Season 17, Episode 5 (New Year Special!)

Episode 5: Miracle Day

New Earth, in the impossibly distant future. The good people of New New York are ready to celebrate a New Year’s Day unlike any other – for this year, the Face of Boe will return to life, as announced by Mother Hame and Cassandra Unlimited^®. Will this Second Coming herald a new era of faith and hope for the galaxy?  A skeptical Lady Penelope decides to investigate…

 

This was our (slightly delayed) New Year Special. I had planned to run this last week but could not be ready in time because of various health problems which pretty much ruined my Xmas holidays… But I’m on the mend now and I intend to resume Lady Penelope’s Odyssey’s usual weekly play schedule (fingers crossed and all that).

This episode finally brought forth an event which I had planned for quite some time – namely the resurrection of the Face of Boe, whose disembodied consciousness had been hazily perceived by Penelope herself during her previous stay in New New York during season 16 (see Episode 16.11, Lady of the Future). 

Miracle Day reused much of the background information and many NPCs from this previous episode – including the faithful Mother Hame and the coldly egomaniacal Lady Cassie.  

And yes, the Face of Boe truly has returned and will undoubtedly feature in some forthcoming episodes, putting New New York in the list of Penelope’s regular destinations, along with New Camelot, Marlowe’s alternate 17^th century and a few other privileged times and places.

In actual play, the episode proved to be a very moving story, with some nifty philosophical overtones – necessity vs. free will and all that.

Its most memorable moment was, I think, the great ‘psychic communion’ scene between Penelope and the disembodied psyche (Ghost? Soul? Spirit?) of the Face of Boe.

To cut a long story short, the whole Second Coming story was actually a sham engineered by Lady Cassie: having successfully cloned the Face of Boe’s physical body (so to speak) from samples preserved in the archives of the now defunct Order of Plenitude, the corporate über-queen secretly intended to use the resurrected Face as her own puppet god, with her own mind in control of what would have essentially been a living but mindless being.

But since the very spirit (Ghost? Soul? Psyche?) of the true Face of Boe was still hovering around, she first had to imprison it in a psychic cage to prevent any unwanted interference…

Fortunately, Penelope (with the help of her psychic-and-time sensitive companion Indira) managed to establish communication with the true disembodied Face and to free it from its psychic imprisonment, enabling it to incarnate itself in the manufactured clone, thereby beating Lady Cassie at her own game. 

In the end, the Miracle did occur and the carefully constructed deception was turned into a history-defining moment of truth.

Happy new year, everyone!  😀

Season 17: Episodes 3-4 (plus some copious design notes...)

Episode 3: The Dark Interpreter

Edinburgh, 1845. A blood-drinking killer is stalking the streets of the Old Town. The aging Thomas de Quincey, visionary writer and opium addict, has seen him in his dark reveries… Enter Lady Penelope, who wants to ask him everything he knows about the enigmatic Three Mothers. Can she help him stop the Nocturnal Stalker before he (or it?) strikes again?

Episode 4: Black Tulip

Amsterdam, 1669, the end of the Dutch Golden Age. Thirty years after the great Tulip Mania crisis, a unique, impossible flower is threatening to spread a deeper, darker brand of madness on the City of Canals… Will Penelope and her friends manage to uncover the truth behind the mystery of the Black Tulip before it is too late?  A tale of revenge, obsession and desire…

 

Design Notes

Together with Episode 17.02 (Roma Mater), these two episodes formed an informal “opium trilogy”, where the aforementioned drug played a discreet but persistent role, as a substance who could allow certain psychically-gifted dreamers to access a region of the collective mindscape tied to the terrors of the interdimensional city of Carcosa…

While our heroine has never visited it (but who knows?), Carcosa has been a foreboding and elusive presence in Lady Penelope’s Odyssey since its very first season – in fact, it played an important role in her first true time travel adventure using the TARDIS: City of Chimeras, set in 1925 Paris, where she encountered a fearsome member of the cursed Porphyr race, the self-styled Master of Chimeras…

Let’s start with Carcosa. You all know, of course, where the name comes from… but when I recycled it for my campaign, I did pretty much the same thing as I did with the Lloigor and other ‘reappropriations’ from various fictional sources: I kept some elements, removed what didn’t feel very Whovian and add my own ideas to the mix.

