted' to become the first four episodes of a whole new season!  In other words, the miniseries has regenerated into season 18!

Here is the blurb of the latest episode...

Episode 4: The Mirrie Dancers

November 2023. Suffering from a bout of post-regeneration melancholy, Lady Penelope (now in her eighth incarnation) decides to take some R&R time among friends, on the mainland of Shetland – but there can never be such a thing as time off for a Time Lady!  Soon, she is drawn to a centuries-old mystery involving unexplained disappearances, ghostly apparitions, local folklore and the majestic, eerie Northern Lights. A tale of past lives and new beginnings.

See you soon for the next episodes!

Sunday, November 5, 2023

Mini-Series: Episode 3... and REGENERATION!

Part Three: Becoming Harry

Weston-Super-Mare, October 1964. How could history possibly run astray here and now? As Mods and Rockers prepare for a new, supposedly epic (but potentially tragic) beach battle, Lady Penelope once again tries to preserve the continuum, as her game of cat-and-mouse (or is blindman’s bluff?) with the mystifying Quantum Archangel accelerates toward its ominous end, culminating in an impossible revelation, a fateful decision… and a regeneration!

 

Talk about unexpected developments. 

Sometimes, the best laid plans of mice, men and GMs will simply go awry. But as far as RPGs is concerned (and especially with games like DW), my philosophy is to go with the flow rather than try to shoehorn or railroad things back as they were supposed to run – or, more correctly, as you first thought they would run. This glorious narrative uncertainty is, after all, one of the joys of game-mastering and often leads to golden moments of inspiration and improvisation which, in the end, make the story better, greater and, in the best cases, deeper. 

This is precisely what happened yesterday evening.

As you may recall, the current, six-part miniseries was centered on the conundrum of the so-called Quantum Archangel, an elusive temporal entity which seemed to follow (or rather precede) Penelope and Harry in their travels, creating divergence points in the continuum and apparently feeding off the “unfulfilled possibilities” released by Penelope’s action to mend history back into shape. It was not the first history-altering entity the Time Lady had encountered (far from it!) but it was the first time that said entity did nothing to prevent her from opposing its actions, actually expecting her to circumvent, repair and defuse its attempts to stir history astray – acting more like some sort of personal temporal parasite or ransom hacker than as an antagonist per se.

This weird cat-and-mouse / blind man’s bluff game was supposed to run throughout the six parts of the mini-series, reaching the following conclusion in its final episode.

The big revelation was that the Quantum Archangel was actually one of Abraxas-Harry’s future selves – a version of him which had rejected the whole “incarnation experience” and re-ascended to a kind of disembodied, super-Weeping Angel status (just like when Abraxas was created as a result of Penelope’s continuum-mending back in season 17). 

Manipulating its own timeline to create temporal incidents, potential paradoxes and divergence points, its goal was to force its hypothetical existence into full reality – a potential future trying to gain supremacy over all others as the only possible fate, Singularity-style.

Faced with this vertiginous truth, Penelope would, basically, have had two possible choices. 

The first choice would be to let the Archangel have what it wanted, resulting in the destruction of Harry’s body and awakening humanity and in the (re)birth of a unique, possibly Kronos-like entity (probably not a good idea, then). 

The second possibility was to use the TARDIS’ Chameleon Ark to fully turn Harry into a mortal human being, complete with his own past, present and future (and no memories of having ever been something else, of meeting Penelope or of travelling in the TARDIS), and release him somewhere in history to live his own life, unaware of the larger universe with its time travellers, cosmic entities and quantum uncertainties…

So what happened yesterday evening? 

Well, to cut a long story short, Penelope got to the truth far earlier than I had planned. Fortunately, as the scenario was unfolding, I sensed that we would Get to the Point before the story was finished, allowing me to GWTF (Go With The Flow) and improvise a proper final act. 

Since everything was suddenly falling into place, there was no point in delaying the inevitable or diluting the storyline – so the best option was to end the episode as grandly as possible. Penelope’s realization of the impossible truth was followed by the very emotional decision to bid Harry farewell. The scene where she put him in the Chameleon Arch to erase all traces of his former existence and turn him into a mere (but so human!) mortal was a grand moment of drama – and I’m ever so grateful for having such a talented player!

