Wednesday, March 26, 2014

PWWO: Doctor Who, Hitchhiker's Guide and Pokémon

With the publication of Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space Limited Edition Hardcover Edition I have been wanting to do more with this game.  I have already run a classic AD&D module with it but the applications for this game seem endless.  So starting with Doctor Who here are the two mashups based on ideas from both of my kids.  So for this edition of Plays Well with Others I have two game ideas based around Doctor Who.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Doctor Who Universe
My oldest son has been reading Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and he had to do a school report on Douglas Adams.  Fans of Adams know of his long association with Doctor Who during the classic Tom Baker years. So for me this has been a great little trip to 1983 when I was doing something very similar in school.  Though unlike my kids I did not have Doctor Who on BluRay anytime I wanted it.

Well this morning I was thinking about Arthur Dent, or more specifically, Martin Freeman.  To date he has pretty much played every important English "everyman" I can think of after only one cup of coffee; Arthur Dent, Bilbo Baggins and John Watson.  The Watson connection got me thinking again about doing a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game using the Doctor Who rules.  I touched on this last year but I think I need to look into it more.

No need to worry about who plays the Time Lord since everyone, including the aliens, are just regular people.  Ok sometimes regular people with two heads and three arms, but that is the galaxy we live in.

Junior Timelord Academy
I was having a conversation with my youngest son back in the winter about how Pokéballs must be Timelord science. Afterall they are bigger on the inside.  Also Pokémon evolution looks more like Timelord regeneration.   Many others have pointed this out. Even the Pokémon character "Looker" is supposed to look like/be the 10th Doctor.  There are dozens of other examples (not to mention all the "Time" powered Pokémon) so I'll leave it as a given.

What can we do with this idea?  Simple, if in the HHGTG game there are no Timelords in an Pokémon one everyone is a Timelord, or at least they will be when they grow up.

Junior Timelord Academy then focuses on young Timelords in training, or even more generically, young Gallifreyians.  They have pets, like most kids do, except in stead of accidentally peeing on the floor these pets summon up elemental powers to do battle.  We know that in the Dark Times on Gallifrey gladiatorial fights were held in the Death Zone till Rassilon put a stop to them.  That legacy lives on in the children's games of fighting with their genetically engineered pets.

So a mix of Doctor Who, Pokémon, some ideas from WitchGirls Adventures, and a little bit of BESM: Cute and Fuzzy Seizure Monsters.  Big Eyes, Small Mouth 3rd Ed though might work better with Doctor Who in terms of system conversion.  This isn't High School drama like Smallville or Byron Falls, the target age here is pre-Teens.

So the characters move across Gallifrey battling their cute pet killing machines against each other knowing that soon they will enter the great Time Lord academies.

Also there is no reason I can't mix both.

6 comments:

Fabio Milito Pagliara said...

I just love this :)

Tim Knight said...

Gygax issue two has an article about doing Hitchhikers with DWAITAS.

Timothy S. Brannan said...

I saw that one. I had the same idea months earlier! ;)

Tim Knight said...

Sorry ;-) I thought you would have seen it, but thought I'd bring it up in case you'd missed it.

Timothy S. Brannan said...

Haha! No worries. There is so much stuff out there it is hard to keep up.

Cygnus said...

Mistydvoratrelundar.