In Lady Penelope’s Odyssey, Carcosa became a sinister interdimensional city populated by a race of psychic vampires known as the Porphyrs; the trans-dimensional nature of the place enabled it to invade (or rather “overlap”?) any other big city where decadence, apocalyptic angst or fin de siècle melancholy had become high enough to attune it to the psychic frequencies of Carcosa, opening a gate between the two cities and allowing the Porphyrs to feast upon the terror, sorrow and despair of a whole metropolis…

Along with the Lloigor, the Porphyrs were to become one of Penelope’s recurring arch-enemies – at least until season 11 (see below for more details), in which they seemed to have been utterly defeated. I’ve already written about the Porphyrs elsewhere on this blog – but here is a short summary / reminder of what they are, along with some notes on their connection to Carcosa, their history within Lady Penelope’s Odyssey and a few new facts thrown in for good measure. 

(Incidentally, the Porphyrs look like Pau’ans from the Star Wars universe and whose name actually come from an old White Dwarf article on Runequest Demons, later reincarnated as a Dragon Warriors supplement – yes, I’m a merciless cannibalizer…)

Luckily for everyone, the Time Lords put an end to Carcosa’s interdimensional invasions by banishing the city (and all its inhabitants!) in an impregnable prison dimension known as Sheol – an event which occurred a long time before the start of Lady Penelope’s adventures.

But the Time War changed all this. While Carcosa was still held captive, cracks began to appear in the dimensional barriers that separated it from the rest of the multiverse, allowing some Porphyrs to pass through these interstices into our reality – usually in a great city which would have made a perfect prey for Carcosa before its imprisonment. Once there, those Porphyr escapees usually tried to increase the local level of existential angst, melancholy or fear. The plan always had the same objectives: by raising collective fear or despair, the Porphyrs sought to attune the local population’s mindscape to the frequencies of Carcosa and force its release by gatecrashing its dimensional prison walls…

This pattern formed the basis of most of Lady Penelope’s encounters with the sinister Porphyrs: the aforementioned Parisian story, as well as the following episodes:  

Phantasmagoria (Season 2, Episode 11) – the very memorable episode where Lady Penelope met Lord Byron, who had fallen prey to the psychic vampires of Carcosa…

Or Not to Be (Season 6, Episode 3) – where the Porphyrs had targeted William Shakespeare himself.

Masque of Winter (Season 8, 7) – in which Penelope once again joined forces with Shakespeare against the lords of Carcosa, this time scoring a major victory against them. With the help of the TARDIS’ psychic circuits, the Time Lady and the Bard managed to create an imaginary entity called Ariel (who else?), a positive, protective psychic construct whose mission was to guard our reality from any renewed incursion attempt by Carcosa.

This should have an end to the Porphyrs’ interventions in Lady Penelope’s world – and it did, to some extent. But of course it was only a matter of time before the Porphyrs tried to find ways to circumvent these renewed psychic barriers and its guardian spirit…

They did so in City of Sighs (season 9, episode 1), in The Banquet of Ashes (season 9, episode 10) and in City of Dreams (season 12, episode 11)… before disappearing from Lady Penelope’s Odyssey for FIVE whole seasons!

It was high time I brought them back… but I didn’t want things to work as if Penelope’s past victories had achieved nothing. I had to re-invent the Porphyrs one way or another – to restore some of their mystery and fear factor, to create new possibilities for stories and to explain how they could once again threaten our reality.

I first decided to put more emphasis on Carcosa itself, its dark secrets and weird history (introducing new cryptic names and other creatures associated with the sinister world – as the “Byakhee from Hastur” which appeared in this season’s Roman episode).

I also decided to change the psychic vampires' modus operandi. Previously, the Porphyrs had always tried to manipulate poets, artists or mass culture (Byron, Shakespeare, silent movies, etc.) as a privileged way to create a psychic bridgehead in the collective psyche of humanity, using art as the main interface or conduit to spread Carcosa’s decaying influence (in keeping with the original Robert W. Chambers’ stories about the King in Yellow). Since this strategy had been (more or less) permanently thwarted by the creation of the Ariel entity, they had to find new (and, so far, more mysterious) ways to exercise their influence on their chosen pawns… And from what Penelope has discovered so far, the consumption of opium seems to act as a “psychic gate opener” between the human mind and the imprisoned mindscape of Carcosa.

