allgeektout

Okay, the title’s a bit of a lie – the contents of Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space (the new Doctor Who RPG from Cubicle 7) are actually pretty snug inside their box. But when you look at the contents of the box, and the fact that I can’t resist an obvious pun, then you’ll see why I picked that as the title for my review of the game.

Now, lots of great content unfortunately turned into a very long review for me, so if you want to skip ahead, here are the major parts of the review:

• The Dice
• The Player’s Guide
• The Gamemaster’s Guide
• The Adventure Book
• Character Sheets
• “Start Here First” Page
• Conclusion

Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to go through the contents of the box in order:

The Dice

The box comes with six six-sided dice inside – convenient, considering those are the types of dice needed for play. They’re clear with “TARDIS blue” pips marking the numbers. To be honest, although I love them, they really could be better. The contrast between the pips and the rest of the die means that you can see through to the other side. It doesn’t actually keep the dice from being read, but it is distracting.

The Player’s Guide

The Player’s Guide sets the stage for the quality of the rest of the box. Let’s just get one thing out of the way for everything in the box – glossy, plenty of pictures from the show, beautiful. Now that I’ve done that, I can get to the content instead of repeating that over and over again.

Character creation is a fairly simple point-buy system. You get a certain number of points that you can distribute between Attributes and Traits (the latter is a type of Edge or Hindrance), and some that you can put in skills. There are also Story points, which don’t normally factor into character creation, unless you decide to take some special Traits, like Time Lord or Immortal. Those will not only cost you character points, but also Story points.

The rules are fairly simple too. The core mechanic is:

2d6 + Attribute + Skill (+ Trait)

And you try to beat a Target Number set by the GM. What’s cool is that your degree of success also gives you a bit of narrative control. There’s a chart that shows how depending on your roll, the outcome can be anything from “no, and…”, with the result dictated by the GM, or “yes, and…” with the result dictated by the player. Very sleek, and very simple. Story points, meanwhile, let you do various things, mainly alter dice rolls up a success level or have a bit of narrative control (“Good thing that hidden door was there!”). That sums up most of the game – the combat system is light-weight, since combat has never been an important part in Doctor Who (I expect it’ll be expanded upon with the UNIT supplement). Initiative is decided upon by what people are doing on their turn (Talking, Running, Doing, and Fighting), and there isn’t a lot more to it. So, on to the next book!

The Gamemaster’s Guide

The first few chapters of the Gamemaster’s Guide are reprinted from the Player’s Guide, with a few more additions to flesh out the rules. Although that’s all good, I’ve mostly told you about that, so I’m going to move on to my favorite part: the storytelling advice.

They have a great chapter (entitled “A Big Ball of Timey-Wimey Stuff”) that goes into detail about how time travel works in the world of Doctor Who, even admitting that it’s inconsistent. It covers everything from paradoxes to nexus points and how to gamemaster a time travel game. Towards the end, it gets a bit more specific, talking about the Time Lords and some of the special functions of the TARDIS. It’s a great read and (personally) gives some ideas for adventures.

Then there’s the monster section; this is pretty slim, but that’s because they’re saving most of the aliens for the upcoming supplement Aliens and Creatures. There’s enough to get started here, although I would like some more detailed rules about creating monsters. Again, those are likely coming in the supplement, but if I don’t have enough monsters to play with just the core rulebook, then I’m going to want some of my own!

I really like the last chapter, “The Oncoming Storm”. It tells you how to set up an adventure, and later on a campaign. It’s based heavily on the new series format (with a repeated meme throughout the season that builds up to a finale), and I like some of the advice it gives. It factored heavily into how I setup my first season, if I ever get to run it.

And one more thing – why isn’t the GM in this game called the “Time Lord”? It just makes sense!

The Adventure Book

Now, despite the large amount of praise I have shoveled onto the other two books, this is truly my favorite book in the set. Inside, it has one full-length adventure, “Arrowdown”, and one short one, “Judoom!”. But after that, it is packed with a whole lot of short plot seeds. They’re each a few paragraphs long, and then break it down into the antagonists, the action scenes, the problems, what needs preparation, and how to continue the adventure into further stories. Full of ideas and inspiration, and best of all, it looks like Cubicle 7 is planning on including one of these in each of their supplements. That alone will probably have me reaching for my wallet.

Character Sheets

Purchasers of the box set have hit the motherload when it comes to character sheets. From the TV show, there are sheets for the Doctor (the Tenth), Rose Tyler, Captain Jack Harkness, Sarah Jane Smith, K-9, Mickey Smith, Martha Jones, and Donna Noble. For those who want to pick up and play, but also want to have their own character, there are 7 archetypes ranging from “Scientist/Inventor” to “Journalist” that just have the stats, with the backgrounds blank. And for those you want to start from scratch, there a blank character sheets – 5 of them – ready for you to fill in with your own characters.

All of them are very nice-looking, glossy, with only a few of those annoying “p. [X] typos”. There’s a weird inconsistency where the characters have the traits described on the back and the archetypes don’t; perhaps it is to give the archetypes a bit more customization. My major one complaint is that there isn’t a blank character sheet online; they released one as a preview for the game, but there isn’t an obvious link to it anywhere on there site, and it is FAR from printer friendly. Thankfully, we have legions of fans on the internet to take care of that one for us (for more stuff like that, be sure to check out the official unofficial Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space forum).

Flyer

A flyer advertising the GM Screen and the upcoming monster supplement, Aliens and Creatures. There isn’t really much to “review” here.

“Start Here First” Page

Yeah… I have no idea what this is doing in the back of the box. This is a short, 4 page quick start guide that quickly introduces to the players what an RPG is, what a GM is, and how to read their character sheet and play the game. It’s assumed that people will pick this up first, and run one of the sample adventures in the adventure book based off of these rules alone. It’s a pretty good summary, but there are very broad strokes. It’s good enough for a quick start, but eventually people are going to have to graduate to the big rulebook.

As a hardcore Doctor Who fanboy (new series only, sadly), there’s a lot that I love inside this box. Now, if you aren’t a Doctor Who fan, I don’t see any reason why you should rush out to buy this. It’s a good sleek system, but it’s nothing really extraordinary. However, Adventures in Time and Space oozes with Who flavor. Chapters are named “Allons-y!” (which will likely be replaced by “Geronimo!” when the Matt Smith edition comes along), “The Children of Time”, and “Big Ball of Timey-Wimey Stuff”. Traits give you access to abilities like “Jiggery Pokery” and “Resourceful Pockets”. The license and the system just work well together, and that’s its strength.

Hits: Simple sleek system, Great Who flavor, Adventure Book is full of inspiration, High quality books.

Misses: No reason to get if you aren’t a Who fan, infested with p. [X], high quality comes at a high price (worth it, though).

One Twit’s Opinion

Adventures in Time and Space is a simple system coated in a delicious but thick Doctor Who shell.

Follow @onetwitsopinion for reviews in 140 characters or less.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I did not receive a free copy of this for review. However, I am a major Doctor Who fanboy, and its possible that some of my excitement at just having a Doctor Who RPG slipped into this review. I tried to avoid any of that, but the disclaimer stands.