Season 18 Finale (Episodes 12-13)... and plans for the future!

Episode 12: Where Angels Fear to Tread

Just when the Time Lady thought she could take some Time Off on 2024 Earth, Urgent Unfinished Business comes knocking at the door – in the form of Miss Jones’ ongoing machinations to harness the vestigial power of the defunct Abraxas entity and take control of the space-time continuum. A tale of tough choices, narrow escapes and, yes, Weeping Angels.

Episode 13: The Wake

The hunt draws to a close. Penelope joins forces with alternate versions of the Doctor and Romana to track down Miss Jones, no longer a living Time Lord/Lady but a disembodied entity desperately seeking a new body to possess and reconfigure. The trail of its wounded TARDIS leads them to a house in 1873 Bloomsbury – just in time for the evening’s séance…

And thus ends our 18^th season – which proved to be a somewhat lengthy yet bumpy ride, with more intermissions that I would have wished…

Started in October 2023, this season concluded just before August 2024 – yes, we dragged on for almost an entire year – which really made it difficult to maintain a satisfying narrative pace… but hey, in the end, we managed to wrap it up in a very satisfying manner, with a dramatic farewell to the whole Abraxas motif.

So, why did it take us so long to play these thirteen episodes?  

Well, it was due to a variety of unrelated factors: our decision, after episode 3, to go for a full-fledged season rather than the intended six-episodes mini-series (a decision which, in retrospect, was perhaps not as brilliant as it seemed in the first place), Penelope’s more-or-less unexpected regeneration, the fact that, after more than 200 episodes, new story ideas were becoming more and more elusive and, last but not least, various Real Life contingencies (the dreaded Triad - work, health, family…).

For all these reasons, Sylvie and I have agreed on a change of pace for Penelope’s next adventures. Instead of going for seasons of 13 to 15 episodes, we’ve decided to adopt the six-part miniseries as the standard format for our beloved Time Lady’s excursions in time and space. This format proved highly successful when we tried it back in 2022 (see the Key to Space miniseries) - and it will actually make it easier for me to construct multi-episode stories and will also make easier for Penelope to ‘linger on’ for several episodes in the same location or time period, something that Sylvie is clearly keen on. Of course, it does not mean that each six-part miniseries will necessarily be set in a single setting, as the six-episodes format also lends itself very well to breakneck quests through space and time, giving me all the creative freedom and flexibility I could ask for!  

See you in a few months, for a new chapter of Lady Penelope’s Odyssey!

Season 18, Episodes 10-11

Episode 10: The Long Backlash

A mysterious temporal phenomenon threatens the very existence of New Earth’s Catkind! Going back to the origins of everybody’s favorite felines, Lady Penelope soon discovers that the survival of the exiled Cheetah People has been put in jeopardy by her own past actions. Altering history always comes at a price – and sooner or later, Time always claims its debts.

Episode 11: The House on Bedford Street

Following the Face of Boe’s ominous warning, Penelope tracks down the TARDIS of her new nemesis, the alternate incarnation of the Master known as Miss Jones, to 1773 London. Now masquerading as the madam of an upmarket bawdy house, the life-stealing Time Lord offers her a quid pro quo transaction – with the fate of one of Penelope’s protégées in the balance!

Episode 10 was obviously deeply connected to the TV episode SURVIVAL - you might even think of it as a sort of sequel, tying up the future of the Cheetah People to the past of New Earth's Catkind... and allowing me to bring back an old 'continuity debt' of Lady Penelope, namely her meddling in the historical course of the Sontaran-Rutan War, way back in season 7...  hence the title of the episode (The Long Backlash), in which our Time Lady had to ensure the exiled Cheetah People's survival against everybody favorite potato-headed genociders.

Episode 11 was another "boomerang effect" story - a direct sequel to the much more recent The Beauty and the Beast episode. It ended with Lady Penelope taking her three protégées (the three Australian girls from the Bainbridge school!) to the world of Avalon and allowing her to take a welcome break in order to contemplate some important, post-regeneration decisions. 

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

Season 18, Episodes 8-9

Episode 8: The Girl Who Knew Too Much

London, 1967. Less than one year ago, Polly Wright returned to her ordinary life, working as a PA in the Post Office Tower. And although everybody else seems to have forgotten (thanks to the Torchwood Institute’s diligent coverup), she still remembers WOTAN and its War Machines. And somewhere, an all-too familiar signal has woken up… Enter the Time Lady.

Episode 9: Sound

Summer 1967. The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album has changed everything, redefining the very paradigm of pop music. Is this the end for John Smith and the Common Men? Is electronic music really the answer? And what weird entities inhabit the Plane of Sound? Penelope is about to find out, with a little help from one Delia Derbyshire.

Set in 1967 London, these two episodes had a very different atmosphere.

The Girl Who Knew Too Much felt a bit like an old B&W episode of The Avengers and was also a veritable feast of Classic DW references: in addition to WOTAN, the War Machines and Polly, it featured the character of Dodo and the Counter Measures group, plus some nifty (if I may say so myself) retcon tying the anachronistic tech of The War Machines to the events of Remembrance of the Daleks, all this by the way of Torchwood (who else?).

Sound was a much more psychological affair, with a hefty dose of pop music references and (thanks to Sylvie’s roleplaying talent) some very moving scenes. In the end, the story had an almost poetic feel – with the Beatles’ A Day in the Life providing the perfect soundtrack for its final scene. Its plot resulted from the mix of three separate ideas: the cultural phenomenon of the Sergeant Pepper LP, the electronic music of Delia Derbyshire & co and one of Ramsey Campbell’s early Cthulhu Mythos short stories, The Plain of Sound, from which I borrowed the idea of my plane of sound (and the look of its inhabitants).

Both stories also allowed us to develop the characters of Antonia and Modesty, Penelope’s new protégées and travelling companions, who are now ready to make their first journey to another world – or perhaps the far future?  See you soon for our next episode!

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) 18^th 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 18^th 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!

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!

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!

 

 

 

 

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!