Lastly, I decided to place this ‘new era’ of Carcosan activity under the sign of the enigmatic figures of the Three Mothers – three female Porphyrs who apparently act as the matriarchs (or goddesses?) of their vampiric race: the Mother of Tears (Mater Lachrymarum), the Mother of Sighs (Mater Suspiriorum) and the Mother of Darkness (Mater Tenebrarum). 

These names will of course be familiar to readers of Thomas de Quincey (hence his pivotal role in The Dark Interpreter) and to connoisseurs of horror movies, as they form the basis of Dario Argento’s Three Mothers trilogy. 

Taking a cue from Argento's approach, I unashamedly re-invented De Quincey’s Three Mothers, keeping some elements and dumping others (the idea being that the version of the Three Mothers mentioned in the author’s Suspiria de Profundis are actually poetic re-imaginations of half-remembered, half-repressed opium-induced nightmares).

So far, Penelope has yet to encounter any of the Mothers – but she has felt their gaze upon her and even had a quick psychic brush with Mater Lachrymarum in Black Tulip… a taste, probably, of more serious confrontations to come. The Time Lady has also discovered the raison d’être of the Three Mothers, each of which is directly connected to one of the three negative emotions the Porphyrs feed on: fear (Mother of Darkness), sorrow (Mother of Tears) and despair (Mother of Sighs).

At this point in our season, I think I’ve managed a nice, slow-build crescendo effect foreshadowing what Penelope herself is now viewing as an unavoidable confrontation with the Three Mothers themselves – and she intends to be ready for it!

Season 17, Episodes 1-2

 Hello fellow space-and-time travellers!  

After the Baroque mini-series The Key to Space, it’s now time for a new regular season of Lady Penelope’s Odyssey!

Episode 1: Blackout

Penelope’s TARDIS receives a psychic distress call from Torchwood’s time sensitive Indira Kapoor – but the signal comes from 1940, half-a-century before Indira’s birth and right in the middle of the London Blitz! As Britain is living its darkest hour, the Time Lady braves the blackout and the bombs to rescue the time-displaced young woman from a web of shadows…

Episode 2: Roma Mater

We all know the story of Romulus and Remus, the she-wolf, the fratricide… but how was the City of Rome really founded? Lady Penelope and her new travelling companions, 17^th century dilettante scholar John Wycliffe and 21^st century time sensitive Indira Kapoor, decide to find out!  But the differences between myth and history can sometimes be quite surprising…

Quite unusually, our Time Lady is now travelling with TWO companions – who were both introduced in earlier scenarios: she met John Wycliffe during the aforementioned mini-series and Indira Kapoor, who first appeared quite a few seasons ago, has long been a regular NPC in her dealings with present-day Torchwood.

Blackout was a very tense season opener, set against the dark backdrop of the London Blitz, with some very moving “darkest hour / finest hour” moments – including a scene built around Vera Lynn’s iconic song We’ll Meet Again to great effect.  I’ve wanted to do a Blitz story for ages but could never find the right way to bring Penelope to this time and place – it’s not the kind of destination a time traveler is likely to choose and, unlike the Doctor’s blue box, Penelope’s TARDIS is a very reliable machine, so I needed a Really Good Reason to bring her there: to rescue the time-displaced Indira. What was she doing in 1940 London?  Well, as you’ve might have guessed it, she had been waylaid by a Weeping Angel! 

When Penelope finally brought her safe and sound in the TARDIS, rescued from the clutches of the 1940s Forge, Indira decided that she wanted to join Penelope for a few adventures in space and time before getting back to her day-to-day work as a 21^st century Torchwood operative. Penelope also discovered that the young woman’s time sensitive powers had been almost drained dry by her chance (?) encounter with the Weeping Angel – a temporary side-effect, from which she should normally recover in time, thanks to the TARDIS’ connection with the vortex.

Roma Mater was what we could call an “imaginary historical” or, perhaps, a “mythical”: in a similar vein to the lost TV Trojan War story, The Myth Makers, it exploring the “real story” behind a well-known half-historical, half-legendary story – in this specific case the founding of Rome and the tale of Romulus and Remus.

