weemadando wrote:Question 1 - Can someone give a brief rundown on the Time War that isn't 200 interlinked Wiki pages?
The canon
To my knowledge, some of this coming from a spuriously canon article by RTD: The Daleks cited the Time Lords' effort to avert their creation (
Genesis of the Daleks) as Causus Belli, while the Time Lords justification (
as in Genesis) was that, well, it's the goddamn Daleks, and would kill all other life if not stopped. There was The Daleks set about manipulating things, and arming themselves with many lost weapons (such as those created by the Deathsmiths of Goth) and after a brief and ineffective negotiation, in which the Master was handed over to the Time Lords to be buried after his state execution by the Daleks, (
TV movie) went to war, launching their entire fleet into the time vortex at once, presumably to avoid retaliation.
We’re told that the time lords dusted off various old weapons. Among these were 'N-forms' (a type of 'ground soldier' from their war with the Vampires; a time travelling construct that could lock onto a large number of targets and then dismember them by materializing parts of itself inside them) black hole carriers and bowships (a canon, if rather fanciful weapon, that fired great steel bolts through giant space vampires' hearts... yep...). The daleks had a minimum of ten million ships at the end of the war, and according to one tenth-doctor novel, the Time Lords had a million military TARDISes...
More interestingly, the Time Lords imprisoned millions of active daleks in at least one prison ship. It seems unlikely the daleks would surrender, so presumably the Time Lords had some means of rounding them up.
The Master was of course, resurrected, and fled. Davros' ship 'disappeared into the jaws of the nightmare child' in the first year of the war.
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Frankly, it's all left pretty undefined, beyond 'vast and hard fought' and certainly, most of that can just be ignored (and in some cases, probably ought to be).
With the exception of the hilariously corrupt High Council of
Trial of a Time Lord. The Time Lords, for all their aloofness, do occasionally attempt to act benevolently, and in their early appearances, were 'sworn to protect' other races.
My own imagination has the first active phase of the war being simultaneous Dalek attacks on countless unaligned worlds, in order to exhaust standing Time Lord assets and try and force them to make mistakes. Much of this would result in Dalek attack forces being time scooped (or something to that effect) into prison ships, like the Genesis Ark, which would presumably be rather comfortable on the inside, if escape proof.
Thus, by the end of the Time War, you've got say, Shada (an old-series Time Lord prison, from an episode by Doug Anderson that was never completed, and eventually made as a
webcast quite recently, which they used to confine the most wicked members of their own species and other races across the universe) holding thousands upon millions of genesis arks, with dalek invasion forces in them.
We know that there are practical limits to the Time Lords' power from a few episodes, so we can assume that a sufficiently large Dalek force could tie up many of their assets, just by causing chaos they have to expend energy to fix. Drive-by-shooting planets and such.
Eventually, of course, it’d likely progress to actual battles as the Time Lords abandon mercy (they’re also rather ruthless when there’s no other choice) and deploy weapons to destroy dalek ships. While doing that, having some convenient traitor (traitors are something Gallifrey is quite vulnerable to, fertile ground for a PC party, this. The Daleks attempted to make a duplicate of the Doctor that they expected would be able to assassinate the High Council in the old series; if one can’t think up a more interesting motive for treason) sabotage Time Lord infrastructure on Gallifrey. (Such a traitor could also explain how the Cult of Skaro got the Genesis Ark, by breaching the defenses of whatever prison the Time Lords are keeping them in and allowing the cult to steal a prison ship. That might make an adequate hook to get PCs looking for such a traitor, in fact) This is their major weakness in the old series, and the Master came within a hair's whisker of destroying the planet by breaching the Eye of Harmony.
Huh. I might run that, if I ever do a Doctor Who RPG campaign.
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As for character ideas; there was one novel (it is by all accounts, a shit book, but it’s an interesting concept) in which the very distant future incarnation of the Cybermen (Here, having become
The Cyberlord Hegemony – Cyberlord was apparently from an abandoned Robert Holmes script in which the Cybermen would have incorporated time-lord biomatter and made a distinct ethical leap forwards) were the greatest allies of the Time Lords in a war. These cyberlords were mentioned in a few other novels, too. Indeed, if the BBC7/Big Finish Play
Human Resources is to be believed, the Time Lords manipulated the Cybermen’s history (presumably the reason we never hear of the cybermen winning a war despite technological superiority) perhaps to achieve this end (or perhaps just out of benevolence, it wasn’t explained).