But there was, of course, the problem of dealing with the extracted part of Abraxas’ being – the timey-wimey, cosmic part that made him a quantum hazard (and a potential successor to Kronos) in the first place. Its power was such that Penelope’s trusty Time Lord fob watch could not be expected to hold it for more than a few minutes. With the help of Nim (her TARDIS’ resident spirit / ghost-in-the-machine), Penelope managed to use the Zero Room as a possibility-void environment where the chaotic energy of the entity could dissolve and fade away without affecting the continuum or the rest of the TARDIS…

It was this delicate operation that resulted in Penelope’s regeneration. This event was more or less in the cards, as a possible (but by no means predestined) consequence of the mini-series’ climax – but the moment had clearly come. The heart-wrenching farewell to Harry (who started his new life on the beach of Weston-Super-Mare, in October 1964…) felt like a necessary but abrupt end – and the feel of the unfolding story demanded that this end gave way to a new beginning.

Enter Lady Penelope’s eighth incarnation:



(Yes, this is Rebecca Hall in The Awakening)

The remaining three episodes will obviously focus on the aftermath of Lady Penelope’s regeneration and her new incarnation’s first adventures in time and space. During our post-game debrief, Sylvie decided that her newly-regenerated character felt quite melancholic (as opposed to bouncy and buoyant) and needed a pause, a short break among friends in a quiet place – so the only thing I currently know about our next episode is that it will be set in contemporary Shetland, where Penelope made some good friends during her seventh incarnation.

And we also decided that the mini-series needed a new title. Initially, I had planned to call “Avatars in Time and Space” (since it was all about two different avatars of the same entity – Harry and the Quantum Archangel) but it is now – far more aptly – titled “Changing Times”.

I hope I’ll be able to cook up episode 4 for next Saturday… Countdown started!  Stay tuned!

 

 

 

 


Monday, October 30, 2023

Mini-Series: Avatars in Time and Space, Parts 1 & 2

Welcome to our new, six-part miniseries - a direct sequel to Season 17!

So, as you might recall, Lady Penelope ended the seventeenth season of her adventures with the cosmic entity known as Abraxas as her, well, ward / protégé / causality child – a new being whom she decided to awaken to the wonders and beauties of human creativity and its achievements (especially in the fine arts), starting with (of course) Italian Renaissance.

But of course, this “grand tour” required a human (or at least human-looking) body for the fledgling entity – a body that was promptly bio-engineered in Lungbarrow by the Doctor himself, who has been experimenting on regenerations and, well, body-making for several seasons now.

Now looking like a male human teenager, Abraxas was ready to travel with Penelope for a series of travels through Earth’s rich history. Before they left Avalon to re-embark on board of the TARDIS, the Time Lady decided to name this human-looking avatar “Harry”, since “Abraxas” might attract undue attention and ring some unwanted bells in some learned circles and has always been a bit of a mouthful anyway…

And now without further ado, the blurbs of the first two episodes…

Part One: The Borgia Divergence

1506. Eight years after his execution, the despotic monk Savonarola is still ruling Florence, crushing the city’s spirit under a fanatical theocratic régime. Where did History go wrong? What unseen cosmic hand is manipulating events in the shadows of Time – and to what ends?  After a daring escape from the gaols of San Marco abbey, Penelope starts looking for answers. Her quest soon takes her to 1497 Rome, at the heart of the Borgia Pope’s palace…

Part Two: The Napoleon Stratagem

Following her first brush with the mysterious Quantum Archangel, Penelope decides to lure it into the open so that she can learn more about the elusive entity. To keep her own time continuum safe from any interferences, she takes her protégé Harry to an alternate 1840, where Napoleon II and Queen Victoria are about to marry. Unexpected consequences ensue, in the form of alternate versions of Captain Harkness, the Doctor and (of course) the Master.

So… what’s next?  Well, it all depends on the Time Lady’s next move!  Stay tuned!

Tuesday, August 29, 2023

Change of Plans & Coming Soon!

 In my latest post, I mentioned that we still had three episodes to run before ending Season 17... but after discussing the situation with Sylvie (Lady Penelope's player), we quickly came to the following two conclusions:

- Three episodes seemed a bit short to explore the consequences of Penelope's decision to take an incarnated Abraxas on some "grand tour of self-discovery" through time and space.

- The final scene of episode 12 (involving the aforementioned decision) really felt like a season-concluding arc.