The episode started in 84 AD, with Penelope and her friend spending a nice Roman holiday under the reign of Emperor Domitian (a destination the Time Lady had already visited back in season 13) – no alien invasion to prevent, weird mystery to unravel or sinister menace to counter, just three weeks of temporal tourism in the Eternal City. And then, as they were preparing to leave for a new destination, the scholarly (and insatiably curious) John Wycliffe wondered about the possibilities of witnessing the true events behind the mythical birth of Rome back in 753 BC – and the rest, as they say, is (more or less) History.

Of course, they discovered that the truth was quite different from the well-known tale, with the mythical Romulus & Remus twins being in fact a single individual, young prince Romus, fated with the difficult task of uniting the Latin and Sabine peoples against their common enemy, the mighty Etruscans. It was a very psychological, motive-driven story, with a single (but quite surprising) fantastic element thrown in – something on which I will come back in a future post, for it will (most probably) have some repercussions in one of our next episodes.

Back to the story of Romus. The scenario itself took a very interesting turn in actual play, thanks to Sylvie’s inspired interpretation of her character: right from the start, she decided that Penelope would be very reluctant to meddle with these half-mythical events, as a direct lesson from her harrowing adventure in Atlantis, back in season 14. But once she was involved in the grand wheel of historical fate, she played her cards masterfully, setting Romus on the path of his grand destiny, while ensuring that her own role in the story would never be recorded – an impressive demonstration on how her character has grown as a Time Lady and learned from her past experiences.

The climactic scene, a dramatic (but purely dialogue-based) facedown between Penelope and the Etruscan king who was Romus’ main enemy, gave Sylvie the opportunity to give an inspired, impressive performance of the “Hell hath no fury like that of a pissed off Time Lady” variety – and the wrap-up, aftermath scenes were also highlighted by some great roleplaying, including Penelope’s interactions with a young, eccentric Etruscan prince who embodied the possible future of his people as part of Romus’ dream of a great city…

See you soon for episode 3 and beyond!

The Key to Space (3/3)

Third Fragment: The Twilight City

I. The Shadow Theatre

Penelope’s quest for the final fragment of the Key takes her to Paris. While Louis XIV is busy building Versailles castle and becoming the Sun King, a sinister Harlequin is treading a secret stage before an entranced audience. But what is the true purpose of the Laughing Mask’s comedy of madness?  Together with her old friend Bellegarde, the Time Lady investigates…

II. The Final Masque

The Shadow Theatre has given its last performance - but the Laughing Mask is on the run, plotting a terrible vengeance against Louis XIV and his court of sycophants. Penelope and Bellegarde must stop the mad Harlequin before his actions derail History. But first, the Time Lady must face the three faceless rulers of Twilight, also known as the Gods of Ragnarok…

 

And thus ends The Key to Space, our six-part baroque cycle, set in the cities and courts of 1668, from Charles II’s London and Oxford to legend-haunted Prague and Louis XIV’s Versailles…

To be fair, it was more of a trilogy or triptych, with each of its three segments being divided in two parts for convenience and ease of play.

So how did our final two-parter go down in actual play?  Well, wonderfully!  But before we get to Penelope’s final decisions, a few words about the historical context, references and personages of the City of Twilight.

The scenario featured many historical NPCs from the world of French classic theatre, including cameos by the famous playwrights Molière (whom Penelope had already briefly met 20 years before, in her previous incarnation) and Racine, as well as some slightly more substantial parts for the doomed actress Thérèse“Marquise” du Parc and the actor La Grange, Molière’s most talented and trusted disciple in his later years.

But the historical figure who dominated the whole show was, of course, the King of France LouisXIV, then aged 29 and in the process of becoming the glorious, so-called Sun-King. The monumental construction site of Versailles castle and the extravagant royal feast that took place there on the 18^th of July 1668 played a major role in the plot, embodying the heady mix of splendor, vanity, domination and extravagance that would define Louis XIV’s reign in history… While he hardly appeared in the scenario itself (he didn’t even have a single line of dialogue!), Louis XIV’s presence loomed over the story from its beginning to its end.

This story gave me the opportunity to create my own imaginary solution to one of France’s most fascinating and enduring historical mysteries – that of the Manin the Iron Mask!  But instead of presenting it as a riddle to be solved, I orchestrated things to make the whole Iron Mask business the consequence of Penelope’s adventure.

