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Another Xmas over and I'm working hard on design trying to get the next expansion 'Silence Will Fall' ready for February. It's a double sized expansion so getting it all done is proving to be a fairly mammoth task - not made any easier by the complex nature of the season as a whole.
This is typified by the Enemies this season. There are 9 in all that I've included in the expansion and all are fairly non-typical in their villainy.
Most Enemy encounters have a standard template of encounter options which get varied slightly between them - but not this bunch. true, there are some areas where I can use the standard template - such as the 'troop' encounters of Kovarian and the Scavenger Cybermen - but they are fairly scarce.
Trying to do the more esoteric villains (and some stories have no villain - The Girl Who Waited, The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe - for example - are even more difficult.
The Siren had to change slightly as she's revealed to be a medical hologram. so how do we do Goals for her? Answer - she's not always a hologram in DWSSG!
House - boy, did I have problems with this one.... I use the Beast as a kind of template since both had affinity for Ood.
Gangers - not too hard but there's the duplicate issue...
Melody Pond - who might regenerate into River who can be redeemed... Huge headache how to do this - but it's done.
Night Terrors and the Tenza - again, a really difficult one to model, although I'm proud of the new mechanics for this one. The Tenza is a litle boy - how does he have a goal? Answer - we dn't use Goals for this one but DMs have a different use...
And then there's the 2011 Xmas special - with NO villain! So what do I do - I change the premise so you can still experince the flavour of the story, but imagine if the Harvest Rangers (who still sound like a football team to me...) came from the 1984 production of Caves of Androzani - in other words led by a Stotz type mercenary, or they were an IMC set up from 'Colony in Space'? They are natural villains then - but I still wanted players to be able to encounter the incompetent (but nice) Droxil and his buddies - so they're in there too.
So what did I think of the Xmas special this year? I've only seen it once and came away thinking that it was a bit slight on both plot and threat, and perhaps a little over-sentimental too.
It took a lot of time establishing the setup in the house and the family (and Claire Skinner was excellent) which is fine if you're doing a 2 hour Narnia movie, but here we only have 55 mins. By the time we ended up on the un-named planet (which always irritates me as I have to find a name for DWSSG) there wasn't much time for anything to actually happen.
No real threat too as the Wood People were nice really and the afore-mentioned Harvest Rangers, who should've been the villains, were just comedy relief. Before we knew it, the plot resolved itself and the show was over. In Classic Who, the Wood people would've had more backstory - for exampe they would've captured the Doctor and Lily and there might have been 2 factions in the community - dark and light - so we could've had more time arguing etc. The Rangers would've had an IMC or Androzani set-up with a sadistic captain and a cold businessman leading them to counter Droxil and his team who would end up as Allies.
The sentimentality (yes, I know it was Xmas, but still), was a bit thick - I just knew that the Dad would make it in the end (but what happened to his co-pilots...?) and especially with the Doctor having a tear at the end. The ending with the cameo from Amy and Rory (even though they have now FAR outstayed their welcome in plot terms) was nicely done too.
Sadly Matt Smith was stuck on 'wacky' again for most of it which is starting to be a bit wearing now. It's smug and just a little bit forced and I'd like him to return to his earlier portrayal rather than the Willy Wonka type character we've got now.
Overall then I'm going with 5.5/10. Not awful, but certainly lacking in some areas.
What did you think?
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