So we decided that Season 17 would actually end here, with its twelfth episode as its final story and that we would devote a complete six-episodes miniseries to Penelope's adventures with Abraxas, using a similar format to our previous experiment with the miniseries format - but, obviously with a very different theme and story arc. 

See you soon for more details on our "Travels with Abraxas" sequence! 

Sunday, June 4, 2023

Season 17, Episodes 11-12

Episode 11: Sic Semper Tyrannis

Paris, 1794. The Reign of Terror has turned the idealistic dream of the French Revolution into a totalitarian nightmare where Madame Guillotine always has the last word. As a triumphant Robespierre prepares the grand celebration of the Supreme Being, fifty days before his own downfall and execution, unseen forces are conspiring in the shadows… Enter the Time Lady!

Episode 12: Synchronicity

From Carl Jung’s house in 1916 Switzerland to the gnostic theologians of Roman Alexandria, Penelope gathers the last pieces of the Abraxas puzzle, before receiving the final (and quite surprising) Revelation in a place beyond space-time. A decidedly metaphysical adventure, in which the very fate of the continuum depends on the outcome of a philosophical debate…

 

Episode 11 finally gave me the perfect excuse to take Penelope to Paris during the Reign of Terror - not the kind of destination a reasonable time-traveller-whose-TARDIS-operates-perfectly-well-thank you-very-much would be likely to visit without a very good reason. The story itself was centered around Robespierre's tragic downfall, taking inspiration from a variety of sources, including Neil Gaiman's superb Sandman episode Thermidor and a nifty French historical mystery novel, La Sibylle de la Révolution by Nicolas Bouchard.

Episode 12 concluded (well, more or less - see below) the “Abraxas arch”, in which Penelope chased the eponymous entity (an elusive Discordian Chronovore) across a series of pseudo-historical adventures always involving notable or obscure historical personages suddenly gifted (by the mysterious Abraxas) with the power of temporal sensitivity – Nostradamus, the mad prophetess Catherine Théos in the Robespierre adventure, the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (whom the Time Lady had already met a few years – and quite a few incarnations – earlier, back in season 3…) and the gnostic theologian Basilides of Alexandria.

Each of these characters was used by the (always unseen) Abraxas entity as an interface / agent / entry point into the historical continuum, apparently trying to twist history according to some mysterious agenda… Nothing Penelope hadn’t seen and handled before – except that, this time, the puppeteer entity always remained off-stage, unreachable and frustratingly unknowable, evidently taking note of Penelope’s interferences in its inscrutable agenda… but never appearing to take direct counter-measures against the interloping Time Lady herself, to her own growing astonishment.

But of course, the Truth was ultimately revealed when Penelope finally got to meet Abraxas itself (themselves?) in an impossible place outside space and time. The look on Penelope’s player’s face when the entity welcomed her (“Greetings, mother…”) was priceless. 

To cut a long story short:

- The entity had (unwittingly) been created by Penelope’s restoration of the continuum after the historical havoc wreaked by Father Ernetti’s machine. Thus, Abraxas considered Penelope to be its mother – and was looking forward to her giving it advice and guidance on its course of action as a newly awakened demiurge.

 - Abraxas had not been created ex nihilo but was actually the coalesced and uplifted version of a trio of Weeping Angels (who had been lurking in the secret Vatican tunnels, attracted by the echoes of Ernetti’s time-warping machine) – a fascinating fact which was made even more ominous and vertiginous by Penelope’s previous discoveries about the link between the Weeping Angels and the eldritch Kronos…

- Because of the particular circumstances of its creation, Adraxas’ omnipotence was actually limited to the period of human history comprised between the Crucifixion and 1958 AD – but within these limits, the entity potentially had the power to reshape history as it wished.

- Abraxas took his demiurgic role very seriously – it wanted to Do the Right Thing for Humanity, mending its world and healing its suffering once and for all, even at the price of every human being’s free will (a concept which was somewhat alien to this quasi-divine being).

- Because of its special connection to Penelope’s timeline, Abraxas had been able to absorb many of her memories and experiences – especially those involving Humanity and the aforementioned historical period (c. 33-1958 AD). And since Penelope always seemed to save lives, help those in need and protect mankind from all kinds of perils, her semi-divine progeny wanted to do the same thing – but, of course, on a much grander and cosmic scale, revealing itself as the “new real god” of humanity and heralding a new era of pure cosmic bliss, without any form of suffering (as well as emotions, since they seem to be the cause for so much pain in the world).