To cut a long story short, I made Eustache Danger (the purported, enigmatic identity of the Man in the Mask) a young, revenge-mad architect who had been socially destroyed by his association with Superintendent Nicolas Fouquet, whose fall from grace and imprisonment were one of Louis XIV’s most dramatic demonstrations of power – and have, incidentally, often been associated with the Iron Mask mystery.

Armed with the second Fragment of Morrolan’s Key (which allowed its user to open passages to other dimensions…), the driven architect had come into contact with the Gods of Ragnarok, who had transformed him into a sinister Harlequin, not only able to drive his audience mad with his sarcasms and antics but with the powers of masking himself to other people’s perceptions and of changing his face at will – think of him as a Vampire – The Masquerade Malkavian adept at Obfuscate and Dementation and you won’t be far off. His powers could have given him the possibility of precipitating the King into utter madness – and even to steal his face and rule in his place…

Luckily for history as we know it, the Laughing Mask was stopped in extremis by Penelope and her friend Bellegarde (acting as His Majesty’s most special agent). Naturally, the only way to prevent Harlequin-Danger from using his sinister powers to escape and wreak havoc once again was to trap his ever-changing face in a cage of its own… And thus the Laughing Mask became the Iron Mask…

As for the Gods of Ragnarok (whom Penelope had already encountered with her long-lost friend Everett Blake in this special episode), they played the proverbial role of the “unseen hand”, the “power-behind-the-scene” (quite literally, in this case) that had observed and, sometimes, manipulated events before revealing themselves in the final act.

And yes, Penelope did manage to outwit them and send them back to their out-of-reality place of exile… a feat which she achieved by destroying the three Fragments of the Key to Space, her father’s flawed artefact of power – a dramatic gesture which was the perfect way to close this story.

In a very touching epilogue, the Time Lady decided to go back to Prague to reunite with the English student of alchemy and seeker of arcane knowledge John Wycliffe, who had helped her during the Secret City segment and whom she had to leave without a word of explanation to pursue her quest. And yes, you guessed it, their reunion ended up with Penelope welcoming the 17^th century dilettante scholar as a new travelling companion in the TARDIS…  

See you in a couple of months (give or take) – for season 17 of Lady Penelope’s Odyssey and more adventures in time and space!

Character Archetypes or: what is your D&D doing in my DWAITAS?

While I definitely don’t intend to convert from my own heavily house-ruled brand of 1^st edition DWAITAS to any other system, I must say that several features of the new DOCTORS & DALEKS rulebook published by Cubicle 7 have struck me as particularly well thought-out, with a very strong accent on genre emulation. 

One of these features is the list of six basic character classes – reminiscent of the old D20 Modern ones (IIRC) but re-designed DW-style. The idea is simple: each of the six basic D&D attributes (Strength, Wisdom, etc.) is tied to a specific character class, which is clearly defined more as a heroic archetype than as, say, a profession or career, which is, IMHO, the perfect way to go. 

The six classes are: the Charmer (Charisma), the Thinker (Intelligence), the Empath (Wisdom), the Trickster (Dexterity), the Protector (Strength) and the Stalwart (Constitution). The names are self-explanatory and if you want more details on these classes, well, I direct you to the Doctors & Daleks players book. 

Each class provides a wide array of special talents and other signature abilities which (this being, basically, D&D) are acquired as the character gains levels (and which, incidentally, take this iteration of DW in RPG form in a completely opposite direction to the one followed by DW 2^nd Edition, which took all our beloved traits out of the equation but I won’t elaborate on this).

As I was thinking about these six classes (let’s call them ‘archetypes’), I realized that they could be readily translated into Doctor Who RPG 1^st edition terms, since the six attributes of the Vortex system are almost identical to the classic D&D six (with a few variations – Wisdom being replaced with Awareness and Constitution with Resolve… but these actually make things even more logical, e.g. Stalwarts being defined by their high Resolve). 

These six archetypes could simply be used as simple and elegant templates for beginning player-characters (especially with new players, I’d say), with their associated special abilities and talents being represented by (wait for it…) a list of possible good traits – YES!

 So here is the result of my little conversion work – and I must say I find it quite interesting. (BTW, for simplicity’s sake, I’ve limited the listed possible good traits to the ones listed in the 12^th Doctor rulebook, leaving special traits out).

Let’s start with the ‘prime requisite’ attribute – the one which should be at least equal to 4:

Charmer = Presence

Empath = Awareness

Protector = Strength

Stalwart = Resolve

Thinker = Ingenuity

Trickster = Coordination

And now, on to the typical/recommended good traits:

Charmer: Attractive, Charming, Friends, Lucky, Noble, Owed Favour, Voice of Authority

Empath: Animal Friendship, Charming, Empathic, Friends, Hypnosis, Psychic Training, Sense of Direction

Protector: Brave, Indomitable, Military Rank, Noble, Quick Reflexes, Tough, Voice of Authority

Stalwart: Brave, Face in the Crowd, Fast Healing, Indomitable, Military Rank, Sense of Direction, Tough

Thinker: Biochemical Genius, Boffin, Percussive Maintenance, Photographic Memory, Resourceful Pockets, Reverse the Polarity of the Neutron Flow, Technically Adept

Trickster: Face in the Crowd, Keen Senses, Lucky, Owed Favour, Quick Reflexes, Resourceful Pockets, Technically Adept

Yes, by some quirk of fate, each list has the same number of typical traits (seven). These lists are not exclusive lists; they simply show which good traits would go well with each archetype; if you really want to make a rule about this, you could say that the character must purchase at least 2 points worth of these recommended traits.

I was amazed by how easy this little conversion work was – and, if anything, it shows that the underlying idea behind the six Doctors & Daleks classes is a very sound and apt one in terms of genre emulation, since it translates so nicely and easily to TOSTIL (That Other System That I Love J).

The Key to Space (2/3)

Second Fragment: The Secret City

I. The Cursed House

Lady Penelope’s search for the second fragment of the Key to Space takes her to Prague, a city full of stories and secrets, memories and mysteries. Her steps soon lead her to the Jewish Ghetto, where the shadows of the past and the threats of the future lurk at the threshold of a troubled present. There, in a forsaken house, a dying man of wisdom is waiting for her…

II. The Hidden Legend

Now in possession of the second fragment of the Key, Penelope must confront a man who should have been dead for 75 years – former charlatan Edward Kelley, now known as Doctor K, hidden master of the Imperial Secret Cabinet. Meanwhile, a religious pogrom is brewing and a well-kept secret is about to step out of the shadows, into the streets of the Ghetto…

Of course, the Golem of Prague made a spectacular appearance - but it was a reinterpreted golem, made of the very stones of the Ghetto and given life by the combined powers of telluric energy (the 'signature shtick' of Penelope 7 - see our last season) and the collective unconscious of an entire community. Part two was extremely moving, with some very emotional scenes dealing with the trail left in Prague by Morrolan, Penelope's long-dead Time Lord father... Also, that scoundrel Edward Kelley finally met a fitting end - yes, it was the Third Defenestration of Prague!

Next stop: Paris!

The Key to Space (1/3)

In this six-chapter mini-series, Lady Penelope goes on a quest all around 1668 Europe to retrieve the three fragments of the Key to Space, a prodigious (and quite hazardous) device crafted by her late father, the Time Lord Morrolan, also known as the Architect… Who knows what hidden perils, mysteries and revelations await her?

First Fragment: The Shining City

I. The Hollow Court

Lady Penelope’s quest for the Key to Space first takes her to Whitehall Palace in London, the seat of King Charles II’s decadent and intrigue-riddled court. Her search soon brings her to join forces with England’s rising star architect, Christopher Wren, to whom her father had entrusted the first fragment of the Key – which has just been stolen by an unknown party…  

II. The Invisible College

Penelope’s search for the stolen fragment of the Key takes her to Oxford, where she quickly draws the attention of the Invisible College, an ancient secret institution fallen under the influence of the mysterious Twilight People. But what is the true agenda of these elusive entities?  And why are they so interested in Christopher Wren’s dream of a new London?

Aside from Christopher Wren himself, this first two-parter featured quite a few historical guest stars and cameos, including Charles II, his various mistresses (well, as far as 1668 was concerned: Barbara Palmer née Villiers, Moll Davis and Nell Gwynn), his wife and his brother James, the inevitable Samuel Pepys, John Denham (reinvented here as a truly tragic figure), the polymath genius Robert Boyle and Lady Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle and author of that strangest of utopias, The Blazing World…

Next stop: Prague!