So, what Penelope had anticipated as a climactic psychic battle against an all-powerful entity quickly took a very different turn – that of a fascinating debate about what made human beings what they were, power and responsibility, the meaning of existence and, of course, that pesky concept of free will…

I knew that Sylvie (who is no slouch when it comes to philosophical culture) would be able to give Penelope some pretty solid argumentative power on such subjects but, well, she (once again) amazed me, with a masterful yet improvised discourse which was simply spot on.

The strange metaphysical conversation between the Time Lady and her unlikely “time-child” was the perfect climactic scene to the entire Abraxas arc – and culminated in a very interesting (and quite wonderful, since I had NOT specifically anticipated this beforehand – but hey, going with the flow is one of the joys of GMing in general and Doctor Who GMing in particular) decision by Penelope: since the entity wanted to learn, she simply invited Abraxas to travel with her, as a way to complete its education into “the meaning of life” and “the needs of mankind”.  

At the end of the episode, Penelope took Abraxas’ pure energy essence in her trusty Time Lord fob watch, parted ways with Indira (who had decided it was time for her to get back to her own time) and headed the TARDIS back to Avalon, to discuss the “What Next” with the Doctor (and see if perhaps he could rustle up a proper physical body for Abraxas)…

See you in a few weeks for the three final episodes of the season!

Sunday, April 9, 2023

Season 17, Episodes 9-10

Episode 9: Deus Ex Machina

Rome, 1958. It’s not all vespas, cinecitta and dolce vita… On the trail of a mysterious temporal anomaly, Lady Penelope and Indira uncover the Vatican’s greatest secret (forget about the Code, the Grail, the Tomb, the Shroud or the Spear): Father Ernetti’s chronovisor, a miracle machine that sees into the past – and is also about to shatter History as we know it…

Episode 10: Foretold

Having rebooted 2000 years of History to save the continuum from the ravages of Father Ernetti’s machine, Penelope must now track down the dissonances and divergences resulting from the temporal shockwave – starting with the French Royal Court in 1555, at the time of Queen Catherine de Medici, the poet Ronsard and the prophet Nostradamus. Intrigue ensues.


This season (season 17!) is divided into two main arcs or half-seasons. Episode 8, with its climactic confrontation in Carcosa, marked the conclusion of the first sequence, which focused on Penelope’s old enemies the Porphyrs, their fearsome Three Mothers and the use of opium as a gateway to their nightmarish city…

Episode 9 kickstarted the second sequence, which will take Penelope and her current traveling companion Indira at various “weak points” in History as-we-know-it, in the wake of a wave of temporal chaos created by Father Ernetti’s time-viewing machine – and yes, this is actually based on real, historical events (or, to put it more correctly, on a real, historical hoax). I had never heard of Ernetti’s chronovisor before reading about it in Kenneth Hite’s excellent Suppressed Transmission 2 sourcebook – and my reaction, as you can imagine, was: “Oh no, it’s too good to be true”

After having absorbed as much background data as possible on Father Ernetti’s story (including a very readable French novel, from which I pilfered quite a few ideas), I decided that this stuff would not only make a great episode but would provide me with the perfect “continuum-impacting event” to build a series of interconnected pseudo-historical episodes!

Episode 10 involved Queen Catherine of Medici, the illustrious French poet Pierre de Ronsard and the ‘prophet’ Michel de Nostredame, better known as Nostradamus. I tried to depict this famous (but quite mysterious) personage as a complex character, borrowing some weird concepts from Valerio Evangelisti’s trilogy of novels Le Roman de Nostradamus and giving them a Whovian spin – the basic idea was that Nostradamus had no real precognitive power… but suddenly found himself assailed by real, powerful and terrifying visions of what the Future had in store for France!  Penelope’s objective was to unravel the mystery of these unprecedented premonitions and keep History on the right track, while navigating Queen Catherine de Medici’s intrigue-laden entourage… 

Precognitive stuff aside, the scenario played out like a pure historical episode, focusing on psychology, interactions and cultural savvy. In the end, the "1555 weak point" was fixed, leaving Penelope with some unanswered questions about a mysterious entity (or place?) called Abraxas... and more "weak points" scattered throughout the continuum to investigate BIITL (Before It Is Too Late). To be continued!